Indian History Carnival – 33

Patanjali is credited with the creation of Yoga, but what he wrote was not about Hatha Yoga. So when did Hatha Yoga originate? Koenraad Elst says

I don’t think any other asana postures except those for simply sitting up straight have been recorded before the late-medieval Gheranda Samhita, Hatha Yoga Pradipika and such. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna calls on Arjuna to “become a yogi”, but he gives no instructions in postures or breathing exercises. Libertines practising the whole range of Kama Sutra postures got more exercise in physical strength and agility than the yogis of their age, who merely sat up straight and forgot about their bodies.

In a long post, Anuraag Sanghi writes about the secret of the Indian socio-political system

Bharat-tantra, the Indic socio-political system, addresses three basic human aspirations. If humans are deprived of these basic ‘wants’, these aspirations, it is cause for war – as per India’s wisdom narrative. These aspirations are ज़र zar (meaning gold), जन jan (meaning people) and ज़मीन jameen (meaning land).
This makes the basis भारत-तंत्र Bharat-tantra different from Western politico-economic systems, that are based on four factors of production (land, labour, capital and enterprise). भारत-तंत्र Bharat-tantra treats these three elements as ‘aspirational’ while Western theory sees these four factors as ‘exploitative’.

Recently Wendy Doniger wrote a review of John Smith’s Mahabharata and she did not mention any of the Indian works.Fëanor wonders why.

Aficionados are no doubt aware that there are several single- and multi-volume editions of the Mahabharata published in India alone. At a pinch I can mention Ramesh Menon’s works, and Kamala Subramaniam’s, and Bibek Debroy’s. The abridgements by R. K. Narayan and C. Rajagopalachari are usually the first introductions to this tale. There are also the reimaginings by Pratibha Ray (Yajnaseni) and M. T. Vasudevan Nair (Randaamoozham) (further retold by Prem Panicker in Bhimsen), Shivaji Samant (Mrityunjay) and P. K. Balakrishnan (Ini Nyan Urangatte). This article in the Telegraph describes other efforts by Namita Gokhale, Amruta Patil and Devdutt Pattanaik. And the grand-daddy of them all is the otiose Victorian version by K. M. Ganguli.

According to Vijay, Pallava stone sculptures of the Dharamaraja Ratha and Chola Bronzes towards the closing years of Sri Raja Raja Chola are the finest examples of art that he has seen.

The upper tiers of the Dharamaraja Ratha in Mallai, hold in their midst some of the finest specimens of artistic expression, for not being confined to any cannons the unrestrained imagination of the Pallava sculptor ran riot, faultless and matchless in their execution, working within the cramped confines of its upper tiers, the whole structure being a monolith carved out of mother rock top down, with zero scope for error, what these immortal artists did to the hard granite is the very pinnacle of artistic brilliance.

In his seminar paper Law and Order in 17th Century Mughal Sindh, Sepoy looks at the resistance movements and disorders under the Shah Jahan regime.

Three main themes emerge from the present scholarship on resistance movements. First, Mughal administrators sought to extract higher and higher revenue payments from peasants who were already unable to bear their tax burdens. Second, the zamindars were engaged in a power struggle with other landholders as well as with the Mughal administrators. Lastly, the peasant uprisings were led by – and often fueled by – the zamindars as pawns in their struggle for autonomy from the central powers. Sindh, in the seventeenth century, provides an excellent venue to examine these themes.

Maddy explains how Muthuswamy Dikshitar composed the Nottu Swara Sahitya influenced by Western music and compositions.

So as we saw, the Celtic tunes were to affect Dikshitar prodding him to create a new genre called Nottuswara – ‘Notes Swara’ (nottu being the Tamil slang for notes) based on these British tunes but set to Sanskrit devotional lyrics. You can call them Indi Celtic fusion in today’s terms. Many of these are based on the folk music tradition of the British Isles and are not from the Western classical music traditions. 39 or 40 of such compositions were considered to have been completed by Muthuswamy.

Without help from the local kings, could the British have conquered India? Calicut Heritage says

It would appear that the idea of territorial sovereignty was a western concept imported into India by the colonials in the 18th Century. Our rulers – the Mughals as well as smaller rulers like the Zamorin – had viewed the state more as an economic unit which could be controlled to extract revenue for the state.
Ultimately, it looks as if our rulers were too keen to offer portions of their territory on a platter to the colonial powers in return for protection, weapons, money or even a cask of red wine, as in the case of Jehangir!

