Indian History Carnival – 28

The Indian History Carnival, published on the 15th of every month, is a collection of posts related to Indian history and archaeology.

Why are there no Chinese fishing nets in Calicut — the place where Zheng He visited — while Cochin has them? CHF has a theory. Please read the comments for this post as well.

A more plausible explanation has been offered by Deepa Leslie in her article at http://enchantingkerala.org/kerala-articles/chinese-nets.php According to her, it is the Portuguese Casado settlers from Macau who brought this form of fishing into Cochin. She explains further that the names of the various parts of the net currently in use are Portuguese in origin

Fëanor writes about 16th century Manipur when texts in Meitei Mayek script were burned to make way for new Sanskrit texts.

After Charai Rongba, his son Gareeb Niwaz fell under the influence of the Chaitanya school of Vaishnavism. He decided to no longer support the Meitei Mayek script, and – fearing that the old texts would undermine his efforts to establish Hinduism among the Manipuris, and quite probably encouraged by his Brahmin adviser Shantidas Adhikari – ordered the burning of documents written in it. Large numbers of histories and texts of the old faith were publicly set aflame. In view of the supposed prestige of the languages of the incoming new faith, Manipuri began to be written in the Bengali script, which along with Sanskrit, assumed greater importance in ritual matters.

Inorite has the tale of the kingdom of Vadakkamkur in Kerala

The fate of the dispossessed Rajahs of the Travancore region had always interested me and I could, at best, only find scattered sources that mentioned them in passing. I am still highly intrigued as to what happened to the Kayamkulam Rajah who was perhaps the fiercest and most difficult enemy of Travancore so much so that Marthanda Varma on his death bed instructed his successor that the enmity of the Kayamkulam Rajah was “never to be forgotten”.

Between 1840 and 1870, a commodity that was imported to the Presidencies of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay was American Ice. This trade made one man — Frederic Tudor of Boston — a millionaire. Maddy writes about A Frozen Journey and varnam has a post on the The Forgotten American Ice Trade.
The Oxford University Blog has an excerpt from the 1888 book The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook which gives practical advice to memsahibs in India.

In regard to other supplies, the difficulty in procuring them depends entirely on your position. The district officials have none, while a mere globe-trotter may starve. It is merely a matter of coercion, for the peasant does not wish to sell, and will not sell, if he thinks it polite to refuse. This fact should never be forgotten by the mistress, for it is easy to understand how fearful a weapon for oppression that appalling necessity of camp life, the tâhseel chuprassi, or tâhseel office orderly, may become…

Uber Desi has some photographs of coins used in pre-colonial and colonial India

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 May 15th.

The Forgotten American Ice Trade

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.
A Business Opportunity
In 1831, a Boston businessman named Frederic Tudor, who wanted to make money without physical effort, came up with an idea. He would speculate on coffee prices; coffee consumption in United States was increasing and prices were going up at the rate of 20 to 30 percent. What could go wrong?
Within three years, this speculation would put him deep in debt of more than $210,000. He did not know that in 1833 when he met Samuel Austin, a Boston merchant. Austin’s ships regularly went from Boston to Calcutta, but on the trip to Calcutta it did not carry cargo, but empty ballast. Austin wanted to know if Tudor wanted to ship American Ice at a low freight rate.
If there was one person in United States who had the expertise to export ice to the opposite side of the globe, it was Tudor. He had invented the ice trade in 1806 by exporting ice, cut from frozen lakes in Massachusetts, to the French colony of Martinique. At that time he had faced ridicule — from his father, relatives, and other Boston merchants — but ignoring them he proceeded. No merchant was willing to carry his cargo, but he overcame that by buying a brig for $4000. Inventing various techniques required for the safe transportation of ice, he delivered ice not just to Martinique, but also to Havana, New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah.
Continue reading “The Forgotten American Ice Trade” →

Two Books on the Crusades

After 9/11, when President Bush used the word “crusade” in one of his speeches, it raised red flags in Europe. Why do those battles — ones which Christians eventually lost — still important? There were two books on this topic and both WSJ and The New York Times had reviews.

