(This book review was published in the September 2012 issue of Pragati)
Urumi, a Malayalam historical film released last year was set in 1502 CE, the year Vasco da Gama made his second voyage to India. The turning point in that movie is when Gama captures Miri- a ship filled with pilgrims returning from Mecca- off the coast of Kerala and barbarically murders 300 Muslims including women and children over five days. The rest of the movie is about how one of the boys, whose father was killed in that attack, gets his revenge during Gama’s third and final voyage. Though the movie was a work of fiction, filled with historical inaccuracies, it brought to attention an important point: Gama had an agenda much bigger than finding a new trading route.
Nigel Cliff’s book expands on that less mentioned detail. He argues that Gama was serving the apocalyptic agenda of King Manuel who wanted to find the Eastern Christians, destroy the power of Islam, and lead Portugal in conquering Jerusalem. This was essential for the Second Coming and the Last Judgement that was to follow. The voyage to Kerala was just one step in this plan.
15th century values
To understand the primary motivation behind Gama’s dangerous voyage circumnavigating Africa and across the Indian Ocean, we have to understand the state of the world in the 15th century. Portugal was ruled by a religious fanatic whose wedding gift to his wife was the expulsion of the Jews settled in Portugal. Since the year 1500 was approaching, he thought the apocalypse was around the corner and he had to conquer Jerusalem. Since Portugal neither had the wealth nor the power for such a task, the plan was to acquire wealth by entering the lucrative spice trade and gain power by forming an alliance with the Eastern Christians. Once the Islamic power was weakened- by eliminating them from the spice trade- the troops could march to Jerusalem and capture the Holy Land.
The Portuguese knew that India was a rich place from where all the spices came. They also knew that it was the home of Prester John, a supposedly Christian king who had unlimited precious metals and a vast army at his disposal. Once the alliance was formed with the Eastern Christians and their rich and powerful king, the march to Jerusalem would be the next logical step.
To put context into this obsession with capturing Jerusalem, Cliff starts off by examining the relation between Islam and Christianity. As a reaction to the violent expansion of Islam from the 8th century till the 10th, the Pope authorised the Crusades to recapture Jerusalem, which went on for centuries. The Crusades had to be halted following the Mongol invasion and the Black Death that followed, but the feelings behind them never really died out. Those feeling were revived following the fall of Constantinople, Christendom’s glorious city, and something had to be done urgently. For that Vasco da Gama set off to find a new route to India bearing the Crusader’s Cross- the one used by the Knights Templar- as his flag.
Disrupting the spice trade was not the first trick the Portuguese tried. After building a naval fleet, they conducted raiding missions down the coast of Africa, planting crosses wherever they landed. When that failed to yield sufficient revenues, they ventured into slave trade. Since this was a war against the Infidels and the unbelievers, it got the stamp of approval from the Pope who issues various Papal bulls and went so far as to divide the world between Portugal and Spain so that peace is maintained between the colonisers.
Apocalypse Now
After a terrifying voyage, Vasco da Gama’s fleet reached Calicut where he found a large number of Muslim traders. He also observed that the ruler belonged to some other religion. By his worldview- in which he had never encountered Hindus- Gama assumed that naturally the Zamorin had to be Christian. But the Zamorin was unimpressed by Gama and the gifts he bought. Gama kept away from the Muslims to be safe, but eventually was disappointed on two counts. First he assumed that the Eastern Christians would be delighted to see their Western counterparts and the united front would expel the Muslims. Second, he thought that Indians would hand over the spices in exchange for the trinkets they had bought but compared to the richness of Calicut, Gama looked like a beggar. Gama in turn blamed his failure on the Muslims, displayed some basic brutality, and returned back to Portugal where he was received as a hero.
Though Gama did not bring back spices or find Prester John, his voyage sent shock waves across Europe. Manuel wanted to ride on this wave of success and sent another mission under Pedro Cabral with a strong warning for the Muslim traders. Cabral wanted the Zamorin to expel all the Muslims traders or face the wrath of the empire. When their demands were not met, the Portuguese went on a rampage. The destroyed the Arab ships in the port and fired shots at the Zamorin’s palace causing him to flee. A later mission under Joao da Nova escalated the religious war and went back without much progress. Manuel needed a strong willed captain who would force the Indians into submission and for that Vasco da Gama was pressed into service once again and it resulted in the Miri incident.
