Importance of Thar in Out of Africa Migration

Map showing Katoati site along with other Palaeolithic sites (via Blinkhorn et al)

Few years back, it was believed that the volcanic eruption of Mt. Toba (74, 000 years back) affected Indian population catastrophically, but evidence from Jwalapuram in Andhra Pradesh indicated that Indians were a tough lot. Going further back in time, we now find new evidence regarding the path the Out of Africa humans took as they reached India.
One of the theories suggest that the early humans took a coastal route from Africa and reached Kerala where they made bird sounds. A new paper now suggests that the humans actually lived in Thar desert around 95,000 years back. During that period, Thar was not that arid, had fluvial activity and hence vegetation. Thus rather than using the coastal route, humans may have used a continental route and the river network to travel.
Another interesting find is the similarity of the tools used by the people who lived in Jwalapuram and in the Thar region and it suggests technological continuity between people who lived in North-West India and South India. That’s not it. There were similarities between tools found in Thar and Sahar and Arabia and it could either be due to independent technological evolution in those places or due to cultural connections. It looks like Thar desert has now become an important region in the study of the dispersal of humans from Africa to rest of the world.
References:

Blinkhorn, James, Hema Achyuthan, Michael Petraglia, and Peter Ditchfield. “Middle Palaeolithic Occupation in the Thar Desert During the Upper Pleistocene: The Signature of a Modern Human Exit Out of Africa?” Quaternary Science Reviews. Accessed July 22, 2013. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2013.06.012. (Thanks @Karmasura)

Indo-European Speakers in North-West India by 4000 BCE?

The dates and method of arrival of Indo-European speakers in North-West India is a contentious issue. Once held sacred, the Aryan Invasion Theory is no longer considered valid by some scholars. Instead of the invasion model, a migration model is now favored with the Indo-European speakers reaching India from an unknown homeland following the decline of the Indus-Saraswati civilization.

The decline of the Harappan civilisation is no longer attributed to “invading Aryans”, though that theory is still kept alive by political parties in South India. Even the non-Aryan invasion theory has been refuted as there is no trace in the archaeological record for such a disruptive event or the arrival of a new culture from Central Asia. The skeletons, which were touted as evidence for the invasion, were found to belong to different cultural phases thus nullifying the theory of a major battle. Due to all this, historians like Upinder Singh categorically state that the Harappan civilisation was not destroyed by an Indo-Aryan invasion. Instead of blaming the decline of the civilisation to invading or migrating population, the end is now attributed to environmental changes and whims and fancies of rivers.[In Pragati: What caused the decline of Harappa?]

If the Vedic speakers reached Punjab following the decline of the Indus-Saraswati civilization, then how did they know about Saraswati, which was no longer a mighty river.? Does this mean that this theory is incorrect and Vedic speakers were present in the region while the river was flowing over a longer distance? Most academics don’t go down that path and insist that IE speakers reached the region not long before the composition of the Rig Veda, even though there is no strong archaeological evidence for such a migration in the 1500 – 1000 BCE period.

If there is one thing that can work up historians, it is the suggestion that Indo-European speakers were present in the region, much before the decline of the Indus-Saraswati civilization. Such a suggestion has serious implications like the possibility of an earlier date for the Vedas than the academically correct one which dates it to post 1500 BCE.

A recently published paper has some interesting observations on this issue. It suggests that the Indo-European speakers were present in the region during the Chalcolithic period (4300 – 3200 BCE) and they arrived as part of an agricultural colonization of a hunter-gatherer territory. The language which was ancestral to Indo-Iranian spread from Anatolia via Armenia, north-Iran, southern-Turkmenistan and finally IE speakers entered Pakistan by 4000 BCE. The paper suggests that IE speakers could have been present even before this period (the Neolithic). During this time Dravidian speakers, who were pastoralists and farmers moved from Gujarat or South Indus region to South India

To understand the impact of this date, it should be noted that the Mature Harappan Period is considered to be from 2600 – 1900 BCE. The paper explicitly suggests that urban Harappan civilization had a large population of Indo-European speakers and possibly some Dravidians as well. By 2000 BCE, before the decline of the Indus-Saraswati civilization, IE speakers were present in the Ganga basin along with Munda speakers.

