Indian History Carnival – 6

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

A recent article in The Mint by Mr. T.R.Ramaswami suggested among other things (a) there is a conspiracy to maintain that Mahābhārata war did not happen between 2500 – 1500 B.C.E (b) 18 day wars could happen only after railways came into existence (c) Valmiki could be a Russian and (d) both Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa took place outside India, on the Russian steppes and were transplanted to India. Eroteme has a response. The Mint also posted a response by me.
Drawing heavily from Kitabu’l-Hind by Al Biruni, kupamanduka unravels the history of xenophobia in India.
How did the Chinese trade with the Malabaris without knowing the language. Maddy explains how fingers talked.
The Battle of Pratapgad was fought between the Shivaji and Afzal Khan in November 1659. Despite having fewer forces, the Marathas got their first significant victory over a regional power and Shivaji became a larger than life person. Kedar says that when people sang about his heroics, they forgot about his strategies.
Amardeep writes what he learned about Shivaji from James Laine’s Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India.
Law Matters writes about the administration of justice in Madras in the seventeenth century.
Szerlem looks past the disrepair and ASI’s disinterest in maintaining the Nizamuddin basti in Delhi and catches glimpses of an ancient past.
Shantanu writes about the Gandhi-Bose rivalry.
Pragmatic has a post about the people India and Pakistan sent to argue Kashmir in United Nations and what happened to both at the end.
From Kamasutra to social conservatism – Hari wonders how this change happened.

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 use this form. Please send me links which are similar to the ones posted, in terms of content and don’t send details of your personal temple visits. The next carnival will be up on July 15th.

The "Secular" Lakshmana Rekha

Yesterday American F-15 jet fighters and B-1 bombers dropped bombs on a Pakistani Frontier Corps checkpoint killing soldiers and thus escalating the tensions between the “allies” in the war on terror. A study by RAND Corp had warned few days back that Pakistani intelligence agents and paramilitary have been aiding Taliban in attacking the Americans. The Pakistanis, used to applying this design pattern in the Kashmir border, thought the response would be a threatening letter or in the worst case scenario, a speech from Karzai, but instead found strong retaliation.

Such an asymmetric warfare happened in Kerala too.It all started with the State Women’s Commission asking the Government to make sure that girls below 18 are not forcibly enrolled as nuns. The Church was furious. The Congress said that the government had no role in managing religious beliefs. The chairperson of the Commission was asked to quit. After lot of noise, the Commission has decided to go “soft” on the issue for no one expected that F-16s and B-1s would be seen on the horizon.

Last year the Communists desperately wanted to get singer KJ Yesudas inside Guruvayoor temple. One minister, Sudharakan, wanted women to have darshan at Sabarimala. Both issues, at this moment, go against Hindu beliefs. (Reforms are required and it is for Hindu priests and religious authorities to decide). At that time we did not see sanctimonious lectures from the Congress Party on the need to stay away from religious beliefs. Maybe Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala was busy helping Rajasekhar Reddy decide if Ahmadiyas are Muslims or not.

In the version of secularism practiced by Indian Govt. there is the Durand Line and the Line of Control. The Line of Control is like a tourist spot; anyone can walk in, urinate, and walk away. But the Durand Line is the Lakshama Rekha. If you do tourism there, as Rajiv Gandhi succintly put it, “naani yaad aayegi“.

Role Model for Maoists

In Russia

As Clifford Levy wrote in The Times last week, Russia’s national networks, the most powerful media in the country, are routinely deleting news or opinions critical of the Kremlin. In one notable case, Mikhail Delyagin, a well-known political analyst, criticized Vladimir Putin during the taping of a talk show. When the program aired, Mr. Delyagin was missing. Or, most of him was missing. His disembodied legs remained in the picture.

Meanwhile, in Nepal

Addressing a rally to celebrate the declaration of republic in Kathmandu Prachanda said his CPN-Maoist will not tolerate further criticism by the media and warned of serious consequences if it continued to criticise the party. Targeting the Kantipur publication that brings out the largest circulated dailies Kantipur and The Kathmandu Post, the former rebel leader said, “You journalists did well to continuously criticise the Maoists before the constituent assembly polls, otherwise the election would not have taken place at all.”“Now we will no longer tolerate criticism as we have already been elected by the people,” he said, adding that the other newspapers criticising the Maoist will also meet the same fate.[

The Maoists, who are not as tech savy as the Kremlin folks, know only one way to make a man disappear and it won’t be pretty. This would be a good time for Siddharth Varadarajan to explain to the Chairman how press functions in a democracy.

My op-ed in Mail Today: Cultural Liberalism

This was the same piece that was published in Pragati, but enhanced with few hundred words, based on suggestions from Ranjith and Oldtimer. Also thanks to Nitin for first publishing it in Pragati.

