The Harappan Empire

Among the ancient civilizations, the Harappan was much larger in size than the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations; it was too large to be administered from just Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. While the sites along the Indus-Saraswati were urban, a new paper suggests that these towns were surrounded by various supply centers which were non-urban and even hunter-gather in some cases.

In addition, many of the outlying settlements were involved in processing and the production of manufactured goods. Dholavira thrived on its industrial exports of agate and shell artefacts. From Kumaun, a large number of copper mines and copper-working implements have been reported from the Pithoragarh region , where there were also huge deposits of sedimentary talc. The Jodhpura people lived close to copper mines and did the dirty work of smelting for the Harappans . In Kashmir, the hoard of carnelian beads of Harappan vintage at Burzahom shows that they had trade contacts. In the far north-west Bactrian region, Shortguai served as a processing centre for lapis lazuli. In Gujurat, sites like Kanmer yielded a large amount of bead-making material indicating their industrial importance. The agate quarries are located just about 20km from Kanmer. The coastal sites of Sutkagen Dor, Khera Kot, Balakot, Allahdino, Dholavira, Kuntasi, etc. probably helped procure and process shell material for beads and bangles.[Redefining the Harappan hinterland]

Confucius Strikes Back

The most popular cinema in China recently was not Avatar, but (due to protectionist rules), a biopic of Confucius. During the Cultural revolution, the Communists were not big on the philosopher; there was a campaign against his ideas. During the 1919 May Fourth anti-imperialist cultural and political movement too Confucianism was regarded as incapable of responding to the challenges of the West: It held China back; it made China vulnerable.
This is quite evident from the 14th century episode of Zheng He when Ming fleets reached Kerala and sailed across the Arabian Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Swahili Coast. These were no ordinary fleets and for perspective we have to compare Vasco da Gama’s and Zheng He’s first voyages. Gama arrived in Calicut on two carracks and a caravel with a crew of 170 people; Zheng He’s first voyage to Cochin and Calicut had between 200 and 317 ships with a crew of 28,000 men.
While China could have monopolized the Indian Ocean trade that did not happen. One of the reasons China withdrew from these voyages was due to Confucianism.

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

The attitude towards Confucius has changed in the past three decades. He is popular not just among academics and the business community, but also among ordinary people. Yu Dan’s Confucius from the Heart: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World sold ten million copies in two years and Chow Yun-Fat is playing the philosopher in the latest blockbuster.
Besides Yu Dan’s book, one of the reasons for the surge in interest in Confucianism is due to the interest by parents. Though it was not taught in Government schools, Confucianism became popular in private schools and children can now recite from his books.
Confucianism is big with the Government too; they are setting up institutes named after him around the world to promote language and culture. The popularity of the philosophy works for them since Confucius promoted order, harmony and respect for hierarchy and authority. It can be used to justify authoritarianism.
But with this new found interest in Confucianism are the Chinese going to scale back on their global trade, support for Pakistan and North Korea and investments in Africa? The current administration is not going to commit the blunder of the Ming emperors. They know that this is good for cultural identity, but not for foreign policy.
Reference:

The Return of Confucius on NPR

Indian History Carnival – 27

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

Who is an Aryan? Giacomo Benedetti goes through the history of this word

In fact, when the Europeans, in the nineteenth century, began to familiarize with the Sanskrit and Avestan traditions, they were in a colonialist and positivistic frame of mind, they were inclined to see all in terms of biological races, and of the superiority of the white race… Previously, ethnic, social and religious differences were more important, and the East was seen as the origin of civilization and wisdom (also the Christian religion came from Asia), but in the nineteenth century they saw everywhere the supremacy of the white Europeans, and they were induced to think that this was due to a racial, intrinsic superiority. Moreover, they had to justify somehow their dominion.

A Greek play written before the second century CE in Egypt was set in Malabar and
featured an ancient South Indian language – either Tulu or Kannada. Maddy has the story of Charition

And strange isn’t it – we come across the Indian weakness for booze in the Geniza scrolls – dealing with the Bomma slave and now again in these papyri. If only the king of Malpe (Malpinak) or Alupa knew how to handle his liquor, we may choose to think, but then again, he did not, and so we have this precious piece of history. Other interesting facts are the usage of women as personal bodyguards (these days the Libyan dictator Gaddafi has such a set of Amazons guarding him) and the attachment the Yavana Devadasi forms with the moon goddess and her refusal to steal the ornaments or offerings made by her devotees, are interesting aspects of the story.