All these change our understanding of the changes that occurred in the region. The Avesta and Rig Veda were written during a period of great change in the region. An older date for the arrival of Indo-European speakers can explain why they knew about the events which happened in the Sapta-Sindhu region and not in some foreign land. Another important point to note is that it was not just one linguistic group which lived in Neolithic/Chalcolithic Iran, Harappan region or BMAC. Many groups co-existed and overlapped in time, space and ideology.

(Many thanks to Carlos for providing the reference)

References:

Gepts, Paul, Thomas R. Famula, Robert L. Bettinger, Stephen B. Brush, and Ardeshir B. Damania. Biodiversity in Agriculture: Domestication, Evolution, and Sustainability. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

The Peaceful Harappans (2)

There is a theory that the people of Indus-Saraswati civilization were quite peaceful and this makes them quite different from other Bronze age civilizations like Egypt, Mesopotamia or the Minoan.

But, the Indus cities had fortified walls. Archaeologists have found arrowheads, and spearheads, besides a small number of daggers and axes. Sir Mortimer Wheeler believed that the tools could have been used for hunting and not warfare. The walls, it is believed, were built to protect the city against flood or to impress. There is no evidence of swords or body armor or military equipment like swords or catapults. Even the Indus art does not depict warfare or killing. Probably the residents were concerned with defense and had no experience in warfare. All this caused Mark Kenoyer to say it is possible that the Indus civilization, which evolved over a period of 4000 years from the local cultures of Mehrgarh, managed to resolve conflict without warfare. If so, this would be a unique example of living among the bronze age civilizations – an early example of ahimsa.[The Peaceful Indus People]

Now a new paper suggests that the Indus-Saraswati people were not so peaceful after all.

Well, it turns out that there may have been some amount of brutality in the Indus cities too. Skulls were caved in, noses were broken. One can’t be entirely surprised – a purely non-violent society on such a large scale sounds like a pipe-dream. According to [1], out of eighteen skulls studied from the later Harappan period (1900-1700 BC), nearly half had suffered heavy trauma. More interestingly, they report that the prevalence and patterning of cranial injuries, combined with striking differences in mortuary treatment and demography among the three burial areas indicate interpersonal violence in Harappan society was structured along lines of gender and community membership. To wit, the farther you lived from the city centre (or, possibly if your remains were found outside the city sewers), the likelier you were to have had a more violent death. Furthermore, the Harappan culture appears to have become more violent over time, with women being more affected in the later periods.[Some Indus Gossip]

Prof. Jim Shaffer asks people to look at the period during which this violence happened

Jim Shaffer, professor at Case Western University, tempers this finding as a characterization for Indus civilization as a whole by pointing out that the sample comes from a late period in the history of Harappa, between 1900 and 1700 BCE, when Indus civilization was in decline.[Indus civilization continues to intrigue]

Nehru: Planning for Poverty

Teen Murti Bhavan, Nehru's residence as Prime Minister

As Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru spent the last 13 years of his life as the Chairman of the Planning Commission, an area he was passionate about. He had great dreams for India: increase the living standards of people, provide them with new opportunities, drive rapid industrialization, expand employment opportunities, reduce income and wealth inequalities, distribute economic power, and achieve self-sufficiency in food grains. These were noble goals with which no one could disagree and if these goals were achieved in the planned time frame, India would have been a different place. What happened was something else and the reasons for the failure of the planning makes for depressing reading.

The Commission

Since the Prime Minister himself was the head of the Commission it served as an alternate power center. People who could not get a cabinet position, people who lost elections, or those who were in transition found their way into the Commission. Some of them never quit. Also for the Prime Minister, this provided yet another opportunity to reward people since not much expertise was required to be a member. Their actions were not scrutinized nor their qualifications questioned. The organization eventually turned out to be a monster, with a budget of a 1 crore in 1964 with almost all the cabinet functions duplicated.

Among the sweeping goals that had been set, no one knew which ones had priority. Even those which they set out to do were done without checking (1) if the project was needed and (2) if a proper technical study was done before green lighting. If such commonsense checks were done, the country would have saved money. For example, after 11 crore was spent on a petrochemical plant, it was discovered that basic raw materials were not available. Another plant was started to make optical glass and later it was found that the country wanted ophthalmic glass; an additional crore was spent to install new machinery.

