Author: जयकृष्णः | ജയകൃഷ്ണൻ

The 12th century story of Ashu Nair and Abraham bin Yiju

In 1132 CE, in Mangalore,  the Tunisian Jewish merchant Abraham bin Yiju married Ashu Nair, a local Malayali woman. They lived together for less than two decades in great prosperity and raised a family. Eventually, their story ended in a heartbreaking tragedy.  Fortunately, we can reconstruct the lives of these two people with a fair amount of accuracy because letters written by Abraham still exist.

Historical accounts typically concern kings, warriors, philosophers, or world travelers. Rarely do you get the stories of people like Abraham bin Yiju, who was one of the many traders along the Indian Ocean supermarket. We know about him because of an ancient Jewish tradition: if the form of the word God appeared on paper, it was not to be destroyed. A room called the geniza was maintained next to a synagogue to preserve such letters. This room had no doors or windows but a slot through which letters could be deposited. Abraham’s personal and business correspondence was preserved in a synagogue near Cairo.

This story is fascinating in many ways because we have first-hand accounts of the lives of Abraham and Ashu. Second, it gives us details of the ports of the Indian Ocean trading network and their inner workings. Third, it provides us vivid details of life on the Malabar coast at that time. We will learn about all these as we go over the lives of Abraham and Ashu.

Tunisia, Aden, and Cairo

First of all, how does a  Tunisian Jew end up on the Malabar coast in the 12th century and end up staying for two decades.? Abraham’s father was a rabbi in the port of Mahdia in Tunisia. Instead of becoming a rabbi, Abraham wanted to be a trader. The way to get a start in those days was by becoming an apprentice to a well-known trader. For that purpose, around 1120 CE, Abraham left Tunisia. He traveled along the caravan route to Cairo with letters of introduction to prominent Jewish Tunisian traders. Cairo was the hub from where spices were distributed to North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Abraham was on the move after spending a few years with traders there. He left for Aden with introductions to the Jewish traders there. The unfolding of his life was beyond prediction.

There was a reason why Aden was an important place. In those days, ships did not go directly from Malabar to Cairo. The stop before Cairo was Aden, a major conduit between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade.  The traffic to Europe via Cairo and the Middle East via Jeddah would go through Aden. Aden was also a perfect port location since it was where the spout of the Red Sea opened to the Indian Ocean.  However, Aden had horrible weather and was cut off from the rest of the country via mountains. Hence, there was no hinterland to trade. 

The Aden trading hub had one thing in plenty: traders with vast trading and travel experience.  Though not as famous as world travelers like Ibn Batuta and Marco Polo, the trader Abu Sa’id Halfon had traveled between Egypt, India, East Africa, Syria, Morocco, and Spain. Another one, Abu Zikri Sijilmasi from Morocco, traveled to Egypt, southern Europe, and India.  Traders like them transported Persian Saffron to China, dishes from China to Greece, Greek brocade to India, Indian steel to Aleppo, glass from Aleppo to Yemen, and striped material from Yemen to Persia. 

There was a reason why Jewish traders in Cairo and Aden focused on the India trade. By this period, the First Crusade had taken over Jerusalem and established kingdoms over today’s Israel and Lebanon over the years. These “holy wars” made it difficult for Jews to work there as Anti-Semitism was rampant. Hence, European Jewish refugees moved to other opportunities like the India trade.

Black Pepper. Photo by Ramshik Raz on Unsplash

In fact, the existence of this long-distance Indian Ocean trade is not surprising at all as there has been plenty of evidence for commodities from India appearing in faraway places, even further back in time. Archaeologists in Dhuwelia, a seasonal hunting site in Eastern Jordan, found a cotton thread embedded in lime-plaster dating to the fourth millennium BCE. Cotton is not native to Arabia, and that particular species could have come from only one place in the world –  Balochistan, where it has been cultivated since the fifth millennium. Queen Puabi, who lived in Iraq during the Mature Harappan period (2600 – 1900 BCE)  had Harappan carnelian beads in her tomb. Following her, Sargon of Akkad (2334 – 2279 BCE) boasted about ships from Meluhha, primarily identified with this Indus region, docked in the bay.   This suggests ships from the Indus region journeyed to Iraq about 5,000 years back.

Burial sites in the third millennium BCE Mesopotamia had shell-made lamps and cups produced from a conch shell found only in India; Early Dynastic Mesopotamians were consumers of the Harappan carnelian bead. By 2000 BCE, the trade between Africa and India intensified. While crops moved from Africa to India, genetic studies have shown that the zebu cattle went from India via Arabia to Africa.  Around 1200 BCE, among the dried fruits kept in the mummy of Ramses II’s nostrils was pepper from South India. If you are familiar with the trading hubs of the old world (1, 2), there is nothing unusual about this trade from both North and South India.

The most important trading goods in the 12th century were spices, like during the time of Queen Puabi and Ramses II. Among the spices like cardamom, ginger, coriander, nutmeg, and cloves, black pepper was considered the most valuable.  In 408 CE, Alaric demanded 3000 pounds of pepper as ransom from Rome. Pepper was not used just for cooking but also as medicine.

At Aden, Abraham found luck with one of the most powerful and influential Jewish traders named Madmun ibn Bandar.  Madmun was the head of the city’s large and wealthy Jewish community and a man of great influence with a trading network extending from Spain to India. 

Staying at Aden, Abraham mastered the intricacies of the Indian Ocean trade. He learned about the wind patterns which decided the trade cycles. He learned how to manage risk. Bad weather could sink a ship. Pirates could loot a ship. The risk was managed by spreading consignments across multiple ships, forming partnerships, and dealing with various commodities. During those times, no brokerage firms or warehouses could store goods for a fee. The traders kept track of the price fluctuations of iron, pepper, cardamom, and other spices in the markets of Cairo.  They relayed the news to their friends and junior trading partners and kept track of events in Syria and Palestine.

As any marriage counselor would say, constant communication is crucial to success. There was a reliable mail system between the trading ports, which would allow a shipper to send advance notice of the list of goods before sending it on a ship.  The mail system did not carry just the list of goods but also gossip and market intelligence. Trade depended on the goodwill of friends and business contacts. These relationships had to be established and nurtured. Hence, the letters also carried mention of personal affection for the recipient and their family members. Gifts were sent along with letters to keep the relationship strong. 

Mangalore

Letter from Abraham b. Yijū to his brothers and sisters after his safe return from India, written in Aden in 1149 CE. (via Cambridge Collection. Fair Use)

After three years of apprenticeship, Madmun encouraged the young Abraham to move to Mangalore to become his junior partner in trade. Initially, this looked like a straightforward ask, but something else was happening here. Most traders traveled back and forth between the ports of the Indian Ocean. Some stayed for a longer duration, but none matched the length of Abraham’s stay at Mangalore. He stayed there for 17 years without even a trip to Aden or Cairo. It is possible he was a bad boy and ran to India to escape the repercussions or he had accumulated large losses and had to stay to recoup it.

The travel was not easy and he wrote about the hardships. Madmun reassured him that the wealth he would accumulate would compensate for the ordeal. The place where he arrived, Mangalore, was one of the many ports on the West Coast of India that rose to prominence due to the spice trade. The harbor was scenic, with the Nethravathi River flowing amid coconut trees into the Indian Ocean. A sandbar protected the lagoon from the ocean waves. Far away in the inland hills grew black pepper and other spices.

The time that Abraham moved to Mangalore was a time of honest trade. Twelve Hindu kingdoms on the Malabar coast controlled ports such as Mangalore, Beypore, Cochin, Cannore, and Calicut. The primary income for these kings was taxes on the trade and some of the wealthy financed ships. The king also provided protection from pirates while the ship was at the port. They also kept war fleets to attack pirates and force the merchants to pay taxes. Merchants stored their wares in fortified houses behind the harbor, close to the beach, where they could keep an eye on the incoming ships. There were no guns or walls or any other defense. These would change centuries later when the Asuric Portuguese showed up with the canons.

Dhow. Photo by Indigo White on Unsplash

Abraham bin Yiju lived alongside a huge community of traders who were Arabs, Gujaratis, Tamils, and Jews.  Like the Jewish traders, Gujaratis traveled across the Indian Ocean ports from Aden to Malacca. They had powerful control over the flow of goods.  Madmun, Abraham’s mentor at Aden, had a close relationship with them and exchanged information about market conditions in the Middle East.  Madmun had business relationships not just with these Gujarati traders but also with Muslims.  Besides that, one of the ships he used belonged to a Pattani-Swami and a man called Nambiar, who was from Kerala. 

Trade did not happen via the barter system. Gold and Silver came in from Aden. Abraham bought goods and sent them over to Aden; horse, weapons, and ceramics trade had not started yet. Goods that were imported to India consisted of silk and clothing, jewelry, household utensils, cheese, sugar, raisins and olive oil. The goods were imported in small quantities indicating it was for personal use and not for wholesale.

