1. The Royal Asiatic Society Blog has few images depicting the nine avatars of Vishnu which are from 19th century Rajasthan.
2. What is the connection between Swati Tirunal, Irvivarman Thampi, Sugandhavalli ,Vadivelu, Bharatnatyam, and Mohinitattam? In a fascinating post Maddy explains

The work carried out by the quartet on Bharata Natyam encouraged the young king Swati Tirunal, who now wanted Vadivelu to work on the extant but unpopular form of Mohiniattam in Kerala. Together they crafted a revival and able support was provided by two more people, Uncle Iravivarman Thampi and a lovely dusky toned dancer. I will not get into the details of Swati Tirunal and his life, but suffices to say that here was a well educated and willing student, waiting for new teachers and new ideas. The dancers knew how to convert the ideas into movements. The king however was a man in a hurry, probably he knew he had only some more years left in his life and so he wanted to experience it all, the role of a ruler, the beauty of dance and the woman’s sensuous role in it as well as the woman herself, fighting the infighting in the large royal family and keeping the colonial rulers and administrators at bay. Was there time for love in his life?

3. Did a tsunami hit Calicut in 1847? CHF investigates

Further south the waves damaged the mouth of the Kotta (Moorad, Vatakara) river and destroyed the Palliyad dam and the cultivation above it over two miles from the mouth of the river. The floods from inland breached the new work on the Conolly canal at Calicut. At Parappanangadi and Tanur private persons suffered much loss from the sudden rise of the sea. The tsunami altered the topography permanently in Chavakkad, where, Logan records, the sea forced a new and deep opening into the Chavakkad backwater and broke with much strength on the Ennamakkal dam…. The description leaves no room to doubt that it was indeed a tsunami . Considering the lack of proper communication those days, it is likely that the damage – particularly in terms of loss of lives and destruction of property – was much more widespread but was not properly documented.

4. Parag Tope’s Operation Red Lotus has a section which describes why English East India Company should be considered as a drug cartel due to the fact that they cultivated and exported opium from India to China. Another good book which goes into the details of this trade is Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. Ptak Science Books has a post which shows some images from the 29 July 1882 issue of the Scientific American which shows the magnitude of this business.

They are iconic images of a devastating trade and were frequently reproduced over many decades–mostly not for the “devastating” part of what I just wrote, but more for the industrial/business appreciation end, as was the case with this article in SciAmerican. The British interest in the trade stretched back two cneturies earlier, and of course the use of opium bends far back into Neolithic times. Sherill’s scenes are all from the opium receiving/production/distribution center in Patna, India, which claimed to produce some 13,000,000 pounds of opium juice annually, shipping the stuff out to Bengal and then on to China.

5. In the June 2010 issue of Pragati, I wrote about the ice trade between United States and India. In this post, Sriram writes about the ice factories of Chennai.

The Madras Ice Company was floated in 1865, with CA Ainslie of Binny, John Charles Loch of Parry and the legendary lawyer John Bruce Norton as its Directors. Despite its high profile origin it was a non-starter. By the 1870s, the Royal Navy showed that ice could be made using what was called the steam process. The International Ice Company was established in Madras in 1874. Nothing much is known about it, beyond the fact that it killed the American import.

The carnival is expected to be on schedule from September onwards. Also there is a possibility that blogging might resume once again after a break of few months. The next carnival will be up on Sept 15th. Send your nominations to varnam.blog @gmail. Thanks to Sandeep V and Feanor.

1. After writing about the how the notion of Kamma changed over time, Jayarava writes about the concept of rebirth

Contrarily those who seek to deny that rebirth was part of the original teaching don’t have a leg to stand on. Rebirth is prominent in the older hagiographical accounts like the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, and in the older parts of the Sutta Nipāta. Rebirth is quite obviously an important part of Buddhism in the earliest records we have. The idea that rebirth is somehow in the background, or was added later, is insupportable based on current evidence. That rebirth no longer seems plausible is an entirely different proposition. And one that creates a dilemma that I have no wish to underplay. We have yet to really work out the implications of this news, though it is the news. Understanding that our doctrines have always been quite changeable and responsive to social change, seems to me to be an important factor in loosening our grip on traditional doctrines with a view to letting them go. Everything changes. Resisting changes causes suffering. The only way forward for Buddhism is, well, forward