Even on projects which passed the checks, no attention was spent on running the plan efficiently. Since it was public wealth, money was spent as if there was no tomorrow. The Rourkela Steel Mill took three years more to complete and the initial cost estimate doubled. The story was the same with fertilizer plants and hence fertilizers had to be imported. This in turn affected food grain production and so food grains too had to be imported. Systemic failures were occurring all over the country, but no one wanted to analyze the failures. Instead they ignored them and buried their heads wishing that the problems would — poof — disappear.

Of Agriculture and Fertilizers

The concept of planning was imported from Soviet Union, but during the import process, the details were left out. In countries where proper planning is done, every basic unit that is involved — factory, workshop — keeps track of the progress and coordinates with other cells to remove bottlenecks. The Soviets also kept track of time and their work charts measured progress. In the pyramidal system of Indian planning, progress was measured by the amount of money spent. Sometimes political influence derailed the planning and even the Parliament did not know about such things. One of the optical plants was switched from Naini to West Bengal simply based on a telephone call from the Chief Minister of Bengal regarding a bye-election.

For an organization which was set up to plan things properly, it functioned in exactly the opposite way. Nehru, for instance, did not pay much attention to agriculture and somehow the available food grain was distributed around. When it came to the Second Plan, it was decided that food production had to be boosted and a target had to be set. Nehru said that since the the Chinese had proposed to increase production at 7.9 per cent per annum, India would be able to increase it by 40 per cent. No studies were done by the Food and Agriculture ministry. No notes were distributed in the commission. The decision came from the top of the pyramid and the minions knew what they had to do.

Due to mismanagement even 19 years after the end of World War, India was rationing food. While Nehru promised self-sufficiency year after year, the per capita consumption of food grains fell short of the prescribed level and it was the poor who suffered more. Meanwhile, the population was increasing and Nehru did not see much cause for alarm. The Americans were willing to help, but they required India to buy agricultural commodities and pay the freight in USD. The sad part was only the public sector could manufacture fertilizers and they could not deliver. Rather than open the sector to private enterprises, the government decided to import it from abroad.

What was shocking was the ignorance of these esteemed members of Indian history or polity. People in Jhusi had been cultivating rice since the 6th millennium BCE without imported fertilizers and suddenly why was there a need for something without which we had done so well. But that did not matter to Nehru and his planners who were obsessed with foreign technology. The people who were part of the swadeshi movement, once they got power, started importing goods like raw cotton, yarn, and pulp. Steel replaced wood and bamboo, naphtha replaced coal for fertilizer manufacture and petrol replaced coal for power generation. Gandhi wanted an India which would rely on its strengths than on foreign goods, but with each passing year India became indebted to other countries. Finally Nehru realized his mistake and opened up fertilizers to the private sector.

In Debt

It was not all downhill; there was growth in national income, in agricultural production, and industrial production. While Nehru gave speeches arguing that the less privileged should get the benefits, nothing of that sort happened. Instead the focus was more on stuff which they could never get their hands on. The planning did nothing to realize Nehru’s dream of income disparity. As Ram Manohar Lohia said, while crores of people lived on 3 annas a day, Nehru’s dog lived on 3 rupees a day.

Another plan the administration came up to remove income disparity was direct taxation through wealth tax, gift tax and expenditure tax, but there was no efficient way of collecting taxes. Tax evasion was quite high; even ministers like Jagjivan Ram did not file income tax for years. Nehru had promised to hang black marketers and anti-socials, but that too did not happen. He complained about ministers and officials living in big houses while he himself lived in a mansion.

As the plans failed to deliver as expected and the foreign dependencies started increasing, Nehru was clear about one thing: India would not ask for foreign aid because the loan sharks would definitely set their terms which would not be in India’s interest. But as the size of the five years plans increased, the foreign reserves started dwindling and austerity measures had to be implemented. Anything that involved foreign exchange had to be stopped, both in the public and private sector. Delegations which went abroad were controlled and student travel abroad was restricted.

Even such rules could not be effectively implemented. The Second Plan was cut down and the Reserve Bank Act had to be amended to raise the notional value of its gold reserve by 300 percent. Finally, Nehru changed his attitude towards foreign aid and decided to borrow extensively. With each plan, the foreign aid component increased and by the time he died the country was 2000 crore in debt.

Nehru, as always, put the blame on others. It did not matter if he chose the wrong people, followed wrong policies and had the wrong prior
ities. According to him the planning was fine, it was the implementation that was lacking. He complained as if the man who ran the government was someone else.

