Category: History

Why Humanities?

One of the casualities of a bad economy is humanities – philosophy, history, poetry and arts. Cash strapped universities have cut down on the study of “dead languages” and teach “useful skills.” As the debate about the value of humanities goes on David Tebaldi, executive director of Mass Humanities, explains why “a high civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone.”

History teaches us how those who came before us have confronted the challenges of the past; literature provides insights into human needs, desires, and motivations; philosophy helps to clarify and illuminate what, in the end, is truly of value. Taken together, the humanities give us a fuller sense of what is possible, desirable, and right.[The lasting value of the humanities]

False Gods and Filthy Idols

Many pilgrims also put themselues vnder the chariot wheeles, to the end that their false god may go ouer them: and al they ouer whom the chariot runneth, are crushed in pieces, and diuided asunder in the midst, and slaine right out. Yea, and in doing this, they think themselues to die most holily and securely, in the seruice of their god. And by this meanes euery yere, there die vnder the said filthy idol, mo then 500.[Journal of Friar Odoric]

Those are the words of Friar Odoric, who traveled to India after 1316 CE. In writings by missionaries like him there is contempt for idol worship and polytheism; both are considered primitive.

So why is monotheism good and polytheism bad? The simple answer comes from these words in the Ten Commandments: “Do not have any other gods before me” and “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

It was believed that there is a natural progression of religion from worshiping gods who are personifications of natural forces to a supreme God who is not limited by nature. Thus coming from a Europe which had abandoned Caananite religions tainted by polytheism and idol worship, the Friar was shocked to see people worshiping “a dead idole, which, from the nauel vpward, resembleth a man, and from the nauel downeward an oxe.”

In the 18th and 19th century, an evolutionary model of religion was put forward in which polytheism was considered primitive, monolatry an improvement and monotheism, the purest form. Instead of understanding them as two different ways, a value judgment was passed. It was during that time that Thomas Macaulay and his friends came to India. For them the task was clear: the primitive practices had to be stopped and the natives had to be uplifted to the purest form.

Prof. Christine Hayes at Yale explains what happened next and how this evolutionary model of religion evolved into a r-evolutionary model. This is part of her course on Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) which explains how the Bible was in fact adapted from various Near East traditions. The course is no MMW4, but worth listening.

Chinese Power in Indian Ocean (2/2)

Zheng He’s map (via Wikipedia)

Read Part 1

Turning Inward
After the death of Zhu Di, China turned against naval expeditions for which there are many reasons.

The simplest is that the Confucians prevailed. The imperial bureaucracy sought to contain the expansionary ambitions of its sailors and the increasing power of its merchant class: Confucian ideology venerates authority and agrarian ways, not innovation and trade. “Barbarian” nations were thought to offer little of value to China. [The Asian Voyage: In the Wake of the Admiral]

Confucius thought that foreign travel interfered with family obligations. In Analects he said “While his parents are alive, the son may not go abroad to a distance. If he does go abroad, he must have a fixed place to which he goes.” Since this was the moral code for the upper class, government service and farming were considered noble professions

Other factors contributed: the renovation of the north-south Grand Canal, for one, facilitated grain transportand other internal commerce in gentle inland waters, obviating the need for an ocean route. And the tax burden of maintaining a big fleet was severe. But the decision to scuttle the great ships was in large part political. With the death of Yongle, the Emperor who sent Zheng He on his voyages, the conservatives began their ascendancy. China suspended naval expeditions. By century’s end, construction of any ship with more than two masts was deemed a capital offense. [The Asian Voyage: In the Wake of the Admiral

Then things took a turn for the worse. The ships were let to rot in the port and the logs books and maps were destroyed. A major attempt at erasing history was done. Then as they say, life finds a way.

Unlike Agathocles, whose memory survived only through coins, Zheg He’s traces were scattered around for it to be erased quickly. In some countries he was worshipped as a god. The chronicles of Zheng He’s translators Ma Huan (Overall Survey of the Western Shores) and Fei Hsin (Overall Survey of the Star Fleet) survived. So did a few imperial decrees and some maps. Zheng He died in the seventh voyage and was probably buried at sea; his tomb contains his clothes.