What comes through clearly is that the “remembered” history of the Crusades might better be called an imagined or invented history. Mr. Asbridge, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, puts it this way: The Crusades “have come to have a profound bearing upon our modern world, but almost entirely through the agency of illusion.” Mr. Phillips, a professor of history at Royal Holloway University of London, says that we have seen only “shadows of the crusades, not true shapes.”[Book Review: Holy Warriors and The Crusades – WSJ.com]

Also it was not just Christians against Muslims

Phillips concentrates on the seven “official” crusades, from 1095 to the final disastrous campaigns of Louis IX (St. Louis) of France in 1248-54 and 1270, but he also describes the fiasco of the so-called Children’s Crusade as well as the horrifying Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southwest France. As he notes, “holy war” was as often as not waged against coreligionists: Catholics against Cathars, Sunnis against Shiites. In the rigid, polarized mentality of the holy warrior, any deviation can signify a dangerous otherness. This is the best recent history of the Crusades; it is also an astute depiction of a frightening cast of mind.[Book Review – ‘Holy Warriors – A Modern History of the Crusades,’ by Jonathan Phillips – Review – NYTimes.com]

Why read Historical Fiction?

Author, historian and chair of the award’s judges Alistair Moffat said that writers like Robert Harris on ancient Rome or Hilary Mantel on 1520s England were “far better at conveying what life was like than some university history lecturers”.
“They are giving history back its stories,” he said. “The best way to understand the past is often to read a novelist rather than an historian. We need to know where we came from, what kind of people our ancestors were … What people in the past believed – such as the absolute certainty about heaven and hell in the Middle Ages – is every bit as important in telling us what they were like as what they left behind in the historical record.”[Booker rivals clash again on Walter Scott prize shortlist | Books | guardian.co.uk]

Among the recent historical fiction I read, The Bellini Card did not impress as much as as The Snake Stone or The Janissary Tree. The Martyr was well written and was a good introduction to Elizabethan England. After reading 50 pages of The Sheen on the Silk, realized that this book is not for me.
Any recommendations?
Update: One book I can recommend is Gore Vidal’s Creation. The main character travels to India and meets Mahavira and Buddha and goes to China and learns from Confucius. Fascinating read.

Pictish writing?

Like the ancestors of Indians, the ancestors of Scots also left a sequence of symbols. For example, “One symbol looks like a dog’s head, for example, while others look like horses, trumpets, mirrors, combs, stags, weapons and crosses.” Like the Harappan symbols these ancient Scottish symbols — known as Pictish — has not be deciphered. The questions are the same? Do they even encode a language? If they don’t encode a language what were they trying to convey?
To analyze the script, the researchers applied Shannon entropy “to study the order, direction, randomness and other characteristics of each engraving.”

The resulting data was compared with that for numerous written languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish Stone engravings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.
Although Lee and his team have not yet deciphered the Pictish language, some of the symbols provide intriguing clues. [New Written Language of Ancient Scotland Discovered]

Now does having order, direction and non-randomness indicate that it is a language? Last year there was a paper which calculated the conditional entropy of the Indus script

The new study compared a well-known compilation of Indus texts with linguistic and nonlinguistic samples. The researchers performed calculations on present-day texts of English; texts of the Sumerian language spoken in Mesopotamia during the time of the Indus civilization; texts in Old Tamil, a Dravidian language originating in southern India that some scholars have hypothesized is related to the Indus script; and ancient Sanskrit, one of the earliest members of the Indo-European language family. In each case the authors calculated the conditional entropy, or randomness, of the symbols’ order.
They then repeated the calculations for samples of symbols that are not spoken languages: one in which the placement of symbols was completely random; another in which the placement of symbols followed a strict hierarchy; DNA sequences from the human genome; bacterial protein sequences; and an artificially created linguistic system, the computer programming language Fortran.
Results showed that the Indus inscriptions fell in the middle of the spoken languages and differed from any of the nonlinguistic systems[Indus Script Encodes Language, Reveals New Study Of Ancient Symbols]

Statistical analysis can only show that the symbols had an order. But can this be assumed to be a spoken language? This methodology has been questioned.

The trouble with this form of argument is that it’s heavily dependent on the particular combination of statistical measure and comparison sets that we choose. And the argument becomes especially unconvincing when there’s an obvious alternative choice of comparison set — generated by a simple random process — that would fall squarely on the side of the line that allegedly identifies “written language”. [Pictish writing?]