The next edition of Indian History Carnival will be up on October 15th. Send your nominations to varnam dot blog @gmail or as a tweet to varnam_blog

Roma: Persecuted for a Millennia

European Parliament asked France to reconsider expelling the Romas. France said they will not stop. The European Parliament is unhappy. Now it looks like that politics is not paying off for President Sarkozy. But it is not just in France.

Roma from East Europe and the Balkans are leaving their countries as a result of the persecution that is so virulent there that it has caused death and destruction of settlements not unlike pogroms of centuries past. For example, in Cluj, a university city in Romania’s multi- ethnic Transylvania region, a large Roma settlement is being displaced and moved into a more remote and environmentally marginal area. The Roma have not been given any recourse. They appear not to have any civil rights. Roma have been attacked in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Slovak Republic. These attacks include fire bombings, shootings, stabbings, beatings and murders. [Roma: Not all alike]

But who are these Roma people and how did they end up in Europe? Subash Kak’s The Roma and the Persistence of Memory gives their history and the persecution they suffered in Europe.

It is estimated that over a million Roma were murdered from 1935 to the end of World War II. After the war, the Roma received little, if any, reparations from any government for their losses and suffering. Not a single Rom was called to testify at the Nuremberg Trials, or has been to any of the subsequent war crime tribunals. Until the 1970s, many Nazi-era laws remained on the books. In 1982, the German government was one of the first (and few) to belatedly recognize the atrocities committed against Romani people during World
The Roma have survived in the most difficult situation and for this they deserve to be saluted by all. They have also given a lot to Europe–music, dance, arts and crafts, and shown an indomitable will to survive.[The Roma and the Persistence of Memory]

Aryans, Early Christians and their Travel Plans

In Robert D. Kaplan’s South Asia’s Geography of Conflict (warning: pdf), there is a section about the history of India. He writes

“Aryans may have infiltrated from the Iranian plateau, and together with the subcontinent’s autochthonous inhabitants were part of a process that consolidated the political organization of the Gangetic Plain in northern India around 1000 B.C.”

Once upon a time, the Aryan Invasion Theory was considered infallible; now everyone agrees that there was no invasion. AIT morphed into the Aryan Migration Theory, Two Wave Migration theory, trickle down theory etc. Now that too has become: may have happened.

In a blog post, Ajay Makken, MP (Cong) writes about Homeland security

India has been a land where people have mastered fusion, a land, a place where perhaps the first Jews arrived, soon after Jerusalem fell, where perhaps Christians came back as early as 3rd Century and had settlements on shores of India as early as 4th Century, where perhaps the Parsis came in 7thCentury after being driven away from Iran and even now, in the last century we have Bahai’s who were driven from their mother land and who came and sought refuge in India.

He mentions the date of Christian arrival as 3rd century, discounting the myth of St. Thomas (52 CE). According to Pope Benedict, St. Thomas went only as far as Western India. According to Romila Thapar, there is no historical evidence to the claim that he was martyred in Mylapore. According to her, the first coming of Christians is associated with the migration of Persian Christians led by Thomas Cana around 345 CE.

Hat Tip to Dhruva, Pragmatic Euphony

Beck's Christianity

One in five Americans believe that the President is a Muslim, even though the President himself has declared that he is a Christian; everyone seems to have forgotten about his infamous pastor. Now adding a twist to this debate, Glenn Beck, the Fox News anchor, has declared that the President may be a Christian, but no one understands his Christianity because he believes in liberation theology.

“You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it,” Beck said. [After Washington rally, Glenn Beck assails Obama’s religion]

This is funny on many levels. It assumes that there is one generic version of Christianity and President Obama’s Christianity. It was never true historically nor is it true now. From the time of Paul and the Gnostics, there have been varying interpretations on the life of Jesus. Each group called the other heretic and groups which gained political power, eliminated rival sects.

For instance, the letters of Paul speak often of both the nature of the gospel and whether the good news is meant for only those of the Jewish faith or should be shared with the “Gentiles.” In addition, it is well documented that the Early Church was split between a more orthodox view of Jesus and that of Gnosticism, which denied the humanity of Jesus in favor of a Jesus that only appeared to be human. Read the Gospel of John, for instance, and one comes away with the stark impression that John is very concerned with whether or not God did indeed come “in the flesh.”[Now, It’s the Wrong Jesus.]

Now move forward in time and you have Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, each different from the other. Then there are American Christian groups, like the Mormons, of which Beck is a member. According to a Pew Poll only 46% of white evangelicals have a favorable opinion of Mormons and some even think of them as unbelievers.

