varnam A Blog on Indian History

1. Jayarava investigates if there is any truth to the claim that Buddha’s family followed Dravidian marriage customs? Read the entire post to get the answer.

A cross cousin marriage is one in which a boy would marry his mother’s brother’s daughter, or a girl would marry her father’s sister’s son. This is one of the preferred matches in South India amongst the Dravidian speaking peoples, and also practised in Sri Lanka. However Good (1996) has been critical of the idea that cross-cousin marriage is the only or most preferred kin relationship, and shows that other marriage matches are made. Be that as it may, cross-cousin marriage is a feature of South Indian kinship, and the Brahmanical law books (the Dharmasūtras) make it clear that cousin marriage is forbidden for Aryas. (Thapar 2010: 306). The perception, then is that if the Buddha’s family practised cross-cousin marriage, they cannot have been Aryas and were likely Dravidians.

2. While we know about the English, Portuguese and Dutch factories in India, less known is the fact that there was a Danish factory in Calicut in the 18th century.

The Calicut lodge was not very much in the scheme of things as far as the Danish were concerned and was just an outpost for pepper procurement. However it also served as a listening post to sound out the English overtures in the Malabar Coast. The Danish were wary of supplying arms and armaments to the Travancore kingdom and the Mysore rajas though they did quite a bit of that quietly under the British eyes and the response from the buyers were not too enthusiastic and the equipment was old, outdated and even unusable at times. But they continued on. Sometimes brown sugar and salt from the Calicut factory found their way to the ships headed back to Copenhagen. The ships came from Tranquebar in Jan/Feb and got back by April/May. During the incoming trip they brought in weapons offloaded at Colachel and later at Calicut for Hyder & Tipu. The principal items of trade were saltpeter, pepper, salt, soft brown sugar, textiles, rattan, indigo & tea (from China). For the Danish ships, the journey to Europe was direct from Tranquebar and not touching the Malabar coasts.

3. Usually we don’t find elaborate descriptions of the Zamorin. But thanks to Italian traveller Pietro Della Valle who visited Calicut in December 1623, we have a bit more details.

Pietro had no difficulty in walking into Zamorin’s Palace where he and his Captain were almost forced to have an audience with the Zamorin. His description of the Zamorin as he walked into the hall to meet the visitors is graphic: After a short space the King came in at the same door, accompanied by many others. He was a young Man of thirty, or five and thirty, years of age, to my thinking; of a large bulk of body, sufficiently fair for an Indian and of a handsome presence. … His beard was somewhat long and worn equally round about his Face; he was naked, having only a piece of fine changeable cotton cloth, blue and white, hanging from the girdle to the middle of the Leg.

4. Do you know why Tiruvarur is famous for? Sriram writes:

Tiruvarur town is also the birthplace of the Carnatic music trinity – Syama Sastry (1762-1827), Tyagaraja (1767-1847) and Muttuswami Dikshitar (1775-1835). The houses in which they were born were later acquired by a trust which built memorials for them at the spots. Though not aesthetically appealing, they serve to commemorate three geniuses who between them, revolutionized South Indian classical music, rather like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart in the world of Western Classical Music. Of the Trinity, Muttuswami Dikshitar is completely associated with Tiruvarur. Several of his compositions are in praise of the deities here.

The Bhakti movement in Tamil Nadu is associated with the 63 devotees of Shiva, known as the Nayanmars, all of whom lived between the 2nd and 8th centuries. Of these, the last- Sundaramurthy has a shrine to himself here. It is believed that he first came up with the idea of the 63, including himself, at the Devashraya – a many-pillared hall that stands within this temple.

Just four posts for this month. The next carnival will be up on Feb 15th. Send your links to varnam dot blog @gmail before that.

This one does not need any commentary.

Widely believed theory of Indo-Aryan invasion, often used to explain early settlements in the Indian subcontinent is a myth, a new study by Indian geneticists says. “Our study clearly shows that there was no genetic influx 3,500 years ago,” said Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj of CCMB, who led the research team, which included scientists from the University of Tartu, Estonia, Chettinad Academy of Research and Education, Chennai and Banaras Hindu University. “It is high time we re-write India’s prehistory based on scientific evidence,” said Dr Lalji Singh, former director of CCMB. “There is no genetic evidence that Indo-Aryans invaded or migrated to India or even something such as Aryans existed”. Singh, vice-chancellor of BHU, is a coauthor.[Indians are not descendants of Aryans, says new study]

Here is a link to the paper.