Reference

Adapted from Rao, Amiya Rao, B. G. Six Thousand Days : Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister. Sterling Publishers, 1974.

Disciplined English Tyranny

1816 CE, Barbados

In 1816, Bussa, an African born, slave who was between thirty and forty years old worked as a chief ranger at the Bayleys sugar plantation in St. Philip in Barbados. He was probably a member of the Bussa nation which had spread over West Africa as traders and conquerors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. All that glorious past did not matter much for he was now a slave, brought from Africa in one of those ships, surviving a deadly trans-Atlantic voyage. His ownership had recently changed hands to a man known as a disciplinarian and life was not looking good.

What distinguished Bussa from the thousands of slaves in Barbados was this: Bussa was planning an uprising for almost a year along with few others. His partners too were elite slaves — slaves who had specialized skills — and one of them was a woman. Due to their status, they could travel freely without attracting attention. With the aim of overthrowing the white planter class,first they started a propaganda claiming that slavery had been abolished in England and the planters were refusing to implement it. The next step in their plan was to set fire to the canes during Easter celebrations, when the planters would be busy. Once the rebellion was successful, a free man of color would be appointed as the governor.

On April 14, 1816, around 8:30 pm, the plantations went up in flames as planned. The canes burned and cane ash fell all around; the smell of burned sugar spread all around. This was a critical time for the slaves. Some of them did not know if they should join the rebellion because most rebellions, except the one on Haiti, had been unsuccessful. If the rebellion failed and they were caught, the repercussion would be deadly for them and their family.

Within few hours of the fires, the militia and the British forces swung into action. Plantation owners, worried about the safety of their families, met and planned the next steps. They did not have to wait long; by midnight the first encounter happened. Slaves carrying machetes, cudgels and axes came face to face against a well armed militia. The fight was uneven; some slaves ran away, while the others were shot dead. There were people like Samuel Jackson’s character in Django Unchained, who showed great courage in jumping in harms way to save their white masters.

Following this, everything went downhill for the slaves. The militia was joined by the black troops of the West India regiment and what happened next was surprise for those who thought that black troops would not fight black slaves. The army had given special privileges to the troops and they did not identify themselves with the slaves and in the battle that followed many slaves were captured and killed. Within four days the rebellion was quelled; Bussa and the other leaders were killed in various battles.

The white plantation owners had many questions: how was the conspiracy hatched? how did Bussa and his friends manage to keep it secret in an island as small as Barbados? Can such incidents happen again? There was one decision though: such incidents should not happen once again and for that draconian disciplinary measures were enforced by the British military. Captive and unlucky slaves were summarily executed. Some were shot, some hanged and inspired by the Spanish Inquisition, some slow roasted over fire. The hanged men were left as is to decompose in the heat. Torture and executions were done publicly to intimidate the survivors and force them into compliance.

1857 CE, India

In places like Barbados and India, numerically few English were able to hold a larger population to slavery or servitude and brutal violence was one of the many tools they used. For a country which claimed to be philosophically strong, ethically superior and had a library worth the whole native literature of India, they were no different from the ancient Romans or the medieval Borgias when it came to violence. All these people realized that fear was a great weapon if used effectively and that behavior was institutionalized. Such British behavior was not surprising because their empire was built on this well-deliberated and cold-blooded policy.

This disciplined tyranny by the British was seen four decades later in India following the war of 1857. Following the success of Operation Red Lotus, the English found that the initial success by Indians was due to the support of the villagers who became the supply chain for the army. It was then decided that such villages had to be ‘cleared’ which meant that the entire village along with their population had to be burned. Since they were law abiding people, the English first passed laws which called for the hanging of people, even non-combatants, whose guilt was doubtful. Once such enormous powers were granted to military officers and NGOs, hanging parties went out to villages and hanged everyone including some young boys who had flaunted rebel colors.

Generals Havelock and Neil marched along the Grand Trunk Road burning and destroying whatever they could find. An Indian traveller from that period wrote that Neil let loose his men in Allahabad killing old men, women and children. For the others, a mock trial was conducted and hanged by twos and threes from branches and signposts all over the town. Following that he marched to Varanasi where the same was repeated. One gentleman in a burst of creativity arranged the hanged corpses in the figure of eight. The Governor-general reported back home that, “the aged, women and children were sacrificed.”