“The Apostle Paul warns Christians against uniting with unbelievers in spiritual endeavors,” Howse wrote. “While I applaud and agree with many of Glenn Beck’s conservative and constitutional views, that does not give me or any other Bible-believing Christian justification to compromise Biblical truth by spiritually joining Beck.”
“Jesus Christ’s Church has universally rejected Mormonism’s Anti-Trinitarian theology and its claim that mortals may become God,” David Shedlock, a contributor to the evangelical blog Caffeinated Thoughts, wrote in a post this month. “Beck asks Christian leaders to ‘put differences aside,’ but Beck himself daily peppers his broadcasts with Mormon distinctives because he cannot keep his beliefs to himself.” [Some evangelicals on defensive over partnering with Glenn Beck, a Mormon]

Thus when Beck says “Christians” don’t recognize Obama’s Christianity, a large number of “Christians” don’t recognize Beck’s Christianity either. For many of them he is a heretic.

In the final review, “Christian” is a self-defined attribute. It doesn’t make any sense for anyone to declare or decry anyone else’s identification as a Christian. If someone says they are, then they are. If they say they aren’t — even if they’ve been baptized and attend services regularly and participate in all the rituals — then they aren’t. This isn’t something that another person can add to or take away from anyone else. This is what “Freedom of Religion” ultimately means.[Nomenclature]

Writing Historical Fiction (4): Research

While writing historical fiction, you need to do two types of research: soft and hard. David Mitchell explains

The hard research involved going through archives and finding items such as the journals kept by the employees of the Dutch East India Company. It also involved seeking out history professors and persuading them to — as Mitchell describes it — “spend a couple of hours answering my rather undergraduate-level questions.”
Meanwhile, the soft research was something that continued until the day Mitchell finished his manuscript. While writing a scene in which a character was shaving, suddenly Mitchell needed to know: Did they have shaving cream in those days? Would it have been affordable to a middle-ranking clerk? Or in a scene at night: How would the room have been lit? By candle? Or by oil lantern?
“You have to know all of that,” Mitchell says. “Sometimes you can’t finish a sentence without spending half a morning going away and finding it out.”
While it was important to understand the intricacies of 18th century life, Mitchell says he also had to be careful to “hide” this knowledge so that it wouldn’t be a distraction: “Otherwise you get ridiculous sentences where the servant walks in and says, ‘Is it going to be the pig tallow candles, my Lord, or would you prefer the sperm whale oil lantern?’ ” [How David Mitchell Brings Historical Fiction To Life]

Apsidal Shrines

Last year there was news of discovery of a 2000 year old Shiva temple complex in Uttar Pradesh, one of the oldest in India. Besides the age, what was interesting was the shape: the temple was apsidal. It was widely believed that the apisdal shape had Buddhist origins and was used by Hindus later. Historians like Romila Thapar have argued that if Hindu temples had such shape, they were converted Buddhist chaityas or shrines
This theory, in fact, cannot be credited to Marxist historians; they evolved out of a colonial myth. Colonial archaeologists, who found that the written record of India was imperfect, resorted to studying the history of art. This study, they hoped, would give a better historical record as well help understand the relation between various Indic traditions.
This Marxist/Colonial explanation — that Hindu traditions replaced Buddhist shrines — actually makes sense if you follow a linear chronology. There is no dispute over the fact that there was a resurgence of Hinduism inspired by bhakti and hence it can be logically argued that this resurgent Hinduism or traditions usurped Buddhist chaityas. Also, Buddhist shrines have been around since the 4th century BCE while Hindu apsidal temples make their appearance few centuries later.
There are three reasons why the Colonials and Marxists are wrong.
First, archaeology has disproved many cases. For example, one site where an apsidal temple was found was Barsi in Maharshtra. According to the British, a Buddhist shrine was converted to a Trivikrama temple, but later archaeological excavations found an apsidal brick temple with a wooden mandapa. The mandapa was not a later addition, but an integral part of the temple. A similar theory was proposed by the British for the Kapotesvaraswamy temple in Guntur and the Durga temple at Aihole, but both were disproved.
Second, this theory ignores another possibility – co-existence. In Nagarjunakonda valley, which was settled from third millennium BCE to sixteenth century CE, there is evidence of both Buddhist establishments and Hindu temples, both using the same plans in different areas. Besides this, Naga traditions too used the same style. Between second century BCE and seventh century CE, there is a rise in apsidal Buddhist shrines in peninsular India. Hindus also constructed new apsidal temples. For example in Kerala, after 800 CE, numerous sanctums with apsidal plans were constructed, especially the ones dedicated to Ayyappa. All these show that various branches of Hindu traditions shared style and space with a number of domestic and regional traditions.
Finally, a point regarding the origin of this style. The earliest elliptical shrines are seen in Vidhisha (second century BCE), Nagari in Chittor (first century BCE) and Etah, Uttar Pradesh (200 – 100 BCE). An apsidal mud platform was also found in Ujjain (500 – 200 BCE). That’s not it. At Daimabad (1600 – 1400 BCE), a complex with a mud platform having fire altars and an apsidal temple with sacrificial activity were found. Similarly at Banawali, a Harappan site on the banks on the Sarasvati bed, there were fire altars on an apsidal structure. Thus the elliptical shape had religious significance from a much ancient time and there is only tradition which still builds fire altars the way people in Banawali did.
References