Also, the trading network was self-regulated, unlike in Europe, where guilds controlled it. There is no evidence of price regulation which existed in Europe at that time. Even though there were Hindu, Muslim, and Jewish traders, partnerships were conducted across religious lines. The biggest fear for the traders was not Jewish courts or Sharia courts but the loss of reputation.  This prevented fraud more than the legal repercussions. 

The Indian Ocean trade was so lucrative that one could become wealthy beyond imagination. One Muslim trader, Ramisht, profited so much from just one voyage that he provided Chinese silk covering for Ka’aba. Abraham, too, became wealthy.  He imported soap and sugar from Egypt, pots and sieves from Aden, mats from Somalia, and carpets from Gujarat. His clothing, including robes, turbans, and shawls, was imported from Egypt.

Abraham also turned into an entrepreneur. There were many metal workers along the Malabar coast, and he saw an opportunity to start a repair shop. From his contacts, he received damaged vessels, lamps, and dishes from as far away as Spain. These damaged goods came with instructions for repair. This is an example of outsourcing work to India,  a millennia before it became a thing.

There is one interesting point in his letters. Even though Abraham lived in Mangalore and never traveled to other ports or even inland towns, he referred to the region as al-Hind or bilad al-Hind (the country of India).  Thus, even though many kingdoms along the Malabar coast controlled the various ports, even a 12th-century trader knew they were all part of India. Traders from that period knew the land east of Sindh to Assam as one unit called al-Hind. Arab travelers and geographers believed this al-Hind had one center under the control of a king named Ballahra (possibly the Arabic version of Vallabharaja, a title used by various dynasties). For them, Bharat was a civilization state.

Life was going fine when something happened on 17th October 1132 CE.  The letters say Abraham publicly granted freedom to a slave girl named Ashu. Or words to that effect. The letters also tell us that Ashu was a Nair.  Such relationships were common among traders who did not bring their families along. If you look at Ibn Batuta’s life story, he was the Sanjay Dutt of those times. Abraham married Ashu and had three children: a son named Surur, a daughter named Sitt Al Dar, and one child who died. 

It is hard to believe Ashu’s backstory. Nairs were mostly warriors and some headed local kingdoms. Some of them looked after land and temples. Thus, it is hard to believe that a Nair would be enslaved. It is not like there were no Jewish girls on the Malabar coast then, and Abraham could have married one of them. Several thousand Jews lived around Cochin, but most were from Syria, not Tunisia. So, there was something else to the story that can be pieced from other information.

There is one incident which throws some light on what could have happened.  Abraham had ordered 14 mithqals of cardamom from a middleman. The trader did not show up in time, and the ships were about to leave. So he had to buy cardamom for 17 mithqals. This was the nature of trade during that time. It was based on an understanding that allowed traders to commit large amounts of money without a mechanism to address fraud. Trust and relationships were paramount.

This was a fraud from the middleman.  It was not just Abraham’s money at stake. Some of his partner’s money was also lost in this deal.  Two of them wrote back, asking Abraham to deal with this matter directly, or they would rebuke the middleman.  They also suspected that there was something odd in this transaction. They asked Abraham to deal with it directly, independent of the role of the partners.  They pushed Abraham for many years, but no result came of it.  It turned out that this middleman was a close relative of Ashu’s brother, the Nair. Thus, Abraham may have loaned the middleman because Ashu or her brother had asked him to. In such close business relations,  it is possible that a monetary debt to her brother, who holds an important position in the matrilineal society of Nairs, may have forced the marriage. 

This marriage, which went outside the Jewish community, was not accepted by the partners, and there is complete silence in the letters about Ashu. It is typical for the partners to inquire about the well-being of the merchant’s family. The problem could have been religion; according to Jewish law, the child gets the mother’s religion.

Malayali historian Manmadhan Ullattil, too, does not believe the slave story. He writes 

My belief was that this deed was made by Yiju for the only purpose of making the Yiju offspring legal in their Jewish community back home and ensuring legal succession (Yiju was a wealthy man). I am not sure about Nair slaves (consider also that Ashu was not thrown out of home or lost caste- as she had a fruitful relationship with her family all the time) at that time or that Ashu would have wanted such a manumission document. Ghosh in his book the Imam and the Indian Page 220 concurs with this since the event was celebrated with fanfare, the document (like today’s wedding card!)was more a public announcement of the betrothal and legality than an act of manumission.

Abraham, Ashu and the Genizah

Final Days

Abraham would have lived on the Malabar coast with Ashu and the kids, but the actions of Roger II, the king of Sicily, changed their lives. In 1148 CE, Roger II attacked Tunisia. People were struck by famine and disease. Abraham’s family was kidnapped and taken to Sicily. Abraham got a message that his brother Mubashshir wanted to join him in India.

On this news, Abraham left Mangalore with his kids in 1149 CE. Ashu stayed or was left behind. Abraham met his brother, who defrauded him. His son Surur died soon after. In 1151 CE, Madmun, too, passed away. A broken Abraham moved from Aden to Egypt and south Yemen, where he became a prominent person in the Jewish community. 

He got his daughter married to his elder brother’s son in Egypt.  The daughter of a Nair woman, Sitt al-Dar, from Malabar, married her cousin at Futsat on 11th August 1156 CE. That way, Abraham’s wealth stayed in the family. During his final days, he stayed near his daughter. Abraham’s son-in-law, Perahya, made a meager living in the Egyptian countryside, which shows that Abraham was not as wealthy as he was in India. There was not really much wealth to preserve.

He never returned to Ashu in Mangalore. After the wedding, there is no news of Abraham. Neither his son-in-law nor other nephews mention him in their letters.  Did he return to Ashu in Malabar or die alone in Egypt? We may never know.

PS: Two hundred years after Abraham bin Yiju, Ibn Batuta from the neighboring Morocco too made his way to the Malabar coast.

References

  1. When Asia Was the World: Traveling Merchants, Scholars, Warriors, and Monks Who Created the “Riches of the “East” by Stewart Gordon
  2. In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh
  3. India Traders of the Middle Ages by Shelomo Dov Goitein and Mordechai Friedman
  4. Abraham, Ashu and the Genizah by Maddy’s Ramblings

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The Immortality Key: Uncovering the Secret History of the Religion with No Name

While we all have heard of Rome, Jerusalem, and Nazareth, most of us have not heard of Eleusis. This Greek harbor town was the spiritual capital of the Western world. Plato visited Eleusis and wrote about the “blessed sight and vision” he witnessed “in a state of perfection” by sipping a drink called kykeon. Those who drank kykeon transcended the division between humankind and nature. They also realized that death was not the end of the human journey, and underneath this mortal clothing, we are immortals.

After the Greeks, the Romans continued the tradition. Cicero and Marcus Aurelius were initiated there, along with so many others. We don’t hear about Eleusis anymore because it became a casualty with the Neo-Christianity that arose in the fourth century CE. Pagan monuments were attacked and destroyed. Secret religions like the one in Eleusis were annihilated by the fourth century CE.

In his book The Immortality Key, Brian Muraresku argues that, rather than starting a new religion, Jesus was trying to preserve the “holiest of Mysteries” from Ancient Greece. This is an origin story of Christianity with a psychedelic plot twist. In this version, Jesus continued the tradition of Plato, Pindar, Sophocles, and the rest of the Athenians. In early Christianity, Mass was celebrated in house churches and underground catacombs. Hence, you could brew the drink in your home instead of going to a unique pilgrimage site or the wilderness of Greece and Italy.

How else does Christianity go from being an obscure cult of “twenty or so illiterate day laborers” in a neglected part of the Mediterranean to the official religion of Rome, converting half the empire and millions in the process? It is well known that pagans in the Mediterranean world were ruthlessly targeted by the Gospel writers and Paul. Muraresku argues that they used the Greek language to create a new religion that convinced believers that the Christian wine is no ordinary wine and that the sacrament of the Greeks and the sacrament of Jesus are one and the same. Behind closed doors, the Eucharistic celebrations included secret rites and revealed truths. This also influenced the Gnostic churches, which were Christian sects that thrived in the second and third centuries CE.

The book argues that psychedelics were the shortcut to enlightenment that founded Western civilization. It went from Eleusinian Mysteries to Dionysian Mysteries to the original Christianity. This was then passed on to the witches of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Muraresku’s book is not just about theory but about his twelve-year investigation into this theory. As part of this, he travels to Greece, Louvre, goes into the catacombs in Rome, and finds manuscripts that have yet to be translated into English. Finally, he finds evidence of the ceremonial use of psychedelic drugs in antiquity.

