Marxists and Museums

Now that wealth of staggering proportions has been found in Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple, various suggestions have come up on what to do with it. Some want it to be taken over and used for “social good” while others want it in a museum while there is no case for monetizing this treasure or confiscating it.
One point is missing in this debate: religion. The artifacts found in the cellars were offerings made to Sree Padmanabhaswamy by devotees and there is no reason to detach it and place it in a secular setting. In this Op-Ed piece P. Parameshwaran looks into why communists are obsessed with turning devotional items into museum pieces and where it has led them.

High profile Marxist academicians of Kerala have been taking very keen interest in the sensitive issue of the new findings in the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple. Most of the party leaders have been prudently reticent, obviously for fear of public anger. What the intellectual giants want is to keep all the valuable articles found in the temple vaults in a state museum, for public exhibition. There is nothing unexpected about this, because for them religion, temple and spirituality are all meaningless and dangerous superstitions. Of course the large followers of the party are not with them in this anti-religious attitude. But the intellectuals are a different class. They hardly communicate with the masses, as they still live in an ivory tower of irrelevant theories and obsolete ideologies.
This is neither a new phenomenon nor something peculiar to Kerala or Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple. This is inherent in the communist psyche all over the world. They have put in practice this ideology which prescribes places of worship and religious and devotional items to be exhibited as artefacts in museums. This has happened in the Soviet Union and communist China (both in the mainland and in Tibet). But, in the twists and turns of history in the communist countries the entire process has been since reversed and instead of sacred places turning into museums the party itself has become a big museum, while temples and churches have emerged more powerful than ever.[Marxists as museum pieces via Michel Danino]

Brain Surgery in Bronze Age

Trepanation is a surgical technique in which a hole is drilled into the human skull to treat intracranial diseases. It was quite popular during the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. Count Philip of Nassau had 27 successive trepanations done in the 17th century. In England, it was a common form of treatment among miners who suffered cranial trauma.
Trepanation has a much older history; it was done during the Bronze Age in Peru and Jericho as well. During those times, it was done to repair skull fracture resulting blows, to remove splinters and blood clots. It was also done on dead people, to obtain skull bones to create necklaces.

At Ikiztepe, a small settlement near the Black Sea occupied from 3200 to 1700 B.C., archaeologist Önder Bilgi of Istanbul University has uncovered five skulls with clean, rectangular incisions that are evidence for trepanation, or basic cranial surgery. The procedure may have been performed to treat hemorrhages, brain cancer, head trauma, or mental illness. Last August Bilgi also unearthed a pair of razor-sharp volcanic glass blades that he believes were used to make the careful cuts.
There is ample evidence that Bronze Age sawbones knew what they doing. Last summer, biological anthropologist Handan üstündag of Anadolu University in Turkey excavated the 4,000-year-old trepanned skull of a man at Kultepe Höyük in central Turkey. üstündag says the surgeon cut a neat 1- by 2-inch incision, and there are clear signs of recovery in the regrowth of bone tissue at the edges. Judging from the frequency of healed bone in such skulls, anthropologist Yilmaz Erdal of Hacettepe University in Turkey recently proposed that about half of all Bronze Age trepanation patients- and 60 percent of those in Turkey- survived the procedure.[Bronze Age Brain Surgeons]

Trepanation was practiced in Harappa (Lothal, Kalibangan) and the megalithic site of Maski too.

Trepanation is known from the Bronze Age Harappan (ca. 4300 BP) people of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Sarkar (1972) attributed a squarish hole on the right temporal skull of a child of 9-10 years skull found at Lothal, a Harappan site. Roy Chowdhury (1973) also believed that evidence of trepanation was present in Harappan skull No. H 796/B and H 802/B, from Cemetery R37 and possibly in a Kalibangan skull (another Harappan site) in Western India. A megalithic skull (M30) from Maski (Karnataka) in South India also showed evidence of trepanation (Sarkar, 1972): it has two circular holes of 22 mm and 15 mm respectively on the either side of the sagittal suture of the vertex.[Evidence of Surgery in Ancient India:Trepanation at Burzahom (Kashmir) over 4000 years ago]

