Hostile Reactions

In 2004, the Dover, Pennysylvania, school board decided to teach students an alternative to evolution called Intelligent Design.

Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of Pandas and People, is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.[Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District]

Promptly a law suit was filed and an opening witness at the trial was Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biologist and leading proponent of evolution. During the trial he had to face not just the lawyers, but the public as well. Lot of people expressed hostile reactions — via letters, via e-mails, via phone. He was told he would spend eternity in hell. He was told he was not respecting God. He was asked how he could be a Christian and believe Darwin — all from folks who read the book of Genesis literally^[1].

Such hostility exists not just between scientists and people who want to enforce their religious beliefs on others, but also between proponents of the Aryan migration/trickle down theory and non-believers. Anyone who opposes the external origins of Aryans can pick one of these labels: “Hindu fundamentalist”, “revisionist” or “fascist”. Any supporter of the external origins of Aryans is either a “colonialist-missionary” or one who harbors “racist-hegemonial” prejudices.^[2] Edwin Bryant’s The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate has a great collection of polemical reactions from both sides.

This is one of those debates where even tenured professors do what Jamal did to watch his favorite actor. Also this kind of language is common in Indian History mailing lists where proponents of various theories display juvenile behavior to much amusement. If you think, quite naively, that to demolish a theory you just to counter the interpretation of data, you are wrong. Not in this field. So when a recent paper on Indus script was published, it was countered with the statement (among other things) that the authors of the paper are Dravidian nationalists.

Before 2004, the Rao et al. paper would not have gathered any attention. (Of course the Indus system is a language script! Why are you discussing it?) But that year, Steve Farmer managed to persuade two others — one of whom, Michael Witzel, is a well-respected authority in the field — to add their names to his thesis that it is not a language. The resulting manuscript was absurdly and unprofessionally bombastic in its language, while containing essentially nothing convincing. Regardless of the work of Rao et al, their hypothesis would have died a natural death — but Rao et al do have Farmer et al to thank for enabling them to publish their work, with its obvious conclusions, in a prestigious journal like Science. Farmer et al are so rattled that they promptly post an incoherent, shrill, content-free, ad hominem rant on Farmer’s website. Sproat even shows up on my previous post, leaving a chain of comments that reveal that he has neither understood, nor cares to understand, the argument. [More Indus thoughts and links]

As Kenneth Miller writes in his book, finally bad science will fail. Intelligent Design was thrown out by the courts since the advocates could not present any peer-reviewed articles or evidence for intelligent design or proof of scientific research or testing. The Aryan Invasion Theory was discredited and discarded and now the Illiterate Harappan hypothesis is being questioned. No amount of polemics can stop that.
Now compare that to a response by Iravatham Mahadevan

References:

Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul by Kenneth Miller
A Survey of Hinduism by Klaus K. Klostermaier
The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate by Edwin Bryant

The Ming Dynasty ship sinks

One documentary I watched while writing Chinese Power in Indian Ocean (2/2) was based on Gavin Menzies’ best selling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America. The thesis of the book was that Zheng He’s fleet had reached America in 1421. But in the documentary, they put Gavin Menzies on camera and contradicted most of his assumptions. Mr. Menzies agreed with the producers that most of his evidence is flimsy, but he still stood by his theory.
To prove that Zheng He’s fleet could have reached America, a replica of the Ming Dynasty ship was built and it set sail to America from Xiamen. The ship made of wood held together with nails docked in San Francisco in October 2008 after a 69 day journey.
But tragedy struck while returning back to Taiwan.