War and Peace Against Consciousness

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan describes the author’s first-hand experiences with various drugs. He also writes about psychedelic trips by various people in which they experience that the consciousness that manifests in the body is not made by the body, nor is it confined to the body, nor does it die with the body’s death. They also lost the fear of death as they transcended the primary identification with the body and experienced ego-free states. In these “mystical” experiences, they experienced the dissolution of the ego followed by a sense of merging with the universe. They accessed an alternative reality where the usual law of physics did not apply. They saw manifestations of cosmic consciousness, encountering visionary beings and being drawn toward sacred realms of light.

Primal mystic experience can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures. In Abrahamic religions, only the founder has the direct experience of the sacred. God reveals himself in history in unique events to specific peoples or prophets that are unavailable to others directly. Followers listen to stories and follow the symbolism. Access to the sacred must be mediated by priests. The Church of Psychedelics, on the other hand, offers a direct religious experience to anyone. Then faith is superfluous.

What will happen to religion when people are convinced that the consciousness that manifests in the body is neither made by a body-mind complex nor confined to the body. What if people realize that consciousness does not become extinct with the death of the body. With this awareness, you no longer fear death. When you no longer fear death, there is no need to fear hell and the final judgment. When you no longer fear the final judgment, you are no longer a customer of what the Church has to sell.

The fact that ordinary people could experience transcendence without the Church did not go well. In his book Indra’s Net Rajiv Malhotra points out how hierarchical religions counter these self-realizations. In their view, the body and its experience are not reliable. There is a concept of a ‘sin’ which prevents one from realizing their connection to the divine. Even though such declarations were made, it was not as if people complied. Hence the history of the Church is a history of oppression and bans.

Emperor Theodosius outlawed the Mysteries at the end of the fourth century CE. In 367 CE, Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria called to cleanse the Church from every defilement by rejecting apocryphal books filled with myths. Church fathers of Neo-Christianity considered Gnosticism dangerous because it offered every initiate direct access to God. All those who received gnosis had gone beyond the Church’s teaching and transcended the authority of its hierarchy. Thus the Gnostic Gospel did not make it to the canonical gospels. During the Spanish colonization, psychedelic mushrooms were declared the flesh of the devil and outlawed.

The male-dominated Church did all this to maintain power in their hands. It was women who sustained the secrets of Ancient Greece; hence women were excluded from leadership positions. The holy family is all males. So women became cartoonish Disney witches, and the drugged wine became the symbolic Eucharist.

But guess what? The Eleusinian Mysteries are making a comeback yet again. Now instead of going to the Greek wilderness, people trek to the Burning Man. Psychedelic drugs are having a renaissance, being used experimentally in therapeutic settings to treat depression, addiction, and the existential fear of death in people with cancer. Therapists involved in this research now believe in the power of the mind to heal itself the way the body typically does. Statements like, “There are people who believe that consciousness is a property of the universe, like electromagnetic radiation or gravity.” emerge from these experiences. Big-name universities are involved in this, and the genie has again escaped from the bottle. What will the Church do now?

Best Books of 2022

When this blog started in 2002, the only history books available were those written by Marxist historians. Looking at books on my desk in 2022, I am delighted to see many with a Bharatiya voice, and I can’t keep up (Good problem).

At the end of every year, I will try to narrow down all the books I have read and recommend just a handful of the best. Here are some of my favorite books of 2022. This does not mean that they were released in 2022. I either read them or re-read them.

Snakes in the Ganga: Breaking India 2.0 by Rajiv Malhotra and Vijaya Vishwanathan

Snakes in the Ganga

Recently several buildings on Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus were defaced with anti-Brahmin slogans. Some of the slogans on the wall were “Brahmins Leave The Campus,” “There Will Be Blood”, “Brahmin Bharat Chhodo” and “Brahmino-Baniyas, we are coming for you! We will avenge.” Now “South Asians” in the United States are facing open discrimination by Brown University. This reminded me of the news reports that Jewish Students Are Facing Growing Hostility and they now have to hide their Jewish identity to survive in American Universities.

In this book, Rajiv Malhotra and Vijaya Viswanathan explain how Breaking India 2.0 ideologies, run by Indians are Harvard, are being imported into India without judgment. The intention of ideologies like Critical Race Theory (CRT) is to break down society; to achieve this aim, victimhood is weaponized. The book goes into how CRT has been taken over by the Leftists in America, how Harvard has adapted CRT to Critical Caste Theory, and how atrocity literature from Harvard is being used to dismantle India. Sadly these are funded by Indian billionaires who just want a Western stamp of approval.

A detailed review will come next year.

Savarkar: Echoes of a Forgotton Past, Vol. 1: Part 1 by Vikram Sampath

Savarkar Vol 1

Savarkar may not have been controversial, but he has been made so. Currently, one cannot challenge the Gandhi-Nehru narrative, so what would happen to a person who did that when Gandhi was alive. On hearing his name, there are only polar opposite reactions; there is no middle ground. The truth, as Vikram Sampath says in the first part of Savarkar’s biography, is somewhere in between.

Savarkar was an opponent of Gandhi, Congress, and the whole “show your other cheek” ideology and was never given due credit for his role in the freedom movement. This book is about his early days, till his incarceration at the Cellular Jail in Andaman. This book reads like fiction, especially his days as a law student in London. The book gives context by describing the political atmosphere of that time and various groups fighting for independence. We learn about Savarkar through his early life, influences, and revolutionary activities. We get a complete picture of the man from his poems, writings, and speeches.

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India, that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution by J Sai Deepak

India that is Bharat

The book Snakes in the Ganga narrates how Breaking India 2.0 forces are exporting Critical Race Theory to India to dismantle India. J Sai Deepak saw this at play with systematic isolation, ostracization, and digestion of Indic strands. The overt hostility hits you every day. The attack on Hindu festivals, the attack on our traditions in Hindi Cinema, and academic Hinduphobia are just a few examples. There is a concerted effort to split sub-identities from their Indic civilizational identity.

This book is part of a trilogy on Bharat that explores the influence of European colonial consciousness. Sai Deepak applies a decolonial lens to shed the European normative framework we have come to accept as the norm. Instead, the book relies on the work of suppressed Indian voices to build the case for the Bharatiya perspective.

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Stories From Inscriptions: Profound Real-life Tales from Hindu Cultural History by Sandeep Balakrishna

Stories from Inscriptions

Sandeep’s book is a collection of 15 stories based on inscriptions. These stories were previously unknown except to scholars. This book is meant for the general audience and is written in the style of popular narrative history. The purpose is to introduce incidents from our past as narrated by kings, businessmen, bards, and warriors in their own words. These stories come from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Tamil Nadu and span a timeline from the 9th century CE up to the 17th century CE. This book does three things. First, it shows how Bharat was unified as a civilization state. Second, it refutes many narratives about how uncultured and backward we were till the invaders and colonizers civilized us. Finally, it reveals many aspects of our culture we were unaware of. (Review)

The Case That Shook the Empire by Raghu Palat and Pushpa Palat

The case that shook the empire

Who in their right mind would think that an Indian would get justice in the British legal system.? Between a person responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and a person arguing against the atrocities, whom would the so-called British legal system side with? Would the British system turn a blind eye to one of their own who had committed an unforgivable crime?

The answer is obvious now, as it was in 1924.

This book is about a defamation case filed by Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab during Jallianwala Bagh, against Chettur Sankaran Nair, a former Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. The trial lasted five-and-a-half weeks in London. There was nothing that indicated that this would be a fair trial. The judge was a racist who saw nothing wrong in Jallianwala Bagh, and the jury agreed with him. (Review)

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Samskritam Notes: Sounds and Vibrations

Samskritam Varṇamālā

The above picture shows the organization of Samskritam varṇamālā in Devanagari script. First, there are the swaras at the top, followed by the vyañjanas. This sequence is the same in all Indian languages.

But why so? Why not in some other sequence? Why is क the first vyañjana or अ the first swara? In this article, we will look at the reason for such an organization of the aksharas. We will also see how the effects of the points of articulation were understood by Samskritam grammarians. Finally, we will also see what makes Om such a unique sound and how this ties to mantra sadhana.

Points of Articulation

This organization of aksharas is based on understanding how sounds are produced in the human mouth. In Samskritam, five areas of the mouth are important for producing various aksharas. Among these five areas, there is a progression from the back of the mouth to the front, forming the basis of the organization. The sound originates based on the contact between the tongue and these areas. Once you learn this, you will observe how the tongue shifts as you say different aksharas.

Let’s go over each area and see what sounds originate there. The following picture shows our vocal system with the vital sound sources marked.

Samskritam – Points of Articulation

The first position is the kaṇṭah or throat. When your tongue makes contact at the back of the throat to produce those aksharas those sounds are called the kaṇṭhya. To experience this, say क and feel where your tongue hits the mouth.

