Dead Sea Scrolls Online

In my article Secrets of the cellars (Pragati,Aug 2011), I wished if only the Mathilakam records were scanned and put online. That may never happen, but there is a model on how it can be done. Two thousand years after they were written, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were kept safe and accessible only to a a few scholars, went online. NPR has an article with photographs which explains how this was done using a $250K camera developed in California and Google’s help.

The appearance of five of the most important Dead Sea scrolls on the Internet is part of a broader attempt by the custodians of the celebrated manuscripts — who were once criticized for allowing them to be monopolized by small circles of scholars — to make them available to anyone with a computer. The scrolls include the biblical Book of Isaiah, the manuscript known as the Temple Scroll, and three others. Surfers can search high-resolution images of the scrolls for specific passages, zoom in and out, and translate verses into English[2,000-Year-Old Dead Sea Scrolls Go Online]

View and read the DSS here.

Writing Historical Fiction (7): Amitav Ghosh

I have not read a single book by Amitav Ghosh (yet), but that should not prevent me from posting his opinion on writing historical fiction

Q: What sorts of things do you have to do to write successful historical fiction?
A: I don’t think there is any great difference between historical and other kinds of fiction. There are, in fact, very few novels that are not, in some sense, ‘historical’. Most novels are written in the past tense after all, and are based on the conceit that they are narrating events that have already happened. Melville’s Moby Dick was inspired by events that occurred decades before he started the book; the same is true of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But today nobody thinks of these books as ‘historical novels’. What this tells us is that history provides novelists, poets and playwrights with different settings and situations: this does not mean that their themes are necessarily different from those that are explored by writers who choose to write about contemporary settings. In the end, novels are all the same in that they are about characters and their predicaments. Nobody would read a historical novel for the history alone. To be successful a historical novel, like any other, must have compelling characters.[Amitav Ghosh Returns to the Opium Trade in “River of Smoke”]

Indian History Carnival – 45: Baburnamah, Rashtrakutas, Mughal Postal System, Camels, Tipu Sultan

Fëanor quotes André Wink to argue that the rise and fall of the Rashtrakuta kingdom was connected to trade with Persian Gulf

Towards the late 10th century, however, the great ports of Gujarat began to decline. According to Wink, the proximate cause was the steady erosion of the Persian Gulf trade as the Red Sea and Egypt became more important. These countries dealt more with Malabar and Coromandel. The resultant decline in wealth and power of the Rashtrakutas was matched by the growing clout of the Cholas in the south of India, with the predictable result.

This is a post from two years back, but it is interesting as it talks about how the postal system worked during the Mughal Period.

The Dak Chawki system was initially restricted to royal and official use. For urgent letters people had to make their own arrangements at personal cost or await the arrival of the regular messengers and prevail upon them to carry the same. In fact, it was this random practice of the postal employees being subject to inducements by the common public, which compelled Babar to introduce the system of transfer. News was conveyed through an efficient channel of confidential reports, supplied daily, bi-weekly and weekly by different agencies acting independently. This system ruled out erroneous information reaching the ruler, not only because of the inbuilt cross-checks but also by giving the emperor different perspectives to a situation.

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has the illustrated edition of Baburnamah — the autobiography of the Mughal invader — from the 16th century CE. The book was originally written in Turkish and was translated and copied by various of his successors. BibliOdyssey has some of the pictures and Flickr has the complete set.
Airavat has a post on how camels were used in Indian warfare.

An illustrated folio of the Akbarnamah depicting the 16th century Mughal siege of Champaner in Gujarat. The two camels are probably the twin-humped Bactrian breed and are carrying naggada beaters. Such foreign breeds were less resistant to heat and Indian camel breeds from Baluchistan westwards began to be used by Mughal armies primarily for transport. Baloch camel traders are shown as forming the long tail of Aurangzeb’s army that caused so much devastation in the Deccan Wars late in the 17th Century. Jadunath Sarkar wrote in his History of Aurangzib: “The worst oppressors of the peasants, however, were the tail of the army……Particularly the Beluchi camel-owners who hired out their animals to the army, and unattached Afghans searching for employment, plundered and beat the country people most mercilessly.”

There is news that very soon a Malayalam movie, which is a historical about Tipu Sultan and Unniarcha, will start filming. Kamal Haasan has signed on. Maddy had a post on this a while back.