Though Zheng He’s voyages were meant to be a peaceful projection of power, they often interfered in local politics and projected force. A Chinese pirate Chen Zuyi who was active in the Sumatra was captured in a battle in the Straits of Malaca and taken to Nanjing and executed. Michael Yamashita mentions that the Chinese put a new king – Manavikarma – on the throne of Calicut. The Sri Lankan king Alakeswara refused to be a tributary to the Chinese; he was captured and taken in chains to Zheng He’s boss.
If the Chinese were a naval power during the ascent of the European powers, the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean would have seen a different geo-political equilibrium.
References: This article was motivated by the lecture on China by Prof. Matthew Herbst in MMW4 series. By then Maddy had posted his well researched article on Zheng He (Cheng Ho) in Calicut. Michael Yamashita got paid to travel along his path for a year resulting in the book Zheng He (Discovery) which has amazing photographs. I did not read Gavin Menzies’ book, but picked the PBS documentary 1421: The Year China Discovered America (PBS)? based on it. When China Ruled the Seas devotes few pages to what they did in Calicut. Maddy also has a comprehensive article covering the Chinese trade in Calicut.
Postscript: A British submarine commander, Gavin Menzies, in a best selling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America argued that Zheng He’s fleet reached America in 1421. A PBS documentary by the same name 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.

Chinese Power in Indian Ocean (1/2)

Chinese treasure ship (via Wikipedia)

In 1498, three ships — Sao Gabriel, Sao Rafael, and Sao Miguel — appeared in Calicut heralding a new era in geopolitics and world trade. Vasco da Gama would become immortal for finding a route from Europe to India, avoiding the Muslims who had a monopoly on overland trade. But for the residents of Calicut, this was not a major event. They were used to foreign traders and many foreigners lived in the Malabar coast. Even da Gama’s ships and crew of less than two hundred people was not a jaw dropper since they had seen huge Chinese ships with larger crew in Calicut port.
Much before Europeans became major players in the Indian Ocean, traders routinely sailed from the Malabar coast to the Swahili coast. During that time the Chinese built the biggest ships of the era and under Admiral Zheng He (pronounced Jung Huh) made seven voyages reaching as far as the Swahili coast. With such technology, the Chinese could have dominated trade, instead of the Europeans, but they did not. It is interesting to see why.
Ming and Zheng He
This story begins on September 10, 1368 when Ukhaantu Khan of the Yuan dynasty fled to Inner Mongolia unable to face the rebels under the leadership of Zhu Yuanzhang. These rebels would establish the native Ming dynasty. The third Ming emperor Zhu Di, wanted to improve trade, enhance the empire’s prestige, and encourage a tribute system for which he ordered an armada to be built.
Zhu Di’s admiral for the mission was Zheng He, a six and half feet tall two hundred pound man. This 34 year old Muslim originally named Ma Ho, was captured as a child by the Ming army from the Mongol village of Yunan. Like the Egyptian Mamluks, these slaves had career paths, but only after castration and so Zheng He eventually became the Grand Eunuch.
Even before the Ming dynasty, huge Chinese ships were spotted in Kerala. In 1340, Ibn Battuta, who was in Calicut, saw 13 Chinese junks wintering in the port. Ibn Battuta who had traveled in various type of ships and dhows in his travels from Morocco to India never mentioned much construction details in his accounts, but the Chinese ships impressed him so much that he wrote about three types of ships — the large junks, middle sized zaws, and small kakams. Ibn Battuta also expressed happiness at the privacy offered in their cabins that he could take his slave girls and wives and no one on board would know about it.
In 1330, Jordan Catalani, a Dominican monk saw them in Quilon and wrote that they had over 100 cabins and 10 sails. They were triple keeled and held together not by nails or metal structures, but the thread of some plant. Ibn Battuta wrote that these ships carried thousand men of which four hundred were soldiers.
Zhu Di’s ships, under the command of Zheng He sailed in 1405. There were 317 ships of which 60 were the large junks. These treasure ships held lacquers, porcelain, and silks. They carried a total of 27,000 men which included soldiers, carpenters, physicians, astrologers, cartographers and interpreters. Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan or Francis Drake would never command such a fleet nor as many men.
Under his leadership, the fleet made seven voyages trading, transporting ambassadors and establishing Chinese colonies. Three of those were to India, one to the Persian Gulf and three to the Swahili Coast and in the process he visited the Champa kingdom, Cambodia, Sumatra, Nicobar Islands, Ceylon, Maldives. One item which Zheng He took back to China was a giraffe; how the giraffe was transported on a ship passing through a rough ocean is not documented well, but it certainly amused the king. So did zebras which were called celestial
horses.
They called Calicut, “a great country” and people as “honest and trustworthy”. They had good opinion of the Zamorin and observed that Calicut had a highly structured society, well trained army and a harsh system of justice. In Calicut they traded using the language of the fingers.
(Read Part 2)