The aksharas that come from there are the following.

swarasvyañjanaantasthaushmanaayogavāha
अकुहvisargah

Here अ means both अ and आ. In fact it represents 18 variations of अ (See: Classification of Letters)

Now what the heck is कु? This is a short form for क ख ग घ ङ. Instead of repeating those five vyañjana, Panini calls it कु.

To understand this short form, you have to get into the mindset of Panini. He was obsessed with brevity. If you can compress 8 bytes into 1, he would do it. In an oral tradition, there is limited memory, and you need to find ways to abbreviate. This kind of brevity helps develop a sutra to make it easy to remember. In this case, you can remember the sutra अ-कु-ह-विसर्जनियानां कण्ठः Look at the first three characters of the sutra – अ कु and ह. Then it adds the visarga and says all of these come from the kaṇṭah.

As you move up from kantah, you reach the talu at the back of the mouth. This is the place where your tongue touches your back teeth. To feel this, try saying इ very slowly and see how your tongue stretches at the back and pushes against the back teeth. talu is the pressure between the tongue and the upper back teeth.

The following sounds come from the tālu and are called the tālavya.

swarasvyañjanaantasthaushmana
इचुयश

Try saying च. Do you feel the contact of the tongue at the front of the mouth or the back? It feels like the front. If you are not feeling that pressure, you are not pronouncing it correctly. Next time pay attention. If you are going to events like Gita Chanting Competition, this will help.

The next spot in the mouth is the murdha. This is the roof of your mouth. These sounds originate when your tongue touches the top of the mouth. Try saying ट, and you can feel it. These are the mūrdhanya sounds.

swarasvyañjanaantasthaushmana
ऋटुरष

The next place in your mouth is where the tongue hits the teeth. They are called the dantya

swarasvyañjanaantasthaushmana
ऌतुलस

Now you can see the pattern here.

Finally, when the contact happens at the lips, it is called the oṣṭhya.

swarasvyañjanaantasthaushmana
उपु

What’s left now? ए ऐ ओ औ and व. These come from a combination of two places in the mouth.

ए and ऐ come from both kantah and talu. Hence it is called kantatalu. The best way to experience this is to say अ (kantah) and इ (talu) really fast. Then, you will end up saying ऐ. Now, if you start saying अ and slowly transition to इ, somewhere in the middle, it will transition to ए. That’s why it is known as kantatalu. ए and ऐ have some proportion of अ and इ and is actually a combination letter.

ओ and औ are produced by a combination of kantah and oshtah. Hence it is called kanṭhoṣṭhya. The same process applies here as well. Say अ (kantah) and उ (oshtah) really fast. You will say औ. If you start at अ and slowly transition to उ, you will say ओ. Remember how we saw that ए and ऐ have some proportion of अ and इ. Similarly, ओ and औ have some proportion of अ and उ.

Finally, what’s left is व. That’s a combination of dantah and oshtah. So it is a dantoṣṭhya.

Going back to our original layout of letters, we now see the format based on the points of articulation.

Nāsikā

There are one more places where sounds come from. The nose. There are five nasal sounds in the varṇamālā, the last five letters in the pillar. ङ ञ ण न म They are also called nāsikā.

But didn’t we say that these letters originate in various other places? So these letters need the original place in the vocal and the nose.

Anuswara & Visarga

What about the anuswara and visarga. The anuswara is just a nasal sound and takes on a variation of the vyañjana that follows it. Let’s look at the word संपदः. The anuswara is above स. Look at the vyañjana that follows स. That is प. Now in the varṇamālā, find the location of प. Move your finger all the way to the right, and you hit म.

Samskritam – Anuswara


The sound of anuswara becomes the sound of the vyañjana in the fifth column. Hence the word gets pronounced as sam-pada.

visarga is just the release of the breath. So, for example, if you have the word हरिः, then the ending इ remains as-is, and you release your breath.

Sounds and Vibrations

In Samskritam pronunciation, there is a conscious use of the breath. For example, say क followed by ख and watch the breath pattern. (If you did not feel any difference, you might not be saying ख with intensity). This is like a natural pranayama. Look at the breath pattern when you do the visargah. It is like a sigh, a natural de-stressor. If you take a swara like अ, there are 18 ways to say it with varying breath patterns. (See: Classification of Letters) Due to these varying breath patterns, there is a physiological impact on you. Like when you chant a mantra.

Thus these sounds don’t exist in isolation; they create an experience. Specifically, specific sequences have an impact on the mind and the body. For example, there is a systematic way in which the tongue touches the vocal system. This, in turn, causes the nerve endings to be simulated and hence the corresponding brain regions. The science of mantra believes that if you can use the right words to train your mind, sharpen its focus, and to channelize the divinity in the universe, you can rise above every negative tendency that holds you back and go past the shackles of your limited conscious mind.

Look at the mantra Om. It is made up of three sounds अ उ and म. अ starts at the throat and is the first swara the human vocal system can produce. उ comes from the lips and is the last swara the vocal system can make. Going from अ to उ covers the entire range of the vocal system. The final म is the settling down or containment of the sound produced.

Chanting Om is a mantra sadhana. Aurobindo says, “The function of a mantra is to create vibrations in the inner consciousness that will prepare it for the realization of what the mantra symbolizes and is supposed indeed to carry within itself.”

The basic principle of mantra sadhana is to practice the utterance of a sound with such intensity, fervor, and determination, that your whole being starts reverberating with that sound. You become that sound, and that sound transports you to another dimension of consciousness. Mantra is a systematized sound technology. The Samskritam sounds have been organized to affect the person chanting them. This comes from a deep understanding that everything in the universe is a vibration. The rishis knew that certain benefits could be achieved by creating those vibratory patterns through our vocal system.

References

  1. Lecture by Varun Khanna at Chinmaya International Foundation.
  2. The Sounds of Sanskrit: Its Alphabet by Prof. Anuradha Chowdry at IIT Kharagpur
  3. The Ancient Science of Mantras: Wisdom of the Sages by Om Swami.

Postscript

  1. The technical term for replacing क ख ग घ ङ as कु is udit

Khilafat, Swami Shraddhanand and Gandhi

Photo by Ishant Mishra on Unsplash

In 1915, Mohandas Gandhi relocated to India after spending 20 years in South Africa. It took him just four years to move from the status of a foreigner to the Independence movement’s leader. In this ascendancy, he surpassed leaders like Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Lokmanya Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Aurobindo Ghose, Abdul Kalam Azad, and Annie Besant. Gandhi achieved this feat by propping up the Khilafat movement and putting that at the same level as the non-cooperation movement for Indian independence.

Two interesting episodes related to Khilafat are mentioned in Vikram Sampath’s Savarkar: Echoes from a forgotten past. The person common in both episodes is Swami Shraddhanand, a disciple of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of Arya Samaj. Swami Dayanand Saraswati used a process called shuddi to reconvert Hindus back to the fold. After his passing away, this gained momentum under Swami Shraddhanand, who conducted shuddi ceremonies in Punjab and northern India. Vinayak Savarkar used the same shuddhi ceremony in the Andaman jail.

Savarkar by Vikram Sampath

Coming back to Khilafat, Bipin Chandra Pal and Annie Beasant had the foresight to see the trouble this would bring. Lala Lajpat Rai wrote, ‘Indian Muslims are more pan-Islamic and exclusive than the Muslims of any other country of the globe, and that fact alone makes the creation of a united India more difficult than would otherwise be. ‘ Even Jinnah opposed the Khilafat agitation initially.

Despite this, Gandhi would not change his mind. Seeing the energy around the Khilafat movement, Gandhi argued that if Hindus and Muslims united for satyagraha, there would be victory. So, in 1920, he promised Swaraj to the Ali brothers – Muhammad and Shaukat. These were people with a known track record of fomenting trouble.

In the Calcutta session in September 1920, Swami Shraddhanand was on the stage with Shaukat Ali. He heard Shaukat Ali tell a few others in his company the following. “Mahatma Gandhi is a shrewd bania. You do not understand his real object. By putting you under discipline, he is preparing you for guerilla warfare. He is not such an out and out non-violencist[sic] as you all suppose. “

Swami Shraddhanand tried to warn Gandhi that his motives were being misrepresented, but they were not taken seriously.

At the annual session of the Congress in Nagpur in 1920, Gandhi consolidated his position. Muslims stood by Gandhi. They turned up in such large numbers that it looked like a Muslim session. Maulanas recited verses referring to jihad and the killing of kafirs. Again when Swami Shraddhanand told this to Gandhi, he said they were referring to the British and not Hindus.