This time the action was not to be restricted to the Malabar coast. Once force was used to subdue the Indians, the fleet would split into two. One part of the fleet would enforce a blockade of the Arab shipping to the Red Sea area and cripple Egypt’s economy. After Egypt was weakened, the Portuguese would sail up the Red Sea and meet land troops who would have marched across Egypt; together they would conquer Jerusalem. But this plan did not work quite as expected.
Gama once again asked his old nemesis, the Zamorin, to expel the Muslims and yet again the Zamorin refused to comply to the Portuguese pirates. An irate Gama went around hanging Muslims and firing cannons towards the coast. The dead people were mutilated and sent on boats off to the shore as a part of the shock and awe strategy. The Portuguese strength came from their naval superiority and since they did not have sufficient strength to fight the Zamorin’s troops, they left. This voyage was considered a great success compared to the others.
The next captain Francisco Alameda, dispensed with the niceties completely and precipitated such a crisis which resulted in major naval battle in the Arabian Sea. After attacking various African countries and butchering people there, Alameda reached Calicut. Remembering the Passion of Christ and motivated by a rousing speech by a priest, the Portuguese attacked Calicut leaving around 3600 dead. Meanwhile another Portuguese fleet cut off the Egyptian supply chain. Based in Muscat, they terrorised all around and took control over the Western destination ports of the Arab ships. The Egyptians, whose business was seriously affected, sent a fleet to the Indian Ocean which defeated the Portuguese, the first naval defeat for them in the Ocean.
The Colonisers
But the Egyptians were no match for the Portuguese; they scored and easy victory over them as well over the Zamorin and finally a fortress was built in Calicut. It looked as if Jerusalem was within grasp.In fact Manuel sent a fleet towards the Suez, but they came back without attacking Jerusalem. Once Goa became a lucrative market for the Portuguese, they were more interested in settling down and plundering the region by enforcing a pass system. Matters like forced conversions and setting up the Inquisition became more important than capturing Jerusalem.
Though the Malabar coast has been part of a global maritime network since the Roman empire, there was an explosion of trade since 1000 CE due to improved navigational aids, better ship building, better map making and new legal arrangements. Places like Quilon (Kollam), Melaka, Quanzhou, Futsat and Aden became the nerve centers of this network where people and goods moved with ease. According to Manmadhan Ullattil who wrote about the Hubs of the medieval trade (Pragati, June 2009), the arrival of the Portuguese changed the rules of the game as they used force to control trade and establish monopolies.
John Keay in “India: A History” has few lines about the Portuguese and Vasco da Gama; he mentions that when Portugal declared a Viceroy for India, it betrayed the true nature of their ambition. “Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World: From 1000 CE to the Present” (Third Edition) (Vol. 2) by Robert Tignor et. al which is used to teach world history at Princeton University, describes the Portuguese brutality in the Malabar coast. But both these books fail to make a connection between the Portuguese voyages to India and the Crusades. Cliff makes a valuable contribution by putting the piety and plunder of the spice trader into a global context.
Indian History Carnival – 58: Sir Edward Winter, Indian Spy, Mahatma Gandhi
- Sriram writes about the less known deposition of Governor Foxcroft by Sir Edward Winter in 1665
The moral tenor of the Fort was fairly lax with even the chaplain, Simon Smythe being a hard drinker. He was besides married to Winter’s niece. Together, the two hatched a plot and on the pretext of an argument at the Common Table in the Fort, Winter sought the impeachment of Foxcroft. Nothing came of this immediately beyond Winter storming into Foxcroft’s rooms early one morning. Convinced that a coup was at hand, Foxcroft ordered the arrest of Winter. But within 48 hours, Winter had won over the Captain of the Guard and more importantly, the latter’s wife. He was released and bided his time during which interval, the Captain, Lt. Chuseman, burst into Foxcroft’s rooms and in the ensuing duel, at least one Councillor was killed while Foxcroft, his son and another Councillor were wounded. Foxcroft and three others were arrested and Winter took possession of the Fort. That was in September 1665.