2. Where do you think the Zamorin’s palace was and how do you think it looked like? Maddy draws an image based on notes from various visitors

And with all that background, let us summarize how the palace would have looked.
The palace grounds were enclosed by low walls with wooden inlays, there were perhaps some moats around the walls (I doubt it), that the walls had four gates and were well guarded. The palace was in the middle and the courtyard housed other buildings such as the women’s quarters, the main meeting halls etc. the roads within were lined with tress, ponds and so on, and some of the buildings were multistoried with tiled roofs. There were bathing ponds within the palace and outside, the Manachira tank provided water supply to the large numbers of people employed. The manachira grounds hosted competitions and bazaars often. Close by was the Tali temple, the mint and the stables.

3. One person who worked behind the scenes in sending Swami Vivekananda to USA was  M.C.Alasinga Perumal. Karthik Bhat has that story

A thought then struck Alasinga that Swami Vivekananda could be sent to Chicago as the Hindu representative. On this idea being put forth before him, Swami Vivekananda readily agreed, having earlier been requested by various dignitaries such as the Maharaja of Mysore and the Raja of Ramnad to travel to the West and propagate the ideals of Hinduism. Soon, preparations started in full earnest for the travel of Swami Vivekananda to the West. A subscription committee was formed under the leadership of Alasinga to raise funds, which did not always come easily. Alasinga even had to resort to door to door begging at times to raise the money. Soon, a princely sum of Rs.500 was collected. However, this sum was redistributed as Swami Vivekananda had second thoughts about his participation in the Parliament, as he took as a bad omen the fact that the Raja of Ramnad had failed to pay up the money promised by him for the purpose. Alasinga was disheartened that his efforts had gone waste. 

4. Sriram writes about the person who pioneered the mid day lunch scheme in schools in Madras

Among his first observations was that several of the poor children of the George Town area did not come to school. He also observed that among those who attended, several remained hungry during the lunch break, as the parents could not afford to send any food. Perhaps taking a leaf from the Chennapuri Annadana Samajam, which had begun sending cooked food to schools, he decided that the Hindu Theological would have its own kitchen. He seeded it with his savings and later aggressively canvassed for support from the parents of well-to-do students. The Deenabandhu Sangam was formed shortly thereafter which took on the task of providing the noon meal and also clothes to indigent students.

5. L K Advani’s blog mentions Will Durant’s A Case for India in which he wrote against the British. Advani quotes Durant’s following lines

“The final element in the real caste system of India is the social treatment of the Hindus by the British. The latter may be genial Englishmen when they arrive, gentlemen famous as lovers of fair play; but they are soon turned, by the example of their leaders and the poison of irresponsible power, into the most arrogant and over-bearing bureaucracy on earth. “Nothing can be more striking,” said a report to Parliament, in 1830, “than the scorn with which the people have been practically treated at the hands of even those who were actuated by the most benevolent motives”. Sunderland reports that the British treat the Hindus as strangers and foreigners in India, in a manner “quite as unsympathetic, harsh and abusive as was ever seen among the Georgia and Louisiana planters in the old days of American slavery”.

Sorry for the delay. The next issue will be out on Independence Day. Thanks to Sandeep V and Feanor for their contributions.

1. The decline of the Indus-Saraswati civilization (terminology used by ASI) is the major news this month and what triggered it is a paper by  Liviu Giosan, a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. NYTimes blog writes

Wild, untamed rivers once slashed through the heart of the Indus plains. They were so unpredictable and dangerous that no city could take root on their banks. As the centuries passed, however, the monsoons became less frequent and the floods less intense, creating stable conditions for agriculture and settlement.
Sprawling across what is now Pakistan, northwestern India and eastern Afghanistan, the Indus civilization encompassed more than 625,000 square miles, rivaling ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in its accomplishments. In its bustling hubs, there was indoor plumbing, gridded streets and a rich intellectual life.
Unlike the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, who used irrigation systems to support crops, the Harappans relied on a gentle, dependable cycle of monsoons that fed local rivers and keyed seasonal floods.
As time passed, the monsoons continued to weaken until the rivers no longer flooded, and the crops failed. The surplus agriculture was longer there to support traders, artists, craftsmen and scholars . The Harappans’ distinct writing system, which still has not been deciphered, fell into disuse.