While the skull of the child found in Lothal is considered the earliest evidence of this type of surgery, a ~4300 year old skull found in Burzahom (10 km north-east of Srinagar) in Kashmir Valley is definite proof of trepanation. In this particular case, the victim had suffered a blow from a strong wooden stick. She survived the blow as well as the trepanation process.
(Thanks Michel Danino, for the links)
References:

The Chicago medical recorder, Volume 35 By Chicago Medical Society
God-apes and fossil men: paleoanthropology of South Asia By Kenneth A. R. Kennedy
First evidence of brain surgery in Bronze Age Harappa, Current Science, Vol 100, No 11, 10 June 2011

The Unknown Synagogues of Kochi

Entrance to Paradesi Synagogue, Kochi, Kerala (Photo by author)

When tourist brochures in Kerala mention the Jewish synagogue, they all refer to the one in Jew Town, Kochi. It turns out that there are other synagogues — the Kadavumbhagam and Thekkumbhagam — which are older and perfectly neglected. (H/T Yashwant)

The structure which is believed to have been constructed around 1200 AD, was rebuilt in 1700 AD as a replica of the first temple in Jerusalem with its 10 windows symbolising the Ten Commandments.
“We try to keep the Synagogue in proper order using as much funds as our pockets permit since the government does not seem to be interested in protecting this heritage site,” says Josephai, one of the last remaining members of the congregation of the Kadavumbagam Synagogue. Though the usage of the holy structure as a shop might sound outrageous to some, it seems to be the only reason that keeps the Synagogue standing.
Right around the corner of Kadavumbagam Synagogue lies the Thekkumbhagam Synagogue, which is inruins owing to disuse and neglect.[Monuments, a picture of neglect]

Jay A. Waronker has a brief history of the Lost Synagogues

The first synagogue built in the Cochin region predated the resettlement of the Kerala Jews en bloc in the sixteenth century as a result of Portuguese aggression. Dating from 1344 and attributed to Joseph Azar, it was located in a village called Kochangadi (near Mattancherry), now a part of the city of Kochi. It was most likely built when the Jews abandoned an area in or around Cranganore after the Perriyar River flooded. This synagogue in Kochangadi was apparently razed by the army of Tipu Sultan during the Second Anglo-Mysore War in the 1780s. The building was never rebuilt, and the Jewish community is thought to have moved to nearby Kochi no later than 1795. They carried with them the inscription stone verifying the fourteenth century date of construction and placed it in the Kadavumbagam Synagogue in Mattancherry. Today it can be found inset in the east wall of the courtyard of the Paradesi Synagogue in Mattancherry.[Lost Kerala Synagogues]

In Pragati: Book Review – Churchill's Secret War by Madhusree Mukherjee

Three days after Germany invaded France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, Winston Churchill inspired Britain with the words, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” These words—Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat—is the title of a book by John Lukacs which analyses Churchill’s motivational speeches during World War II as American and Russian forces battled the Axis in Europe and the Pacific. The titles of other books—The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory, Churchill: A Study in Greatness—reveal the exalted position Britain’s war-time prime pinister occupies in world history, specifically Western history.
While reading Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat it was unclear what was more funny—Mr Lukacs’ repetition of the title words every few pages or his admiration of Churchill’s speeches extolling the virtues of freedom ignoring the enslaved people of the colonies. For such historians Churchill proved his mettle by leading the country through the war and coming out victorious. Like how many American historians do not see the irony in Thomas Jefferson asserting all men are equal while owning slaves, members of Churchill fan club do not see anything wrong in pronouncing him as the upholder of freedom and democracy despite his unapologetic imperialist stance and inhuman behavior towards the colonies.
In Madhusree Mukherjee’s book, Churchill is neither a lion nor a man of great moral rectitude. He was a man who could have prevented three million Indians from starving to death, but did not. Clouded by racist views of Indians, he even stopped other countries from helping the starving population, antagonised the US president with his stand on India and argued that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to British India. Despite all these, when the first words of Paul Johnson’s biography states that Churchill was most valuable man to the whole of humanity in the 20th century, one has to wonder about the lack of perspective behind that testimonial.
The famine
Between 1941 and 1942, three events occurred which turned out to be disastrous for the people of Bengal. First, fearing the Japanese invasion of India, the War Cabinet ordered a scorched earth policy in areas which would have to be surrendered. Rice was removed or destroyed. Money was advanced to businessmen to buy and hoard. Along with this, boats, much needed by farmers, fishermen and potters for their livelihood were destroyed.
Continue reading →