- Maddy has the fascinating tale of an Indian spy in Turkey following the first World War
- Baxter Wood has a review of Prof. Vinay Lal’s UCLA course titled Topics in Contemporary Indian History: The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. This was my opinion after listening to Prof. Lal talk about the dark skinned dasas in another course.
This is one of the strangest cases I have come across and perhaps one that is still not solved. On May 24th 1921, this Indian was hanged to death in Ankara, indicted of spying for the British and of a purported assassination attempt on Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Well, as it was to turn out, that was a turning point, and a reason for a total lack of Turkish support for the Indian independence and Khilafat movement in India. Later as it turned out, when the Ali brothers went to Turkey, they could not even get an audience with Mustafa Kemal, perhaps owing to the aborted plans of Saghir. At that point in history, it became a major event in Turkey and the nationalists made a big fuss of it, due to their own issues with Britain. It was a period when Indians in general were not too popular in Ankara as a large number of Punjabi’s and Gurkha’s were involved in the battles at Gallipoli and part of the Allied powers.
Vinay Lal covers many themes about Gandhi: Women, Religions, the West, the Body and his Mentors. But perhaps the most interesting thematic subject is about fasting. And it is presented in several places throughout the course. Twenty-five years ago Lal wrote a book about fasting. His mother’s critique was that the author of a book about fasting should actually try fasting. So Lal took an oath not to publish until he experienced fasting and, of course, the book has not been, nor will ever be published. You will have to get it here.
Not many entries this time. The next carnival will be up on Nov 15th. Send your nominations as a tweet to @varnam_blog or as a mail to varnam.blog @gmail
5000 year old cows
By 2000 BCE, the the Harappan maritime activity shifted to Gujarat. Around that time 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. These Bos Indicus, who reached Africa, met some Bos taurines and before you knew, sparks were flying, setting the African Savannah on fire. There is also evidence of the migration of zebus from Indus to Near East via Iran in the late third millennium BCE. Some of this zebu movement involved travel by boats along the Arabian coast and points to a trade on a much larger scale. Thus the transportation of a giraffe in 1405 by Zheng He’s fleet from Africa to China does not look that far fetched.[Trading Hubs of the Old World – Part 2]
While we know that Bos Indicus were important components of the Indo-African trade of 2000 BCE, we have new evidence of one of the oldest representations of these cows. These come from an excavation at Gilund, a site about 100 KM north of Udaipur. Gilund was part of the Ahar-Banas culture, and existed during the same period as the Harappans. In fact one of the earliest pieces of burned brick was found at Gilund.
The terracota figurines of the cows have the following characteristics
They are most often of fired terracotta, but there are also a number of unfired clay specimens. Nearly half of the collection is comprised of humped animals, interpreted as humped cattle, or Bos indicus .There is significant stylistic variety within the collection,for example, the way the face, legs and hump are shaped;the range in size; whether or not the artisan added such details as ears under the horns, or incised eyes, nose andmouth, etc. (Figure 3.3). In particular, the humped cattlefigurines share stylistic affinities with those recovered atAhar, Ojiyana and Purani Marmi. Similar humped cattle figurineshave also been reported from Mahidpur in MadhyaPradesh[The Gilund Project:Excavations in Regional Context (via e-mail from Carlos Aramayo)]
Another site, Ojiyana, too revealed such cow figurines and they have modeled udders. These are in fact the oldest representations of cows from that region.
Aleppo
Fire swept through the old central souk, or marketplace, of Aleppo, Syria, on Saturday, damaging a vast and well-preserved labyrinth of medieval storehouses, shops, schools and ornate courtyards as fierce clashes between security forces and insurgents vowing to carry out a “decisive battle” for the city continued.[Fire Sweeps Through 17th-Century Souk of Aleppo, City’s Soul]
The battle for Aleppo is not going very well. Guardian’s Ghaith Abdul-Ahad had a documentary on this in which he visited the rebel frontlines and found them disorganized. In an interview with NPR he said
“There is chaos, there is no military planning, there is no organization,” he says. “Most of the skirmishes happen like a game of cat and mouse: The tank is the cat. When the tank moves down street, the rebels disperse, run away, try to ambush the tank, they go from a corner to a corner. Meantime, there is shelling [and] mortars raining on them.”[Journalist Examines Chaotic Fighting In Syria]
In one of the history courses I am doing, there is a mention of Aleppo in the section on overland commerce and the Ottoman expansion in the fifteenth century. By this time Vasco da Gama had reached Calicut and Columbus had led the way for the exploitation of the Americas. But that did not halt the overland caravan trading completely; the land routes that linked the Europe to India and China were still active. One of the cities that thrived along this route was Aleppo because it was at a prime location: at the end of the caravan route from India and Baghdad. It was bigger than Damascus and Homs and by the 16th century, one of the most important commercial centers in the region.