After surviving several storms during its 10-month voyage, the junk broke in two and sank after it was rammed by a freighter just off Taiwan’s coast.
All 11 crew members were rescued after being found adrift on the wreckage.
“We have worked so hard for so many years, but we failed at the last minute, I’m really ashamed,” said Taiwanese captain Liu Ningsheng after being rescued by the coast guard. [BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Ming Dynasty replica junk sinks]

Indian History Carnival – 16

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

Recently about 70 Harappan graves were discovered in Farmana, Haryana. From this is it possible to find out if Harappan were an indigenous population or migrants? Suvrat Kher says, “My money is that they were like the rest of us living Indians, mostly native but with little pieces from outside as well.”
“There are also no historical records of slave trades, prices, quantities, ownership anywhere in India. In fact, Sanskritic Indian languages have no word for slaves,” writes Anuraag in a post about Demons, Satan and Ogres and Monsters.
While we know details of Chandragupta Maurya’s death, less is know about the last days of Chanakya. At varnam, there is one story of Chanakya’s death.
“We do think now, that Akbar had not only finally managed to come out of the prison of Islam, and returned to his own roots, but that he was also determined to stamp out Islam from India, forcefully if needed, just before his life came to a premature end when he died of poisoning
(killed?).” Sarvesh K Tiwari explains this in a multi part post, A Ghazi turned Kafir: the Case of Akbar’s U-Turn (Part 1, 2, 3)
A Mughal painting from 1625 shows Holi being celebrated including a “drunk Jahangir being carried to to bed.”
According to Thomas Hervey Baber (1777 to 1843), the man who tracked Pazhassi Raja, “the natives of the Malabar Coast were more strict observers of truth than the other inhabitants of Hindostan”
“The irony can’t be harsher: While the Muslim League demanded — and got — separateness, the Hindu Mahasabha was reprimanded for fighting against this very demand for separatism.” Sandeep explains the importance of the Lucknow Pact of 1916 and Pirpur Report of 1938.
In a post about Nagas in World War II Feanor says, “It is a sad fact that Indian history (at least as taught when I went to school there) has nothing at all to say about the Northeast.
As India goes to the polls, Hari, based on excerpts from Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi looks at the first election of 1951.
Is there any difference between Manmohan Singh and Flavius Belisarius? Arby finds out
Combining mythology and history, Kamini Dandapani has a travelogue about Kanya Kumari.

f you find any posts related to Indian history published in the past one month, please send it to jk AT varnam DOT org or use this form. Please send me links which are similar to the ones posted, in terms of content.The next carnival will be up on May 15th.
See Also: Previous Carnivals

New Exodus Theory

Then comes the major event of the parting of the Red Sea. It seems the Hebrew word, Yam Suf was mistranslated as Red Sea while it actually means Reed Sea. Instead of looking for the sea scholars should have been looking for a lake. Based on the new evidence, the film makers find the location of the Reed Sea, a lake currently dried up, due to the Suez Canal. Again, the parting of the lake is attributed to the seismic activity.[Exodus Decoded (1) | varnam]

Besides this, archaeology too has not found any evidence of the Exodus, in the scale mentioned in the Bible.

That is one of the conclusions of the two hour NOVA documentary, Bible’s Buried Secrets, which aired on PBS on Nov 18th. This conclusion is not revolutionary; it has been suggested before, most recently by Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archaeologist.
The Exodus, the most repeated story in the Hebrew Bible immortalized by Charlton Heston, suggests that about six hundred thousand men and their families escaped Egypt and reached the promised land. A century of archaeological work has found no such evidence but has found that during the time of the Exodus, dated between the Merneptah Stele (1275 B.C.E) and the Zayit Stone (1208 B.C.E), the promised land, Canaan, had just 25 settlements with 3000 – 5000 inhabitants.[Bible’s Buried Secrets (1/2) | varnam]

Still that has not prevented people from coming up with theories of the partition of the Red Sea.

Accepting the biblical account as a “possible ‘qualitative’ description of an event,” Florida State oceanographer Doron Nof set out to investigate whether the parting of the Red Sea is “plausible from a physical point of view.” Using a common phenomenon called wind set-down effect, he found that “a northwesterly wind of 20 m/s blowing for 10-14 h is sufficient to cause a sea level drop of about 2.5m.” Such a drop in sea level, Nof speculates, might have exposed an underwater ridge, which the Israelites crossed as if it were dry land. Although the event is plausible, Nof estimated that the likelihood of such a storm occurring in that particular place and time of year is less than once every 2,400 years.[La scienza e i miracoli dell’Esodo]

Jesus, Interrupted

In his book, “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why ,” Bart Ehrman, Professor of Religious Studies at UNC, Chappel Hill, argued that the Bible was mistranslated by scribes during translation. The fact that Bible was not the word of God, but a human creation had huge ramifications for his faith; he left it. Besides this books, Ehrman, a former evangelical, is also known for his various debates on topics like Did the Bible misquote Jesus? or Is the Resurrection of Christ Provable?
Now he has a new book Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible in which he talks about what happened before the scribes got the texts which they mistranslated.