In 1787 Charles Grant, who was the Commercial Resident of Malda, wrote a letter to one Mr. Wilberforce. This letter contained the word “Hindooism” – the first ever known usage of this word. varnam has a post on Charles Grant.

After taking a position as the Commercial Resident of Malda, Grant took an interest in the moral nature of Indians. He rejected the argument that Hindus were people in whom mild and gentle qualities dominated; he thought that they were morally depraved. He wanted to bring in social and economic reform and the way for that, not surprisingly, was to make people acquainted with the truth of Revelation and free them from the ‘false religion’.

If you are interested in learning about the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a few podcasts are available and Anne has a list

In a short a time, three podcast series have started paying attention to the revolt in India in 1857. What began with disconcerted Indian foot-soldiers in the British colonial army – hence the rebellion is also called a mutiny – extended into a broad revolt which eventually even got the Mogul Emperor involved. After the fighting and the massacres neither India nor Britain would be the same

Worried about the Chinese military activity in Tibet, the Americans decided to install a surveillance device on the summit of Nanda Devi. Murphys law was involved and Fëanor has that story.

The following year, the Indians returned to the mountain. To their horror, they found that a landslide had hidden the nuclear generator. A missive of masterly understatement found its way to the CIA (‘We may be experiencing a small operational problem with Project Blue Mountain’). The Americans returned in force to attempt to salvage the device.

Recently Kim Plofker published a book called Mathematics in India based on books from the Vedic period to the 18th century. Hari has the book on his desk

There is the use of Pythagoras’ famous theorem in the construction of pillars, some centuries before the Greek philosopher is said to have postulated it in fifth century BC; Pāṇini’s rules of Sanskrit grammar and recursion, which “without exaggeration…anticipated the basic ideas of modern computer science”; and Pingala, whose study of Sanskrit verses led to the binary notation and the development of Pascal’s famous triangle, useful in the calculation of binomial coefficients (which, coincidentally, is what I am teaching now); and Madhava of Sangamagramma (circa 14th century), the genius of the Kerala School, who contributed along with others, to “the discoveries of the power series expansions of arctangent, sine, and cosine” (a text on this in Malayalam has survived).

If you find any posts related to Indian history published in the past one month, please send it to jk AT varnam DOT org or send a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up on April 15th.

Creating the Hebrew Bible

Jewish Ideas Daily had an interview with Dr. Irving Finkel who is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum. In this interview he talks about how the scriptures were created during the Babylonian exile to forge a religious identity. The PBS Documentary Bible’s Buried Secrets had mentioned this thesis before

The exile challenged the Judeans to refine their ideas about their single God. Thinking of God as an elusive abstraction did not serve to maintain cohesion. To complicate matters further, there were local theologians in Babylon who were also arguing for one god: their patron deity was Marduk, and they held that all the other gods were but manifestations of his powers. We have cuneiform records encapsulating this dispute among Babylonian theologians.
As a single god, Marduk contributed to the insecurity of Jewish belief. The great fear was that the Judean flock would succumb to idol worship or to marrying out, or both. If that happened, the population would disappear just like the Northern Israelites in Assyria. This threat engendered the need for the biblical text to be finished, in order to solidify the Judeans’ belief in their superior understanding of monotheism. What was needed was a theology.
So the “Jews” did something to prevent a replay of the Assyrian outcome. What they did was to produce the Bible, a work that practically screams out that it was written by humans. [But for the Grace of Babylon]

How Tom Hanks makes History Interesting

The current issue of Time features Tom Hanks on the cover. They have anointed him as America’s Historian in Chief for producing From the Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers, John Adams and The Pacific. The article then mentions his idea of making history interesting