Swami Shraddhanand on a 1970 stamp of India

Sometime after May 1921, the British government intercepted a telegram sent to the Amir of Afghanistan urging him to invade India and not make peace with the British. This was allegedly written by Muhammad Ali, but Muhammad Ali claimed that he did not know Persian or Arabic. At Motilal Nehru’s house, Swami Shraddhanand met Muhammad Ali. Ali took him aside and handed over a piece of paper which was the draft of the telegram intercepted by the British. According to Swami Shraddhanand, the handwriting was Gandhi’s.

Gandhi reached Anand Bhavan the next day, and Swami Shraddhanand asked him about the letter. Gandhi said he does not remember sending such a telegram. What is suspicious about this statement is that Gandhi himself had made the following statement earlier, ‘I would in a sense, certainly assist the Amir of Afghanistan, if he waged war against the British Government.’

In January 1921, Gandhi said that Hindu sadhus have to sacrifice their all for the sake of Khilafat. According to him, every Hindu had a duty to save Islam from danger. Six months before this, he had warned that if Hindus did not help Muhammadans during their time of trouble, their own slavery was a certainty.

Look what happened later that year. The Amir of Afghanistan did not invade India. Also, India did not achieve Swaraj by Gandhi’s promised date to the Ali brothers. The Hindus of Malabar paid the price for that unholy alliance with their lives.

The Vedic Homeland

Scheme of Indo-European language dispersal from c. 4000 to 1000 BCE according to the widely held Kurgan hypothesis By Joshua Jonathan (via Wikipedia)

In The Wonder That Was India, A L Basham presented a dramatic picture of the decline of the Harappan civilization. According to him, from 3000 BCE, invaders were present in the region. After conquering the outlying villages, they moved on Mohenjo-daro. The people of Mohenjo-Daro fled but were cut down by the invaders; the discovered skeletons proved this invasion. Basham concluded that the Indus cities fell to barbarians “who triumphed not only through greater military prowess, but also because they were equipped with better weapons, and had learned to make full use of the swift and terror-striking beats of the steppes.” Sir R [[Mortimer Wheeler]] claimed these horse-riding invaders were none other than Aryans. Their war-god Indra destroyed the forts and citadels at Harappa.

According to the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), Basham’s invaders were Indo-European speakers on a global invasion tour from Central Asia. Before the invaders split up into Vedic Aryans and Iranians, they had developed a joint culture in Central Asia, hence the similarity in Rig Veda and Avesta. Once they left Central Asia, the Indians and Iranians parted ways. The above map shows the scheme of Indo-European language dispersal.

In a previous article, based on Shrikant G. Talageri’s excellent book, The Rig Veda and The Avesta: The Final Evidence, we saw that the common culture was not developed in Central Asia. We also saw that during the Middle and Late periods of Rigveda, the proto-Iranians were settled in western parts of Punjab and Afghanistan. They continuously interacted with the Vedic Aryans, and the joint Indo-Iranian culture developed.

Rig Veda and Avesta – Chronology of development

This begs the question. Where did the Vedic Aryans live before they met the Iranians or people of the Anu/Anava tribe? Did they come from Central Asia, or did they come from the Eastern parts of India? Again for this article, I will be once again using Shrikant G. Talageri ‘s The Rig Veda and The Avesta: The Final Evidence.

Basics

Two important concepts will help understand the details. The first is related to the chronological ordering of the mandalas of Rig Veda. The second is the geography around the rivers of Punjab.

The Rig Veda Samhita consists of 10 mandalas, numbered 1 to 10. This does not mean that mandala 1 was the first and 10 the last. The chronological ordering of the books is as follows:
– Early Books: 6, 3, 7
– Middle Books: 4,2
– Late Books: 5,1, 8-10
– Order of Vedic Books

Coming to the region’s geography, this is the map to remember. This shows some important rivers like Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, and Indus.
–

These are rivers mentioned in Rig Veda. Displaying great familiarity with the Indian North-West, the nadistuti sukta lists nineteen rivers from the Ganga to the Kurram sequentially from East to West. According to the Vedic tradition, Sarasvati flowed between the Yamuna and Sutlej, a location mentioned in other texts.

Shri. Talageri divides this area into three regions.

  1. Region East of Saraswati (Haryana and West UP)
  2. Region West of Indus (Afghanistan, South Central Asia, North West Pakistan)
  3. Region between Indus and Saraswati (North Pakistan, Punjab)

Strong evidence against the Aryan Invasion Theory comes from the above two basic concepts augmented with the names of rivers, lakes, places, mountains, and animals. There is also a big clue in nadistuti sukta. See the direction in which the rivers are named. That has great significance for what we are about to discover.

Evidence from Rivers

The Rig Veda and The Avesta: The Final Evidence

According to AIT, the joint Indo-Iranian culture is pre-Rigvedic. This culture was developed in Central Asia before the Indians and Iranians took different exits on the Aryan Invasion freeway. But in another article, we saw that the joint culture was not pre-Rigvedic, but Late Rigvedic. Now, if the Vedic culture did not develop in Central Asia, where did it originate?

From both Rigveda and Avesta, we know the regions they are familiar with. The Avesta knows the land from Afghanistan and south Central Asia to Punjab. The Rig Veda knows the area from Western Uttar Pradesh to eastern and southern Afghanistan. So, if you draw a Venn diagram, the place familiar to both the Vedic people and Iranians is the land from Punjab to Afghanistan.

Now it gets interesting. Geographical data in the Early and Middle books of Rigveda show that the Vedic Aryans lived in the interior of India, to the East of Sarasvati. The Early Books (Books 6, 3, 7) of Rig Veda don’t show familiarity with the Western region. The earliest book, Book 6, does not reference the Central or Western rivers but mentions Ganga. The next book, Book 3, refers to the two easternmost rivers of the five rivers of Punjab.

The last book in the Early Books, Book 7, refers to the third from the east of the five rivers of Punjab. This is in reference to the pivotal Battle of Ten Kings. The non-Vedic enemies are people living to the West of the fourth river (Asikni).

Two exciting pieces come out of this analysis. First, these Early Books do not use the words sapta sindhu. Second, the enemies of the Vedic people are mentioned as those who live West of the fourth river in Punjab. The Vedic attitude towards northwest and western areas is suspicion and hostility. These lands are treated as mleccha or barbarian lands; their social and religious practices are strongly disapproved. These are not considered areas that fit a visit by orthodox Brahmins. This is also reflected in later texts: In Ramayana, the good queen Kausalya is from the east and the bad queen Kaikeyi is from the northwest; in Mahabharata, Kunti is from the east, while Gandhari is from the northwest.

We see familiarity with the Western landscape as we move from the Early Books to the newer ones. The Middle Books (4, 2) show familiarity with the Western region. This is the first time three Western rivers appear (Book 4). Also, the word sapta-sindhu shows up for the first time. Finally, when it comes to the Late Books, they too refer to sapta-sindhu.

The Eastern region, the land East of Sarasvati, was known to the Vedic Aryans of the Early, Middle, and Late Books. At the same time, the Western region is unknown to the Early books, but newly familiar to the Middle Books. Three Western rivers appear in the first book among the Middle Books (Book 4), and the same rivers are known in the first book of the Late Books.

Other evidence from nature

Besides the evidence from the rivers, there is evidence from nature that rules out Afghanistan or Central Asia as the Vedic homeland. The Vedic rishis lived in a land of monsoon storms and mountains. They worshiped Indra as the most important god. The monsoon land stops after Punjab; hence, it could not have been composed in Afghanistan. The animals mentioned in Rig Veda are spotted deer, buffalo, bison, peacock, and elephant. It’s not like elephants were stampeding in Kabul during that time like in the opening scene of Lion King.

Trees provide some fascinating evidence. There is mention of khadira, and simsapa, which are used in the manufacture of the body of a chariot, kimsuka and salmali used in the manufacture of wheels, and aratu used in the manufacture of the axle. If you compare this with the Egyptians, the raw material for the chariots came from the Caucuses. We don’t say that the Egyptians came from the Caucuses because they used imported wood. If Vedic Aryans came from the Caucuses, they too would have used the same wood that should be known to them. Instead, they used Indian trees. If they rode their chariots into India as per Basham, would they have used Indian trees?

Rice and wheat are popular cereals in India, depending on which part of India you are from. Rig Vedic Aryans do not show any familiarity with wheat. At the same time, they are familiar with three preparations of rice. If the invasion route was through a wheat-producing area, why doesn’t the Rigveda mention that? This shows that the Vedic tradition took root before wheat consumption started in North India. In a later period, in contrast to the use of rice, wheat is treated with disdain. Among Brahmins, during death, when they are required to abstain from food, rice is forbidden, but not wheat.