Due to this systematic massacre, the English were able to create a dead zone from Kanpur, all the way to Calcutta, thus breaking the supply chain. These were now areas under the English control and thus it became quite hard for Indian troops to march through this area. With this Havelock and Neil broke the back of Indian army and they are glorified for their actions. Even now there are two islands in the Andamans named after Neil and Havelock which speaks volumes about our historical literacy.

References:

Stuart, Andrea. Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire . Knopf, 2013.
Tope, Parag. Tatya Tope’s Operation Red Lotus. Rupa & Co., 2010.

Nehru: The Vacillating Socialist

When Jawaharlal Nehru became the Prime Minister of India, it was expected that India would have a socialist government. This was not a false expectation because over the past two decades he had shown his inclination through the speeches he gave, the literature he read and the friends he kept. In 1929, two years after this three day visit to Moscow, Jawaharlal Nehru told Congress workers that India has to be a socialist nation to end poverty and inequality. During that period, socialism was not in the official party line, but he called himself a socialist. Mahatma Gandhi understood his passion and once explained that Nehru wanted socialism by any means, even without non-violence.
But once he took office, this passion for socialism disappeared and reappeared only seven years before his death. As a man who always got things done his way, he could have got the country to adopt this idea as well, but he stayed away from it even when opportunity presented. One such occasion was during the refugee crisis following partition, but even then he did not voice anything about socialism or a classless society. In 1948 a private member of the Constituent Assembly introduced legislation demanding a socialist economic pattern, nationalization of key industries, and collective farming. Nehru dismissed this demand as “vague” and wondered how any government could accept such a resolution.
What was going on? Why did the self-professed socialist backpedal when he got an opportunity to implement his ideas? In some cases, it was seen that he even opposed making socialism official. Did he realize that socialism went against millennia old Indian polity and hence stayed away from it or was it pure politics which caused him to press pause and then resume when the situation demanded?
Party Politics
One reason for Nehru going slow on socialism maybe due to the fact that the party machinery was controlled by Sardar Patel, who was known as a capitalists’ man. A socialism versus capitalism fight during that period would not have done any good for the party. Then Patel died in 1950 and Nehru was able to get Patel’s nominees out of the leadership paving way for absolute control. He could have inflicted any “ism” on the country, but even while the first Five-Year-Plan was being developed, there was no reference to socialism in the documents.
A turning point came after the first general elections. The Congress won an overwhelming majority both to the Parliament and in the State legislatures, but the Socialists and the Kisan Mazdoor Party polled in double digits as well. This was a cause of concern to Nehru and he tried to get Socialists to his side by negotiating with Jayaprakash Narayan. Once again the demands of Jayaprakash Narayan — redistribution of land, nationalization of banks and insurance, state ownership of selected industries — sounded like Nehru’s dream, but he walked away from it stating that the time was not right. The Socialists were not surprised because it was on Nehru’s advice that the group was formed within the Congress and once it was formed, Nehru refused to join it. Also, when Gandhi wanted a socialist leader to be the President of Congress in 1947, Nehru joined forces with Patel and opposed it. What was more strange was this: the Constitution and Economic Programme Committee of the party, under Nehru’s chairmanship recommended a socialist economic programme, but as Prime Minister he rejected the report.
He provided various explanations for this behavior; in one speech he said that he was not interested in any “ism” and was focused on achieving a casteless and classless society. In another speech he said he aimed for a society not guided by greed, but one in which there is distribution of economic power. What people wanted, he argued, was food, clothing and shelter and they were not concerned about the social and economic policies.
The Socialist Vision
In 1954 Nehru visited China and North Vietnam and saw how both countries were using a new social system to build their nations. He saw the response of the hungry masses to socialism and thought that it would be a trump card against both Socialists and Communists. On his return, without consulting the Cabinet or Planning Commission or Congress Working Committee, he started touting socialism. In speech after speech, he talked about the utopia that socialism would bring and this policy was adopted in the next annual session of the Congress party without much difficulty. This was a brilliant move for it seeded confusion among the socialists and leftists and brought everyone else into Nehru’s big tent.
Once socialism and the goals of casteless and classless society were proclaimed, candidates for the next election were selected based on caste, class and religion. In places where feudal loyalties played an important part, feudal candidates were selected. In some places black-marketers or drunkards were selected and Nehru justified it saying that the selection was due to the pressure from the ‘rightist’ elements.
After all this, he started behaving erratically; the Second Five Year plan was released later and it had no trace of socialism in it. After spending energy explaining socialism and socialist pattern was few years earlier, he started backpedaling once again. He refused to define what he wanted and vaguely mentioned equality and removal of disparities. He asked party workers to go around the country explaining the party agenda and when some of them asked details on his vision of socialism, he simply refused. All this did not prevent the party from adopting a resolution which demanded the creation of a socialistic society in the Nagpur session in 1959. At this point no one seemed to care what it meant and no one wanted to know.
At the end, the socialist agenda of Nehru was vague. It could only be explained using the words “Neti, Neti” for it was not about nationalization or doctrine or confiscation of private property. For a man who was passionate about the idea, it later became an empty slogan which could be used for political needs. By being vague about it, he could bring it up when needed and discard it once the juice was extracted. Fed up with this drama Subash Bose bluntly asked how a person as individualist as Nehru could be a socialist. Finally thanks to Nehru’s vague socialism, many congressmen who were paupers before 1947 became millionaires.
Reference