What differentiates Hanks from the academic past masters is his conviction that the historical experience should be a very personal one. He harbors a pugnacious indignation against history as data gathering, preferring the work of popular historians like McCullough, Ambrose, Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin. He wants viewers to identify with their ancestors, allowing them to ponder the prevalence of moral ambiguity, human willpower and plain dumb luck in shaping the past. And he wants to be transported back in time, with a Sousa band banging the drum loudly.
As Hanks’ star rose in the 1990s, he sought out new sources of what he calls “entertainable historical knowledge.” Leon Uris’ fact-anchored novels — Mila 18, Armageddon and Exodus — taught Hanks to feel history in a way no high school teacher ever did, but the entertainment level had to be hyperkinetic to hold his attention. It was the same with most academic histories. “The writing is often too dull to grab regular people by the lapel,” he says.
The way he found was to make it a mix of spectacle and drama, drawing on his own cultural influences.
His favorite book as a teen was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which he thought was far scarier than any Hitchcock psychodrama because it had actually happened to a particular family in Holcomb, Kans. “Capote’s horror,” Hanks says, “has stuck with me.” Capote called his work a nonfiction novel — informed by reporting but drawing on the techniques of fiction for its dramatic power. It’s a fair description of Hanks’ productions, in which historical events and figures are drawn together along fictionalized story arcs, and characters have the psychological interiority of characters in novels.[Tom Hanks on ‘Pacific’ HBO Series, World War II, History]

Converting Tiger Woods

When it was discovered that Tiger Woods had a distributed harem, one of the issues that came up was his faith: Woods is Buddhist. Fox News anchor Brit Hume suggested that Tiger convert to Christianity and obtain “forgiveness and redemption.” The reason this conversion was needed is because Christianity offers a way for redemption from sin while Buddhism does not.
This can be quickly dismissed by blaming Hume’s ignorance of Buddhist philosophy, but that suppresses a larger issue hidden in that statement. To the question on if Buddhism offers a way of forgiveness and redemption, the answer will always be no. According to Buddhist philosophy, there is no one to forgive you; you attain nirvana through spiritual practice without belief in constructs like Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.
The issue here is not of theological difference, but of theological superiority and this argument has been made before regarding another Indic religion; it was a common theme among missionaries operating in India in the 18th and 19th centuries.
To see an example we need to go to go to Serampore (in Bengal) of 1799 where the Baptist missionary William Ward preached. He was an evangelical who believed that even unbelievers had to hear the Gospel to be saved from damnation. According to his colleague and mentor William Carey, Hindus definitely had knowledge of God, but it was not the same as attaining salvation by accepting Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
Ward, who had gone beyond the rituals of Hinduism, agreed with this. He was not one of those missionaries, who during Alexander Duff’s time, preached in street corners. He had learned Sanskrit from the Head Pundit at Fort William – one Mrityunjay Vidyalankar. He had read Vedanta and even translated Vedanta Sara.
According to him Non-Christians — Africans, Indians, Greeks, Romans — all knew about God. That was not sufficient; only through divine revelation, you would know how to worship God. Hence the idolaters would never reach the Kingdom of Heaven and any religion which did not have this concept was irrational and absurd.
Three decades after Ward, Peter Percival who spent fifteen years in Tamil Nadu, did a similar comparison. He found that the goal of a Hindu was to merge with the sole, self-existing essential spirit. He then held this concept of an impersonal Brahman against Hinduism; the God mentioned in the Bible had personality, free will, and absolute power and hence that theism was more attractive.
You just can’t win.
In his staged apology for the media, Tiger Woods talked about his religion

Part of following this path for me is Buddhism, which my mother taught me at a young age. People probably don’t realize it, but I was raised a Buddhist, and I actively practiced my faith from childhood until I drifted away from it in recent years. Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously, I lost track of what I was taught.[Tiger Woods’ apology: Full transcript]

Tiger Woods also ignored the televangelist’s suggestion.
References:

Dr G A Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793-1900 (Sage Publications, 2006).

In Pragati:The Indus colony in Mesopotamia

Someone recently asked why sea voyages were prohibited in India. The answer is simple: sea voyages were not prohibited in India. How else do you explain the Indian Ocean Trading system where merchants — Gujarati vaniyas, Tamil and Telugu chettis, Malabar Mappilas, Saraswats, Navayats — traded in ports from Meleka to Aden? The June 2009 issue of Pragati had an article by Manmadhan Ullatil on this trading network.
But the history of sea voyages is much older; around 2000 B.C.E, there was a Meluhhan (identified as people from Indus region) colony in Mesopotamia. There was also a person who could read Meluhhan and Sumerian or Akkadian which could help in deciphering the Indus script. Read all about it in the latest issue of Pragati. The references can be found here.

Alcohol or Temples?