Governments usually ban books and movies when they think it has or can upset religious sentiments resulting in a break down in law and order. While that may be the official reason, the ground reality is that it is connected to politics. The Communists became a pot among kettles when they banned Taslima Nasreen’s book Dwikhandito in West Bengal and when Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya ordered the cancellation of the screening of “Taurus”, a film which showed Lenin in a less admirable light. With all these bans, the governments made it clear that they would rather appease than take an honorable stand.
…
As usual there will be mob violence and selective outrage, but let not the Iranian Ayatollahs and Bangladeshi fundamentalists be our role models. Instead, it is illuminating to read these lines which Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul wrote in the M.F. Hussain verdict, “A liberal tolerance of a different point of view causes no damage. It means only a greater self restraint. Diversity in expression of views whether in writings, paintings or visual media encourages debate. A debate should never be shut out.”[JPG/PDF]

Lets First do Archaeology

Mr. Ramaswami, a proponent of Aryan Invasion Theory and subsequent corollaries like Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata happened in Russia, recently left a comment on my blog post with some questions. This was related to his article on Mint claiming that there was an Aryan Invasion and my subsequent response citing two papers which show that there was none.

He wrote

In attempting to refute my theory, Nair has waxed eloquent about DNA, linguistic history etc but does not have the courage, for obvious reasons, to state with conviction the central question raised in my article – what is the
date?

The only reason I don’t mention the date is because: I don’t know. This is mostly because I have not seen a consensus date among historians and archaeologists so far, not because I have any agenda.

Instead, everyone has their favourite date based on their favourite techniques and Dr.Subhash Kak has a good summary. The dates vary from 5th millennia (based on astronomical references) to 1000 B.C.E. One argument was that we don’t find any dates between 2500 – 1500 B.C.E, but Dr. Kak’s paper mentions 1924 B.C.E as a possible date.

The date of 1924 BC. Based on Puranic genealogies that see a gap of 1000 years or so between the War and the rule of the Nandas (424 BC) we get the date of 1424 BC. But Pargiter, while editing these accounts from the various Puranas,4 suggested that the original number was 1,500 which was wrongly copied in various texts as 1000, 1015, or 1050. I accept the arguments of Pargiter and, therefore, consider the Puranic tradition to support the date of 1924 BC. [The Mahabharata and the Sindhu-Sarasvati Tradition]

Mr. Ramaswami is quite right when he says that it is strange that there is a spread of millennia for an epic which tells the story of a few generations and we cannot accurately nail it to a specific date. It would be helpful if we could find some horse bones or evidence of Ashwamedha or of the palace at Indraprastha. It would indeed give closure if we could say for sure if Mahabharata was real history, or a minor history event embellished by Vyasa or just poetic imagination. Does this look absurd compared to the certainity of events in Egypt and Mesopotamia? It certainy does.

Ramaswami says

f you were the Indian government would you not dig up these places like the Mumbai Municipal Corporation right down to the centre of the earth if necessary? What we done and what have we found? Let me tell you the answers. If at all they have dug they have found nothing or found something to the contrary. After all if there was any evidence it would have made headlines all over the world. The correct answer is that no excavation has been done because everyone knows that nothing will be found because it did not happen.

How do we know this is the correct answer? No idea. But here is another answer.

“Those who are on the side of the Hindu fundamentalists have been misusing archaeology to push back the antiquity of Indian civilization”, was one of the complaints when Jagmohan of that “communal” NDA Govt started the Saraswati Heritage Project to conduct archaeology along the banks of the Ghaggar river. The project which involved IITs and Birbal Sahni Institution was canned by the present UPA Govt, not because of the fear that nothing will be found, but because of the fear that something will be found.

There is one more reason – people might decolonize their minds. This is what happened to the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, B.B. Lal. A disciple of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, he started out by believing in the Aryan Theory and then went on to dig some Mahabharata sites.

In my report on the excavations at Hastinapura and in a few subsequent papers I expressed the view that the Painted Grey Ware Culture represented the early Aryans in India. But the honeymoon was soon to be over. Excavations in the middle Ganga valley threw up in the pre-NBP strata a ceramic industry with the same shapes (viz. bowls and dishes) and painted designs as in the case of the PGW, the only difference being that in the former case the ware had a black or black-and-red surface-colour, which, however, was just the result of a particular method of firing. And even the associated cultural equipment was alike in the two cases. All this similarity opened my eyes and I could no longer sustain the theory of the PGW having been a representative of the early Aryans in India.[Let not the 19th century paradigms continue to haunt us! ]

If you go to any library or watch History channel, you will be bombarded with information on Egyptian or Mesopotamian civilization. Thus there is no surprise if there is certainty in their events, because much archaeology and research has been done, while nothing of that sort has been done in India, due lack of political will. Why go as far as Mahābhārata war? The dates for Adi Shankara has a spread of millennia.