Summing up, our results confirm both ancestry and temporal complexity shaping the still on-going process of genetic structuring of South Asian populations. This intricacy cannot be readily explained by the putative recent influx of Indo-Aryans alone but suggests multiple gene flows to the South Asian gene pool, both from the west and east, over a much longer time span. We highlight a few genes as candidates of positive selection in South Asia that could have implications in lipid metabolism and etiology of type 2 diabetes. Further studies on data sets without ascertainment and allele frequency biases such as sequence data will be needed to validate the signals for selection.

The point is that nothing exciting happened following the decline of the Harappan civilization. The Dravidian folklore is just that – folklore. Migrations did happen to the region, but they date to much earlier period before there were Dravidian and Indo-European languages.

When we talk about the Arabian Sea trading network, it usually is implied to mean the time from which the Europeans started sailing through the region. But as Manmadhan Ullatil pointed out in Hubs of the medieval trade, this trading network existed much before this period. In fact the ports along the coast of India and Africa were part of the trading network of the Old World. By studying the Prehistoric movement of plants and animals, we are able to reconstruct the trading patterns and speculate about the traders.

In such a study, something interesting has turned up. Researchers looking into the domestication of banana found that it may have been initially done in New Guinea; wild bananas are found in South Asian rainforests. By looking at the banana phytoliths, it is now believed that bananas reached the Harappan region around 2000 BCE, before the decline of the civilization started and apparently were not used for eating. So what else could they have been used for?

Given the distribution of wild Musaceae in South Asia, and the climate at that time (Asouti & Fuller 2008, Madella & Fuller 2006), it is unlikely that these could derive from the ancient presence of wild Musa or Ensete. The possibility that a species was cultivated as a garden ornamental or as a source of fiber and raw materials (e.g., for paper) cannot be ruled out. Indeed, one of these nonculinary uses of Musa/Ensete might be a more plausible explanation for these phytoliths than an early dispersal of edible cultivated bananas from Island Southeast Asia by the third millennium B.C.[Banana Cultivation in South Asia and East Asia: A review of the evidence from archaeology and linguistics( via Carlos Aromayo)]

The paper says that it is possible that the Indus people used the fiber for making paper. Now if they made paper you would think that the next step would be to assume writing. But claiming that Indus people were literate would violate a lakshmana rekha.

So the next line in this paper says that since few folks think that Indus people were illiterate, this could not have happened. Thus apparently, Indus people got bananas, did not eat them, made paper and threw them away. They could have done anything, except writing on it.

This is the 4 year anniversary edition of the Indian History Carnival. So let me take this opportunity to thank my contributors who e-mail me various links. This has become important as various other things, like work, has been keeping me terribly busy leaving less time for reading and blogging. So Sandeep V, Feanor and others – Thanks for making my life easy.

1. Shubo Bose has an excellent blog which looks at the coins of India with lots of pictures.
2. The Taj Mahal diamond owned by Elizabeth Taylor is going to be auctioned. That rock has an interesting history.

Though the gem is associated with one of the most famous marriages of this century- the one of Burton and Taylor, its provenance goes back to one of the greatest love stories in history. The Mughal Emperor Shah Jahangir gave it to his son Shah Jahan who in turn gifted it to his favorite wife Mumtaz-i-Mahal and later built the Taj Mahal in her honor.

3. Matthew Gibb (1849-1920), great-grandfather of the Bee Gees, was a military man and he served in India. Fëanor writes

He was one among the many BOR – British Other Ranks – soldiers from these isles who served in India, along with the much larger native forces. They bivouacked in Cantonments waiting to be called out on campaign. When he joined, India was the largest and most important of British colonies. The Army acted as a vast Imperial police force, maintaining law and order and British interests in the region. Gibb was one of sixty thousand white soldiers living and working along with Indian army men in garrison towns across the subcontinent.