Besides the iMac and iPhone, one of the greatest inventions of mankind is agriculture. But an eternal question remains: what sparked the invention of agriculture? What motivated the hunter-gatherer to leave a foraging life, settle down and apply for a mortgage?

One theory says that following the Ice Age (Part 3), the environment dried out creating areas of deserts and oases. People were driven to areas with resources, like the Nile valley, and the population pressure led to innovation. In contrast to this shortage model, the abundance model tells that agriculture developed in areas, like the Fertile Crescent, where plenty of wild wheat grew.

There is another theory which says that the motivation was alcohol

Here is how the story likely began — a prehistoric human picked up some dropped fruit from the ground and popped it unsuspectingly into his or her mouth. The first effect was nothing more than an agreeably bittersweet flavor spreading across the palate. But as alcohol entered the bloodstream, the brain started sending out a new message — whatever that was, I want more of it! Humankind’s first encounters with alcohol in the form of fermented fruit probably occurred in just such an accidental fashion. But once they were familiar with the effect, archaeologist Patrick McGovern believes, humans stopped at nothing in their pursuit of frequent intoxication. [Brewing Up a Civilization]

This is related to the Social Competition model which explains that groups which were able to produce better goods for feast gained prestige and dominance relative to other groups. The earliest domesticated crops — wheat, millet — were also ingredients in alcohol. Thus it was not about substinence, but about getting friendly with strangers.

The latest in the list of theories regarding the origin of agriculture suggests that it was the need to worship that made the foragers settle down; To support this new religious life style, they domesticated plants and animals. We had covered this few years back (1,2), but recently Newsweek had a major story on this topic in connection to the 11,500 year old temple at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey.

This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a “Neolithic revolution” 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion. As far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thinkers have argued that the social compact of cities came first, and only then the “high” religions with their great temples, a paradigm still taught in American high schools.

Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archaeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that “the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture,” and Göbekli may prove his case. [History in the Remaking]

The man who coined 'Hindooism'

In 1767, a 21 year old Charles Grant, like many other twenty year olds traveled to India to join the East India Company’s military service. Arriving in Bengal, he was offended by the corrupt activities of the company and the officers. Soon a personal incident changed him forever and his life went in a new direction. He became an evangelical and argued vehemently for the introduction of Christianity — which was against company policy — to enhance the morality of Indians. In the process he coined the word “Hinduism” and redefined the way how the world viewed the traditions of India.
When Grant arrived in Calcutta, a decade after the Battle of Plassey, the company was in charge of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Robert Clive had left and the company officers we indulging as best as they could. Corruption was rampant and the famine had reduced the Bengal population by a third. Though he argued that the company had done quite a lot, he was troubled by the suffering. But interestingly, in his letters written during this period, there is no mention of religion or God.
After the famine he got a severe fever and had to return to England to recover. He returned in 1773 with his new bride – the 18 year old Jane Fraser. The young Mrs. Grant did not take to Indian climate very well and this worried Charles, but those worries went away with the birth of his daughter Elizabeth. He got promoted as the Secretary of the Board of Trade, but that did not prevent him from criticizing the Warren Hastings’ administration.
By then he had a secure life: good friends, great family, terrific salary. If you have watched any non-Adoor Gopalakrishnan Indian movie, you will know that usually there is a song here and then it all goes downhill. What is true now, was true in the year of American Independence too; Elizabeth and her younger sister Margaret died of small pox, just nine days apart.
A devastated Grant took refuge in Christ and became a sincere believer; he became an evangelical and few missionaries in the area helped him overcome his pain. He became a new man, renounced vices like gambling, and letters written during this period contain references to God and salvation.
After taking a position as the Commercial Resident of Malda, Grant took an interest in the moral nature of Indians. He rejected the argument that Hindus were people in whom mild and gentle qualities dominated; he thought that they were morally depraved. He wanted to bring in social and economic reform and the way for that, not surprisingly, was to make people acquainted with the truth of Revelation and free them from the ‘false religion’.
In his words

With the argument for the introduction of Christianity and Western education in India, Grant was years ahead of Thomas Macaulay and Alexander Duff. The charter of the East India Company did not officially permit missionary activity, but Grant was convinced that it had to change. This social revolution, Grant argued, would promote the well being of the population and in turn protect the company’s interests.
In 1787 Grant wrote a letter to one Mr. Wilberforce which contained the following paragraph.