Adapted from Rao, Amiya Rao, B. G. Six thousand days : Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister, Sterling Publishers, 1974.

Aviyal

(As part of Centre Right India’s 3rd anniversary, this entry was featured as part of their week long culinary blogging festival. Someone complained that the picture at CRI looked like fruit salad. So here are better pictures)

In May, 1498, when Vasco da Gama’s fleet arrived in Calicut, it was the epicenter of the global spice trade; it was a place for spice production as well as distribution. These spices that came down from the Western Ghats included ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon, but the most valuable was pepper. Pepper, whose growth and harvest was tied to the monsoons, was to Kerala, what oil is to Saudi Arabia. The spices of Kerala did not owe their worldwide popularity to the Portuguese; an obscure Sanskrit name for pepper was yavanesta, which meant, “The passion of the Greeks” and before them came the Romans. From 1000 – 1500 CE, the Indian Ocean spice network was buzzing with Arabs, Tunisians, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Maghribi and Karimi traders and their agents.

While these spices are now used in various Indian cuisines, what makes the Kerala cuisine unique is the delicious base of coconut either as fresh ground, sliced, grated or as coconut milk. Even though spices are abundant in the region, it is the taste of coconut that will overwhelm you in most Kerala dishes. Besides this, the dishes are cooked in coconut oil which adds a distinct taste (We also apply copious amounts of coconut oil on our hair to reflect the tropical sun).

One of the typical dishes is called Aviyal which essentially is a medley of various vegetables. Colloquially, the word is used in conversation to mean things are messed up. It was quite hard to find the history of this dish and we are simply left with two legends of which one dates to the era of Mahabharata. Apparently, when Bhima was serving as the chef of King Virata, there were some unexpected guests. Improvising quickly, he chopped all the available vegetables, added some coconut and voila, the problem was solved. There is another version which mentions that the dish was invented in the kitchens of the Travancore Royal Family when the chef was faced with a similar situation.

I am not a chef and so this recipe is adapted from household records and few books. One of the nice things is that it allows for improvisation; almost any vegetable is acceptable. Also, it is light on spices and relies on coconut to give the taste.

Ingredients:

5 oz yam
5 oz winter melon
2 raw green plantains
2 drumsticks
1 carrot
4-5 beans
1 potato (small)
salt to taste
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/4 cup coconut oil
few curry leaves
4-5 green chillies
1/2 cup yogurt
1/2 coconut – grated
1 teaspoon cumin seeds

Steps:

Wash and peel all the vegetables. Chop them lengthwise
Put them in a heavy bottom kadai with the yam, plantains and winter melon at the bottom and others at the top. Add turmeric and salt. Also add water and cover to cook.
The vegetables should not be overcooked so that they become mushy.
Make a paste of grated coconut, cumin and green chillies with just enough water.
Add this paste to the cooked vegetables along with the yogurt. Make sure that no vegetable is spared of the paste.
Finally add coconut oil and few curry leaves.
You are done. This can be eaten as a side dish along with rice.