Multiple Big Bangs and Hindu Cosmology

Recently Briane Greene was on National Public Radio regarding his new book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos which talks about brain churning concepts like parallel universes. He also theorizes that the universe did not have a single begining, instead there were multiple big bangs which created multiple universes. At this point the host said it reminded him of Hindu cosmology.
I am not sure if Hindu cosmology talks about multiple universes and their creation and destruction, or just about the creation and destruction of one universe. Much before Brian Greene, Carl Sagan had noted in Cosmos

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales still.
…A millennium before Europeans were wiling to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions”

In his new book Indian Culture And Indias Future Michel Danino writes about the achievements of Āryabhaṭa (476 CE) like computing π, values of sines, diameter of earth, and computation of orbits of planets. Āryabhaṭa was also fascinated with the concept of yugas, in which the universe (in singular) is destroyed and re-created. He wrote “Time is without begining or end”

A 2nd century Jaina in Kerala

(Image via KCHR)
The picture shown above is the broken rim of a pot found at the Muziris Heritage site at Pattanam, Kerala. The words, written in Tamil-Brahmi, read “a ma na” which means a Jaina and attests to the fact that Jainism was present in Kerala in the second century CE.

Mr. Cherian, who is also Director of KCHR, said the discovery “excites me as an excavator because it was for the first time we are getting direct evidence relating to a religious system or faith in Kerala.” The pot might have belonged to a Jaina monk. The broken rim with the script was found at a depth of two metres in trench 29 in the early historical layer which “by our stratigraphic understanding could belong to third-second CE period,” he said. The associated finds included amphora sherds, iron nails, and beads among others.
In a trial trench laid earlier at Pattanam by Professor V. Selvakumar, Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology and Epigraphy, Tamil University, Thanjavur and K.P. Shajan of KCHR, a pot-sherd with the Tamil-Brahmi letters reading “ur pa ve o” was found. Later, another Tamil-Brahmi script with the letters “ca ta [n]” was found.[Tamil-Brahmi script found at Pattanam in Kerala (H/T Nikhil, Dr. Cheriyan)]

A Home for the Mongoose

Madhusree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War tells an interesting story which happened in 1943 in Bengal. One night Krishna Chaitanya Mahapatro, a seventeen year old courier for the secret parallel government, reached Tamluk carrying copies of their newspaper. He had to make sure he was not caught by the soldiers who were out to catch the freedom fighters. As he hid behind some trees, a farmer, recognizing who he was invited him to spend the night in his home.
The house was a one room shack. The walls were mud plastered on bamboo and the roof, some leaves. Mahapatro noticed that the farmer was walking around as if something bothered him.

“Whatever the villagers had in the house — some fermented rice, some puffed rice–they would offer. But he was so poor he had nothing.” Kanu asked him not to worry. It was the middle of the night; he should just go to sleep. The farmer went inside, but soon emerged. “Babu, you had nothing. I am feeling bad,” he said wringing his hands. Kanu tried again to reassure him, but to no avail. In a little while the man got a small brass pot out of the hut, washed it in a nearby pond and milked the cow. “Please have at least this,” he offered. “I drank the warm milk, and his love brought tears to my eyes,” Mahapatro said [Churchill’s Secret War]

This incident happened in the midst of the Bengal Famine in which at least 3 million people died. If the famed mongoose had visited this farmer’s house, his body would have turned golden.

Indian Army after 1857

In his post, Punjabis in the Indian Army, Fëanor writes about the composition of the Indian army in the 1870s. He notes that there were more Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs in the army compared to others.

Because most fighting by Indian troops from the mid-nineteenth century onwards was in north-west India, it was thought that troops recruited from amongst the local Kshatriya castes were best suited in those military spheres; further, recruits from the local peasantry were thought to be more impressionable and more easily commanded than the Bengalis and Tamils in the erstwhile Indian armies – higher caste folks with far too many opinions on the ways and means of the world than were good for them.