Now a huge fire has destroyed those souks
The souks of Aleppo, a maze of vaulted passageways with shops that sell everything from foods to fabrics, perfumes, spices and artisan souvenirs, are a tactical prize for the combatants. They lie beneath the city’s towering citadel where activists say regime troops and snipers have taken up positions.
Aleppo’a souks are not the only Syrian cultural treasures to have fallen victim to the violence following the country’s uprising and the crackdown by the Assad regime.
Some of the country’s most significant sites, including centuries-old fortresses, have been caught in the crossfire in battles between regime forces and rebels. Others have been turned into military bases. In Homs, where up to 7,000 are estimated to have died, historic mosques and souk areas have also been smashed and artefacts stolen.[Medieval Aleppo souks destroyed by fire as battle rages in Syria]
Reference
- Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World: From 1000 CE to the Present (Third Edition) (Vol. 2) by Robert Tignor et al
Yoga Gloves and Socks
If lack of Yoga gloves and socks were preventing you from doing the “downward dog”, help is here.
Mrs. Yeshua
Recently Karen King of Harvard Divinity School made public a a fourth century papyrus which contains the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’ ” followed by “she will be able to be my disciple.” This has triggered a debate on if this means Jesus was really married, on if the papyrus is fake and what not.
The provenance of the papyrus is mysterious. It came from an anonymous collector who acquired it in the 60s from Communist East Germany. The fragment itself is quite small
The fragment is some four centimeters tall and eight centimeters wide. Its rough edges suggest that it had been cut out of a larger manuscript; some dealers, keener on profit than preservation, will dice up texts for maximum return. The presence of writing on both sides convinced the scholars that it was part of a codex—or book—rather than a scroll. [The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus]
There is one argument which goes that this is a fake because the writing seem to be similar to the ones in The Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic gospel discovered in Nag Hammadi. There is also another argument that even though the papyrus itself could be old, the ink may not be. Harvard University journal itself says that the research is unverified.
That said, the appearance of the papyrus has produced lots of back and forth which gives us a glimpse of the Jesus movement in the early periods. For example, the wife of Jesus theory is not something new, but something which has existed in other texts as well.
But let’s keep in mind that we actually already have a text that mentions Jesus’ wife. It is the Gospel of Philip. We already know that there were some early Christians, in particular the Valentinian Gnostics, who taught that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ consort or wife. They wrote about it in the Gospel of Philip.
…
The new gospel fragment supports this Valentinian picture. If it turns out to be an authentic gospel fragment from antiquity, it likely came from a page of yet another Valentinian gospel that contained sayings of Jesus. Valentinian Christians were very prolific and they preserved an entire sayings tradition of counter-memories that supported their creative metaphysical outlook and Gnostic spirituality [Did Jesus have a wife?]
Smithsonian has a long backstory of the papyrus. From that:
Though King makes no claims for the value of the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” as, well, a marriage certificate, she says it “puts into greater question the assumption that Jesus wasn’t married, which has equally no evidence,” she told me. It casts doubt “on the whole Catholic claim of a celibate priesthood based on Jesus’ celibacy. They always say, ‘This is the tradition, this is the tradition.’ Now we see that this alternative tradition has been silenced.”
“What this shows,” she continued, “is that there were early Christians for whom that was simply not the case, who could understand indeed that sexual union in marriage could be an imitation of God’s creativity and generativity and it could be spiritually proper and appropriate.”