It seems Ehrman’s main aim is to introduce biblical scholarship to a popular audience so as to reveal that fundamentalist biblicism doesn’t make sense. This argument will appear to theological liberals (and some moderates) and to the broad secular audience that is fascinated by religion. Few can explain biblical scholarship to a broad audience as effectively as Bart Ehrman does. But marketing makes all the difference. As scholars, Allison and Ehrman are reaching mostly the same conclusions with nearly identical methodologies. Yet consider Ehrman’s dust cover: “Jesus, Paul, Matthew, and John all expressed fundamentally different religions.” [Jesus, Research, and Faith: Bart Ehrman and Dale Allison]

Here is another review

I highly recommend Ehrman’s book as a readable overview presenting information about the Bible and early Christianity that ought by now to be common knowledge. The reason it is not probably is due largely to the belief that such critical study of the Bible it antithetical to the Christian faith, and that the appropriate Christian stance is to affirm the Bible’s inerrancy rather than allow one’s view of the Bible and other matters to be shaped by the Bible’s actual contents. [Review of Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted]

This book is currently ranked 11^th in the New York Times best seller list.

The Death of Chanakya

In Episode 2 of The Story of India, Michael Wood, journeys from Patna to Sravanabelagola following the footsteps of Chandragupta Maurya. According to Jain tradition, after a teacher warned Chandragupta about an impending famine, Chandragupta made Bindusara the king, took a begging bowl and walked to Deccan. Even now there is a cave with a carving of a stone foot, where the Mauryan emperor is believed to have starved to death (See from 35 min onwards)
But what about Chanakya? While most popular accounts of Chanakya end with coronation of Chandragupta Maurya’s coronation, Visakshadutta’s Mudrarakshasa is about events after the coronation where Chanakya tries to get the deposed minister of the Nandas, Amatya Rakshasa, to serve as the Emperor’s minister. We don’t know what happened after that.
The only information I could find about Chanakya’s life after this period is in the book The Lives of the Jain Elders by the Jain monk Hemacandra. This narration talks not just about the death of Chanakya, but also about the birth of Bindusara and associated palace intrigues.
According to Hemacandra, while Chanakya served as the Prime Minister of Chandragupta Maurya, he started adding small amounts of poison in the Emperor’s food so that he would get used to it; railway meals was not available then. This gourmet cuisine was prepared to prevent the Emperor from being poisoned by enemies.
One day a pregnant queen Durdha shared the food with the Emperor. Since poisoned food was not her staple diet, she died. Chanakya decided that the baby should not die; he cut open the belly of the queen and took out the baby. A drop (bindu) of poison had passed to the baby’s head, and hence Chanakya named him Bindusara.
After Chandragupta abdicated the throne, Chanakya stayed as the Prime Minister of Bindusara. One person who did not like this was Bindusara’s minister Subandhu who revealed to Bindusara that Chanakya was responsible for the murder of his mother.
On hearing that the Emperor was angry with him, Chanakya thought he had nothing to lose but his life. He donated a his wealth to the poor, widows, and orphans and sat on a dung heap, prepared to die by total abstinence from food and drink. Bindusara, meanwhile heard the full story of his birth from the nurses and rushed to beg forgiveness of Chanakya. But Chanakya would not relent. Bindusara vent his fury on Subandhu, who asked for time to beg for forgiveness from Chanakya.
Subandhu, who still hated Chanakya, wanted to make sure that he did not return to the city – alive. He arranged for a ceremony of respect, but unnoticed by anyone, slipped a smoldering charcoal ember inside the dung heap. Aided by the wind, the dung heap was on fire and the man behind the Mauryan Empire and the author of Arthashastra was burned to death.
R.C.C. Fynes writes in the introduction to the translation of The Lives of the Jain Elders that the stories told by Hemacandra are legend and not history. He has a point since there are no other sources to verify this story. Also it is told entirely from a Jain perspective which adds its own bias. But then most legends have a kernel of truth to them, only sometimes that kernel is hard to find.

