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Someone recently asked why sea voyages were prohibited in India. The answer is simple: sea voyages were not prohibited in India. How else do you explain the Indian Ocean Trading system where merchants — Gujarati vaniyas, Tamil and Telugu chettis, Malabar Mappilas, Saraswats, Navayats — traded in ports from Meleka to Aden? The June 2009 issue of Pragati had an article by Manmadhan Ullatil on this trading network.

But the history of sea voyages is much older; around 2000 B.C.E, there was a Meluhhan (identified as people from Indus region) colony in Mesopotamia. There was also a person who could read Meluhhan and Sumerian or Akkadian which could help in deciphering the Indus script. Read all about it in the latest issue of Pragati. The references can be found here.

Besides the iMac and iPhone, one of the greatest inventions of mankind is agriculture. But an eternal question remains: what sparked the invention of agriculture? What motivated the hunter-gatherer to leave a foraging life, settle down and apply for a mortgage?

One theory says that following the Ice Age (Part 3), the environment dried out creating areas of deserts and oases. People were driven to areas with resources, like the Nile valley, and the population pressure led to innovation. In contrast to this shortage model, the abundance model tells that agriculture developed in areas, like the Fertile Crescent, where plenty of wild wheat grew.

There is another theory which says that the motivation was alcohol

Here is how the story likely began — a prehistoric human picked up some dropped fruit from the ground and popped it unsuspectingly into his or her mouth. The first effect was nothing more than an agreeably bittersweet flavor spreading across the palate. But as alcohol entered the bloodstream, the brain started sending out a new message — whatever that was, I want more of it! Humankind’s first encounters with alcohol in the form of fermented fruit probably occurred in just such an accidental fashion. But once they were familiar with the effect, archaeologist Patrick McGovern believes, humans stopped at nothing in their pursuit of frequent intoxication. [Brewing Up a Civilization]

This is related to the Social Competition model which explains that groups which were able to produce better goods for feast gained prestige and dominance relative to other groups. The earliest domesticated crops — wheat, millet — were also ingredients in alcohol. Thus it was not about substinence, but about getting friendly with strangers.

The latest in the list of theories regarding the origin of agriculture suggests that it was the need to worship that made the foragers settle down; To support this new religious life style, they domesticated plants and animals. We had covered this few years back (1,2), but recently Newsweek had a major story on this topic in connection to the 11,500 year old temple at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a “Neolithic revolution” 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the “high” religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archaeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that “the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture,” and Göbekli may prove his case. [History in the Remaking]

In 1767, a 21 year old Charles Grant, like many other twenty year olds traveled to India to join the East India Company’s military service. Arriving in Bengal, he was offended by the corrupt activities of the company and the officers. Soon a personal incident changed him forever and his life went in a new direction. He became an evangelical and argued vehemently for the introduction of Christianity — which was against company policy — to enhance the morality of Indians. In the process he coined the word “Hinduism” and redefined the way how the world viewed the traditions of India.

When Grant arrived in Calcutta, a decade after the Battle of Plassey,  the company was in charge of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Robert Clive had left and the company officers we indulging as best as they could. Corruption was rampant and the famine had reduced the Bengal population by a third. Though he argued that the company had done quite a lot, he was troubled by the suffering. But interestingly, in his letters written during this period, there is no mention of religion or God.

After the famine he got a severe fever and had to return to England to recover.  He returned in 1773 with his new bride - the 18 year old Jane Fraser. The young Mrs. Grant did not take to Indian climate very well and this worried Charles, but those worries went away with the birth of his daughter Elizabeth. He got promoted as the Secretary of the Board of Trade, but that did not prevent him from criticizing the Warren Hastings’ administration.

By then he had a secure life: good friends, great family, terrific salary. If you have watched any non-Adoor Gopalakrishnan Indian movie, you will know that usually there is a song here and then it all goes downhill. What is true now, was true in the year of American Independence too; Elizabeth and her younger sister Margaret died of small pox, just nine days apart.