A good example of a myth turning into reality was the Trojan war. Interested in the location of Homer’s Troy, Heinrich Schliemann started digging for it in Turkey. Though British archaeologist Frank Calvert had identified Hissarlik as the site of Troy, his work was over shadowed by Schliemann who published Ithaka, der Peloponnesus und Troja in which he claimed Hissarlik as the site of Troy. This is now accepted by historians.

Even though the site was discovered there were sceptics who claimed that Troy was an insignificant town and such a large war as described by Homer could not have happened there. For the past 16 years more than 350 people have been collaborating on the excavations in the site and their discoveries have resulted in some new facts. Troy, it seems was a large and important city controlling access from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. German archaeologist Manfred Korfmann who has been excavating in Troy wrote

According to the archaeological and historical findings of the past decade especially, it is now more likely than not that there were several armed conflicts in and around Troy at the end of the Late Bronze Age. At present we do not know whether all or some of these conflicts were distilled in later memory into the “Trojan War” or whether among them there was an especially memorable, single “Trojan War.” However, everything currently suggests that Homer should be taken seriously, that his story of a military conflict between Greeks and the inhabitants of Troy is based on a memory of historical events–whatever these may have been [Was There a Trojan War?]

Let there be more archaeology and Mumbai Municipal Corporation like digging around the country. Let there be an Archaeological Survey of India freed from political masters. Let us allow researchers into the field. Let us first have some data before jumping to conclusions.

Ramaswami says, “the gap in the MB dates coincided with the Aryan invasion and they are both the same events.” I don’t believe in an Aryan Invasion, due to lack of genetic evidence, and so the date of Mahābhārata is not tied to it and that’s our disagreement in this debate.

My Article in Pragati:Towards a cultural liberalism

Governments usually ban books and movies when they think that it has or can upset religious sentiments resulting in a break down in law and order. While that may be the official reason, the ground reality is that it is connected to politics. Thus by banning The Da Vinci Code and The Satanic Verses, the governments made it clear that they can sacrifice liberalism. On finding that James Laine’s Shivaji: Hindu King in Muslim India had remarks that were deemed derogatory to the Maratha hero, the Maharashtra state government banned the book, showing that it is not just minority appeasement at work. Maharashtra’s ban also showed that laws made by local authorities might not be an obvious cure, but opportunities for customised pandering.
Our constitution writers were clear that democracy is meaningless without freedom of speech, and that people should live in a social environment that permits maximum personal and cultural freedom.
Our politicians though, play petty politics with this right. Our governments, independent of their ideology, have indulged in communal and regional politics to satisfy vocal groups. Liberals must oppose such bans and question the judgement behind maintaining such lists
Download Pragati and read the rest.

Madras High Court 1, SVDSS 0

International Sri Vaishnava Dharma Samrakshanna Society had petitioned the Madras High Court objecting to various scenes in Kamal Haasan’s Dasavatharam because it offended Hindu sentiments. The Court, as expected, dismissed the petition, citing that imaginary concerns cannot be addressed.

Describing the petitioner’s claims of scenes in which Kamal Haasan allegedly steps on the ‘OM’ mantra and tramples on the Bhagawad Gita as “imaginary assumption of the petitioner,” the Bench said the scenes were only a fiction born out of imagination.

Since the petitioners had not watched the movie their apprehension lack substance, the Bench said while dismissing the case.

The Bench also turned down the petitioner’s contention that there were scenes depicting clashes between Vaishnavites and Saivites, which could lead to caste clashes, on the same ground that they had not watched the movie.[‘Dasavatharam’: Madras HC dismisses petition]

My article in Mint: Genetic data refutes theory

In “A battle about history” (Mint,23 May), T.R. Ramaswami said certain dates for the Mahabharat war were suppressed and the Pandavs and Kauravs were outsiders, and even suggested that the Mahabharat and Ramayan took place outside India. Mint has published an article by me which uses genetic evidence to claim that the Aryan Invasion, which even historians like Romila Thapar reject, did not happen.
The article is an edited version of a previous piece published here at varnam.

On the ancestry of Indian populations, research says there is no need to look beyond the borders of South Asia for the paternal heritage of a majority of Indians since the time agriculture began. Also, there is no evidence of people coming through the north-west corridor in massive numbers, indicating a South Asian origin for the Indian caste communities (and not a Central Asian one). And, there is recent shared ancestry between Central Asians and Indians, but it is explained by diffusion of Indian lineages northwards, which means some Indians went to Central Asia and got lucky.[Genetic data refutes theory]

Here are the two papers mentioned in the article

A prehistory of Indian Y chromosomes: Evaluating demic diffusion scenarios by Sanghamitra Sahoo, Anamika Singh et. al.
Deep common ancestry of Indian and western-Eurasian mitochondrial DNA lineages by T. Kivisild et al.