2. On the same topic, Suvrat Kher has a post in which he writes

Paleobotanical and sedimentological criteria had always indicated that increasing aridification and reduction in monsoon strength better explained the drying of the Ghaggar around 3900 B.P. Despite all this, the Sutlej or the Yamuna changing course at around 3900 B.P became the favored explanation for the drying of the Ghaggar. This scenario of a once large Ghaggar neatly fitted the description in the Rig Veda of a mighty Saraswati, a holy river that just like the Ganges was thought to have its source in the high glacial Himalayas. I suspect that the glacial river theory had more emotional appeal and gained acceptance among some geologists.
The strong assertions by geologists that the diversion of glacial rivers from the Ghaggar coincided with the decline of the Harappan civilization was used by archaeologists like Prof. B.B. Lal to place the composers of the Rig Veda on the plains of the Punjab before the Ghaggar dried up, apparently bolstering the theory that the Harappan people and the Vedic people were one and the same. A geological narrative constructed without rigorous evidence has been promoted to support a theory of cultural evolution in northwest India.
Unfortunately, this glacial past of the Saraswati timed to the demise of the Harappan civilization is now enshrined in textbooks written by senior geologists like K.S. Valdiya. They should now be revised or at the very least these geologists need to admit that their theory has been seriously challenged. If geologists working on this problem still want to stick to the theory of a glacial Saraswati, they will need to come up with a more convincing data driven rebuttal to the work of Clift et.al. and Giosan et. al.

3. How did the Buddhist idea of Kamma change over time? Jayarava illustrates it with several examples

There is no single unified Theory of Karma in Buddhism, either synchronically (in our time) or diachronically (across time). Instead there are multiple theories, and very many exegetes explaining the “Truth” of karma. Some of these ‘truths’ are mutually exclusive. Sectarians tend not to be conversant with the details of the different theories, since sectarian teachers present their version of karma as the Truth. Those who are conversant with a range of karma theories find them difficult to reconcile. ‘Actions have consequences’ is what it boils down to, but its hard to see this as a great revelation from the Buddha since everyone knows this platitude already. The how and when of actions having consequences are Buddhism’s specific contribution to moral theory, but unfortunately Buddhists themselves disagree on precisely these points.

4. In 1705 Scotland joined the British union to create Great Britain and there was someone from Malabar who was in the thick of the events that led to it. Maddy has that fascinating tale

The witnesses Francisco and Ferdinando when produced before the court were termed Negros or blacks, not considered real Christians and their names as stated were not considered real. They were for these reasons not considered equivalent to ten pound Scots. Nevertheless, their depositions were the basis for later judgment, Ferdinando’s being the clinching eyewitness testimony augmented by supporting evidence by the others. It appears that he provided his testimony either in Malayalam. Imagine the irony, the destiny of Scotland was decided by a few words in Malayalam!! The translations in court were provided by George Yeaman.

5. Sriram has details on how Chennai got its port

The Port scheme gained a major source of support with the establishment of the Madras Chamber of Commerce in 1836. The merchants of the city were convinced that if it was to transform from being Kipiling’s “tired withered beldame”, Madras needed a proper harbour and therefore began championing the cause. The Chamber, which had most of its members on First Line Beach, roped in the Madras Trades Association, which comprised the retail giants of Mount Road. In 1857, a Committee in which the Chamber was represented submitted to the East India Company a report that stated “that an iron screw pile pier was not only feasible but simple of construction and was the most suitable structure for spanning the Madras surf”. The Government that replaced the Company post Mutiny accepted this proposal which was estimated to cost Rs 95,000. A year later this was revised to Rs 103,000 and on 17th September 1859, the first pile was screwed down by Sir Charles Trevelyan, the then Governor, assisted by the Commander-in-Chief and Henry Nelson, Chairman of the Chamber.

