By around 800 CE, the language used in Kerala was a local variation of Tamil. The language known as Malayalam did not exist. Ilango Adigal (who wrote Silappatikaram) and Kulasekhara Alwar (responsible for devotional literature) were Malayalis, but wrote in Tamil. By around the 9th century CE, Malayalam evolved into a separate language under the heavy influence of Saṃskṛtam. As it became a new language — the youngest among the Dravidian languages — it discarded the earlier script and started using the script used for writing Saṃskṛtam.
But some data from Edakkal caves is changing our understanding of the evolution of Malayalam language. It seems the language started evolving much earlier than the “brahminical period”.
Eminent epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan contends that Edakal-5 provides important evidence that the common people of Kerala were already expressing themselves in Malayalam at about the end of the 4th century c.e.
The inscription (Edakal-5) is engraved just below and to the left of a tall, imposing anthropomorphic figure, which is part of the much earlier prehistoric engravings covering the rock walls of the cave (Picture 1). It appears that Edakal-5 is a label inscription engraved by a casual visitor to the cave recording his impression of the anthropomorphic figure he saw there.
The language of Edakal-5 is Malayalam. This becomes clear from the first word i (this), which is a pronoun in Malayalam standing for someone or something nearer the speaker. In Tamil, i has the same meaning, but does not occur as an independent word unlike in Malayalam. That the language of the inscription is indeed Malayalam is made clear by the second word pazhama which corresponds to pazhamai in Tamil, meaning “that which is ancient or old”. The text in Malayalam and its nearest rendering in Tamil are juxtaposed below to bring out the distinction.
i pazhama (Malayalam)
idu pazhamai (Tamil)
‘this (is) ancient’ (translation)
The most important result from the revised reading is that Edakal-5 is by far the earliest inscription in Malayalam and the only one in Brahmi. It may be assigned to late 4th or early 5th century c.e. on palaeographic evidence discussed below. The next earliest inscriptions in Malayalam occur much later from about the beginning of the 9th century c.e. and are in the Vatteluttu script.
Edakal-5 provides important evidence that the common people of Kerala were already expressing themselves in Malayalam at about the end of the 4th century c.e. However, Tamil was also retained by the elite as the literary idiom in which great works like Silappadikaram were composed. Eventually, of course, the people’s language prevailed in the region and Malayalam became the medium of communication for all purposes from about the beginning of the Kollam Era (early 9th century c.e.).[The earliest inscription in Malayalam (via Nikhil Narayanan)]
But then this is just one data point and one cannot generalize anything about what was happening in Kerala just from this.
Elephant bones have been found in Syria dating to the late Bronze age and it is possible that they were imported from India.
During the excavations season 2008 of Tell Mishrifé, bones of elephant have been found in a Late Bronze Age context. Discovery of elephant bones is not usual in Syria. They belong to infrequently occurring mammal species and their bones seems to appear in contexts dated up to the Middle Bronze Age. The questions arising are about the species identification and the occurrence of the elephant in Ancient Syria. One proposition is the import from India. The cultural and technical development of three great oriental state-levels societies during the 3rd and the beginning 2nd Millennium BC, the Harrapian Civilisation in the Indus valley, the Mesopotamian Civilisation and the Egyptian Civilisation led to the emergence of an intensive, evidenced as maritime, trade in the Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea with some sites on the Arabian peninsular region playing an important role as primary trading places. The trade centred on a variety of luxuries but also on raw materials. The appearance in Mesopotamia and Levant during the 2nd Millennium BC of exotic species originated from India, plants such as sesame and animals, such as domesticated fowl and zebu, are also a hint for relation between Mesopotamia and India-Middle Asia though by what route remains unclear. The elephant presence in Syria could be related to the same trade.[The elephant in Syria via Carlos Aramayo]
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 review appeared in Oct 2011 edition of Pragati)
In the 19th century, Britain went on a world wide bloodthirsty rampage: they were involved in the Crimean War (1853 – 1856), Anglo-Indian war of 1857, Second Opium War (1856 – 1860) and the Anglo-Sudan War (1870s) and a photographer named Felice Beato was present to capture all of them on film. Like Ibn Batuta who roamed around Dar al-Islam documenting the customs and traditions of various countries, Beato visited the countries occupied by the British and captured the war, landscapes and local life using the newly invented medium. Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road by Anne Lacoste and Fred Ritchin features a selection of photographs he took in India, China, Burma, Korea and Japan covering significant events in the history of those countries. For people back in Britain, Beato’s photographs gave an early realistic depiction of the cultures they had conquered. His photographs about India during the Anglo-Indian war are important now not just because of their historical significance, but also because they reveal a lot about the colonial attitudes of that period.
