Indian History Carnival – 31

  1. Are there any references in Tamil to Valmiki Ramayanam? Are there any sculptures to support it? Vijay has an analysis

    2. The Pullamangai sculpture is part of the base stones of the Vimana and the latest date for this Vimana is 953 CE, and the portrayal clearly show the curse of Ahalya to turn to stone had taken firm root by then. Was valmiki unclear in the actual wording of the curse, did he mean that she be turned to stone as well. But one thing is clear, that she was turned to stone was part of tamil folkore as early as in the late sangam period as evidenced by the Paripadal verse.

  2. Fëanor writes about the fall of Hindu Sindh at the hands of an invading Muslim army.

    3. The first engagement of the war was the siege of Daybul. al-Thaqafi set up a large catapult, a swing-beam hand-pulled weapon, to bombard the city. The artillerymen targeted a big Buddhist stupa atop which a red flag fluttered; when it was brought down, the spirit of the defenders wilted, and the Arabs penetrated the city and slaughtered the inhabitants for three days. Dahir’s governor fled ignominiously, but hundreds of priests were murdered, and their temples laid waste.

  3. Maddy has a post with the translation of the Vencaticota Ola – a manuscript describing Malabar history and the Portuguese arrival

    4. Considering that this document has not seen light in recent times, it would surely be of some interest to history enthusiasts, buffs and Malabar specialists. I can only begin by offering a small token of thanks to today’s modern search engines like Google and the good sense of the long lost Englishman who consigned this to paper and archived it for posterity. Regrettably, our own precious original history & manuscript collections are slowly rotting away and disintegrating in Kerala, if not gone already, for lack of care & finance. 

  4. Dr. Koenraad Elst writes about a painting which shows Guru Nanak wearing a Hindu-style cap and worshipping Lord Vishnu and the later events.

    5. In 1970, he presented to the publishing unit of Punjabi University Patiala a manuscript with illustrations for a book, 100 Years Survey of Panjab Painting (1841-1941). It was eventually published by the PUP in 1975, but only in mutilated form. The Senate Board of the University objected to the inclusion of one particular painting, and threatened that if it were published, the grant for the whole publishing unit would be stopped.

  5. Calicut Heritage has a brief history of those tea chests which used to come with the words E&SJCWS inscribed on them.

    6. Starting with the business of wholesale merchanting, these CWSs expanded to cover every item of business from production to retailing. It also dabbled in banking and insurance. At one time, the English CWS owned 174 factories in different parts of England and Wales. Similarly, the Scottish CWS owned 56 factories and employed 13000 workers. In the pre-world war years these two CWSs came together to form the English and Scottish Joint Co-operative Wholesale Society (E&SJCWS). 

  6. Nicole Bovin says good bye to Dr. Raymond Allchin, who died on 4th June 2010.

    7. Raymond helped to educate and inspire numerous generations of South Asian archaeologists, including my own. I knew him only late in his career, after his retirement from the University ofCambridge, but was nonetheless struck by his intelligence and warmth. While I lived in Cambridge, our families met occasionally for tea or dinner, and I remember his lively and often humorous stories with great fondness. Also memorable was the grace that he sang at my wedding to a fellow South Asian archaeologist – in Sanskrit and, naturally, without notes.

If you find any posts related to Indian history published in the past one month, please send it to jk AT varnam DOT org or send a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up on Aug 15th.

Movie Watch: Urumi

Santosh Sivan has announced that his next venture will be a movie titled Urumi. The name is the Malayalam word for a long sword made of flexible steel. This video clip makes you wonder how those two managed to give a demo without killing themselves.
In The Mannanars of Chirakkal, Maddy has a description of how it can be used.

The sword was made of thin pliable steel, and worn round the waist like a belt, the point being fastened to the hilt through a small hole near the point. A man, intending to damage another, might make an apparently friendly call on him, his body loosely covered with a cloth, and to all appearances unarmed. In less than a second, he could unfasten the sword round his waist, and cut the other down. This for those who do not know, is the weapon called ‘Urumi’ of the warriors of Malabar. [The Mannanars of Chirakkal]

Urumi is a period film set in the 15th century, at a crucial moment in Indian history — the arrival of Vasco da Gama. The story line we have is minimal at this point.

Urumi is about a group of men who wanted to assassinate Vasco Da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, who set foot in Kappad in Calicut in 1498. The film will have an English subtitle- “Who Killed Vasco De Gama?” Genelia will play a Portuguese princess while Prithviraj will be the leader of the gang that wants to kill Vasco De Gama. [Genelia opposite Pritviraj!]