4. New Delhi is 100 years old and the NYTimes blog has the story of its birth.

Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens, the two architects appointed to design much of the city, seemed to be curious choices for such a venture. Baker worked in South Africa, where he had become a disciple of the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Lutyens, who previously had mostly designed English country houses, was known for his occasional prejudiced outbursts against India. In a letter to his wife, for example, Lutyens described Indian architecture as “essentially the building style of children.” Even the Taj Mahal, he complained, was “small but very costly beer.” Both men reveled in their assignment to create a monument to imperialism.

5. Bhaskara has a detailed history of Air India from its humble origins in 1932. This is only the first part in a three part series.

During World War 2; the growth in new routes slowed for Tata Airlines. But because the War was relatively docile in India; demand on existing routes continued to grow. They upgraded their fleet constantly; eventually jumping up to a fleet of 3 Stinson Model As, as well as multiple 14 seat Douglas DC-2s. This new lift helped Tata spread its wings to Bangalore, Nagpur, Calcutta, and even Baghdad, Iraq by June of 1945 (nearing the end of the war).

If you find interesting blog posts on Indian history, please send it to varnam.blog @gmail or as a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up around Jan 15th.

Sati. Check. Inter-caste love affair. Check. A clownish Hindu who thinks a Black shipmate is an avatar of Lord Krishna. Check. Amitav Ghosh’s book, which is set in during the period when opium was cultivated in India and exported to China, has all the typical Booker Prize ingredients (The book was a finalist). 

In Operation Red Lotus, Parag Tope writes that the East India Company was a state sanctioned monopoly for drug trafficking  during this period; the manufacture of the drug was controlled by the company either directly or indirectly. In 1837, following the First Opium War, the trade ran into some hiccups causing the British traders to come up with a new strategy. During that time the following conversation happens between them:

This elicited an instantaneous response from Mr. Burnham, who placed his wineglass forcefully on the table. `Evidently you have mistaken my meaning, Raja Neel Rattan,’ he said ‘The war, when it comes, will not be for opium. It will be for a principle: for freedom – for the freedom of trade and for the freedom of the Chinese people. Free Trade is a right conferred on Man by God, and More so perhaps, since in its absence many millions of natives would be denied the lasting advantages of British influence.’

As the war was being planned,Benjamin Burnham, the owner of Ibis, a slave carrying ship from United States had no other option, but to divert to transport coolies to Mauritius. It is into this ship that an assortment of characters step in. They include the recently widowed Deeti and her Ox cart driving husband, Zachary Reidm a freed slave , Neel Rattan Halder, a Raja whose land was seized and turned into a convict by the British, Paulette Lambert, a French orphan and an assortment of characters.

A large porition of the book is plain narrative where the characters and their back story are established. Very soon it lapses into a Films Division style documentary on life during that period. But that period is described meticulously and the amount of research that has gone into the habits, costumes and food is really impressive. I recently started reading Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth and found much more vivid historical detail in Ghosh’s work. The book drags in the middle and there is a rush of action towards the end.

Episode 4 of the PBS show Fabric of the Cosmos is truly mind bending. In this episode Brian Greene talks about multiple universes and how the math proves that many universes could theoretically exist. The evidence for this comes from the fact that the universe is expanding and the math of string theory. The possibility that there could be another copy of me in another universe with a blog which has more than ten readers is very disturbing.

You can watch all the four episodes of Fabric of Cosmos online.

Abraham Eraly has a new book on the Gupta period which is considered a Golden Age in Indian history. There are two reviews of The First Spring.  The first review by Bibek Debroy has Eraly’s theory on why this period was considered as the Golden Age.

First, Buddhist (and Jain) ethics emphasised equity and access and human enterprise. “Fatalism” had not set in. Second, agriculture went through a transformation. There was monetisation, capital formation and trade, with increase in literacy. Third, guilds provided skills and their standardisation, and testing and certification of goods and services. They also regulated prices and working conditions of labourers. Fourth, kings had contractual obligations, not a divine right to rule. More importantly, s/he possessed executive duties of ensuring domestic and external security, with almost no legislative powers and limited dispute resolution powers. “One of the most laudable aspects of the political developments of the classical age was the robust growth of village self-government in many parts of India.” To use today’s jargon, we had better governance and decentralisation, with optimal provision of public goods and services. Fifth, there was urbanisation, not a retreat into a rural Arcadia. Sixth, cross-fertilisation led to innovation and experimentation. Seventh, rigidities of caste had not set in. Individually and in isolation, each of these propositions is plausible and known. Taken together, they represent a coherent story of why civilisations rise (and fall). The reversal into dark ages is explained by a reversal of each of these trends. Though not an Eraly estimate, there are rear-casts that between 500 BC and 500 AD, India had a per capita income of about $150. That made it one of the richest regions of the world.[Lessons From The Golden Age (H/T Yashwant)]

Eraly is a believer of the Aryan Invasion Theory and has romantic notions of Buddhism. His analysis of Vedas is based on translations by Wendy Doniger and so his observations have to be taken with quintals of salt. Nayanjot Lahiri’s review bursts Eraly’s balloon.