Sanskrit, a synonym for Communalism

In a column analyzing the BJP victory in Karnataka, Indian Express columnist Seema Chisthi wrote the following paragraph.

The much-Sanskritised chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, who had also campaigned in Karnataka, was calmly in conversation with the TV anchor, commenting on national issues. Very difficult to engage on matters outside Gujarat usually, he signalled his stepping onto a national stage on Sunday — a Sanskritisation (a phrase coined by a Kannadiga sociologist M.N. Srinivas, incidentally) in political terms, which could have violent consequences for not just his party, but also for how politics may take shape quickly, and feverishly, before 2009.[He who holds Bangalore

Usually you see the word saffronization associated with the Hindutva folks, not Sanskritization. This word, which was used as a pejorative during the anti-Brahmin movement, is not in vogue in public commentary these days, but the revival is with mischievous intent. Narendra Modi and Sanskritization, well you get the association. Now the name of a language has become a synonym for communal politics.

In fact this attempt to brand Sanskrit as a non-secular entity happened once before, believe it or not – by the Central Board of Secondary Education. It was an attempt to pull the rug off India’s cultural heritage and history by branding an entire language as not-secular.

At that time the Central Board of Secondary Education decided not to offer Sanskrit as an elective because

If they offered Sanskrit, they would have to offer Arabic and Persian since they were also classical languages. If Sanskrit alone was offered ignoring Arabic and Persian, then it would not be secular education, so went the reasoning.
If they offered Sanskrit, they would also have to offer other languages like French and German and even Lepcha.

The Supreme Court in a landmark verdict rejected the accusation that teaching Sanskrit was against secularism. To make that judgment, the Court first defined secularism as neither pro-God or anti-God, but the ability to treat devout, agnostic and atheist alike and to be neutral in religious matters. To be a secular person you don’t have to reject your religious beliefs; you could deeply religious as well as secular. To illustrate the case, the Court cited two Indians – Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda – to “dispel the impression that if a person is devout Hindu or devout Muslim he ceases to be secular.”

Regarding the language, the Court wrote that Sanskrit was the language in which Indian minds expressed the noblest ideas. It was also the language in which our culture, which includes the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, the teachings of Sankaracharya to Vallabhacharya and classics of Kalidasa to Banabhatta were expressed. Without understanding Sanskrit, the Court wrote, you cannot understand Indian philosophy on which our culture is based

There were two other reasons (a) Sanskrit is in the Eighth Schedule, while French, German, Arabic, Persian and Lepcha are not and (b) Article 351 of the Indian Constitution.

Now Seema Chisthi is taking us two decades back, once again to imply that Sanskrit = Communal, thus giving a language such a narrow definition that it would disconnect an ancient nation from its rich cultural heritage. Soon Sanskrit speakers, students of history, and Indian philosophy will be branded communal and the volunteers of Samskrita Bharati will be compared to Mohammed Afzal.

Lets watch to see if our eminent journalists, defenders of secularism and guardians of enlightenment pick this up.

Related Links: The Supreme Court Verdict

One More Under The Bus

California is going to have a major earthquake. I know this, not because the U.S. Geological Survey warned so, but because of the predictions of one John C. Hagee, the founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Pastor Hagee believes that Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank do not belong to the Arabs since it was ruled by Ottoman Turks before WWI. He believes in Rapture, Second Coming of Jesus, rebirth of Israel – the usual works.

After Hurricane Katrina, in an interview with Terry Gross, he said that God had punished New Orleans for a “a level of sin that was offensive to God” because of a homosexual parade, and the tropical cyclone was proof “of the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans.”

When same sex marriage was legalized in New England, Rev. Hagee wrote

“Massachusetts has just agreed to recognize same-sex marriages. It will open the door to incest, to polygamy, and every conceivable marriage arrangement demented minds can possibly conceive. If God does not then punish America, he will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.” He also wrote: “It is impossible to call yourself a Christian and defend homosexuality. Homosexuality means the death of society because homosexuals can recruit, but they cannot reproduce.” [California Kicks Right-Wing Butt]

Now that the California Supreme Court has lifted the ban on same-sex marriage, Rev. Hagee might be hoping that God would unleash his retributions on the Golden State.

God did act, but it was on Rev. Hagee himself. Besides suggesting that Katrina was divine punishment for sin, he had also referred to the Catholic Church as “the great whore” and “false cult system.” After an audio recording of a 1990 sermon, in which he said that God had sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land, surfaced he became a political pariah. Sen. John McCain who, as part of his right wing appeasement policy, had sought and obtained Rev. Hagee’s endorsement called his comment, “crazy and unacceptable” and rejected the endorsement.

Brahman, the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality, cannot laugh, but if there is a God, he definitely is laughing at Rev. Hagee.