The Imaginary Essenes?

The History Channel documentary on the Lost Years of Jesus mentioned a possibility that the concept of baptism came to Jesus when he and John the Baptist lived among the Essenes and that later the Essenes moved to Qumran in the West Bank from Jerusalem due to the fear of Romans. The documentary also suggested a theory that Jesus was a revolutionary fighting the Romans and those activities have been left out of the Bible since it would be difficult to circulate such a document while being governed by the Romans due to which there is no mention of what he did between the ages of 12 and 30.
We know that the Essenes consisting of about 75 men, moved to Qumran, a desolate desert site, sometime between 130 and 100 B.C to escape Roman persecution. It is believed that they lived in a monastery, whose ruins are present even now, and wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, the only surviving texts of the Hebrew Bible written before 100 AD.[The Virtual Qumran | varnam]

According to John Marco Allergro, a Biblical scholar, who had access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jesus was a “personification of the Messianic expectations of the members of an extremist Jewish sect of Qumran in the first century of Christianity.”The Essenes, besides sharing a messianic belief, lived in a community embracing poverty and abstinence from worldly pleasures.
So far so good.
Now according to one Biblical scholar, the Essenes never existed: they were fabricated by the 1st century historian Flavius Josephus.

Elior contends that Josephus, a former Jewish priest who wrote his history while being held captive in Rome, “wanted to explain to the Romans that the Jews weren’t all losers and traitors, that there were many exceptional Jews of religious devotion and heroism. You might say it was the first rebuttal to anti-Semitic literature.”

As Elior explains, the Essenes make no mention of themselves in the 900 scrolls found by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947 in the caves of Qumran, near the Dead Sea. “Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls,” Elior tells TIME. “But they didn’t exist. This is legend on a legend.” [Scholar Claims Dead Sea Scrolls ‘Authors’ Never Existed – TIME]

So if Essenes did not write the DSS, then who did it? According to Elior, it was written by Sadducees, a sect descending from the high priest Zadok. Another scholar, Norman Golb, too has claimed that the DSS were not written by the Essenes. He also claimed that other scholars are trying to silence him.
Instead of an imaginary group called Essenses, a priestly class wrote it. So what’s the big deal you may wonder. The problem is with the behavior of the group: while Jews are asked to “go forth and multiply”, this group violated that by remaining celibate. This contrarian behavior, by thousands, never found any mention in Jewish texts of that period.
Then it was pointed out that Philo of Alexandria who lived a generation before Josephus and Pliny the Elder, who was a contemporary, too wrote about Essenes. Elior responded.

Are any Essenes mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls? The answer is: no.
Are any Essenes mentioned in this name in contemporary literature written in the Land of Israel (other then Josephus/philo/pliny written elsewhere) such as the Apocrypha, sages, or the New Testament? The answer is: no.
Is it reasonable to assume that thousands of people had lived as celibates in the Land of Israel for many generations, as the well-known Greek and Latin sources suggest, while no reference to this prohibited existence, which contradicts the first biblical law of “be fruitful and multiply”, will be found in any Hebrew or Aramaic text?
Is it possible that thousands of people had lived in communities of communal residence and communal money with no private property and not a word will be found about it in any Hebrew source? [Rachel Elior Responds to Her Critics]

A new book – Memory and Oblivion – coming out next month, will give more details than what can be gathered from the press reports.

Shoguns vs Jesuits

That was a report from the Malayalam newspaper, Kerala Kaumdi (March 3, 2009), about an organization called Love Jihad whose goal is to convert girls from “other religions”, marry them, and produce at least four children. Around 4000 such marriages happened in the past 6 months, inviting the attention of the Special Branch. No religion was mentioned, except that most marriages happened in Malappuram district.