This is important for one reason: it is the first time the word Hindooism is ever used; it replaced descriptions like “Hindoo religion” and “Hindoo creed”. By coining this new term and advocating it, Grant’s label made it convenient to refer to the various religious traditions of India.
This was a time when there were apparently four religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Paganism. Now the Paganism of India had a name and a comparison to Christianity could be done. For example what was the religious structure and accepted scriptures of Hinduism? How similar or how different was it from the Protestant religion?
He had answers for this: Hinduism was Brahmanism and Brahminism was Hinduism. These crafty priests had enslaved the population — people who did not have a mind of their own — through rituals and the caste system. These slaves, enslaved through fear and ignorance practiced barbaric rituals like sati, hook swinging and the devadasi system. Also unlike in his religion, only those crafty priests could read the sacred texts.
Though he despised the Brahmins, he thought they were the descendants of Noah and were blessed in the Garden of Eden. These Brahmins who once held belief in a rational Supreme Being, had now fallen from grace into the ignorant ways of polytheism and idolatry.This belief, that Brahmins were descendants of Noah,was nothing new and was prevalent in India at that time. While Grant was in Bengal, the French-Catholic missionary Jean-Antoine Dubois who was working in South India, too connected Brahmins to Noah

After the flood, the whole world was repopulated again. For this, Noah and his sons dispersed around the world. One group went West, while the others under the guidance of Magog, Noah’s grandson, went to the Caucasian range. From there they came via the North into India and populated it. He even has a date for this migration – nine centuries before Christian era. Thus the Brahmins, according to Dubois, were descendants of Magog’s father Japheth.[The Biblical Migration Theory]

Grant wrote all these ex cathedra pronouncements in Observations on the State of Society among Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, but initially showed it only to a few evangelical friends. Grant later became a member of the Board of Directors of the EIC, but still then the pamphlet was not released publicly. Even other missionaries had not seen it. So why should these comments by a delusional missionary matter?
His work, along with the work of others, influenced the British perception of India. This was the beginning of the establishment of a dominant paradigm — defining Hinduism for Indians and rest of the world. Since the colonial power was in the control, their representation of the traditions became the accepted norm, which we continue to use even today.
Also in 1813,the Charter of the company came up for renewal and by then the Evangelicals had gained strength. People like Zachary Macaulay, father of Thomas Macaulay, had become influential and wanted the ban on missionaries to be removed. On the eve of that debate, Grant’s work was printed as a parliamentary paper.
The evangelicals won in 1813.
References:

Dr G A Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism, 1793-1900 (Sage Publications, 2006).
Henry Morris, The life of Charles Grant (J. Murray, 1904).
Image from Wikipedia

Mathematics in India

Last year Communist ideologue P Govindapillai wrote an article in the Malayalam newspaper Mathrubumi about Eurocentrism and lamented that Europeans did not give sufficient credit to Muslim scientists. In the article Govindapillai conveniently left out mathematicians from his own state — the Kerala School of Mathematics — and their discoveries. This lead to an Op-Ed in Mail Today.
In his review of Kim Plofker’s Mathematics in India, David Mumford, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, writes that the prosperity and success of India has created support for new Western scholars who are looking at India without the old biases. I have not read the book yet, but the review is positive.

Chapter 7 of Plofker’s book is devoted to the crown jewel of Indian mathematics, the work of the Kerala school. Kerala is a narrow fertile strip between the mountains and the Arabian Sea along the southwest coast of India. Here, in a number of small villages, supported by the Maharaja of Calicut, an amazing dynasty17 of mathematicians and astronomers lived and thrived. A large proportion of their results were attributed by later writers to the founder of this school, Madhava of Sangamagramma, who lived from approximately 1350 to 1425. It seems fair to me to compare him with Newton and Leibniz. The high points of their mathematical work were the discoveries of the power series expansions of arctangent, sine, and cosine. By a marvelous and unique happenstance, there survives an informal exposition of these results with full derivations, written in Malayalam, the vernacular of Kerala, by Jyes.t.hedeva perhaps about 1540. This book, the Gan.ita-Yukti-Bhasa, has only very recently been translated into English with an extensive commentary.18 As a result, this book gives a unique insight into Indian methods. Simply put, these are recursion, induction, and careful passage to the limit.[Mathematics in India via IndiaArchaeology]