Felice Beato was an Italian who had settled in Constantinople as an apprentice to Scottish photographer James Robertson. In 1858, he left Constantinople for Calcutta and spent the next two years photographing the final phases of the Anglo-Indian war of 1857. Beato did not introduce photography to India; British officials were already using for more than a decade and there were photographic societies in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.
By the time Beato reached Calcutta, the war of 1857, which was planned by leaders like Nana Saheb, Tatya Tope, and Baija Bai Shinde, had shocked the English and they had retaliated using extreme brutality. Citing the murder of women and children at Cawnpore (Kanpur) by Indian soldiers, they discarded their usual pretence to civilized behavior and embarked on a death march to clear the villages which supported the army. At the start of 1858, Delhi and Kanpur were in English hands; Awadh was cut off from Central India and Lucknow’s fate was uncertain. Kalpi was the headquarters of the freedom fighters and Tatya Tope and Rani Laxmibai were still holding out.
Beato went to Cawnpore, Delhi and Lucknow and documented the damage caused by the war. Photographers of that period had severe technological limitations: the equipment was heavy and the photographer also had to carry glass plates and chemicals. Since lengthy exposures were required and the negatives had to be developed within minutes, the photographer could not be in the middle of the battle; he could capture the scene before the battle or after it was done. (via Wikipedia)
He reached Lucknow a few weeks after the city was captured by British forces under Sir Colin Campbell and one of the gruesome photographs he took in Sikandar Bagh shows a partially destroyed building with skeletons scattered all around with a few locals passively watching them. The skeletons were of the 1,800 Sepoys bayoneted by the British troops and left to the dogs and vultures in November 1857. There is controversy regarding this photograph: Sir Colin Campbell probably not wanting to suggest that the corpses were left to rot in the open wrote that Beato dug up the bones and laid them out for dramatic effect, but a reporter from The Times who visited Sikandar Bagh around the same period remembered many skeletons still lying around. Even if it was staged, there was nothing unusual about it. His contemporaries who were covering other wars too did it for dramatic effect.
Another photograph from the same period shows the hanging of two sepoys: In the picture two people are hanging by their necks watched by a group of turbaned soldiers. The caption claims that the soldiers were from the 31st Native Infantry who were being hanged in Lucknow. Even that is not without controversy. First, the 31st Native Infantry did not participate in the war and second, they were based in Sagar. So it is possible that there is a mistake in documentation or that they simply were villagers hanged by the English as part of their campaign of brutality.
Beato, the lucid strategist, was on the side of the British and showed no compassion for the conquered or the dead. He was quite different from the British soldier named Clive Branson who served in India in 1942. Madhusree Mukherjee’s Churchil’s Secret War mentions Branson who roamed around the countryside visiting villages and socializing with the locals since his unit was not doing anything important. As he traveled, he felt ashamed of his country and the fact that he was one among them. Beato never felt that way. He earned his living by selling photographs like the hangings to soldiers and onlookers as souvenirs as well as by taking flattering portraits of Army officers. He ingratiated himself with British officials and his enthusiastic documentation of their triumphs got him a into prominent locations like Lucknow as soon as it was retaken. He also was an ‘embedded’ war photographer in the Second Opium War and captured the war in all its horror. Each catastrophe thus cemented his reputation.
Another area in which he specialized was architecture. Thus when he went around India, he took pictures of the Taj, Benares, the Golden Temple and various palaces. He also specialized in taking panoramic shots. Currently you can use the stitching feature of photoshop software to generate panoramas from a series of photographs, but during Beato’s time you had to take a series of overlapping photos carefully, develop the negatives quickly to maintain the uniform tone and join the pictures manually. His panoramas in India include those of Delhi, Lucknow, Qutub Minar and the entrance to the Juma Masjid which were around five to seven feet in length.