A change in our mental model

The Lost River by Michel Danino

Before reading this book, my mental model was different. In Michel Danino’s The Lost River, it was clear that Sarasvati was the most important river for the Vedic Aryans. In forty-five hymns, the rishis praised Sarasvati; for them, she was ‘great among the great, the most impetuous of rivers,’ ‘limitless, unbroken, swift-moving, and ‘surpasses in majesty and might all other waters.’ Once Saraswati dried up after 1900 BCE, people migrated to different regions, including the Ganges Valley.

Now with this internal evidence from Rig Veda, it is clear that the story is different. Vedic Aryans during the period of Early and Middle Books did not live in Central Asia or Afghanistan but in the interior of India. Specifically to the East of Saraswati. Also, they were familiar with Ganga. From there, they progressively moved Westward. This is why the nadistuti sukta lists rivers from East to West.

Also, the Early and Middle Books of Rigveda represent a period older than the period of joint development of the Indo-Iranian culture. Moreover, this joint development happened in a region between Punjab and Afghanistan and not Central Asia.

Still crawling at Kucha Kurrichhan

Sardar Udham Movie Poster (fair use)

Sardar Udham, one of the most heartbreaking movies made on Jallianwala Bagh, was not sent to the Oscars.

Explaining why Sardar Udham was not selected, Indraadip Dasgupta, one of the jury members, told Times Of India, “Sardar Udham is a little lengthy and harps on the Jallianwala Bagh incident. It is an honest effort to make a lavish film on an unsung hero of the Indian freedom struggle. But in the process, it again projects our hatred towards the British. In this era of globalization, it is not fair to hold on to this hatred.”

Sardar Udham shows hatred towards British, jury on not sending film to Oscars. Fans are furious

Among the British atrocities in Punjab, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre is the most infamous. I recently read the book The Case that Shook the Empire, which lists many more of these atrocities.

Let’s go through some of them.

The British unleashed terror in Punjab as part of meeting the army recruitment quota for World War I.

The committee also recorded that men were captured forcibly and marched off for enlistment. Raids took place at night and men were forcibly seized and removed. Their hands were tied together and they were stripped in the presence of their families and made to bend over thorns when they were whipped. Additionally, women were stripped naked and made to sit on bramble bushes and thorn bushes in the hot sun until their men who had been hiding agreed to be recruited. In some instances, the women were made to sit with bramble between their legs overnight. Old men, too, had inhuman punishment meted out to them – they were made to sit ‘bare buttocks’ on thorns in order to force their sons to enlist.

The Case that Shook the Empire

In April 1919, Marcella Sherwood, a Church of England missionary, was allegedly attacked by a crowd as she cycled down a narrow lane. She had shut the schools and sent the kids home. While cycling through a street called Kucha Kurrichhan, she was caught by a mob, pulled to the ground by her hair, stripped naked, beaten, kicked, and left for dead. The father of one of her students rescued her by talking her to Gobindgarh Fort.

Reginald Dyer, the butcher of Jallianwala Bagh, met Miss Sherwood and ordered that every Indian man using that street must crawl its length of 150 to 200 yards on his hands and knees. Dyer explained his rationale for the order, “Some Indians crawl face downwards in front of their gods. I wanted them to know that a British woman is as sacred as a Hindu God and therefore they have to crawl in front of her, too… It is a small point, but in fact “crawling order” is a misnomer; the order was to go down on all fours in an attitude well understood by natives of India in relation to holy places.”

Indians forced to crawl up Kucha Kurrichhan where Miss Sherwood was assaulted in 1919 (Image via Wikipedia)
Indians forced to crawl up Kucha Kurrichhan where Miss Sherwood was assaulted in 1919 (Image via Wikipedia)

Many houses were alongside the street, and residents had to crawl to get their daily chores done. No one was exempt — the old, sick, the weak; everyone had to crawl. Of course, the crawl had to be perfect as well. If anyone lifted their bellies or turned to get relief from pain, the police would push them down with rifle butts. In his mercy, Reginald Dyer kept the order only from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. After 10 p.m., they were free to move about normally, except they would violate the night curfew and get shot.

On top of this, Reginald Dyer also ordered that any Indian who came within lathi-length of a British policeman be flogged. To facilitate the punishment, a flogging booth was built. Six boys were caught and given 30 lashes. When one of the boys, Sundar Singh, lost consciousness after the fourth lash, he was doused with water, and the lashing continued. He lost consciousness again, but he was lashed till the count of 30.

The next one was the salaam order. On seeing that the people of Gujranwala did not show respect to the British, a special order was issued. If the salute did not meet the expected standards, severe punishment was melted out. If the salaam was not performed by mistake, the turban was taken off his head, tied around the neck, and dragged to a military camp to be flogged. One person was even made to kiss the boots of an officer.

If they did not get an opportunity to torture, they spent their time humiliating people. Lawyers were made to work as coolies as punishment for protesting against the Rowlatt Act. The lawyers were humiliated in front of people who held them in esteem. A 75-year-old lawyer Kanhya Lal was made to carry furniture and patrol the city in the hot sun.

Immediately after Jallianwala Bagh, the administrator of Gujranwala asked for assistance. When he was told that troops could not be sent immediately, guess what was done – a bombing of the civilian population. Military bombers flew over the city and dropped bombs on random targets. A total of 12 people were killed and 24 injured in the bombing raid. The justification for the bombing of school children and farmers – “It was done to have a sort of moral effect”

The movie Udham Singh exposes only one of the atrocities committed by the British. There was no end to slaughter and torture, and the action was close to genocidal. Much of our forgotten history needs to be told, like Operation Red Lotus, Kashmir Files, etc. The old adage goes, “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” The characters of the past and the stories we tell ourselves about them shape our present and future.

There is another kind of self-censorship in the world. The country which lectures the world on freedom, democracy, and minority rights censors itself to please China. Why would American film studios voluntarily run a Chinese Ministry of Truth in Hollywood.? Money.

But accessing those Chinese screens required the approval of Chinese censors, so studio chiefs in Los Angeles started to think like Ministry of Propaganda apparatchiks in Beijing. They scrubbed scripts of any scene, image, or line that might anger officials, avoiding at all costs the “three T’s” (Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen) or flashpoints like ghosts (too spiritual), time travel (too ahistoric), or homosexuality (too immoral). Behind-the-scenes changes became common: Red Dawn was only released after editing out a Chinese antagonist; World War Z was revised to cut implications that a zombie pandemic had originated in China; and Bohemian Rhapsody shoved Freddie Mercury back in the closet before Queen fans in China could see his story.

‘Top Gun’ Tells The Whole Story of China and Hollywood

When Avatar made $200 million in China, it was evident to Hollywood that crawling in front of Chinese censors could make them rich. So they have been doing that since.

Now, India does not need to please the British. They did not even ask for censoring the movie. For all these years after independence, we learned more about our invaders than our heroes. It was history written by the victors. When it’s time for us to tell our stories, it’s shocking that enslaved minds still exist after seven decades of independence. The British have left, but Indraadip Dasgupta is still crawling on all fours at Kucha Kurrichhan.

Book Review: The Case That Shook the Empire

The Case That Shook the Empire: One Man’s Fight for the Truth about the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre by Raghu Palat and Pushpa Palat, Bloomsbury India; 1st edition (August 23, 2019), ‎ 162 pages

Who in their right mind would think that an Indian would get justice in the British legal system.? Between a person responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and a person arguing against the atrocities, whom would the so-called British legal system side with? Would the British system turn a blind eye to one of their own who had committed an unforgivable crime?

The answer is obvious now, as it was in 1924.

This book is about a defamation case filed by Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab during Jallianwala Bagh, against Chettur Sankaran Nair, a former Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. The trial lasted five-and-a-half weeks in London. There was nothing that indicated that this would be a fair trial. The judge was a racist who saw nothing wrong in Jallianwala Bagh, and the jury agreed with him.

English juries always sided with their own, even when they were murderers. The narrative that O’Dwyer’s actions saved the empire found acceptance. The media was no different from the legal system. London Times applauded the decision, stating that it was a decisive verdict and an assertion of the will of the English people to protect India.

The person who was dragged into the court by Michael O’Dwyer was Chettur Sankaran Nair, a former Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, a former President of the Indian National Congress, and a retired Judge of the Madras High Court. Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, described Nair “as an impossible person… He shouts at the top of his voice and refuses to listen to anything when one argues, and is absolutely uncompromising.” Also, as a Nair, he did not believe in Gandhi’s non-violence. Warriors by nature, Nairs were taught to retaliate when attacked. “I draw the line when asked to turn the other cheek to my enemy. If someone were to smite me on my cheek, I would chop his head off,” Nair once said.