The story thus continues to remain a myth. If Unniarcha was born in 1766 and was taken away by Tipu in 1789, then it is impossible for her to have mothered Aromal, unless he were Tipu’s son. But that is also not possible for according to legends, Unniarcha was very much around Malabar and goading Aromal to take revenge on Chandu. Even then the timelines would not be right for such events would not have occurred in difficult times when the Sultans and their army were encamped in Malabar (those events would have found their way into the ballads). Then again, let us for a moment assume that Unniarcha was a favored queen in the Zenana. This is also not possible for the name was never seen in Wellesley’s or Marriott’s papers. The queens listed and the sons that come up do not indicate any person of Malabar origin

Last month’s Carnival featured a post by Sriram on de Havilland and the Madras Bulwark. He has another post on the Eastern and Western Castlets of de Havilland

Western Castlet appears to have survived for much longer, though its exact location is even more difficult to identify. Considering that most accounts say it was off Mount Road, it is very likely that de Havilland’s property extended from east to west with Eastern Castlet being on Mount Road itself and Western Castlet in the rear. After they were divided it is probable that Western Castlet was accessed by a service lane from Mount Road.

Thanks to Fëanor and Sandeep V for sending the links. If you find interesting blog posts on Indian history, please send it to varnam.blog /gmail or as a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up on Oct 15th.

How Urdu got an Islamic Identity

Urdu has an Islamic identity in India and the neighboring countries even though Muslims speak many languages other than Urdu. How did this association happen.? In Tribune, Prof Tariq Rahman writes that the language went through a change from 1750 CE onwards in which the Indic elements were purged by Muslim poets who then used the language as an identity marker for the religion.

Among the changes which occurred were: the removal of local (bhaka) and Sanskritic words, the substitution of Iranian and Islamic cultural allusions and metaphors in place of Indian and Hindu ones, and the replacement of the Indian conventions about the expression of love (woman to man) by Persian ones (man to woman or adolescent boy). Among the more than 4,000 words purged out were nain (eye), prem (love), mohan (dear one) etc. They do exist in songs and some other forms of poetry, of course, but they were banished from the ghazal. The grounds given in the writings of the poets who did all this — such as Shah Hatim (1699-1786), Imam Baksh Nasikh (d. 1838), Insha Ullah Khan Insha (1752-1818), etc — are not communal. They said that certain words are obsolete, unfashionable and rough. However, the end result was that words of Indic origin were the ones which were purged. That is one reason why I call this movement ‘Islamisation’[How Urdu got associated with Muslims in India? — I]

In Part 2, he looks at the use of Urdu in education, religious debate and printing which helped associate it with Muslims.

As Muslim political power shrank and anxiety spread about why this had happened, the ulema began a movement of education and purification. This they did by writing small books (chapbooks) in the local languages. Thus there are nur namas, wafat namas, jang namas, lahad namas etc. in almost all languages used by Muslims in South Asia and, as it happens, most of them are in Urdu. This movement started in the 18th century and accelerated in the 19th and the 20th centuries. Indeed, if one consults the British reports on printing, one finds that two themes always predominate: religion and love. In some years, one may exceed the other but, as books on history and morals also have a religious colour, it may be true to say that religion mostly predominates printing.
This was a tremendous social change for all religious communities in India. Thus, although there was a secularising trend introduced by the British also, there were more religious texts available in print than ever before. Hence, the consciousness of religious identity grew among all religious communities in India. And within Islam, the consciousness of sectarian identity grew also. Thus, on the one hand the modernist secular classes grew alienated from the religious masses. But on the other, the religious classes also grew alienated from each other and from other religious communities.[How Urdu got associated with Muslims in India — Part II (via Yashwant)]

Added to the Reading List (1)

The Historical Novel Society sends out a newsletter once a month with book review roundups from all the major newspapers. The newsletter covers not just fiction, but non-fiction as well. Here are some interesting books. Clicking on the book titles will take you to the review.
Ragnarok by AS Byatt

Why do myths endure? We don’t need them anymore to explain our world. We don’t believe in them. But because they boil human experience down to its essence, speak of our greatest fears and desires, and offer such rich soil for the imagination, they can bear retelling a thousand times.
Canongate’s myth series broaches the question by inviting eminent authors to look at them afresh, and Byatt has chosen the most uncompromising of the lot – the Norse version of Armageddon.
Rather than transplanting, reshaping or reinterpreting her chosen myth, as other authors have done, Byatt boldly retells it in a relatively pure form, though with a deeply personalised slant.

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

His debut novel, published in 2008, is a complex tale of intrigue and betrayal that unfolds on the Malaysian island of Penang during the brutal Japanese occupation in World War II.
Rich in detail of the history of Japanese imperialism in colonial Malaya, the story draws the reader into one man’s struggle at a pivotal moment in history.