Beato was not caught up in political correctness and photographed British brutality for commercial benefits. He took photos of drawings of beheadings in Japan and photographs of dead bodies in China; in China one of the military surgeons noted Beato walking with excitement among the dead, photographing them before they were removed. Due to Beato’s photographs, the blurry words of historians become indelible images.
In their commentary on the photographs, the authors write that the hanging photograph brings up questions like “How did the British officers decide to hang the Indian soldiers? Did they hold any trial? What were the responses of the men to their impending execution?”. They don’t offer answers, but the answers can be found in Parag Tope’s Operation Red Lotus which presents a dramatically different version of the war of 1857 based on never before translated letters and eye witness accounts. He argues that the official policy of Britain to suppress the insurrection was to target thousands of civilians including women and children and this policy was one of the reasons why India lost the war. Sepoys of mutinous regiments who could not give a good account of themselves were hanged. From Beato’s images we know that even some from non-mutinous regiments may also have been hanged.
Two important photographs taken by Beato are not there in the book. One shows the Lal Bagh, the place in which General James Neill was shot and the other, the Residency where Sir Henry Lawrence was killed. These photographs don’t depict cadavers or skeletons, but form an important point in the narrative of the war of 1857 where two war criminals met justice. As you flip through the book, you see the conquered locals of India, China and Korea among demolished buildings and their conquerors in flamboyant settings. This contrast explains the story of the East better than many thousand words.
Following World War II, Western anthropologists realized that race cannot be scientifically defined, based on cranial size or nasal index. According to Prof. Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, who has studied the Harappan skeletal remains extensively, “Biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support to any of the theories concerning an Aryan biological or demographic entity.” According to Prof. Gregory Possehl, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Pennyslvania, “Race as it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been totally discredited as a useful concept in human biology.” Thus there is nothing to distinguish the invaders from the natives; in short, there is no Aryan or Dravidian race.
Few years back, Gregory L. Possehl, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, was reading Leo Oppenheim’s Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, when he discovered a reference to a personal seal of a Meluhhan translator — Shu-ilishu — who lived in Mesopotamia. Possehl tracked down a photograph of the seal as well as got a fresh impression from the original seal (pic). The seal was dated from Late Akkadian (2200 – 2113 B.C.E) to Ur III (2113–2004 B.C.E)
Urdu has an Islamic identity in India and the neighboring countries even though Muslims speak many languages other than Urdu. How did this association happen.? In Tribune, Prof Tariq Rahman writes that the language went through a change from 1750 CE onwards in which the Indic elements were purged by Muslim poets who then used the language as an identity marker for the religion.
Among the changes which occurred were: the removal of local (bhaka) and Sanskritic words, the substitution of Iranian and Islamic cultural allusions and metaphors in place of Indian and Hindu ones, and the replacement of the Indian conventions about the expression of love (woman to man) by Persian ones (man to woman or adolescent boy). Among the more than 4,000 words purged out were nain (eye), prem (love), mohan (dear one) etc. They do exist in songs and some other forms of poetry, of course, but they were banished from the ghazal. The grounds given in the writings of the poets who did all this — such as Shah Hatim (1699-1786), Imam Baksh Nasikh (d. 1838), Insha Ullah Khan Insha (1752-1818), etc — are not communal. They said that certain words are obsolete, unfashionable and rough. However, the end result was that words of Indic origin were the ones which were purged. That is one reason why I call this movement ‘Islamisation’[How Urdu got associated with Muslims in India? — I]
In Part 2, he looks at the use of Urdu in education, religious debate and printing which helped associate it with Muslims.
As Muslim political power shrank and anxiety spread about why this had happened, the ulema began a movement of education and purification. This they did by writing small books (chapbooks) in the local languages. Thus there are nur namas, wafat namas, jang namas, lahad namas etc. in almost all languages used by Muslims in South Asia and, as it happens, most of them are in Urdu. This movement started in the 18th century and accelerated in the 19th and the 20th centuries. Indeed, if one consults the British reports on printing, one finds that two themes always predominate: religion and love. In some years, one may exceed the other but, as books on history and morals also have a religious colour, it may be true to say that religion mostly predominates printing.