This is both exciting and scary at the same time. Remember Santosh Sivan’s period film Asoka (2001), where Sivan, Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Anu Malik did a Kalinga on our brains.? But there are three plus points: Santosh later made another period film Before the Rains which was watchable. Second, this movie is being scripted by Shankar Ramakrishnan, who directed one of the brilliant shorts in Kerala Cafe. Finally, the movie does not have Shah Rukh Khan.

Dead Sea Scrolls and Proton Beams

Given a particle accelerator and the Dead Sea Scrolls, what would you do? If you are from Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy, you would send proton beams of 1.3 MeV into one square centimeter pieces of the scroll to find out if they were created elsewhere and bought to Qumran.

At the LANDIS laboratory (one of the INFN laboratories in Catania), non-destructive analyses were performed to obtain results on the origin of the scrolls. To produce a scroll, which was the writing material used at the time, a great quantity of water is needed. By analysing water samples taken in the area where the scrolls were found, the presence of certain chemical elements was established, and the ratio of their concentrations was determined.

According to this analysis, the ratio of chlorine to bromine in the scroll is consistent with the ratio in local water sources. In other words, this finding supports the hypothesis that the scroll was created in the area in which it was found. The next step in the research will be to analyse the ink used to write the scrolls.[Protons for studying the Dead Sea Scrolls]

Incorrect Interpretation of Dr. Parpola's Speech

Recently an article appeared in the Deccan Herald which suggests that the Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola has demolished the Aryan-Dravidian divide as a myth. Dr. Parpola, for those you don’t know, has been studying the Indus scripts since 1960, and holds that the language is proto-Dravidian. Recently, the President of India awarded the first Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Award to the Dr. Parpola. In his speech Dr. Parpola said

Tamil goes back to Proto-Dravidian, which in my opinion can be identified as the language of the thousands of short texts in the Indus script, written in 2600-1700 BCE. There are, of course, different opinions, but many critical scholars agree that even the Rigveda, collected in the Indus Valley about 1000 BCE, has at least half a dozen Dravidian loanwords. [Acceptance speech of Asko Parpola at World Classical Tamil Conference]

Now if such a person, who argues that the language of the Indus was an early form of Tamil, suggests that the Aryan-Dravidian divide is a myth, then there is something to it. This is what Deccan Herald says

However, the rich religious/cultural heritage in South Asia till now has been preserved both by the speakers of Dravidian languages (predominantly in South India) and the people of North India, Prof. Parpola emphasised, to demolish the myth of a clear Aryan-Dravidian divide. Dr Parpola’s work left the top DMK leadership seated in front, nonplussed, kindling them to rethink the Aryan-Dravidian divide issue. [Jolt to Aryan-Dravidian divide theory]

The problem is this: the Aryan-Dravidian divide is not based what happened after the Aryans arrived, but before. It is based on identifying who were the natives and who were the outsiders and according to Dr. Parpola, the Aryans migrated into India. In fact he believes that there were two waves of migration: two Indo-Aryan groups — the Dasas and Panis — arrived around 2100 B.C.E from the steppes via Central Asia bringing horses with them, but they were not the composers of the Rig Veda. The Vedic composers came a couple of centuries later.

Then: 

Most of the Early Dravidian speakers of North and Central India switched over to the dominant Indo-Aryan languages in Post-Harappan times. Speakers of Aryan languages have indistinguishably merged with speakers of Dravidian and Munda languages millennia ago, creating a composite Indian society containing elements inherited from every source. [Parpola and the Indus script]

Thus what Dr. Parpola said at the World Classical Tamil Conference is not different from his decades old position. Unless Dr. Parpola states that he believes in the Indigenous Aryanism — that the Sanskrit speakers were natives of India and not migrants — he is still supporting the Aryan-Dravidian divide.

Harappan Coastal Towns

The city of Dholavira (see map), an important site of the Harappan civilization, is located in a small island in the Rann of Kutch. Discovered in 1966, it was excavated two decades later. It was not a small town; extending over 47 hectares, it ranks among the top five Harappan sites. Now new discoveries from this area are changing our understanding of the Harappan sites which were hundreds of kilometers away from the well known sites of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, but were coastal towns.
For example a huge tank like structure was discovered at Lothal, which is about 50 km east of Dholavira. Located near Bhogavo, a tributary of Sabarmati river, Lothal is a small site (7 hectares) which followed the Harappan tradition of wide streets and fortification. The “tank” structure is 217m long and 36m wide and its walls were made of millions of baked bricks.  When stone anchors and marine shells were found in this tank, archaeologists identified it as a tidal dockyard. During high tide, boats could sail up the Bhogavo and dock here. The warehouse was nearby and there was a spillway for overflowing waters.
Then as with almost anything related to the Harappan civilization, this identification is controversial. Some argue that it was just a reservoir and nothing more. Then shouldn’t a reservoir have slanted steps like in Dholavira or Mohenjo-daro? If it were a reservoir, would the Harappans empty waste water into it?[1] Recently Dennys Frenez of the University of Bologna found some hints that wide canal connected the basin with the sea which supports the theory that the tank was indeed a port[3].
To understand what goods went out from Lothal we need to visit Kanmer.  Located close to Dholavira, it had a population of less than 500 people during the peak of the Harappan civilization. The people of this fortified city were involved in bead making — from carnelian, lapis and agate — and exporting. One of the difficult tasks for the bead makers was drilling the small hole for the string which was done using drill bits made of hardened synthetic  stone. Also found in Kanmer were clay seals with a central hole (see pic). According to the dig director Toshiki Osada, they might be pendants used as a kind of passport in trade. 
References:

  1. Michel Danino, Lost River: On The Trail of the Sarasvati (Penguin Books India, 2010).
  2. D.P Agrawal et al., Redefining the Harappan hinterland, Antiquity, 084, no. 323 (March 2010). 
  3. Andrew Lawler, The Coastal Indus Looks West,  Science, May 28, 2010. (via Ranjith P)

Indian History Carnival – 30

  1. Analyzing a paper by P.A. Underhill et. al on the Indo-European migration Giacomo Benedetti writes

    2. The mid-Holocene period is around 6000 years BP, that means that after 4000 BC we cannot suppose a migration from Europe to Central Asia and South Asia, and this refutes all the theories supposing that the Kurgan people of the Pontic region went to Afghanistan during the Bactria-Margiana civilization (III-II mill. BC) and then to India (II mill. BC).

  2. Is Hinduism a missionary religion? While most people don’t think so, Arvind Sharma writes about an exception

    3. The diffusion of Vaisnavite and Saivite ideas outside India is strong enough to show that Hinduism, too, was a missionary religion; at a very early date a Hinduist movement took root in the Hellenistic world and penetrated as far as Egypt. The decline of Hinduism after the Moslem period must not be allowed to obscure this fact.

    Hinduism long ago advanced beyond the limits assigned to it by Manu, by means of conquest or peaceful absorption, by marriage, and by adoption.

  3. Sandeep has a three part post (1,2,3) on his visit to Ajanta and Ellora. In his final post he laments about the state of the monuments and Hindu apathy.

    4. This one-upmanship game is one of the chief reasons why Hindu monuments continue to languish this horribly. The other reason though is the near-complete deracination of Hindus. As I mentioned in the opening part, Ellora is simply another drop in the sea of similar monuments across the country. Take any state, city, town and village: the two magnificient Hoysala temples in Nagalapura village (in Karnataka) are orphaned but for a moronic ASI signboard. The state of most of the grand temples in Tamil Nadu evokes tears of blood.

  4. Was Chola art of the 13th century influenced by Ancient Greek sculpture? Vijay has the answer.

    5. The diagrams of the movement and flow in the Greek sculpture so closely resemble the Chola bronze. The rear view of bronze shows the exaggerated `S’ so talked off above to move in conjunction with the Contrapposto.

  5. Maddy looks at the period 1732-1805 when Tipu Sultan started his conversion spree and the Zamorin went into exile. During that time two gentlemen tried to hold on to power sometimes aligning with the British and sometimes even with Tipu.

    6. So these two will always remain as enigmas, fighters with faces unknown, and fighters with no personal life, who spent their entire youth and middle age fighting the Mysore Sultans & the British, mainly the former. The populace in the eagerness to name only the British as the oppressors and conquerors forgot the two lone fighters who fought for Malabar against both. Nevertheless, the Pazhassi raja that joined later got into the limelight mainly because his fight was against the declared invader the British and much better chronicled.

The next Carnival will be up on July 15th. You can send the nominations by e-mail to jk @ varnam dot org or as a tweet to @varnam_blog

Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

A new award — Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction — will be awarded on June 19th at the Borders Book Festival. Sarah Dunant, one of the finalists, explains why Historical fiction is the genre of the moment.

Toni Morrison’s astonishing imagination enriched our understanding of slavery. Sarah Waters’s gay adventures rewrote the sexual history of the Victorians, while my own trilogy on the Italian Renaissance told through the experiences of women could not have been conceived, let alone written, even 20 years ago, such was the lack of documentary evidence.

But there is more to this new flowering than good stories. Historical fiction, like history itself, always tells us as much about the time it is written as the period it is writing about. And right now there are huge questions to be asked about the renewed power of religion. It informs global politics, dominates international security, influences social and scientific policies in countries as big as America and spawns a new intellectual war between believers and those out to ignite a new secular revolution.