The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller

This whopping whodunit, which also manages to create a poignant portrait of soldiers’ lives in the aftermath of World War I, presents a devastated, grayed-down England suffering under the profound loss that overwhelms survivors – both soldiers and those left at home.
The novel revolves around the execution of an officer in France for cowardice and desertion and the rippling effect on the soldiers and families involved. It was inspired, Speller tells us in an author’s note, by the execution of more than 300 British soldiers by firing squad in the Great War. That only three of them were officers raised intriguing questions about class discrepancies.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann

1493” picks up where Mann’s best seller, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” left off. In 1491, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were almost impassable barriers. America might as well have been on another planet from Europe and Asia. But Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean the following year changed everything. Plants, animals, microbes and cultures began washing around the world, taking tomatoes to Massachusetts, corn to the Philippines and slaves, markets and malaria almost everywhere. It was one world, ready or not.

City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire by Roger Crowley

Roger Crowley’s hugely readable, well-written and informative book – take it there with you this summer! – explains how the Venetian Republic grabbed the riches that built it. Grabbed: it’s not the kind of language we associate with the beauty of San Marco or the notion of La Serenissima. But though diplomacy was always a Venetian art, the city was not built on serenity.
It had a large empire which, in its heyday, stretched down the Adriatic, along the Peloponnesian coast, across to Crete, up the Adriatic and into Asia Minor, with its eastern outpost at Tana on the far end of the Sea of Azov beyond the Crimea. An empire is not tranquil: it requires war, conquest, impressment, imposed government and slavery. Venice engaged in all these in the name of trade. The beauty of Venice, just like the beauty of nearly all great European cities, rests on profit and brutality.

Arabian Horses and the Aryans

(from Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities)

Recently Saudi Arabian officials claimed they have evidence that horses were domesticated in the Arabian peninsula around 9,000 years back.

“This discovery will change our knowledge concerning the domestication of horses and the evolution of culture in the late Neolithic period,” he told a news conference in Jeddah, according to the Reuters news agency.
“The al-Maqar civilisation is a very advanced civilization of the Neolithic period. This site shows us clearly, the roots of the domestication of horses 9,000 years ago,” he added.
Although humans came into contact with horses about 50,000 years ago, they were originally herded for meat, skins, and possibly for milk.[Saudis ‘find evidence of early horse domestication]

This is shocking: archaeological news from a country which has declared war on archaeology?
The website of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities has a large number of photos from al-Maqar. One of the artifacts is a sculpture of a horse around 100 cm long. On this horse, there are signs of a bridle which proves that the horse was domesticated much earlier than what we thought before. While this is interesting news as it pushes the antiquity of horse domestication by a few millenia, it has a serious impact on a version of Aryan Invasion Theory which depends on the date of horse domestication.
According to this version of history, the Indus civilization fell to the invaders. In The Wonder that was India, A L Basham gives a dramatic account of this fall. According to him, the barbarians who were already ranging the provinces finally made their move. The citizens of the Mohenjo-daro were no match for the invaders who had superior weapons. Basham also notes that the invaders trimphed because they had the terror striking beasts of the steppes.
These terror striking beasts are horses which till last week was considered to be first domesticated in the steppes of Central Asia. They were probably first domesticated by the Botai people of Kazakstan. In fact there is no dispute over the fact that horses were alien to India and were domesticated by nomads in the Pontic-Caspian region.
According to one of the Indo-European homeland hypothesis known as the Kurgan theory, these mounted warriors from this region, after domesticating the horse used this advantage to impose their culture on their neighbors in Old Europe. These “Aryans” then displaced the “Dravidians” in a kind of fairy tale.
What happens to this theory if the horse was not domesticated near the Caspian sea, but somewhere in the middle of Saudi Arabia as per the new evidence? Did the horsemen wait for few millennia to time their adventure with the decline of the Harappan civilization? If the Aryans indeed came from the Caspian sea area, what prompted them to make a move around that period?
References:

Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004).

Is Tamil-Brahmi pre-Asokan?

The oldest known script in the Indian subcontinent is the undeciphered Harappan script. The oldest deciphered script is Brahmi, dating to around 4th century BCE. In South India, the oldest deciphered script is Tamil-Brahmi which is dated to two centuries after Brahmi. Inscriptions in rock shelters and caves near Madurai provide proof for this.
In an excavation at Kodumanal, near Erode more than 20 pot-sherds with Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions were found. On the basis of this archaeological work, some scholars suggested an older date for Tamil-Brahmi which would put it in the same period as Brahmi. Now there is new evidence from Palani which suggests 400 BCE as the date for Tamil-Brahmi. This adds a new data point to the debate on if Tamil-Brahmi is pre or post-Asokan.