In her paper, King speculates that the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” may have been tossed on the garbage heap not because the papyrus was worn or damaged, but “because the ideas it contained flowed so strongly against the ascetic currents of the tides in which Christian practices and understandings of marriage and sexual intercourse were surging.”[The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus]
(Credits: Image via Wikipedia)
The Nataraja of Netherlands
Apparently, the largest bronze Nataraja from the Chola dynasty does not live in India, but in Netherlands. Recently they x-rayed the statue and found something interesting
Research recently revealed that the Rijksmuseum’s monumental bronze statue of Shiva was cast in solid bronze. The thousand year-old temple statue was X-rayed, along with the lorry transporting it, in the most powerful X-ray tunnel for containers of the Rotterdam customs authority. It is the first research of its kind on a museological masterpiece.
The statue was created ca. 1100 in South India. Each temple had its own set of bronze statues which were carried through the city during major temple festivals. This gives the statues their name: utsavamurti, which is Sanskrit for ‘festival images’. Chola bronzes were considered masterpieces of Indian bronze casting.
Anna Ślączka, curator of South Asian Art, comments, ‘We had expected that the statue itself would prove to be solid, but it was a complete surprise to discover that the aureole and the demon under Shiva’s feet are also solid.’ [Dancing Shiva X-rayed (via Michel Danino]
To see the full image, click on the downward pointing white arrow on the Nataraja on the sidebar.
Indian History Carnival – 57: Madras Mail, Kalapani, Greater Magadha, Asom Dynasty
- Sriram writes about Charles Lawson, who ran the powerful newspaper The Madras Mail from 1868 CE
- Maddy writes about the voyage of TSS Maharaja which took Moplahs to Kalapani
- Jayarava has a review of Johannes Bronkhorst’s Greater Magadha (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 2 South Asia). He seems to rely a lot on Prof. Michael Witzel’s world view, but here are some excerpts
- Fëanor writes how the 600 years old Asom dynasty came to an end
The Madras Mail, founded in 1868, was the true representative of commercial interests. Lawson was close to most of the top-ranking business houses of First Line Beach and after a brief stint in rented offices on Second Line Beach, The Madras Mail moved to the first floor of A D’ Rozario, Auctioneers at 6, First Line Beach. This building, no longer in existence was the southern neighbour of the State Bank building. Lawson took an active interest in the affairs of the Madras Chamber of Commerce of which he was elected Secretary on 24th November 1862. The Chamber had till then not been lucky in the matter of Secretaries with the incumbents leaving to take up Government and other assignments. Lawson was to be Secretary for 30 long years.
The story of the movement of people to Andaman is a sad and cruel one; especially the initial century of its existence, as Andaman was to serve as the English Penal colony for Indians who acted against them. The English had chosen isolation to be a part of incarceration and in early days many a white convict was transported to Australia. As far as the Indians were concerned, the Andaman islands and the Hijli camp (near Kharagpur) were particularly infamous and followed the earlier days when they were sent to Singapore and a few other places like Botany bay in Australia, where they were tasked with clean up as well as hard labor (some even say that ‘klings’ is a derogatory usage for Indians that came from that period due to the sound of the chains that Indian convicts wore). Interestingly, the aspect of isolation was arrived at as people abhorred the prospect of back breaking labor in faraway places from which there was no return (for lifers), especially in the case of Hindu middle class caste conscious political prisoners not used to work or doing things like crossing the black waters or Kala Pani, against the tenets of early religious texts (see my article on ocean crossing taboo).
Another plus is that Bronkhorst has made it abundantly clear that Buddhism can no longer be studied in isolation, but is a branch of Indology. Ignorance of archaeology and material culture (the gist of Greg Schopen’s critique of Buddhist studies as a subject) is no longer acceptable. The Late Vedic literature–the Epics, Early Upaniṣads, Brāhmaṇas, Dharmasūtras, Dharmaśastras and even the Gṛhyasūtras–is starting to look more relevant in understanding early Buddhism. Early Buddhism existed in a context and we have been overlooking, or over-simplifying this context for too long. The downside of this is that an already complex subject appears to become an order of magnitude more complex. And this at a time when we are just beginning to make use of the Chinese parallels to the Pāli Nikāyas and discover the influence of Central Asia in transmitting Buddhist to the East. And this also at a time when Buddhist studies is dying out as an academic subject in the UK.