A devastated Grant took refuge in Christ and became a sincere believer; he became an evangelical and few missionaries in the area helped him overcome his pain. He became a new man, renounced vices like gambling, and letters written during this period contain references to God and salvation.

After taking a position as the Commercial Resident of Malda, Grant took an interest in the moral nature of Indians. He rejected the argument that Hindus were people in whom mild and gentle qualities dominated; he thought that they were morally depraved. He wanted to bring in social and economic reform and the way for that, not surprisingly, was to make people acquainted with the truth of Revelation and free them from the ‘false religion’.

In his words

With the argument for the introduction of Christianity and Western education in India, Grant was years ahead of Thomas Macaulay and Alexander Duff. The charter of the East India Company did not officially permit missionary activity, but Grant was convinced that it had to change. This social revolution, Grant argued, would promote the well being of the population and in turn protect the company’s interests.

In 1787 Grant wrote a letter to one Mr. Wilberforce which contained the following paragraph.

This is important for one reason: it is the first time the word Hindooism is ever used; it replaced descriptions like  ”Hindoo religion” and “Hindoo creed”. By coining this new term and advocating it, Grant’s label made it convenient to refer to the various religious traditions of India.

This was a time when there were apparently four religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Paganism. Now the Paganism of India had a name and a comparison to Christianity could be done. For example what was the religious structure and accepted scriptures of Hinduism? How similar or how different was it from the Protestant religion?

He had answers for this: Hinduism was Brahmanism and Brahminism was Hinduism. These crafty priests had enslaved the population — people who did not have a mind of their own — through rituals and the caste system. These slaves, enslaved through fear and ignorance practiced barbaric rituals like sati, hook swinging and the devadasi system. Also unlike in his religion, only those crafty priests could read the sacred texts.

Though he despised the Brahmins, he thought they were the descendants of Noah and  were blessed in the Garden of Eden. These Brahmins who once held belief in a rational Supreme Being, had now fallen from grace into the ignorant ways of polytheism and idolatry.This belief, that Brahmins were descendants of Noah,was nothing new and was prevalent in India at that time. While Grant was in Bengal, the French-Catholic missionary Jean-Antoine Dubois who was working in South India, too connected Brahmins to Noah

After the flood, the whole world was repopulated again. For this, Noah and his  sons dispersed around the world. One group went West, while the others under the guidance of Magog, Noah’s grandson, went to the Caucasian range. From there they came via the North into India and populated it. He even has a date  for this migration – nine centuries before Christian era. Thus the Brahmins, according to Dubois, were descendants of Magog’s father Japheth.[The Biblical Migration Theory]

Grant wrote all these ex cathedra pronouncements in Observations on the State of Society among Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, but initially showed it only to a few evangelical friends. Grant later became a member of the Board of Directors of the EIC, but still then the pamphlet was not released publicly. Even other missionaries had not seen it. So why should these comments by a delusional missionary matter?

His work, along with the work of others, influenced the British perception of India. This was the beginning of the establishment of a dominant paradigm — defining Hinduism for Indians and rest of the world. Since the colonial power was in the control, their representation of the traditions became the accepted norm, which we continue to use even today.

Also in 1813,the Charter of the company came up for renewal and by then the Evangelicals had gained strength. People like Zachary Macaulay, father of Thomas Macaulay, had become influential and wanted the ban on missionaries to be removed.  On the eve of that debate, Grant’s work was printed as a parliamentary paper.

The evangelicals won in 1813.

References:

1. Dr G A Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793-1900 (Sage Publications, 2006). 
2. Henry Morris, The life of Charles Grant (J. Murray, 1904).
3. Image from Wikipedia

Last year Communist ideologue P Govindapillai wrote an article in the Malayalam newspaper Mathrubumi about Eurocentrism and lamented that Europeans did not give sufficient credit to Muslim scientists. In the article Govindapillai conveniently left out mathematicians from his own state — the Kerala School of Mathematics — and their discoveries. This lead to an Op-Ed in Mail Today.