This was a tremendous social change for all religious communities in India. Thus, although there was a secularising trend introduced by the British also, there were more religious texts available in print than ever before. Hence, the consciousness of religious identity grew among all religious communities in India. And within Islam, the consciousness of sectarian identity grew also. Thus, on the one hand the modernist secular classes grew alienated from the religious masses. But on the other, the religious classes also grew alienated from each other and from other religious communities.[How Urdu got associated with Muslims in India — Part II (via Yashwant)]
(from Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities)
Recently Saudi Arabian officials claimed they have evidence that horses were domesticated in the Arabian peninsula around 9,000 years back.
“This discovery will change our knowledge concerning the domestication of horses and the evolution of culture in the late Neolithic period,” he told a news conference in Jeddah, according to the Reuters news agency.
“The al-Maqar civilisation is a very advanced civilization of the Neolithic period. This site shows us clearly, the roots of the domestication of horses 9,000 years ago,” he added.
Although humans came into contact with horses about 50,000 years ago, they were originally herded for meat, skins, and possibly for milk.[Saudis ‘find evidence of early horse domestication]
This is shocking: archaeological news from a country which has declared war on archaeology?
The website of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities has a large number of photos from al-Maqar. One of the artifacts is a sculpture of a horse around 100 cm long. On this horse, there are signs of a bridle which proves that the horse was domesticated much earlier than what we thought before. While this is interesting news as it pushes the antiquity of horse domestication by a few millenia, it has a serious impact on a version of Aryan Invasion Theory which depends on the date of horse domestication.
According to this version of history, the Indus civilization fell to the invaders. In The Wonder that was India, A L Basham gives a dramatic account of this fall. According to him, the barbarians who were already ranging the provinces finally made their move. The citizens of the Mohenjo-daro were no match for the invaders who had superior weapons. Basham also notes that the invaders trimphed because they had the terror striking beasts of the steppes.
These terror striking beasts are horses which till last week was considered to be first domesticated in the steppes of Central Asia. They were probably first domesticated by the Botai people of Kazakstan. In fact there is no dispute over the fact that horses were alien to India and were domesticated by nomads in the Pontic-Caspian region.
According to one of the Indo-European homeland hypothesis known as the Kurgan theory, these mounted warriors from this region, after domesticating the horse used this advantage to impose their culture on their neighbors in Old Europe. These “Aryans” then displaced the “Dravidians” in a kind of fairy tale.
What happens to this theory if the horse was not domesticated near the Caspian sea, but somewhere in the middle of Saudi Arabia as per the new evidence? Did the horsemen wait for few millennia to time their adventure with the decline of the Harappan civilization? If the Aryans indeed came from the Caspian sea area, what prompted them to make a move around that period?
References:
Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004).
(via Wikipedia)
The oldest known script in the Indian subcontinent is the undeciphered Harappan script. The oldest deciphered script is Brahmi, dating to around 4th century BCE. In South India, the oldest deciphered script is Tamil-Brahmi which is dated to two centuries after Brahmi. Inscriptions in rock shelters and caves near Madurai provide proof for this.
In an excavation at Kodumanal, near Erode more than 20 pot-sherds with Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions were found. On the basis of this archaeological work, some scholars suggested an older date for Tamil-Brahmi which would put it in the same period as Brahmi. Now there is new evidence from Palani which suggests 400 BCE as the date for Tamil-Brahmi. This adds a new data point to the debate on if Tamil-Brahmi is pre or post-Asokan.
When K. Rajan, Professor, Department of History, Pondicherry University, excavated this megalithic grave, little did he realise that the paddy found in the four-legged jar would be instrumental in reviving the debate on the origin of the Tamil-Brahmi script. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of the paddy done by Beta Analysis Inc., Miami, U.S.A, assigned the paddy to 490 BCE. “Since all the goods kept in the grave including the paddy and the ring-stands with the Tamil-Brahmi script are single-time deposits, the date given to the paddy is applicable to the Tamil-Brahmi script also,” said Dr. Rajan. So the date of evolution of Tamil-Brahmi could be pushed 200 years before Asoka, he argued.[Palani excavation triggers fresh debate via @amargov]
Read the article for it explains the controversies regarding this dating.
References:
Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, 1st ed. (Prentice Hall, 2009).