It could represent a language or a set of ordered symbols to represent a personal seal or something to mark the goods. Since it was created by humans it probably meant something to the person who created it and the person who saw it. While we know the Indus seals were used in an economic context in some cases, it is not clear what the Pictish seals convey.

The World of Eunuchs and Harems

It can be aptly summarised in one word — lopsided. It was a man’s world. Women were merely objects of pleasure, sex and bearing children. They were status symbols and the more you have in your harem, the higher your prestige. Akbar was said to have over a thousand: Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Arabs, Turks, Caucasians and Moors. They were kept in strict seclusion, guarded by troops of eunuchs and not allowed to go out without the Monarch’s permission. He spent his evenings with them to have his drinks, listen to music and have sex with one or two. He could not possibly enjoy a lot of them; that was beyond their prowess no matter how many kushtas (aphrodisiacs) they consumed. Mughal rulers never wrote about the sexual exploits. With severe censorship how did the sordid goings in harems get known? Eunuchs were occasionally allowed to go out, as were female servants. Bazars of cities like Delhi and Agra were full of salacious gossip of what was going on in the palaces. Foreigners like Tavernier and Manucci wrote about them in their memoirs.[When will Pakistan stamp out the jihadis?- Hindustan Times (LT Pragmatic)]

This is true of most harems; the women and eunuchs had their own politics which sometimes influenced succession. Gore Vidal’s Creation, for example, describes the intrigues in Xerxes’ harem. Also due to this you often see eunuchs as main characters in historical fiction since they could enter any room in the palace. The investigator in Jason Goodwin’s The Snake Stone, The Janissary Tree and The Bellini Card set in 19th century Istanbul is Yashim the Eunuch. The book I picked this week from the library, Anne Perry’s The Sheen on the Silk, set in 13th century Byzanthium, features a physician disguising as a eunuch to solve a murder mystery.
And of course, who can forget Zheng He

Gama's Eastern Christians

An iconic scene during the Portuguese arrival in Malabar in 1498 is when the ex-convict Joao Nunes stepped into land and met two Moors from Tunis. The Moors greeted the ex-convict, “The Devil take you! What bought you here.” He replied, “We came to seek Christians and spices”.

While the Portuguese search for a direct trade route to India bypassing the Muslims is well known, less mentioned is this search for Christians. They searched for the Eastern Christians in Africa and India and interestingly found them everywhere they looked. They also encountered Muslims; encounters which did not go well. The joyous news of the discovery of Eastern Christians was duly reported to Dom Manuel.

Vasco da Gama’s king, Dom Manuel, over a period had developed a messianic streak, due to the death of a large number of people who had preceded him. He believed that he was chosen by the Holy Spirit to confront the powerful. He wanted to take over the Holy Land and destroy Mecca to claim the title — the Emperor of the East. But he could not do it alone: to attack the Egyptian Mamluks, for instance, he needed help and for this the lost Christian kingdoms of Asia could become useful.

To understand this Portuguese obsession with finding Eastern Christians, we need to go along with Vasco da Gama on his first Voyage to Malabar and experience his encounters with people of other faiths.

In Search of Christians

(Prester John)

After navigating the Cape, the fleet reached Mozambique Island in March 1498 where men belonging to the “sect of Mohammed” told them that Eastern Christians lived on a nearby island. The other half of the island where the Christians lived was populated by Moors and there were constant battles among them. Then they were told that Prester John — the mythical Christian king — lived nearby in the interior and he could be reached by a camel trip. Though they were happy to hear about Prester John, they did not attempt to visit him.

During a conversation, the Sultan of Mozambique asked Nicolau Coelho, one of the captains in Gama’s fleet, about Turkey and their religious books. Then Coelho realized that the Sultan had assumed them to be Turks and not Christians. The Portuguese wanted to conceal their identity since they did not know how the reaction would be. Hence for celebrating mass, they would go off to an island.
Continue reading “Gama's Eastern Christians” →

The story of Hypatia

There are two reasons to see the movie Agora when it is released: One, it is a gripping tale of the woman philosopher Hypatia who was murdered by Christian zealots in Alexandria in the 5th century; second, it stars Rachel Weisz. The Smithsonian had an article on her in this month’s issue.