Between 1881 and 1893, the proportion of these martial races went up from 25% to 50% of the entire Indian infantry.[Punjabis in the Indian Army]

Madhusree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War mentions this change in demographics of the recruits to the army and offers a different explanation. Following the Anglo-Indian war of 1857, Queen Victoria took direct control of the colony after dismissing the East India Company and military strategists had to think of ways to prevent incidents like 1857 from happening again. So the native portion of the Army was filled with “martial races” — Sikhs, Muslims or Rajputs — from the regions that had not gone to war in 1857. Also recognizing the unity among various religious groups in attacking the English, they were segregated so that a Sikh regiment would fire into a Hindu regiment or vice-versa without any qualms.

When some groups are named “martial races”, the implication is that the others are not. What about the Native Infantries from Eastern and Central India that rebelled and quickly liberated various towns and cities in 1857? What about their leaders who planned the war, conducted internal and external reconnaissance, and recruited soldiers? Were they not “martial” enough?

The Missing Tibetans of New Nalanda

Under the leadership of Amarta Sen, there is an effort to revive the Nalanda University which was destroyed by Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1193. Recently at the Indian Science Congress at Chennai, he gave a lecture on the significance of Nalanda. Anirban Ganguly of Vivekananda International Foundation explains the problems with this effort (H/T Michel Danino). The most important one: the Tibetans are left out.

Why, for example, does the Mentors Group of the proposed university comprising of public intellectuals, scientists, academics and bureaucrats not have a single representation from the Tibetan community. A glaring omission considering the historic-religious link that Tibetan Buddhism and Nalanda had and the fact that successive Tibetan monarchs in history, had through their munificence, hosted and established in Tibet a number of masters from the Nalanda Mahavihara. It was, in fact, through the efforts of these teachers from Nalanda that the ‘Golden Age of Tibet’ was inaugurated.[Recreating Nalanda – Is the Deeper Raison d’être Missing? ]

The answer probably lies here:China announces donation for Nalanda University
When asked, why the Dalai Lama was not involved with the effort, Dr. Sen gave the laughable reply that as a religious leader he was not suited for religious studies. This reply..

… speaks volumes of the group’s ‘understanding’ of the essence of religious studies and practice within the Indic paradigm. Being religiously active was an essential pre-requisite for the study of religion in the Eastern context. The religion and philosophy of India was the ‘Science of the Self’ (Adhyātma-vidyā)7 and it was only through an assiduous study of this vidyā (Science) that one could begin to practice it. In the ancient Indian scheme of things, at least when the older Nalanda was in its full bloom, the dichotomy between being religiously active and studying religion did never really exist.[Recreating Nalanda – Is the Deeper Raison d’être Missing?]

Alivardi Khan on Governance

In Operation Red Lotus, Parag Tope wrote about the forgotten Azamgarh proclamation in which the Indian leaders of 1857 promised a triad of invaluable freedoms : political, personal, and economic. The review was getting too long and I had to leave this piece, about life in 1700s, which I found in Madhusree Mukherjee’s Churchill’s Secret War.

In the early 1700s, a far sighted diwan named Murshid Quli Khan reformed administration. Sixteen powerful zamindars, or overseers, and about a thousand minor ones, ran the province under his watchful eye. The zamindars, who called themselves rajas if they were Hindus and nawabs if they were Muslim, maintained armies, collected taxes and ran the courts, police, postal services, and often the schools. Villagers owned the lands they tended, and not even bankruptcy could evict them. Tax-exempt fields attached to the temples and mosques aided the poor, whereas those who excavated ponds or made other improvements earned tax remissions. Agricultural taxes — a fifth of the harvest — could be paid in kind, without resort to money lenders. The state, recognizing farmers, spinners, weavers, and merchants as the source of its wealth, tried to protect them. “The money in the hands of the people of the country is my wealth which I have consigned to their purses,” explained Alivardi, a ruler in the mid-eighteenth century, cautioning his grandson Siraj-ud-daula to abstain from extortion. “Let them grow rich and the state will grow rich also.”