That’s it for June. The next carnival will be up on July 15th. Please send nominations to @varnam_blog or varnam dot blog at gmail.

1. Last year there was a big brouhaha over the so called censoring of A K Ramanujan’s text on Ramayana. Deepak Sharma, the moderator of RISA, wrote an article in the Huffington Post titled Censoring Ramanujan’s Essay On Ramayana: Intolerant Hindus And Confusing Texts.  As the politics behind history is as interesting as history itself, here is an article by Koenraad Elst on the issue

“Where Ramanujan got it wrong, driven by his ideological agendas, is to to place all the diverse renderings of Ramayana at par with the Valmiki Ramayana. Let us get one thing VERY CLEAR – All these different versions of Ramayana (Dasharatha Jataka included) have the Ramayana of Valmiki as their basis and draw their storyline to it. It is another matter that they adapt it to their own purposes. Even Ashvaghosha, the author of Buddhacharita, salutes Valmiki as the Adikavi. The Shakya lineage was derided for having descended from a brother sister union. The Buddhists therefore created the Jataka in which Rama and Sita married, and linked the Shakyas with the Ikshavakus. So, their agenda was obvious. To claim, despite this obvious explanation, that in the ‘most ancient version of the Ramayana, Rama and Sita are siblings’ is to distort stuff with the deliberate intent of deriding Hindu beliefs.

2. A popular theory which explains the spread of Indo-European language around the world is called the Kurgan hypothesis.
   Jesus Sanchis, based on new work by Francisco Villar, suggests something radical.

Of course, some may think: “Ok, there were IE language in Europe at that early age, but then there was another wave of IE dispersal at the bronze age which brought the IE languages as we know them today and historically”. The authors admit this possibility, but also say that it is quite unlikely. As they say, and as I have insisted in this blog many times, there is no evidence of any sort of relevant population movement in the Bronze Age that could even remotely support this theory, usually known as the Kurgan theory.

3. How did ancient Indians trade? Did they simply barter or did they have any sort of currency? An excellent blog called Indian Coins looks at this

What gave an impetus to the development of a long lasting metal-based monetary system was the eventual arrival of gold, followed by silver and other metals. Gold was abundant in several south Indian rivers and people were able to glean gold nuggets from them. They were also able to extract coarse gold dust from sand with a reasonable effort. These gold nuggets and gold dust became an important medium of currency within India by 1000. Gold dust was placed in impervious bags and these bags were used for transaction. There are numerous references in ancient Indian literature to these bags of gold. This in turn attracted Indians to gold and silver which foreign merchants offered to purchase Indian products.

4. Sriram writes about the trinity of bhajana sampradaya in Tanjore region

The Tanjore region became the bhajana tradition’s stronghold with the arrival of the bhajana sampradAya trinity, namely Sadguru Swamin, Bhodendral and Sridhara Venkatesa Ayyaval. The trio existed between 1684 and 1817 AD. Ayyaval who was the senior most is considered the father of the Bhajan tradition in South India. Born in Tiruvisanallur, Tanjore District, Ayyaval was a contemporary of King Shahaji I (ruled 1684-1712). He firmly believed in nAma siddhAnta, the principle of chanting God’s name and composed several simple songs for congregational singing.

5. In 1873, Edward Lear arrived in India and spent time painting and sketching. Fëanor writes
   

   Lear’s Nonsense verses were immensely popular in India. Of course, this is not to say the local population knew any of them. Rather, the colonial kids – living in their bubbles – knew them and even studied them at school. His interaction with Indians appears to have been somewhat limited. He learned a few Hindi and Tamil words. He could ask the way (‘Rusta ke hai?’) and he was happy to eat ‘Bhat’ and curry, and in Madras, could say ‘Please endewennum?’ He expressed regret that he hadn’t bothered to learn the ‘Lingo’ before arriving in India.