The biggest threat to Asom came from the Mughals who were rampaging across eastern India at the same time. Unlike the Hindu kingdoms of the rest of the subcontinent which were worn out after centuries of warfare against them, the Ahom were fresh and dominant. Given their organisation as a mobilizer of manpower rather than ownership of land, the Ahom could raise armies at moment’s notice, a capability that surprised the Mughals. During the reign of Jahangir, there were almost annual battles between the two throughout the jungles around the Brahmaputra. The Ahom were expert at guerrilla tactics, demoralising the Mughals who called them ‘black and loathsome in appearance’ and Assam as ‘a land of witches and magic’.
Just 4 posts for this month. More on October 15th. If you have any links for the carnival send it to me at varnam.blog @gmail or as a tweet to @varnam_blog
Indian History Carnival – 56: The 19th century
- The Royal Asiatic Society Blog has few images depicting the nine avatars of Vishnu which are from 19th century Rajasthan.
- What is the connection between Swati Tirunal, Irvivarman Thampi, Sugandhavalli ,Vadivelu, Bharatnatyam, and Mohinitattam? In a fascinating post Maddy explains
- Did a tsunami hit Calicut in 1847? CHF investigates
- Parag Tope’s Operation Red Lotus has a section which describes why English East India Company should be considered as a drug cartel due to the fact that they cultivated and exported opium from India to China. Another good book which goes into the details of this trade is Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. Ptak Science Books has a post which shows some images from the 29 July 1882 issue of the Scientific American which shows the magnitude of this business.
- In the June 2010 issue of Pragati, I wrote about the ice trade between United States and India. In this post, Sriram writes about the ice factories of Chennai.
The work carried out by the quartet on Bharata Natyam encouraged the young king Swati Tirunal, who now wanted Vadivelu to work on the extant but unpopular form of Mohiniattam in Kerala. Together they crafted a revival and able support was provided by two more people, Uncle Iravivarman Thampi and a lovely dusky toned dancer. I will not get into the details of Swati Tirunal and his life, but suffices to say that here was a well educated and willing student, waiting for new teachers and new ideas. The dancers knew how to convert the ideas into movements. The king however was a man in a hurry, probably he knew he had only some more years left in his life and so he wanted to experience it all, the role of a ruler, the beauty of dance and the woman’s sensuous role in it as well as the woman herself, fighting the infighting in the large royal family and keeping the colonial rulers and administrators at bay. Was there time for love in his life?
Further south the waves damaged the mouth of the Kotta (Moorad, Vatakara) river and destroyed the Palliyad dam and the cultivation above it over two miles from the mouth of the river. The floods from inland breached the new work on the Conolly canal at Calicut. At Parappanangadi and Tanur private persons suffered much loss from the sudden rise of the sea. The tsunami altered the topography permanently in Chavakkad, where, Logan records, the sea forced a new and deep opening into the Chavakkad backwater and broke with much strength on the Ennamakkal dam…. The description leaves no room to doubt that it was indeed a tsunami . Considering the lack of proper communication those days, it is likely that the damage – particularly in terms of loss of lives and destruction of property – was much more widespread but was not properly documented.
They are iconic images of a devastating trade and were frequently reproduced over many decades–mostly not for the “devastating” part of what I just wrote, but more for the industrial/business appreciation end, as was the case with this article in SciAmerican. The British interest in the trade stretched back two cneturies earlier, and of course the use of opium bends far back into Neolithic times. Sherill’s scenes are all from the opium receiving/production/distribution center in Patna, India, which claimed to produce some 13,000,000 pounds of opium juice annually, shipping the stuff out to Bengal and then on to China.
The Madras Ice Company was floated in 1865, with CA Ainslie of Binny, John Charles Loch of Parry and the legendary lawyer John Bruce Norton as its Directors. Despite its high profile origin it was a non-starter. By the 1870s, the Royal Navy showed that ice could be made using what was called the steam process. The International Ice Company was established in Madras in 1874. Nothing much is known about it, beyond the fact that it killed the American import.
The carnival is expected to be on schedule from September onwards. Also there is a possibility that blogging might resume once again after a break of few months. The next carnival will be up on Sept 15th. Send your nominations to varnam.blog @gmail. Thanks to Sandeep V and Feanor.