There is more to like about him. He did not believe in Gandhi’s cuckoo plan for Khilafat, which he thought was impractical. And he was absolutely right, as that plan was purely for Gandhi’s ascendance into leadership than helping anyone. The Arabs or Egyptians did not want to be ruled by a Turkish Caliph. Come to think of it, even the Turks did not wish to a caliph. They were the ones who got rid of him and converted to a secular democracy. The Ottoman Empire was broken up, and some of the lands were under French control. There was no way a few petitions would cause France and Britain to sit and undo the damage they did. None of this mattered to Gandhi. He went so far as to suggest that Indian swaraj activity could be postponed if Khilafat ask could be advanced. Thus from a Swaraj, which meant self-rule for India, it got converted overnight to support an imaginary Caliphate in faraway Turkey.

Mr. Nair’s sharp personality is revealed through various anecdotes. Once Lady O’Dwyer was annoyed by Mr. Nair’s reaction to her pet. “Nair rudely and rather cruelly replied that this was because, while the English were nearer to dogs in their evolution, Indians had in their 5,000-year history moved further away.” Directly quoted individual voices are the yeast that allows history to rise. When he resigned from the Viceroy’s council, he was asked to suggest a replacement. He pointed to the turbaned, red- and gold-liveried peon standing ramrod straight by the giant doorway. His reasoning is, “He is tall. He is handsome. He wears his livery well and he will say yes to whatever you say. Altogether he will make an ideal Member of Council.”

Despite all this, he believed that an Indian could get an impartial hearing at an English court.

Indians forced to crawl up the street where Miss Sherwood was assaulted in 1919 (Image via Wikipedia)

Michael O’Dwyer was everything you would expect from a British overlord. He followed the Macaulay doctrine of contempt for Indian culture and constant reiteration of Western superiority. He believed that God had ordained Great Britain to govern the world. He also believed that British authority would be weakened if higher posts were given to Indians. He was intolerant of the growing wave of nationalism in India. He believed that India was won by the sword and must forever be preserved by force. On self-government, he proclaimed,” ‘India would not be fit for self-government much before doomsday.” Chettur Sankaran Nair was born in 1857, the year of the First War of Independence. Michael O’Dwyer and Reginald Dyer did everything to prevent anything like 1857 from re-occurring.

The book gives context to Jallianwala Bagh; it was not violence in isolation. We often speak of how Indian soldiers were all around the world during World War I. More than one million Indian soldiers were deployed during World War I, serving in the Indian Army as part of Britain’s imperial war effort. These men fought in France and Belgium, Egypt and East Africa, Gallipoli, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. What is not mentioned is how they were recruited. It’s not like a Punjabi farmer felt a sudden urge to go to Mesopotamia to defend his oppressor.

On failing to meet the recruitment targets, O’Dwyer took it upon himself to meet the goals and deployed new techniques. He did that by battering away at the darkest corners of people’s souls.

The committee also recorded men being captured forcibly and marched off for enlistment. Raids took place at night, and men were forcibly seized and removed. Their hands were tied together, and they were stripped in the presence of their families and made to bend over thorns when they were whipped. Additionally, women were stripped naked and made to sit on bramble bushes and thorn bushes in the hot sun until their men who had been hiding agreed to be recruited. In some instances, the women were made to sit with bramble between their legs overnight. Old men, too, had inhuman punishment meted out to them – they were made to sit ‘bare buttocks’ on thorns to force their sons to enlist.

Right now, we all know about what happened at Jallianwala Bagh. It’s mentioned in our history books, and many movies have depicted it. However, it was not so in 1924. Due to the draconian press rules, the atrocities in Punjab were not known around the world.

The book argues that there were some positive outcomes even though he lost the case. The court case between Nair and Michael O’Dwyer resulted in the whole world knowing about British atrocities (for which not a single British Prime Minister has apologized). It boosted the nationalist cause and a case of an Indian role in the administration of India(What an idea). No surprise on who did not send a note of encouragement or sympathy to this case – the Congress. For his efforts, there is a plaque honoring Sir Nair in the museum at Jallianwala Bagh, just outside the Golden Temple.

The book is short (162 pages). The author duo has written it in a vivid accessible style, which is how history books should be written. Together with a strong opening, setting the events of 1919 in their historical place, the reader is left with a history of British rule in Punjab from the Anglo-Afghan wars to the time of Jallianwala Bagh. Previously, I heard about Chettur Sankaran Nair from Maddy’s blog, but this book was a more detailed introduction.

The Katapayadi Number System

By Image: http://collections.lacma.org/sites/default/files/remote_images/piction/ma-31973398-O3.jpg Gallery: http://collections.lacma.org/node/171573 archive copy, Public Domain, Link

What’s common between the first verse of Mahabharata and the last verse of Mēlputtūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri’s Narayaneeyam written in 1586 CE.?

The first verse of adi parva reads

नारायणं नमस्कृत्य नरं चैव नरॊत्तमम देवीं सरस्वतीं चैव ततॊ जयम उदीरयेत

(” Om ! Having bowed to Narãyana and Nara, the most exalted male being, and also to the Goddess Saraswati, must the word Jaya be uttered)

Mēlputtūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri’s Narayaneeyam ends with the words ayur- ̄arogya-saukhyam. This wishes long life, health, and happiness to the readers of his devotional poem.

The words jayam and ayur- ̄arogya-saukhyam have two properties.

  1. Both have proper meanings in the context of the sentence used (as in, they are not gibberish words.) This matters as we go into the details.
  2. The second property is not well known. Both those words encode a number that has a deeper meaning.

In this system of encoding, jaya represents 18 and ayur- ̄arogya-saukhyam 17,12,210. Counting those many days from Kali Yuga, gives the date as 8th December 1586, the completion date of Narayaneeyam.

This article looks at this style of representing numbers using meaningful words.

Katapayadi Number System

Process-wise, the encoding is simple. Each Samskritam consonant is given a number. Hence the algorithm is as simple as reading it from right to left.

jaya
81
encoding of jaya in katapayadi system

The letter ja is assigned the number 8 and ya, 1. Reading from right to left, it becomes 18.

Why did Vyasa pick on the number 18 and encode it as jaya? Why did he call Mahābhārata as jaya. Mahābhārata has 18 parvas. Gita has 18 chapters. The war was fought for 18 days. There were 18 akshauhini’s in the war. Thus jaya was not a random selection.

Here is the full table of the consonant to number assignment.

1234567890
ka क കkha ख ഖ
ga ग ഗ
gha घ ഘ
nga ङ ങ
ca च ച
cha छ ഛ
ja ज ജ
jha झ ഝ
nya ञ ഞ
ṭa ट ട
ṭha ठ ഠ
ḍa ड ഡ
ḍha ढ ഢ
ṇa ण ണ
ta त ത
tha थ
da द ദ
dha ध ധ
na न ന
pa प പ
pha फ ഫ
ba ब ബ
bha भ ഭ
ma म മ
ya य യ
ra र ര
la ल ല
va व വ
śha श ശ
sha ष ഷ
sa स സ
ha ह ഹ
katapayadi table

Look at the letters which represent the number 1. ka, ta, pa, ya gives it the name katapayadi (adi in Samskritam means beginning). Vowels meant 0, and vowels followed by a consonant had no value. In the case of compound letters, the value of the last letter was used.

In its land of origin, Kerala, it was known by a different name Paralpperu where paral means seashell and peru name” (astronomical calculations were done using seashells).

Here is another example. The year 2010 is expressed as natanara.

This is because

LetterValue
na0
ta1
na0
ra2

If you read this backward, you get 2010. An important point is that the letters are not chosen randomly. They mean something. In this case, natanara means “a man (nara) who is an actor ( nata)”. Since there are many possible letters for each number, the mathematician can create a meaningful word from the numbers.

Similarly, ayur- ̄arogya-saukhyam represents 17,12,210 to represent the date of 8 December 1586. Why was the epoch chosen as the beginning of Kali Yuga? It was the popular way of dating events called the Kali-ahargana. Kali-yuga started at sunrise on Friday, 18 February 3102 BCE, and computing the number of days from then was common in planetary calculations.

The fact that Bhaṭṭatiri used this system is not surprising. He was a student of Achyuta Pisharati, a member of the Hindu school of Mathematics from Kerala. This is also an example where it was used in non-scientific work.

Thus the katapayadi system allows the author to represent large numbers using easy-to-remember words. It also has the flexibility to let the author pick an appropriate word for the context and one that fits the meter if it’s a poem.

During the time of Aryabhatta, there were at least three methods of writing numbers. Mathematicians like Varahamihira and Bhaskaracharya used a system called the bhoot samkhya. Aryabhatta, though, invented his own system, which was a new contribution.(The Aryabhata Number System)

Katapayadi number system was primarily used by Hindu mathematicians and astronomers in Kerala. The fact that numbers can be converted to meaningful words that can be strung together helped Malayali mathematicians perform complicated calculations from memory. They computed eclipses, memorized the calculations using words, and committed to memory. This way, there was no dependency on books or tables. This system of memorization was prevalent till around 100 years back.