Nehru and Uniform Civil Code

Jawaharlal Nehru with school children at Durgapur (via Wikipedia)

Six Thousand Days: Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister by Amiya Rao and B.G.Rao has a section on the first Prime Minister’s politics regarding the introduction of Uniform Civil Code in India. He had sponsored the Hindu Code Bills because the personal laws of Hindus had to be modified to come in line with modern thought and attitudes. It was also intended especially for, “freeing our people, more especially our women-folk from the outworn customs and shackles which have bound them.”
Even though President Bourgiba of Tunisia and President Ayub of Pakistan had changed Muslim personal law in their countries, Nehru was not willing to do so in India. The book accuses him of conceding that only the Ulema and not the Parliament had the power to make rules for Muslims purely for the vote bank. In a speech Nehru mentioned

“We have passed one or two laws recently and we are considering one … in regard to Hindu marriage and divorce … These are personal ingrained in custom, habit and religion … Now we do not dare to touch the Muslims because they are a minority and we do not want the Hindu majority to do it. These are personal laws and so will remain for the Muslims until they want to change them … We do not wish to create the impression that we are forcing any particular thing in regard to Muslims’ personal laws.”

Thus, even though Article 44 stated that the state shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout India, that was one path Nehru was unwilling to travel.

Islamic Invasions and the Delhi Sultanate: Two American Versions

Last year I audited two courses on World History from two American Universities. The first one was the Making of Modern World from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the second, The Modern World: Global History since 1760 from Princeton University via Coursera. A common area covered in both the courses were the Islamic invasions of India and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate. The UCSD course by Prof. Matthew Herbst, spent almost an hour on the topic, while that much time was not spent by Prof. Jeremy Adelman of Princeton. While the UCSD lectures are still available online, the Princeton ones have gone offline and so the I have to rely on the course textbook for material. In this post, we will look at how the two professors dealt with the material.
Princeton

The book Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World: From 1000 CE to the Present (Third Edition) by Robert Tignor et al, which is the course textbook at Princeton, talks about this period and states that Islam joined the canopy of Hinduism to make the region more diverse. This showed how cross-cultural integration preserved diversity as well as integral unity. As the Turks “spilled into” India with their new beliefs, they added to the ethnic and religious mix “without upsetting the balance” and India became an intersection of trade, migration and culture of Afro-Eurasian people.
How did India look during that period? They were ruled by Rajas, supported by high-caste Brahmins. These Brahmins previously had converted much of uncultivated India into arable land. The Brahmins also did two other things: they built temples and converted indigenous hunter-gatherers to Hinduism. Following that they spread the religion and expanded the agrarian tax base. The relationship between the Raja and the Brahmin was one of quid pro quo. The Brahmins created elaborate genealogies for the kings and the kings besides giving them wealth learned Sanskrit culture and became patrons of arts.
When the Turkish warlords entered India, they introduced their own customs while accepting Indian customs like the caste system. Since they were concerned with promoting their religion, they built grand mosques and libraries. There is mention of both Mahmud of Ghazna and Muhammad Ghuri: the former just led some “expeditions” into North India while the latter led a wave of “invasions.” Much later, when the Delhi Sultanate was established, they strengthened the cultural diversity and tolerance, which were the hallmarks of Indian society. They did not convert their subjects and due to this India never became an Islamic-dominate country.
Also, by the time the Turks arrived, India had experienced many invaders and had assimilated them. The Turks cooperated with the assimilation and thought of themselves as Indians, but they never changed the way they dressed and soon the local started wearing trousers and robes. They had an influence on the language as well: Persian was made the court and administrative language even though the majority of the people they ruled did not speak that language.
According to the authors, Islam did not become a conquering religion in India; they collected jaziya and let people worship as they pleased. The new sultans granted land to the ulema and Sufi saints, like how the Hindu rajas had done to Brahmins.
University of California, San Diego

Ferdowsi reads the poem, the Shahnameh, to Mahmud of Ghazni.