In his review of Kim Plofker’s Mathematics in India, David Mumford, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, writes that the prosperity and success of India has created support for new Western scholars who are looking at India without the old biases. I have not read the book yet, but the review is positive.

Chapter 7 of Plofker’s book is devoted to the crown jewel of Indian mathematics, the work of the Kerala school. Kerala is a narrow fertile strip between the mountains and the Arabian Sea along the southwest coast of India. Here, in a number of small villages, supported by the Maharaja of Calicut, an amazing dynasty17 of mathematicians and astronomers lived and thrived. A large proportion of their results were attributed by later writers to the founder of this school, Madhava of Sangamagramma, who lived from approximately 1350 to 1425. It seems fair to me to compare him with Newton and Leibniz. The high points of their mathematical work were the discoveries of the power series expansions of arctangent, sine, and cosine. By a marvelous and unique happenstance, there survives an informal exposition of these results with full derivations, written in Malayalam, the vernacular of Kerala, by Jyes.t.hedeva perhaps about 1540. This book, the Gan.ita-Yukti-Bhasa, has only very recently been translated into English with an extensive commentary.18 As a result, this book gives a unique insight into Indian methods. Simply put, these are recursion, induction, and careful passage to the limit.[Mathematics in India via IndiaArchaeology]

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

1. In the debate on the origins of Indo-Aryans, is a transition happening? Giacomo Benedetti thinks so

What is particularly interesting in this conference is its opening to positions regarded as heretical by the academic establishment (also in the US); then it gives some hope for an authentic debate and for the Great Transition which various hints suggest as being underway: from the old paradigm to a new one, no more based on the aprioristic theory of the Aryan invasion or migration into India.

2. Suvrat Kher argues that the river Ghaggar, identified as the Vedic Sarasvati, did not have a glacial source.

The funny thing is, in my opinion the theory of a glacial source of Saraswati is not necessary in this debate. The Ghaggar was a wetter river before 1800 B.C. because of a generally more wetter climate. Strong summer monsoons over the Siwaliks and then spring flow would have made human settlements along its banks sustainable. A life sustaining river would have been holy to the people depending on it, regardless of whether it had a glacial origin or not.

3. Maddy has a brief history of Calico and its origins

These days you do find coarse crepe material from some remaining handloom units in Malabar but what is the real story of Calico? Did all the Calico exported to Europe get woven in Calicut? Or was it just an exporting center from historic times through its famous ports? Some of you may even believe that British renamed Kozhikode to Calicut due to the textile Calico.

4. Calicut Heritage writes about Father Giacomo Finici, the Italian Priest, who tried to convert the tribals in 1603

At the end of the trip all that Father Finicio and his team could find was a tribe of innocent Badagas and Todas who worshipped the buffalo. The pious priest stayed among the Todas for two months braving the biting cold, trying to convince the Todas on how they could be saved by becoming Christians. In return, the head priest of the Todas extolled on the virtues of the Bufalo God!

5. Here at varnam, we had a three part series (1,2,3) on the Indian Spy in Kashgar during the Great Game.
6. Fëanor writes about various titles instituted by the British for the colonies

The ruling princes were so desperate for these awards that they competed desperately amongst each other; they seemed to have completely missed the fact that being awarded something like Commander of the Order of the Star of India (CSI) or even Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India would merely equate them to a high-court judge or a British resident; even so rich and grand a prince as the Maharaja of Mysore expected to be awarded the Knight Grand Commander of the Star of India in every generation, an award that put him at the same rank as, say, the governor-general of Bombay or Madras.

7. Murali Ramavarma displays a collection of stamp papers from Travancore and Cochin
8. Atanu Dey writes about Gandhi, Bose and few issues related to India’s Independence.

I think that Gandhi was an ego-maniac as well. I read his autobiography and that message comes across very clearly to me. He could not stand anyone who challenged his authority. Subhas Chandra Bose did not approve of Gandhi’s carefully calculated pacifism. Gandhi basically decided that Subhas is his enemy. When it comes to practical matters, I suppose Gandhi decided “love thine enemy” is not applicable, and saw to it that Subhas is buried.

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 March 15th.