Eraly’s new book brings more than a millennium within the ambit of ‘Classical India’. This makes the scope of The First Spring highly ambitious, including in it India’s sprawling landscape, polity and society, economy and everyday life, philosophy and literature, even arts and religion, across 1,300 years and more.

Unfortunately, this is compromised by unsubstantiated generalisations, by an ignorance of archaeology and the kind of information it has yielded on many of the issues examined here, and by a complete disregard for some segments of the India it claims to describe.

Anyone with a working knowledge of ancient India would be appalled, for instance, by the book’s characterisation of classical Indian civilisation as essentially Buddhist. Is this a reaction to what Eraly supposes to be a “common misconception that it was a Hindu civilisation”? He should know that such labels are no longer used to characterise Indian history and, certainly, the millennium he examines was neither Buddhist nor Hindu but one marked by multiple religious traditions. Mathura is one example where there were Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu practices besides the worship of fertility deities. Nagarjunakonda is another instance of religious heterogeneity, with over 30 Buddhist establishments, 19 Hindu temples and some medieval Jain places of worship.

Eraly ignores the evidence of archaeology, goes for unproven generalisations, and doesn’t include the Northeast in his narrative.

Similarly, if Eraly had cared to look at the details of ordinary living that have emerged from excavations in the Gangetic plains, he’d find it difficult to believe that the Aryans “changed farming techniques” and introduced iron there. Rice began to be cultivated in the Gangetic alluvium in the 7th millennium BC and communities with broad-based farming patterns were flourishing there from the early 2nd millennium BC onwards. If the area did not have to wait for the putative Aryans for the consolidation of its agricultural base, neither did it require them for producing metallic iron, which was used there from the middle of the 2nd millennium BC itself.

Eraly’s description of cities also ignores archaeology, including the splendid ruins of urban Taxila, the most extensively excavated urban landscape of ancient India. Even when he describes Ujjain, he does not say anything about the town plan and building tradition that various seasons of digging has revealed.

These, though, are just the small things that Eraly so often forgets to mention. The most serious lacuna is that a big chunk of India, from Assam to Nagaland, is missing from the narrative. You wouldn’t know from the book that the epigraphs of the kings of Assam, for instance, have been extensively used to reconstruct the agricultural practices and the settlement pattern of the Brahmaputra valley or that there are Gupta type architectural remains near Tezpur. Nor would you learn about Tripura, not even about the presence of Buddhism there, otherwise so central to this book, as the relics of the Buddhist stupa at Shyam Sunder Tilla so dramatically reveal.

This is a book which aspires to have a reach. Alas, that aspirational reach exceeds its author’s intellectual grasp.[Facile Spring (H/T Yashwant)]

1. Sriram explains how the Sabha culture originated in Chennai

Chennai was uniquely positioned for the birth of such a concept. When Chennai or Madras first came into existence in 1639, the performing arts were dependent exclusively on the patronage of the rulers, landholders and noblemen. They held private soirees to which their intimate friends were invited or on occasion sponsored public performances in temples or open spaces where the ordinary folk could attend. Temple festivals and weddings in the houses of the rich were occasions when people could attend these performances without invitation.

2. Fëanor has some photographs of the Mughal miniatures he saw at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin
3. Based on the 17th century notes by Roger Hawkes, Maddy gives us a glimpse of life in Calicut during that period.

7. We see that the textile traders in Calicut were mainly from West Godavari regions.

8. We see that the Shabander or governor had responsibility for repayment of goods sold. Dubious practices of him needing to be bribed can be seen as a lack of law and order, and more consistent with activities today. We also see that he had authority to decide who got control of the goods cleared through customs.