Prof. Herbst sets the context by talking about the Egyptian Mamluks, who were Central Asian pagans who were captured, sold, converted and eventually ruled Egypt as elites. They were Muslim rulers who were ruling over a Muslim population and even though they were outsiders in terms of language and culture, they were insiders in terms of religion. These outsiders united the people by advocating jihad against the enemies of Islam like the Mongols, Crusaders and Shiites. But when it came to the Delhi Sultanate, they had a different problem: they were a Muslim power ruling a numerically large non-Muslim population with a radically different culture.
He explains the three approaches of Islam in India during this period.
The first was to plunder and leave. According to Prof. Herbst, Mahmud of Ghazni did not lead “expeditions”; this descendent of a Mamluk, led military campaigns for plunder. He attacked cities, sacked temples and wanted to destroy the idolaters of India. The Somnath temple was destroyed and the idols of Shiva were broken and there were two reasons for it. One, the temples had money and it was simple plunder. Second, Hindu temples have representation of God and that if offensive to the invaders because that is forbidden in their religion. Mahmud called it jihad and the Caliph from Baghdad wrote a letter congratulating him for a quarter of century of attacks.
The second approach was to conquer and stay which the Delhi Sultanate did from the 13th to the 16th century. Their goal was to change India from Dar al-Harb to Dar al-Islam and that was a hard task in a land which was holy to another religion. Also the Delhi Sultans were outsiders who ate different food, spoke a different language and had a different style of clothing. The Caliph appreciated the work of the Sultans, but then Indians did not care much for the Caliph. They adopted Persian as the language of the court, but a vast majority of Indians did not speak that language. To build legitimacy in such an atmosphere, they did few things.
They built the Qutub complex using the pillars of destroyed Hindu and Jain temples. Then they also bought the iron pillar and some Asoka edicts there. Then a 240 ft high minar was built. Obviously such a tall minaret was not for the muezzin to call the faithful for prayer, but it was a statement of power to the 100 million non-Muslims. Even though India lay at the geographic fringe of Dar al-Islam, they had to be central in their accomplishments. For this they hired Muslim poets and judges: Ibn Battuta, a North African Muslim, thus found a job a qadi in Delhi and Muslim scholarship and literature started rising from India.
The third approach was the Sufi way. The Sufis, who emphasized a person experience with God and used images of sexuality and drunkenness, challenged the tolerance of the ulema. They were organized into brotherhoods under a sheikh. They ran soup kitchens, asked the followers to develop river like generosity and enjoy worldly pleasures in moderation. They did not want to be seen associated with the administration: there is a story of one of the sheiks leaving through the backdoor when the Sultan visited. When the Sufi sheikhs died, their shrines became places of pilgrimage and very soon there were Muslim places of pilgrimage in a place where there was none. Prof. Herbst ends by talking about Vijayanagara empire, which was established in South India during this period to ward off the Islamic invasions.
The Princeton version has no mention of the plunder or the destruction of temples; they are replaced with euphemisms like “expeditions” or “spilled into” as if they came on a sightseeing trip. Also, in their versions empires like the Mauryas and Guptas which ruled a large portion of India did not exist and it was left to the Brahmins to make the whole country arable. That must have been quite an effort. The UCSD version does not resort to such political correctness. These two interpretations shows how Indian history is shaped and massaged in American Universities. Sometimes you know the historian and are prepared for the bias. When it comes to unknown historians, it is important to read multiple interpretations to understand the history of the historian.
References:

Making of the Modern World 13, Lecture 3, Lecture 4 at UC San Diego of April, 2012
Tignor, Robert, Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, and Michael Tsin. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World: From 1000 CE to the Present (Third Edition). Third Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

The Astronomical Code of the Rig Veda

Prof. Subhash Kak has put his book The Astronomical Code of the Rig Veda in the public domain (via Michel Danino). From the introduction of the book

My own discovery was triggered by an essay in a popular magazine in November 1992 pointing out the marvelous coincidence that the moon and the sun are nearly of identical size when viewed from the earth. I had an overpowering feeling that the matter of size had something to do with the structure of the R. gveda. Checking the text in my library, I quickly discovered that the number of hymns encoded facts about the passage of the sun and the moon. The next task was to make sure that the correspondence was not just a coincidence, which required a careful sifting of numerical and textual data. I later found a confirmation of these numbers in the structure of the Atharvaveda and the Bhagavadgita.

There are those who argue that human progress can be measured only in terms of scientific progress. To such people the question of the science of the R. gveda is of much importance, for it is the oldest complete book that has come down to mankind.

Scholarly opinion has often swung between two extreme views on the past: one barbaric, the other idyllic. In truth, the past was much more of a complex affair than suggested by either of these labels. The discovery of the astronomical code not only allows us a new look at the rise of early science, it also focuses on the need to find the developmental process at the basis of the hymns[The Astronomical Code of the Rig Veda]

I have not read this book yet, but will do soon. You can download the entire PDF here