The Slave Dynasties of Cairo and Delhi

(via thovie333)

India and Egypt have a lot in common.Both are ancient civilizations. Trade ships used to ply between the West coast of India to Egypt as documented in 1st century book, The Periplus of the Eritrean Sea. Following Independence, Chacha Nehru, along with a bunch of people founded the Non-Aligned Movement and conned a bunch of countries to join so that they could align themselves with the Soviet Union. One of Nehruji’s friends was Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt who in 1967 Tughlaqian move tried to wipe Israel off the map.

A lesser discussed fact is that both Delhi and Cairo were once ruled by members of the Slave Dynasty who were Turks. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of two such Turks, Baibars [2] and Qutb-ud-din Aybak.
Baibars was captured by the Mongols, sometime after 1223, and sold as a slave. He was passed up by many buyers since he had cataract. Sold at a discount, he ended up in Syria and was later sold to an Egyptian Mamluk. He had charisma and soon became a commander defeating the Seventh Crusade by Louis IX of France. A quick promotion and he became the Sultan of Egypt ruling about half a million people.
Baibars was a Mamluk – a Turkish speaking warrior class who ruled not just Egypt but Syria and Palestine, thus controlling Jerusalem. The Mamluk tradition was to capture pagan boys as slaves from the north of Black Sea and Caspian Sea. The captured boys were converted to Islam, trained in religion and warfare, and given freedom and employment. They remained separate from the Egyptian population.They were patrons of Islam, building mosques and madrassas, and hence was tolerated by the local population.
Qutb-ud-din Aybak was born before Baibars in Central Asia and captured as a slave when he was a boy. He was sold to a qazi of a town in Iran who gave him very good education. After the qazi’s death, his sons sold him to a slave merchant and finally he was bought by a person called Muhammad of Ghor.
Muhammad of Ghor soon owned a major portion of India. He had one problem though – no male heirs. But he had a way around it which was clarified by the remark, “I have thousands of sons, my Turkish slaves who will be the heirs of my dominions, and who, after me, will take care to preserve my name in the Khutba throughout these territories.” After Muhammad’s death Qutb-ud-din Aybak established the slave dynasty in India. This is a slumdog millionaire story which even Vikas Swarup can’t make up.
In Egypt, minorities like Jews and Christians were treated as second class citizens during the Mamluk era; they had to wear distinguishing clothing. Sometimes synagogues and churches were destroyed to build mosques.This was the time of crusades and some believe that the attacks on Jews and Christians of Egypt were a reaction[2]. In India which was not affected by the Western crusades, Qutb-ud-din Aybak, who constructed the Qutub Minar inspired by the Minaret of Jam, would also build the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque from the parts of twenty seven Hindu and Jain temples. In Varanasi, Aybak demolished idols in a thousand temples and made them the place of worship of one true God[3].
Apart from such religious tolerance, a major achievement of the Mamluks was keeping the Mongols out. Due to this Cairo prospered and became a refuge for scholars, artists and merchants and became a cosmopolitan center among Islamic countries. In India, Gengis Khan crossed the Indus in 1222 and a similar exodus of Muslim refugees into India happened making Delhi a another Islamic cosmopolitan center. The Mongols would try again, after Raziya Sultana’s time, but would be held back by another slave, Ghiyas ud din Balban.
When Ibn Battuta visited Cairo in 1326, it was still under Mamluk control; they would be defeated by the Ottomans. By the time he reached Delhi in 1333, the Tughlaq dynasty was in power[1]; the Turkish slave dynasty was put to an end by the Khilji dynasty in 1290.
References:

  1. The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
  2. Making of the Modern World 4, Lecture 2, by Prof. Mathew Herbst.
  3. India: A History
  4. Wikipedia:Qutb-ud-din Aybak, Baibars, Qutub Complex, Ghiyas ud din Balban

[serialposts]

King Agathocles's Coins

(Balarama depicted on a 1st century BCE Maues coin. via wikipedia)

Between 190 and 180 BCE, towards the end of the Mauryan empire, there lived a king named Agathocles near Ai-Khanoum, in the Kunduz area of Afghanistan. There are no cities, monuments or accounts about him and he would have remained unknown if not for one thing – coins.