With Cyril the head of the main religious body of the city and Orestes in charge of the civil government, a fight began over who controlled Alexandria. Orestes was a Christian, but he did not want to cede power to the church. The struggle for power reached its peak following a massacre of Christians by Jewish extremists, when Cyril led a crowd that expelled all Jews from the city and looted their homes and temples. Orestes protested to the Roman government in Constantinople. When Orestes refused Cyril’s attempts at reconciliation, Cyril’s monks tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him.
Hypatia, however, was an easier target. She was a pagan who publicly spoke about a non-Christian philosophy, Neoplatonism, and she was less likely to be protected by guards than the now-prepared Orestes. A rumor spread that she was preventing Orestes and Cyril from settling their differences. From there, Peter the Lector and his mob took action and Hypatia met her tragic end. [Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar]

The Harappan Empire

Among the ancient civilizations, the Harappan was much larger in size than the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations; it was too large to be administered from just Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. While the sites along the Indus-Saraswati were urban, a new paper suggests that these towns were surrounded by various supply centers which were non-urban and even hunter-gather in some cases.

In addition, many of the outlying settlements were involved in processing and the production of manufactured goods. Dholavira thrived on its industrial exports of agate and shell artefacts. From Kumaun, a large number of copper mines and copper-working implements have been reported from the Pithoragarh region , where there were also huge deposits of sedimentary talc. The Jodhpura people lived close to copper mines and did the dirty work of smelting for the Harappans . In Kashmir, the hoard of carnelian beads of Harappan vintage at Burzahom shows that they had trade contacts. In the far north-west Bactrian region, Shortguai served as a processing centre for lapis lazuli. In Gujurat, sites like Kanmer yielded a large amount of bead-making material indicating their industrial importance. The agate quarries are located just about 20km from Kanmer. The coastal sites of Sutkagen Dor, Khera Kot, Balakot, Allahdino, Dholavira, Kuntasi, etc. probably helped procure and process shell material for beads and bangles.[Redefining the Harappan hinterland]

Confucius Strikes Back

The most popular cinema in China recently was not Avatar, but (due to protectionist rules), a biopic of Confucius. During the Cultural revolution, the Communists were not big on the philosopher; there was a campaign against his ideas. During the 1919 May Fourth anti-imperialist cultural and political movement too Confucianism was regarded as incapable of responding to the challenges of the West: It held China back; it made China vulnerable.
This is quite evident from the 14th century episode of Zheng He when Ming fleets reached Kerala and sailed across the Arabian Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Swahili Coast. These were no ordinary fleets and for perspective we have to compare Vasco da Gama’s and Zheng He’s first voyages. Gama arrived in Calicut on two carracks and a caravel with a crew of 170 people; Zheng He’s first voyage to Cochin and Calicut had between 200 and 317 ships with a crew of 28,000 men.
While China could have monopolized the Indian Ocean trade that did not happen. One of the reasons China withdrew from these voyages was due to Confucianism.

The imperial bureaucracy sought to contain the expansionary ambitions of its sailors and the increasing power of its merchant class: Confucian ideology venerates authority and agrarian ways, not innovation and trade. “Barbarian” nations were thought to offer little of value to China. [The Asian Voyage: In the Wake of the Admiral]

The attitude towards Confucius has changed in the past three decades. He is popular not just among academics and the business community, but also among ordinary people. Yu Dan’s Confucius from the Heart: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World sold ten million copies in two years and Chow Yun-Fat is playing the philosopher in the latest blockbuster.
Besides Yu Dan’s book, one of the reasons for the surge in interest in Confucianism is due to the interest by parents. Though it was not taught in Government schools, Confucianism became popular in private schools and children can now recite from his books.
Confucianism is big with the Government too; they are setting up institutes named after him around the world to promote language and culture. The popularity of the philosophy works for them since Confucius promoted order, harmony and respect for hierarchy and authority. It can be used to justify authoritarianism.
But with this new found interest in Confucianism are the Chinese going to scale back on their global trade, support for Pakistan and North Korea and investments in Africa? The current administration is not going to commit the blunder of the Ming emperors. They know that this is good for cultural identity, but not for foreign policy.
Reference:

The Return of Confucius on NPR