The book Moonwalking with Einstein talks about various techniques used by the ancients to memorize data. One of the techniques was called memory palace. The katapayadi system looks simpler as the data to commit to memory is that table.

Origins and Spread

If you ask, who started this number system, there are many answers. It’s possible that Vararuchi wrote them in Candra-vakyas in the fourth century. Aryabahata I, who lived 100 years after, was aware of it. It was then popularized in 683 CE in Kerala by Haridatta. ́Sankaranarayana ( 825–900 CE) mentions this name in his commentary on the Laghubhaskarıya of Bhaskara I. Subhash Kak argues that the the system is much older

Though the system originated in Kerala, it spread around India. Though it was well known in the northern part of India, it was not widely used. It spread from Kerala to Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. That came due to their contact with Nilakanta Somayaji, another mathematician from the Madhava school. In Karnataka, Jains used it in their writing. Orissa has manuscripts that show usage of this system. Aryabhata II used this in the 10th century with some modifications. Bhaskara II used both Bhootsamkya system and Katapayadi system in his works.

This system was not used just in astronomy and mathematics but also in classifying music. For example, the 72 ragas were classified by musicologist Muddu Venkata Makki using the first two letters to indicate the serial number of the Melakartharagam. Thus Kanakangı shows the serial number 1, Rupavatı 12, Sanmukhapriya 56, or Rasikapriya 72.

You are too late if you think this system would help write something like Da Vinci Code. The National-Treasure-in-India script was done a few hundred years back. Ramacandra Vajapeyin, who lived in Uttar Pradesh, used this technique to forecast a dispute or war victory. His brother wrote a text to draw magic squares for therapeutic purposes.

Forgotten Mathematicians

I learned about the Hindu school of Mathematics (as opposed to the Jain school) from Kerala by reading A Passage to Infinity by George Gheverghese Joseph. Though there were few mathematicians in Kerala in the 9th, 12th, and 13th centuries, what is today called the Kerala School started with Madhava, who came from near modern-day Irinjalakuda. His achievements were phenomenal; they included calculating the exact position of the moon and what is now known as the Gregory series for the arctangent, Leibniz series for the pi and Newton power series for sine and cosine with great accuracy.

Some of these techniques were forgotten, but thanks to a renewed interest in Samskritam, there is a revival of knowledge. This whole article was triggered when I read the first chapter of my Samskrita Bharati book on sandhis which mentioned the katapayadi system.

Postscript

  1. If are you curious to know why Mahābhārata was called jaya, then read this article.

References:

  1. Vijayalekshmy M. “‘KATAPAYADI’ SYSTEM — A CONTRIBUTION OF MEDIEVAL KERALA TO ASTRONOMY AND MATHEMATICS.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 69, 2008, pp. 442–46, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44147207. Accessed 7 May 2022.
  2. Anusha, R., et al. “Coding the Encoded: Automatic Decryption of KaTapayAdi and AryabhaTa’s Systems of Numeration.” Current Science, vol. 112, no. 3, 2017, pp. 588–91, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24912445. Accessed 7 May 2022.
  3. Kak, Subhash. “INDIAN BINARY NUMBERS AND THE KAṬAPAYĀDI NOTATION.” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol. 81, no. 1/4, 2000, pp. 269–72, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41694622. Accessed 7 May 2022.
  4. Iyer, P. R. Chidambara. “REVELATIONS OF THE FIRST STANZA OF THE MAHĀBHĀRATA.” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, vol. 27, no. 1/2, 1946, pp. 83–101, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41784867. Accessed 7 May 2022.
  5. A. V. Raman, “The Katapayadi formula and the modern hashing technique,” in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 49-52, Oct.-Dec. 1997, doi: 10.1109/85.627900.

Review: The Kashmir Files

Kashmir Files Movie Poster

In one of the shocking scenes in the movie Kashmir Files terrorists line up 23 Kashmiri Hindus and start shooting them one by one. The camera moves behind the lone terrorist holding the gun. We see the face of the victim, and in the next instant, a bullet enters his forehead, and the body falls into the pit. The terrorist moves to the next Hindu and shoots him. The camera does not skip a single victim. Finally, to make up for a count of 24, the terrorist pulls in a little boy and shoots him. There was pin-drop silence in the theater as the movie ended on this note, and we all walked out silently. I mentioned “one of the shocking scenes” because this is not the most gruesome scene. There is one which I could not watch.

While there are many movies on the Holocaust, there is almost none on the Hindu genocide in Kashmir. As I watched this movie, which brings out an ignored past, I felt angry, sad, and horrified. Anger at how various governments did nothing for the Kashmiri Hindus, sadness at how we let it be forgotten, and horror at the brutality that was done. The movie demonstrates the total failure of the system, which stood by, turned a blind eye, and was complicit in the atrocities. Kashmir Files packs a powerful punch, and it’s a punch to your gut.

There is a reason why the movie — without the usual Hindi movie elite and mandatory Punjabi songs– became a critical and commercial success. The film is brilliantly made, and it exposes the elites.

Except for a few movies like Uri, Sardar Udham, Shershaah, or Ghazi Attack, most Hindi films tell the same tired story repeated and rinsed. The fashionable ones just copy “woke” ideas from the West. Kashmir Files is a different breed. The story is told through the eyes of a young Kashmiri, who was ignorant of the events of 1990. Falling into the trap of a treacherous and scheming university professor he is motivated to fight for aazadi. Switching to the past, the film shows what happened in 1990. This was when Kashmiri Hindus were asked to either convert, leave or die. This was when politicians formed alliances with terrorists and a time when Pakistani currency was returned as change.

Anupam Kher in The Kashmir Files

The movie manages the challenge of telling the forgotten story of Kashmiri Hindus through the intense performance of Anupam Kher. The full impact of the violence is etched in his face, and we all experience his traumatic memories. The scene where he sits in a refugee camp with a box of two biscuits to when he walks around calling for the abrogation of Article 370 touches your heart. His transition from fear to sadness to numbness is one of the heart-wrenching performances by an actor in recent memory.

This is an event that the Indian “Ministry of Truth” has tried to suppress for the past 32 years. As part of writing this article, I searched up on some papers written about this incident and this is a gem by Haley Duschinski

Kashmiri Hindus are a numerically small yet historically privileged cultural and religious community in the Muslim- majority region of Kashmir Valley in Jammu and Kashmir State in India. They all belong to the same caste of Sarasvat Brahmanas known as Pandits. In 1989-90, the majority of Kashmiri Hindus living in Kashmir Valley fled their homes at the onset of conflict in the region, resettling in towns and cities throughout India while awaiting an opportunity to return to their homeland.

Haley Duschinski

A genocide was packaged as a voluntary exodus and then repeated by politicians, media, and intellectuals. This narrative was then sold to the public by the Hindi movie industry. Just watch Mission Kashmir, Haider, etc. The Malayalam movie industry, which shed copious tears over Gujarat, was busy re-reading Karl Marx while this happened in India.

Another reason this movie struck a chord is because it exposed the Leftists and their strategy. The Breaking India forces are called out, and the links between “eminent intellectuals” and terrorists are revealed. One of the interesting characters is the university professor portrayed by Pallavi Joshi. If you have read Breaking India, you know the playbook. There is an ominous dialogue she says, “The government might be theirs, but the system is ours.”

The movie brilliantly shows how fake news is created, truth is hidden, and how history is converted from “ashuddho” to “shuddho .” After watching this movie, you will not read the news the same way. It also calls out the current intellectual favorites, the Sufis, and their role in converting the Pandits many hundred years back. The technique was repeated in Malabar in 1921.

One of the most uplifting scenes in the movie is where we get educated on Kashmiri history. It answers the question: why should we care about Kashmir? Kashmir was the land of Kashyapa, Abhinavagupta, Charaka, Vagbhata, Panini, Vishnu Sharma, and Bharat Muni. It was the center of educational and cultural excellence and spirituality. Heard of Kashmiri Shaivism? Kashmir was the place for ambitious explorers seeking to grasp the vast reality of the mind, arts and sciences. A person from Kashmir was treated with respect like how we respect graduates from the best universities in the world. Unfortunately, it was this world that was ended by the Islamic invasion. The keepers of that knowledge were forced to flee at gunpoint.

The movies that have come in the past have tried to portray the terrorists as victims. However, Kashmir Files takes an unapologetic stance and shows what happened in the few days in 1990. Such movies need to be made to not forget the lessons from its aftermath. It’s not that such atrocities won’t happen again, but it will keep us on the alert to ensure that they are bought to light more quickly than in 1990 when the whole country looked the other way.