Suddenly, history has a great deal to offer us when it comes to penetrating “otherness”. And when understanding how belief can be so powerful that it changes attitudes towards death, suicide, even murder, history is a potent tool. It was only a few centuries ago that Europe was consumed by religious wars, and faith both oppressed and brought comfort and meaning in times of brutal poverty and inequality. How far did the threat of Hell or the promises of pleasures in Heaven dictate behaviour then? How and when did the adrenalin of fervour turn to violence? And how did the word of God become the rights of men rather than women or children, imposing a straitjacket on human sexuality bound to end in hypocrisy and abuse? Having spent the past ten years deep within Renaissance Italy, it sometimes feels to me as if I have been learning as much about the present as the past.[Historical fiction is the genre of the moment]

The sign board at Dholavira

While various techniques are being applied to decipher the Indus script, there is an even more fundamental debate on if the Indus people were literate or not. The average length of a seal is five symbols; the longest single-sided inscription has seventeen signs.

One probable use of Indus seals was in economic activity; the seals found in Lothal had impressions of a coarse cloth on their reverse and sometimes several seals were used to mark the goods. Thus the seals meant something to the sender and receiver though we are not quite sure what. But did those seals have meaning only to the trading community? The sign board at Dholavira says no.

This signboard — accidently discovered and painstakingly excavated — is large. The board is 3m long and each of the ten signs is “35 cm to 37 cm tall and 25 cm to 27 cm broad.” The width of the board to the specific length was intentional: it fit the northern gate of the citadel. The signs were made of baked gypsum so that it could be seen from the distance.

Since this board was placed in a public place, big enough to be seen by people in the middle and lower town, it is sure that it had some meaning. According to R. S. Bisht, who discovered the board in 1991, “The inscription could stand for the name of the city, the king or the ruling family,”

He also adds

Bisht opined that the Harappans were a literate people. The commanding height at which the 10-sign board had been erected showed that it was meant to be read by all people.

Besides, seals with Indus signs were found everywhere in the city – in the citadel, middle town, lower town, annexe, and so on. It meant a large majority of the people knew how to read and write. The Indus script had been found on pottery as well. Even children wrote on potsherds.

Bisht said: “The argument that literacy was confined to a few people is not correct. You find inscriptions on pottery, bangles and even copper tools. This is not graffiti, which is child’s play. The finest things were available even to the lowest sections of society. The same seals, beads and pottery were found everywhere in the castle, bailey, the middle town and the lower town of the settlement at Dholavira, as if the entire population had wealth. [Inscriptions on stone and wood]

See Also: Stone inscription with Indus signs

In Pragati: Better than Hoogly Slush

In the winter of 1846 – 47, Henry David Thoreau looked out of his small self-built house in Walden and saw a hundred Irishmen with their American bosses cutting ice slabs from the pond. On a good day, he noted, a thousand tonnes were carted away. These ice slabs went not just to New Orleans and Charleston, but also to Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. Thoreau was amused: here he was sitting in America reading the Bhagavad Gita and the water from his well was being taken to the land of the Ganges.[The Forgotten American Ice Trade]

The June 2010 issue of Pragati carries an expanded version of this post.

Searching for the Historical Jesus (2)

For the faithful, the Bible is the word of God; for the historian it is not since there are major discrepancies among gospels. For example, the genealogy of Jesus differs among the gospels of Mathew and Luke. Also in Mark, the followers don’t recognize him as the Messiah until much later while in John, it is right from the beginning. There is no agreement even on which day he actually died. Mark says one thing and John says something else.  
Can we know for sure if the gospels contain the sayings of Jesus? We can’t be sure since the gospels disagree there too. In John for example, Jesus asserts his divinity, which he never does in the synoptic gospels. But then isn’t it possible that the anonymous authors of the gospels re-contextualized the messages and edited them to suit their needs? Isn’t it sufficient that Jesus’s theology of the Kingdom of God, was something prevalent in that period? 
If the Gospel writers changed words — the historian would argue —  would they differ radically in important events like the trial of Jesus by Pilate or the words he uttered during crucifixion or the post-death events? In Mark he asks the Father why he was forsaken while in Luke he asks his killers be forgiven.
The believer would then say that even though there are some differences, they all agree on where Jesus lived, preached and how he died. The historian would posit that there is no eyewitness account of Jesus outside the gospels. The first Jewish reference appears in Josephus, six decades later; the first Roman reference almost nine decades later in Pliny.
How do you resolve this dispute? You can get some answers by organizing a debate between a non-believer and a believer. And that’s what happened at the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in April of this year where  Dr. Craig Evans and Dr. Bart Ehrman debated on questions like ” are the gospels historically reliable?” and “Do the gospels contain eyewitness tradition?”. You can see the entire debate here and read few accounts here and here.
OT: Recently Glenn Beck displayed his unfathomable knowledge of the Dead Sea Scrolls. While many experts pointed out that he was an idiot, one blogger came to Beck’s defense.