When K. Rajan, Professor, Department of History, Pondicherry University, excavated this megalithic grave, little did he realise that the paddy found in the four-legged jar would be instrumental in reviving the debate on the origin of the Tamil-Brahmi script. Accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of the paddy done by Beta Analysis Inc., Miami, U.S.A, assigned the paddy to 490 BCE. “Since all the goods kept in the grave including the paddy and the ring-stands with the Tamil-Brahmi script are single-time deposits, the date given to the paddy is applicable to the Tamil-Brahmi script also,” said Dr. Rajan. So the date of evolution of Tamil-Brahmi could be pushed 200 years before Asoka, he argued.[Palani excavation triggers fresh debate via @amargov]

Read the article for it explains the controversies regarding this dating.
References:

Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, 1st ed. (Prentice Hall, 2009).

How Curious George escaped Hitler

Curious George is a popular story book for children written by Hans Augusto Rey and Margret Rey. George is a monkey and lives with “The Man with The Yellow Hat” in a big city. In the first book, published in 1939, he was not called George, but Fifi. In 1940 Nazi Germany occupied three fifths of France and the authors of George being Jews had to think of their survival.

The Reys took the manuscript and cycled from Paris for three days. Eventually they reached Orleans and by taking a few trains they went across Spain and Portugal. From Lisbon they took a ship to South America and reached Rio de Janeiro. Two months later they boarded a ship for United States and reached New York City.

George found fame in America and later he became an animated series on PBS. Without the help of Curious George in keeping few enquiring monkeys busy, the posting frequency on this blog would have been much less.
(Pictures from a Curious George exhibit)

Briefly Noted: The Conspirator (2010)

Robert E. Lee’s Army surrendered to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865 and after six days President Lincoln was assassinated. Ten days later, the assassin John Wilkes Booth was killed by Union soldiers in Virginia. But on the day Lincoln was shot, he went into a coma and the War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton wanted answers. Very soon one of Booth’s colleague, a John Surratt was identified. John had left town, so his mother Mary Surratt was taken into custody. Robert Redford’s gripping period movie follows the trial of Mary Surratt
Mary was the owner of a boarding house in which the conspirators stayed and that was a fact she never denied. To defend her before a military tribunal a reluctant lawyer — a 27 year old civil war hero by the name of Fredrick Aiken is appointed. Mr. Aiken believes that his client is guilty and he reluctantly defends her because he was forced to by his mentor who believes that the constitution is applicable during war time as well.
But as the trial proceeds he changes; from being certain that Mary was guilty, he becomes unsure of her role. Despite the fact that the military tribunal worked against him, never giving him the freedom to work the case, he manages to convince everyone that Mary was not guilty. But Mary becomes the first woman to be executed by United States because Edwin M. Stanton believes that, “They assassinated the President and someone must be held accountable.”
After the preachy and boring Lions for Lambs, this is an excellent movie which goes into deeper questions about nation, laws, war and the people who have to make tough decisions in the midst of all these.

Alexander Cunningham's diaries

When Nayanjot Lahiri found three notebooks by an unknown writer at the ASI library he was intrigued. This colonial explorer had traveled across India using the texts of Fa Hsien and Hsuan Tsang as reference.

But who could this archaeological explorer be? The intrepid explorer was a colonial, there was no doubt about it, as his quaint spellings of place names and the people that he mentioned, made clear. That he was not John Marshall, my favourite archaeologist of colonial India, I already knew because this is not his handwriting. Besides, Marshall was born a year after the first of these notebooks began, dated as they were from 1875 to 1881. From those dates, I guessed that these were also unlikely to be James Prinsep’s journals. Prinsep died in 1840 and while he was an outstanding discoverer of ancient scripts and dynasties, he hardly moved out of Calcutta, after he became the secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Could it be James Burgess, the architectural scholar who is known to have conducted surveys from the 1860s till the 1880s? He too had to be eliminated from the list of probables, since he mainly worked in western and southern India while this explorer was busy surveying north India.
Following this process of elimination, it dawned on me that these could only be the hitherto undiscovered notebooks of one man: Alexander Cunningham. He was the one archaeological explorer in India who, in the latter part of the 19th century, traversed and published on the sites that are recorded in the notebooks — Mahabodhi, Sarnath, Mahasthan and so many others. In 1861, Cunningham was appointed as India’s first archaeological surveyor by Lord Canning. Eventually, he became the first director general of a government department of archaeology, better known as the Archaeological Survey of India, when it was created in 1871. These three notebooks seem to have been penned by him during his ‘director general’ years.[Alexander the Great (H/T Yashwant)]