The second report comes from Bangalore, where Father Joseph Menengis of St. James Church tells the B K Somashekhara Commission of inquiry that idol worship was practiced in churches to attract Hindus with the aim of converting them to Christianity.
What happened to those times when folks worked hard to convert people?
In MMW4, Prof. Matthew Herbst talks about the time when Jesuits converted 300,000 Japanese to Christianity in 1600 CE. The Jesuits, members of the Society of Jesus formed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, emerged from Paris to spread Catholicism.
They did it the hard way. They adopted local dress instead of staying in robes like the Franciscans or Dominicans. They learned the local language. They learned the classical texts. Then through the local language, using the classical text as a bridge, they spread the “good word.”
But this story had a tragic ending – for the Jesuit priests.
The Tokugawa shoguns who ruled Japan after 1600 knew their history for they had seen what happened in Philippines: first came the missionaries, then the army. There was also the question of loyalty. When someone became a Christian, the Tokugawa wondered, were the converts loyal to Tokugawa or the priests.?
Realizing that the Jesuits would undermine Japan, the Tokugawa asked Jesuits to leave. Being Japanese and Christian was outlawed and Christians were asked to convert back to Buddhism. Even Jesuit priests were made to convert and forced to take an oath declaring Christianity was evil.
For couple of centuries the Japan was free of missionaries. But they came back again, in the 19th century.
(Hat tip: Ranjith, Dheeraj)

Interview with Romila Thapar

The problem began with the British periodising Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British and maintaining that Hindus and Muslims were always antagonistic towards each other. “This cannot be sustained historically. But now this ideology is used for mobilising political power. Basically, the mobilisation is through appealing to Hindu sentiment.”

Which raises the issue of her rebuttal of the “Golden Age” theory — another point that rankled with historians of a religious nationalist persuasion. “Golden ages all over world in various histories were a fashion among nineteenth-century historians. Most historians of present times have given up the idea. Nationalist thinking didn’t pay enough attention to the implications of the description nor was any attempt made to define it in detail. They just went on saying ‘it was a marvellous age of harmony and prosperity’. It’s like today when one hears talk about India Shining; few analyse what it means and what the implications are for the Indian citizen.”[Lunch with BS: Romila Thapar]

In this interview over a Rs. 3400 sushi platter, the Kluge Prize winner talks about Hindutva and Hindu-Muslim relationship. She also talks about her current work: to prove that Indian civilization had a sense of history.

Indian History Carnival – 15

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

On February 21 and 22, a conference on the Sindhu-Saraswati civilization was held at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. K B Nair has a report.
Prof. Arvind Sharma explains why “Western assumptions of time and space can be potentially distorting when applied uncritically in an Indian context.”
Anuraag Sanghi has a long post on three battles that changed both world and Indian history
Three silk fragments dating to the Mature Harappan Period (2600-1700 BCE) has been found in Harappa and Chanhu-daro which shows that Indus people knew about wild silk around the same time as the Chinese.
The Thalassery Protestant Church was built sometime after 1840 and was in real bad shape when local authorities decided to restore it. Nick Balmer has a post with some photographs.
In his trip to Kerala, Nikhil visited many forts, temples and caves. He too mentions the Thalassery church.
Sir Richard F. Burton, known for his translation of Arabian Nights and Kamasutra visited Malabar in 1846. He met the Zamorin as well as a crowd of dames in the palace: “The translator of Kamasutra turns poetic while describing the ‘sight of Nair female beauty’ : ‘The ladies were very young and pretty-their long jetty tresses, small soft features, clear dark olive-coloured skins, and delicate limbs, reminded us exactly of the old prints and descriptions of the South Sea Islanders”, writes Calicut Heritage.
Chandrahas in his post on the Surya Mandir at Modhera in Gujarat writes, “The idol of Surya inside the garbhagriha, or sanctum sanctorum, of the Modhera temple is long gone, plundered by Mahmud of Ghazni on one of his many raids on northern and western India in the eleventh century CE.”
Now that the general elections are upon us, Arby_K looks at the elections from 1952 to 1999 and reads between the numbers.

If you find any posts related to Indian history published in the past one month, please send it to jk AT varnam DOT org or use this form. Please send me links which are similar to the ones posted, in terms of content.The next carnival will be up on March 15th.
See Also: Previous Carnivals