6. During WW1, a large number of Indian soldiers fought in Mesopotamia. Seyahatname visited the Haydarpaşa English cemetery in Turkey and found some memorial stones.

Mesopotamia saw the largest influx of Indian soldiers. Over the course of the many campaigns, close to 675,000 Indian fighting troops as well as hundreds of thousands of auxiliary troops were involved in Mesopotamia. When General Townshend’s troops surrendered in April 1916, the POWs were marched all the way from Mesopotamia to POW camps in Turkey. Most of those who survived probably ended up at the POW camps in Afyonkarahissar (the name ‘black poppy castle’ always makes me chuckle). Apparently, there are still some memorial stones in that region of Anatolia, but most of the Indian POWs are remembered here in Istanbul.

7. Samanth Subramanian at NYTimes Blog has a post on independent India’s first corruption scandal involving the party that has been bringing us bigger and better corruption scandals for the past six decades.

After Mr. Chagla filed his report, Mr. Krishnamachari resigned on Feb. 18, 1958. When Mr. Nehru received the letter of resignation, he wrote back a note that was curiously dismissive of Mr. Chagla and that betrayed his deep fondness for Mr. Krishnamachari: “Despite the clear finding of the Commission so far as you are concerned, I am most convinced that your part in this matter was the smallest and that you did not even know what was done.” Mr. Mundhra, arrested at a suite at the Claridges Hotel in New Delhi, went to prison for 22 years.

That’s it for May. The next carnival will be up on June 15th or the weekend following it. If you have any links, please e-mail me at varnam.blog @gmail. (Thanks Sandeep, Feanor, as usual)

1. Chandrahas has a review of Diana Eck’s India, A Sacred Geography

Thousands of years before India was a nation-state (1947), a colony of Britain (the 18th century), or a cartographic vision on a map (1782), it was, in Eck’s view, conceived as a geographical unit in the hearts and minds of the faithful, and particularly in the religious imagination of Hinduism.
Pilgrims thought of India as the land of the seven great rivers, as a space marked by the benediction and caprice of the gods who resided in the great northern peaks of the Himalayas, as woven into unity by the great centers of pilgrimage, or dhams, in the north, south, east and west. Seeking the marks and manifestations of the sacred, they fashioned with their footprints a map of a vast subcontinent suffused with the presence of the gods and stories of their appearances in different incarnations.

2. In 1502, Vasco da Gama massacred the pilgrims of  the ship Meri and it turned the tide of events in Calicut. Now Maddy writes about the events a century later involving another ship which created a diplomatic furor

The owner of the ship was none other than the prodigious lady trader Maryam Uz Zamani, the mother of Jehangir. Maryam was the Hindu princess from Amber who had married Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605) in 1562 as part of a political alliance between her father Raja BiharI Mall Kachhwaha and the emperor. Many people are/were under the impression that she was a “Jodh Bai,” a lady from Jodhpur, as suggested by some historians, but this is not apparently correct (Jahangir himself, however, married a Jodh Bai. She was mother to the future Shah Jahan and died in 1619.The capture of her ship was as you can imagine an insult to the reigning emperor’s family.

3. In a short post Tyler Cowen writes about the role of British in eradicating literacy in India

It turns out it was worse than I had thought. I’ve been reading some papers by Latika Chaudhary on this topic, and I learned that educational expenditures in India, under the British empire, never exceeded one percent of gdp. To put that in perspective, for 1860-1912 in per capita terms the independent “Princely states” were spending about twice as much on education as India under the British. Mexico and Brazil, hardly marvels of successful education, were spending about five times as much. Other parts of the British empire, again per capita, were spending about eighteen times as much.

4. I had no idea who Thatikonda Namberumal Chetty was or his achievements till I read this post  by Sriram

In 1887, Namberumal was to land his first big job – the construction of the Victoria Public Hall on Poonamallee High Road, to Chisholm’s design, though there is a theory that he was also the contractor for the GPO, designed by Chisholm and completed in 1884. It was with Chisholm’s successor Henry Irwin that Namberumal struck a great working relationship. The Irwin-Namberumal combination was to create some of the most wonderful buildings of the city including the High Court and Law College, the Bank of Madras (now State Bank of India), the Victoria Memorial Hall (now the National Art Gallery) and the Connemara Public Library.