4. One of the earliest photographers in India was Felice Beato. But before Beato, there was Linnaeus Tripe who took photographs of South India and Burma. India Ink has more with some of the photographs.

The part of Mr. Tripe’s career that he is most well-known for can be broken into three parts: The first was in December 1854 when, on leave again, he went to photograph the temples at Halebid and Belur in Mysore. One of Sotheby’s portfolios contains 56 prints from this trip, including 26 unique prints and three previously unknown photographs. One of the newly discovered images is of a Hoysala-era Ganesha statue at the temple in Halebid.

5. Apparently, the plan to move the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi was a secret, writes India Realtime blog

Those who did know about it referred to the plan by the codename “Sesame.” The queen wasn’t told about it till the party arrived in India, according to architectural historian Robert Grant Irving. The viceroys of the provinces concerned weren’t told a thing till the night of Dec. 11.

The ceremonial laying of the foundation stone of the new capital, which took place on Dec. 15, isn’t mentioned anywhere in the detailed official program of the week’s events, which had been released earlier. Two days after the Durbar, 500 invitations were hurriedly distributed for the stone-laying, wrote Mr. Irving.

Thanks: Sandeep V & Fëanor

If you find interesting blog posts on Indian history, please send it to varnam.blog @gmail or as a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up on Dec 15th.

As the world population is hitting 7 Billion this month, The New Yorker takes a look at the population count at various periods in our history.

Around ten thousand years ago, there were maybe five million people on earth. By the time of the First Dynasty in Egypt, the number was up to about fifteen million, and by the time of the birth of Christ it had climbed to somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred million. Global population finally reached a billion around 1800, just a couple of years after Thomas Malthus published his famous essay warning that human numbers would always be held in check by war, pestilence, or “inevitable famine.” In a distinctly un-Malthusian fashion, population then took off. It hit two billion in the nineteen-twenties, and was three billion by 1960. In 1968, when Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” predicting the imminent deaths of hundreds of millions of people from starvation, it stood at around three and a half billion; since then, it has been growing at the rate of a billion people every twelve or thirteen years.[Billions and Billions]

India’s population was somewhere between 350 and 400 million at the time of independence and this growth chart shows how fast we reached here.

Last month, a Taliban member came with a message from the Quetta shura to meet Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president who was leading the peace council. The Taliban member — Mullah Esmatullah — had bought two audio messages from the shura and one of them was for Mr. Rabbani. The messenger was treated with respect and bought into Rabbani’s room where he exploded, taking a few lives with him.

In 2009, in Khost, Afghanistan, a similar event happened. A Jordanian agent who had provided spectacular reports on Al-Qaeda members was invited to Camp Chapman for a debriefing. To show that he was trusted, CIA officials in Khost who had never met him decided to let him inside without a search. As soon as he saw the line of CIA officers and their Blackwater guards he started chanting something and only his Jordanian handler knew what was going to happen.

According to a NY Times report

The attack at the C.I.A. base dealt a devastating blow to the spy agency’s operations against militants in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, eliminating an elite team using an informant with strong jihadi credentials. The attack further delayed hope of penetrating Al Qaeda’s upper ranks, and also seemed potent evidence of militants’ ability to strike back against their American pursuers.[Attacker in Afghanistan Was a Double Agent]

The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole who infiltrated the CIA by Joby Warrick tells the story of what happened in Khost by following the lives of the bomber Humam al-Balawi, his Jordanian handler Sharif Ali bin Zeid, the station chief Jennifer Matthews, the analyst Elizabeth Hanson and even their guards. It starts with the arrest of al-Balwai who was a doctor who moonlighted as an online Islamic warrior. He was arrested by Jordianian Intelligence, but then bin Zeid decided to make him a double agent. He was to infiltrate al-Qaeda in Pakistan and report back. The doctor who had never been to Pakistan before vanished into the tribal regions and very soon started giving inside information like they had never seen before. No one in Jordan or Langley realized that it was a setup. The al-Qaeda folks turned out to be smarter than the ones who flew the drones.

The book compiles decisions made the various actors and how they all added up to a disastrous end. Excited by the possibility that they could get al-Zawahiri, the CIA let their guard down. The blame is finally attributed to the station chief Jennifer Matthews who made the decision to let the bomber in without a search. The book is less than 300 pages, but reads a Frederick Forsyth novel.