Indian History Carnival – 55: Rebirth, Zamorin, Alasinga Perumal, Midday lunch, Will Durant
- After writing about the how the notion of Kamma changed over time, Jayarava writes about the concept of rebirth
- Where do you think the Zamorin’s palace was and how do you think it looked like? Maddy draws an image based on notes from various visitors
- One person who worked behind the scenes in sending Swami Vivekananda to USA was M.C.Alasinga Perumal. Karthik Bhat has that story
- Sriram writes about the person who pioneered the mid day lunch scheme in schools in Madras
- L K Advani’s blog mentions Will Durant’s A Case for India in which he wrote against the British. Advani quotes Durant’s following lines
Contrarily those who seek to deny that rebirth was part of the original teaching don’t have a leg to stand on. Rebirth is prominent in the older hagiographical accounts like the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, and in the older parts of the Sutta Nipāta. Rebirth is quite obviously an important part of Buddhism in the earliest records we have. The idea that rebirth is somehow in the background, or was added later, is insupportable based on current evidence. That rebirth no longer seems plausible is an entirely different proposition. And one that creates a dilemma that I have no wish to underplay. We have yet to really work out the implications of this news, though it is the news. Understanding that our doctrines have always been quite changeable and responsive to social change, seems to me to be an important factor in loosening our grip on traditional doctrines with a view to letting them go. Everything changes. Resisting changes causes suffering. The only way forward for Buddhism is, well, forward
And with all that background, let us summarize how the palace would have looked.
The palace grounds were enclosed by low walls with wooden inlays, there were perhaps some moats around the walls (I doubt it), that the walls had four gates and were well guarded. The palace was in the middle and the courtyard housed other buildings such as the women’s quarters, the main meeting halls etc. the roads within were lined with tress, ponds and so on, and some of the buildings were multistoried with tiled roofs. There were bathing ponds within the palace and outside, the Manachira tank provided water supply to the large numbers of people employed. The manachira grounds hosted competitions and bazaars often. Close by was the Tali temple, the mint and the stables.
A thought then struck Alasinga that Swami Vivekananda could be sent to Chicago as the Hindu representative. On this idea being put forth before him, Swami Vivekananda readily agreed, having earlier been requested by various dignitaries such as the Maharaja of Mysore and the Raja of Ramnad to travel to the West and propagate the ideals of Hinduism. Soon, preparations started in full earnest for the travel of Swami Vivekananda to the West. A subscription committee was formed under the leadership of Alasinga to raise funds, which did not always come easily. Alasinga even had to resort to door to door begging at times to raise the money. Soon, a princely sum of Rs.500 was collected. However, this sum was redistributed as Swami Vivekananda had second thoughts about his participation in the Parliament, as he took as a bad omen the fact that the Raja of Ramnad had failed to pay up the money promised by him for the purpose. Alasinga was disheartened that his efforts had gone waste.
Among his first observations was that several of the poor children of the George Town area did not come to school. He also observed that among those who attended, several remained hungry during the lunch break, as the parents could not afford to send any food. Perhaps taking a leaf from the Chennapuri Annadana Samajam, which had begun sending cooked food to schools, he decided that the Hindu Theological would have its own kitchen. He seeded it with his savings and later aggressively canvassed for support from the parents of well-to-do students. The Deenabandhu Sangam was formed shortly thereafter which took on the task of providing the noon meal and also clothes to indigent students.
“The final element in the real caste system of India is the social treatment of the Hindus by the British. The latter may be genial Englishmen when they arrive, gentlemen famous as lovers of fair play; but they are soon turned, by the example of their leaders and the poison of irresponsible power, into the most arrogant and over-bearing bureaucracy on earth. “Nothing can be more striking,” said a report to Parliament, in 1830, “than the scorn with which the people have been practically treated at the hands of even those who were actuated by the most benevolent motives”. Sunderland reports that the British treat the Hindus as strangers and foreigners in India, in a manner “quite as unsympathetic, harsh and abusive as was ever seen among the Georgia and Louisiana planters in the old days of American slavery”.
Sorry for the delay. The next issue will be out on Independence Day. Thanks to Sandeep V and Feanor for their contributions.