5. Was the war of 1947 – 48, a war of lost opportunities for Pakistan? There is a lengthy post at Military History blog which concludes

Mr Jinnah was unlucky unlike Nehru in having no Patel by his side. When Bucher the British C-in-C of the Indian Army advised the Indian government not to attack Hyderabad till the Kashmir War was over,and Patel insisted otherwise, Bucher threatened to resign. Patel simply told him on the spot that he could resign and then ordered Sardar Baldev Singh,the Defence Minister ‘The Army will march into Hyderabad as planned tomorrow morning’15. Mr Jinnah was undoubtedly; by virtue of having taken an iron and most resolute stand on the division of the Indian Army; the father of Pakistan Army.

That’s it for April. Will see you on May 15th with the next carnival. If you have any links, please e-mail me at varnam.blog @gmail. (Thanks Sandeep, Feanor, as usual)

1. An often neglected aspect in the Aryan Invasion-Migration debate is astronomy and Vedic chronology. TRS Prasanna, a Professor at IITB has a paper on this.

Prof. Prasanna has published an article in the latest issue of Indian Journal of History of Science titled “Ancient Indian Astronomy and Aryan Invasion Theory”; you can download a the preprint version of the paper here (pdf). Here are some of the highlights of the paper:
» A simple method to date the Brahmana period to about 3000 BC
» The origin of Mahashivratri and its dating to about 3000 BC
» Interpretation of Ekastaka verses and their relevance to dating the Vedic texts.
» The position of Krittika during the Samhita period (which, sort of explains my title to this post!)

2. How did Chennai get its name? Sriram writes

Did the temple give the city its name or was it the other way round? Perhaps the former is the correct explanation for Chenna Kesava was a common name for Vishnu in temples of south India. Whatever be the correct theory, it cannot be denied that Chennai and the Chenna Kesava Perumal temple grew in size together. The temple that Thimmannan built was located where the present High Court premises stand. A visitor to the city in 1673, Dr Fryer penned his impressions of the shrine, most of which is unfortunately in completely unintelligible English.

3. Look and Learn blog has an article about Jim Corbett or Korbit Sahib as he was known.
   

   Yet as the years passed, Jim Corbett found himself shooting less and less. A friend had made him a present of a movie camera and he found more pleasure in recording the habits of the magnificent animals he loved than in exterminating the rogues. Even Sultana’s bandits, watching Corbett and his friends making their way stealthily along the old watercourse knew it. What puzzled them was the fact that Korbit Sahib had taken to hunting men.

4. About 69 years back Subhash Chandra Bose declared the forming of a Provisional Government of Free India based in Singapore. WSJ blog writes about him and few people who were involved.
   

   On the evening of Oct. 21, 1943, after announcing the formation of the provisional government, Mr Bose also formally inaugurated a Queen of Jhansi Regiment (or RJR) training camp in Singapore. RJR was the female wing of INA and named after a 19th-century queen of an Indian princely state who had also fought against British rule in 1857-58. 

5. The role of Sir C P Ramaswamy Iyer in the murder case of Robert William Escourt Ashe has more twists and turns than a movie. Maddy has the details.
   

   Now enters the next important man in the case. It was none other than Subramanian Bharati, who was also holed up in Pondicherry. Bharatiyar as he is more popularly known, was born in Ettayapuram, a palace I covered at length in my article about Kattabomman, and a place of much ,musical repute. After a trip to Benares, his spiritual and nationalistic fervor increased. By 1904 he was a active journalist espousing the causes of the downtrodden and writing against authority. He was soon aligned to the Tilak brand of militancy and sometimes engaged with VOC at nearby Tuticorin. When Ashe took up the cudgels against VOC, Bharati testified in support of VOC. This put him also into the bad books of the British and soon, faced with imminent arrest, he fled to Pondicherry. He continued his strident tone in an immense volume of literary output from Pondicherry. While there he got involved with Aurobindo & VVS Iyer and teamed up in many anti British activities. It so happened that two of the pamphlets he authored were found in the house of Vanchi Iyer after security guards ransacked it for evidence. The government suspected Bharati and VVS Iyer of having had a direct hand in the planning of the murder

The next carnival will be up on April 15th. Please send your nominations to varnam.blog @gmail.com Thanks once again to the contributors which makes my life easy.