When Nayanjot Lahiri found three notebooks by an unknown writer at the ASI library he was intrigued. This colonial explorer had traveled across India using the texts of Fa Hsien and Hsuan Tsang as reference.
But who could this archaeological explorer be? The intrepid explorer was a colonial, there was no doubt about it, as his quaint spellings of place names and the people that he mentioned, made clear. That he was not John Marshall, my favourite archaeologist of colonial India, I already knew because this is not his handwriting. Besides, Marshall was born a year after the first of these notebooks began, dated as they were from 1875 to 1881. From those dates, I guessed that these were also unlikely to be James Prinsep’s journals. Prinsep died in 1840 and while he was an outstanding discoverer of ancient scripts and dynasties, he hardly moved out of Calcutta, after he became the secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Could it be James Burgess, the architectural scholar who is known to have conducted surveys from the 1860s till the 1880s? He too had to be eliminated from the list of probables, since he mainly worked in western and southern India while this explorer was busy surveying north India.
Following this process of elimination, it dawned on me that these could only be the hitherto undiscovered notebooks of one man: Alexander Cunningham. He was the one archaeological explorer in India who, in the latter part of the 19th century, traversed and published on the sites that are recorded in the notebooks — Mahabodhi, Sarnath, Mahasthan and so many others. In 1861, Cunningham was appointed as India’s first archaeological surveyor by Lord Canning. Eventually, he became the first director general of a government department of archaeology, better known as the Archaeological Survey of India, when it was created in 1871. These three notebooks seem to have been penned by him during his ‘director general’ years.[Alexander the Great (H/T Yashwant)]
Palace of Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula at Lucknow (wikipedia)
Complete Review has a review of Jayánta Bhaṭṭa’s Sanskrit play Āgamaḍambara
Much Ado about Religion, written about 900, is a didactic play that takes on (some) religion in a mix of satire and call for tolerance. Relating directly to conditions in Kashmir of the time, and the local ruler, King Shánkara·varman, and his policies and rule, the arcane specifics remain — despite a brief Introduction and quite extensive textual notes — difficult to fully grasp. Much, however, is also more universal, and so the play is certainly more than of merely historical interest.
In Uddaṇḍa Ṥāstrī’s Kokila Sandeśa, written in the 15th century, the unnamed hero in Kanchipuram sends a message with koel or cuckoo to his wife who is near Kochi. This is interesting to historians because it provides social, cultural and historical details of that period. Venetia Ansell has a three part post (1,2, 3) on this.
More recently, one of the Kulaśekhara kings of Mahodayapuram (the koel’s penultimate stop), Kulaśekhara Āḷwār, who after gaining power over all of southern India turned to Vaishnavism in a big way and is said to have died en route to Tirupati, is also supposed to have founded the temple. There is no consensus on his dates but he was probably pre-10th century AD. Two copper plate inscriptions – which seem to link the temple to the rulers of northern Koṭṭayam, the koel’s next but one stop – and various other archaeological evidence suggests that the temple was indeed well established by the 10th century.
Fëanor translates a French newspaper report on an exhibition about the Royal Court of Lucknow.
The golden age of the city was short, the British having ended it in ambush. It started with the accession to power of the ruler Shuja al-Daula in 1754, who made Lucknow his permanent residence. The Nawab attempted to curb the growing power of the British East India Company militarily, which earned him a stinging defeat in 1764. He then signed a treaty with the British in which he recovered his powers of Awadh in exchange for trade concessions and large payments of money.
Sriram has a post about Thomas Fiott de Havilland who was responsible for the construction of the Madras Bulwark among many other things.
When this was done, de Havilland submitted a proposal to build a bridge across the Cauvery in Mysore with just five arches. To demonstrate his skill in building it, de Havilland erected a great arch in his garden, with a hundred-foot span. The structure became a local landmark and stood till 1937 when it collapsed. The remains of the de Havilland arch are a tourist attraction in Seringapatam even now. The brick bridge over the Cauvery was completed in 1810 in which year de Havilland joined a group of officers who mutinied, protesting against the appalling conditions of the army in Mysore. He was dismissed and returned to Guersney where he was commissioned to construct a barracks. Reinstated in service in 1812, he returned to Madras and became civil engineer and architect of the Presidency in 1814.
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 Sep 15th.