Himanshu Prabha Ray, The apsidal shrine in early Hinduism: origins, cultic affiliation, patronage, World Archaeology 36, no. 3 (2004): 343. (Thanks Ranjith)
Michel Danino, Lost River: On The Trail of the Sarasvati (Penguin Books India, 2010).
Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, 1st ed. (Prentice Hall, 2009).

Writing Historical Fiction (3)

Recently historians started getting obscene amounts of money for writing historical fiction. Thus when such a historian sets out to write a work of fiction, what sort of issues does he face? Saul David, whose new novel Hart of Empire is set during the second Anglo-Afghan War of 1879, writes

I, on the other hand, wanted to give history an undue prominence in my fiction until I was advised by my editor to “let go of the past”. Not an easy task for someone who’d spent the last fifteen years writing history, you might think? And you’d be right. Historical facts are the vital framework around which non-fiction writers construct their narratives; they are, quite simply, indispensable. Yet now I was being told that if I wanted to write decent historical fiction I had to avoid being constrained by events as they actually happened.
Eventually I saw the sense of this. I wasn’t being asked to sacrifice historical accuracy per se. Just to accept that a historical novel, or any novel for that matter, stands or falls on plot and characterisation; period detail is important, but only in so far as it gives a sense of authenticity. It must remain in the background and never be allowed to dominate the story
Historical fiction, as a result, often takes liberties with the ‘truth’: it compresses time, invents conversations and motives that real people never had, and generally tampers with the historical record for the purposes of plot.[Tall tales from history: Are historians best placed to write historical fiction?]

Briefly Noted: The Green Zone

The year before the invasion of Iraq, the news was all about WMD: the chemical weapons, biological weapons and the mushroom cloud. Newspapers quoted “senior administration officials”; Colin Powell made a presentation; curveball made damning revelations. The smoking gun was never found, and the WMD scare just faded away as the goal post shifted.
In this action movie, based on Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the search for WMD comes back in Jason Bourne style. Matt Damon plays an Army Officer tasked to find the non-existent WMD. As he follows one false lead after another, he uncovers the truth: the administration knew very well that they did not exist.
Now that combat troops have been renamed in Iraq, it is important to remember how the pre-emptive war originally started because another shift in goal posts is happening in Afghanistan. There is an attempt to explain that American troops are required because who else would save the women?
This angle appeared in two media outlets in a span of weeks. First TIME had a cover story titled “What happens if we leave Afghanistan” which was accompanied by the image of a girl whose face was scarred by acid. Katie Couric made the same point in her broadcast from Afghanistan.

VIDEO — KATIE COURIC’s “Final Thoughts” from Afghanistan: “There are many searing images from Afghanistan: the faces — so young! — of the soldiers receiving their bronze stars for valor in combat. ,,, But these are the faces and the eyes that I will always remember: the girls and women who have escaped to this shelter, their lives put indefinitely on hold. … Protecting human rights alone may not justify a massive military commitment. But whether you support this war or not, REMEMBER THESE FACES. As the Afghan government, with the tacit approval of the United States, extends a hand to the Taliban, will we turn our backs on the future of this country? Will the nations of the world allow the newfound rights of girls and women to become a casualty of a brokered peace?” http://bit.ly/9nH9bC [From POLITCO Playbook via email]

After this, are the Americans going to save the women in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan?

Indian History Carnival – 32

Here is a collection of posts related to Indian history from the blogosphere.

At varnam, we had a book review of Michel Danino’s new book The Lost River on the river Sarasvati.