Some time in the 70s, archaeologists found two types of coins issued by him. One set was Greek silver coins depicting Zeus and Dionysos. He also issued bronze and silver coins, square or rectangular in shape, which portryated Indian gods like Vishnu, Shiva, Vasudeva, Buddha and Balarama. On these coins were written, in Brahmi or Kharoshthi, that the money belonged to Rajane Agathuklayasa.

“These square coins, dating back to 180- BC, with Krishna on one side and Balram on the other, were unearthed recently in Al Khanoun in Afghanistan and are the earliest proof that Krishna was venerated as a god, and that the worship had spread beyond the Mathura region,” says T K V Rajan, archaeologist and founder-director, Indian Science Monitor, who is holding a five-day exhibition, In search of Lord Krishna,’ in the city from Saturday. [New finds take archaeologists closer to Krishna-Chennai-Cities-The Times of India]

The images show Vasudeva carrying a chakra and sankha on one side and Balarama carrying a gada (club) and hala (plough) and are some of the earliest coins depicting Krishna and Balarama. But these are not recent discoveries as mentioned in Times of India; a paper on it (Narain, A.K. “Two Hindu Divinities on the Coins of Agathocles from Ai-Khanum”, Journal of Numismatic Society of India) was published in 1973.

References:

  1. Alexander the Great and Bactria By Frank Lee Holt
  2. Iconography of Balarama By N.P. Joshi

Consequences of having Reflective Floors

An important turning point in Mahabharata is when Duryodhana visits Indraprastha for attending Yudhishtira’s rajasuya yagya. Walking around, amazed at the grandeur of the palace, at one place Duryodhana mistakes the floor to be a pool of water and raises his clothes. In another place, he mistakes a pool as the floor and falls into it, and Draupadi laughs. You know the rest.
There is a similar story in the Qur’an about a person getting confused with a reflective floor. Here it is a woman – the Queen of Sheba – who ruled over a kingdom which may have included Eritrea, Ethiopia and Yemen. In the story, she visits King Sulayman (the biblical Solomon) with gifts of incense.
The pagan Queen enters the palace and seeing the reflective floor assumes it is water and lifts her skirt. This, of course is against social convention. It also does not help when Sulayman tells her that it was just glass. According to one version the Queen admits her mistake and accepts the King’s religion.
In another version the King too had heard about the Queen. He also had heard that her left foot is hairy and is like that of a goat. To test this he gets the floor shined until it is like glass.

When the Queen of Sheba walks across the floor, Solomon sees the reflection of her cloven foot. Right in front of his eyes, it transforms and becomes normal.The Queen of Sheba tests Solomon’s wisdom, asking him many questions and giving him riddles to solve. He answers to her satisfaction and then he teaches her about his god Yahweh and she becomes a follower.[In Search of Myths & Heroes . The Queen of Sheba | PBS]

The missionaries who are busy harvesting souls in Orissa and Karnataka would be wishing if only conversions were this easy.

Quotes (1)

Westerners have singularly narrowed the history of the world in grouping the little that they know about the expansion of the human race around the peoples of Israel, Greece and Rome. Thus have they ignored all those travelers and explorers who in their ships ploughed the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, or rode the immensities of Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. In truth the larger part of the globe, containing cultures different from those of the ancient Greeks and Romans but no less civilized, has remained unknown to those who wrote the history of their little world under the impression that they were writing world history

Henri Cordier, French Sinologist quoted in The Adventures of Ibn Battuta

Indian History Carnival – 12

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

  1. A while back, at varnam, we looked at the myth of Cheraman Perumal’s conversion to Islam. Now Maddy at Historical Alleys investigates the story of the Perumal and the pickle and writes that, “While the persons and the dates are shrouded in a veil of confusion, the one less disputed fact that remains was that a person of high standing reached Makkah after conversion and shared a jar of ginger pickle with some dignitaries.”
  2. Continuing on the same topic, Calicut Heritage wonders if this conversion was part of embracing the religion of trade like the conversion of Parameswara, a Hindu from the Srivijaya dynasty, to Islam in 1400.
  3. Bharatpur was in the news due to various political chess games being played there. Murali has a brief history of the place the British called Bhurtpore.
  4. In 1780s, William Hodges, a member of James Cook’s expeditions traveled across India. He witnessed sati in Benares and wrote about it. Feanor has an excerpt.
  5. Do you want to know how Bangalore was in the 1950s and ’60s? E. R. Ramachandran’s post is great for reading while sitting in the current Bangalore traffic.

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 Jan 15th.
See Also: Previous Carnivals