1. Jayarava investigates if there is any truth to the claim that Buddha’s family followed Dravidian marriage customs? Read the entire post to get the answer.

A cross cousin marriage is one in which a boy would marry his mother’s brother’s daughter, or a girl would marry her father’s sister’s son. This is one of the preferred matches in South India amongst the Dravidian speaking peoples, and also practised in Sri Lanka. However Good (1996) has been critical of the idea that cross-cousin marriage is the only or most preferred kin relationship, and shows that other marriage matches are made. Be that as it may, cross-cousin marriage is a feature of South Indian kinship, and the Brahmanical law books (the Dharmasūtras) make it clear that cousin marriage is forbidden for Aryas. (Thapar 2010: 306). The perception, then is that if the Buddha’s family practised cross-cousin marriage, they cannot have been Aryas and were likely Dravidians.

2. While we know about the English, Portuguese and Dutch factories in India, less known is the fact that there was a Danish factory in Calicut in the 18th century.

The Calicut lodge was not very much in the scheme of things as far as the Danish were concerned and was just an outpost for pepper procurement. However it also served as a listening post to sound out the English overtures in the Malabar Coast. The Danish were wary of supplying arms and armaments to the Travancore kingdom and the Mysore rajas though they did quite a bit of that quietly under the British eyes and the response from the buyers were not too enthusiastic and the equipment was old, outdated and even unusable at times. But they continued on. Sometimes brown sugar and salt from the Calicut factory found their way to the ships headed back to Copenhagen. The ships came from Tranquebar in Jan/Feb and got back by April/May. During the incoming trip they brought in weapons offloaded at Colachel and later at Calicut for Hyder & Tipu. The principal items of trade were saltpeter, pepper, salt, soft brown sugar, textiles, rattan, indigo & tea (from China). For the Danish ships, the journey to Europe was direct from Tranquebar and not touching the Malabar coasts.

3. Usually we don’t find elaborate descriptions of the Zamorin. But thanks to Italian traveller Pietro Della Valle who visited Calicut in December 1623, we have a bit more details.

Pietro had no difficulty in walking into Zamorin’s Palace where he and his Captain were almost forced to have an audience with the Zamorin. His description of the Zamorin as he walked into the hall to meet the visitors is graphic: After a short space the King came in at the same door, accompanied by many others. He was a young Man of thirty, or five and thirty, years of age, to my thinking; of a large bulk of body, sufficiently fair for an Indian and of a handsome presence. … His beard was somewhat long and worn equally round about his Face; he was naked, having only a piece of fine changeable cotton cloth, blue and white, hanging from the girdle to the middle of the Leg.

4. Do you know why Tiruvarur is famous for? Sriram writes:

Tiruvarur town is also the birthplace of the Carnatic music trinity – Syama Sastry (1762-1827), Tyagaraja (1767-1847) and Muttuswami Dikshitar (1775-1835). The houses in which they were born were later acquired by a trust which built memorials for them at the spots. Though not aesthetically appealing, they serve to commemorate three geniuses who between them, revolutionized South Indian classical music, rather like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart in the world of Western Classical Music. Of the Trinity, Muttuswami Dikshitar is completely associated with Tiruvarur. Several of his compositions are in praise of the deities here.
The Bhakti movement in Tamil Nadu is associated with the 63 devotees of Shiva, known as the Nayanmars, all of whom lived between the 2nd and 8th centuries. Of these, the last- Sundaramurthy has a shrine to himself here. It is believed that he first came up with the idea of the 63, including himself, at the Devashraya – a many-pillared hall that stands within this temple.

Just four posts for this month. The next carnival will be up on Feb 15th. Send your links to varnam dot blog @gmail before that.