In The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (2004), Prof. Edwin Bryant writes that till recently most scholars in the West were unaware that there was an Aryan debate: the issue was considered settled. With exceptions like A Survey of Hinduism (2007) by Klaus K. Klostermaier and An Introduction to Hinduism (1996) by Gavin Flood, very few books mention the debate. But even among those books which mention this debate, Sarasvati, which challenges the normative view, has not got a fair hearing. In Prof. Bryant’s book, Sarasvati gets less than 5 pages; Thomas Trautmann’s The Aryan Debate (2008) has a 50 page abridged version of S.P.Gupta’s article on the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. Thus it is commendable that Danino has expanded on a rarely mentioned topic.

In a post titled The Arab conquest of Sind, and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Hari quotes V S Naipaul on the Arab conquest of the Hindu-Buddhist Sindh.

The Chachnama shows the Arabs of the seventh century as a people stimulated and enlightened by the discipline of Islam, developing fast, picking up learning and new ways and new weapons (catapults, Greek fire) from the people they conquer, intelligently curious about the people they intend to conquer. The current fundamentalist wish in Pakistan [Naipaul was writing in 1979] to go back to that pure Islamic time has nothing to do with a historical understanding of the Arab expansion. The fundamentalists feel that to be like those early Arabs they need only one tool: the Koran. Islam, which made seventh-century Arabs world conquerors, now clouds the minds of their successors or pretended successors.

What was behind the rise of English power in India? How did few English soldiers manage to control India? Disillusioned by the answers provided by Indian historians, Anuraag provides his explanation

The usual answers trotted out are:-
Military superiority (better trained and motivated English soldiers)
Technological superiority (Indians had bows and arrows versus English guns and cannons)
Political unity (united English vs a divided India)
Historical evidence completely contradicts these three constructs during the 1600-1850 period, the phase of English ascent. For real answers we will need to look somewhere else.

In the 19th century, there was a rumor that the owners of Irani restaurants in Bombay were adding opium to tea and the British Govt. got involved to sort out the issue. Maddy has that story

By the 1820s a large number of Parsis, Marwaris, Gujarati Banias and Konkani Muslims had moved into the opium trade at Mumbai. Of the 42 foreign firms operating in China at the end of the 1830s, 20 were fully owned by Parsis. This effect was evident in the geographical make up of the city. It was the Parsis, many of them beneficiaries of opium’s huge profits, who developed South Bombay. It was primarily opium that linked Bombay to the international capitalist economy and the western Indian hinterland in the nineteenth century.

Following the Chauri Chaura incident in February, 1922, Mahatma Gandhi called off the Non-Cooperation movement. But Gandhiji did not feel the same following the Wagon Tragedy of 1921. Calicut Heritage writes

What history does not tell us is how Gandhiji was suddenly jolted into action after the loss of 23 lives in Chauri Chaura and called off the movement when six months before this event, many more innocent lives had been lost in Malabar on the same Khilafat cause? As Gandhi wrote, explaining his decision to call off the non-cooperation movement, ‘God spoke clearly through Chauri Chaura’. Perhaps, God was less coherent in Malabar! Sir C. Sankaran Nair wrote about Gandhi in his book Gandhi and Anarchy (1922 ) : Mr. Gandhi, to take him at his best is indifferent to facts. Facts must submit to the dictates of his theories.

The next Carnival will be up on September 15th. You can send the nominations by e-mail to varnam dot blog (gmail) or as a tweet to @varnam_blog

Writing Historical Fiction (2)

How accurate should historical fiction be? Can the writer deliberately omit information? Should the reader tolerate inaccuracies? In a post at the Guardian book blog James Forrester writes

The spectrum of historical fiction is therefore not as simple as “accurate = good” and “inaccurate = bad”. It depends on whether the inaccuracies are constructive lies or accidental mistakes
James Clavell’s Shogun brilliantly lied about the closeness of the English pilot Blackthorne to the future Shogun, Toranaga, to illustrate the drama of political events in Japan around 1600. In reality, the real English pilot William Adams was never as close to the real Shogun (Tokugawa Ieyasu). As with Wolf Hall, the lies added to the story, they did not detract from it.
Some lies go too far and alienate the reader. Some are too obvious. But some lying is necessary, and to get away with it, one has to be both subtle and convincing. Shakespeare is a good rule of thumb in this respect. He knowingly conflated historical characters in historical plays. He deliberately misnamed others. Sometimes he gave them attributes that were the very opposite of their real characters. And yet he made the drama of their lives meaningful for us, so that we remember who they are. No one is likely ever to accuse Shakespeare of historical accuracy, but who has written a greater work of historical fiction about the later Plantagenets?[The lying art of historical fiction]