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Tag: history

Four Moments that Show how the 70s was the Decade of Smugglers

Posted on by Penguin India

Sufi is the story of two boys who grew up in Dongri, Mumbai.

 

One of them, Iqbal Rupani, aided and abetted by a corrupt policeman, is drawn towards criminal activities in his teens. As he becomes powerful and influential as a racketeer and smuggler, he creates a puritan code of conduct for himself: no drinking, no smoking and no murders. He comes to be known as ‘Sufi’ because of his principles and philosophical manner of speaking. The other boy, Aabid Surti, grows up to become a famous author.

How did the lives of these two boys, which began on such a similar note, diverge so drastically? This book presents an astonishing real-life story, with the sweep and scale of Kane and Abel, told by one of India’s most beloved storytellers.

Here are some true-to-life examples from the book that bring to light the era of smuggling!

 

‘The boatmen lifted the crates from the steam launch and handed them over to men who passed them on to others standing in a row. The crates were loaded on to the truck, Lastly, an unconscious Iqbal was also hauled out in the same way as the crates’

 

‘The procession of three vehicles crossed the bridge to enter Panvel and turned towards Bombay – past a tea stall where a waiting customs official in mufti noted down the registration numbers of all three vehicles and, barely able to conceal his smile, headed for the nearest phone booth’

 

‘In this so-called legal trade, unlike the criminal world of smuggling, a person’s word did not carry any weight. This was a cut-throat business. Those whom he(Iqbal) had dismissed as uneducated, unsophisticated Marathas were in fact the prawn mafia.’

 

‘Those days, the government had imposed a 240 per cent customs duty on the import of stainless steel. Understandably, a rise in customs duty led to an increase in price. And when the price increases, it boosts smuggling.’

 

Read Sufi by Aabid Surti for a true-to-life story of Kane and Abel!

The Lost Art of Scripture – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Today we see the Quran being used by some to justify war and terrorism, the Torah to deny Palestinians the right to live in the Land of Israel, and the Bible to condemn homosexuality and contraception. The holy texts at the centre of all religious traditions are often employed selectively to underwrite arbitrary and subjective views. They are believed to be divinely ordained; they are claimed to contain eternal truths.

In our increasingly secular world, holy texts are at best seen as irrelevant, and at worst as an excuse to incite violence, hatred and division. So what value, if any, can scripture hold for us today? And if our world no longer seems compatible with scripture, is it perhaps because its original purpose has become lost?

In her book The Lost Art of Scripture, Karen Armstrong, a world authority on religious affairs, shows in this fascinating journey through millennia of history, this narrow reading of scripture is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Read the excerpt from the first chapter here!

The fall of Adam and Eve is one of the most famous stories of the Hebrew Bible. Yahweh, the divine creator, placed the first human beings in Eden, where there was every kind of tree, enticing to look at and good to eat, with the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden”. But Yahweh gave Adam a stern warning: he could eat the fruit of all these trees except the fruit of the tree of knowledge,’ for on the day you eat of it, you shall most surely die’. But, alas, Eve succumbed to the temptation of the serpent and she and Adam were condemned to a life of hard labour and suffering that could end only in death.

This story is so deeply embedded in the Judaeo- Christian consciousness that it is, perhaps, surprising to learn that in fact it is steeped in the Mesopotamian Wisdom traditions that embodied the ethical ideals that bound the ruling aristocracy together. Civilisation began in Sumer in what is now Iraq in about 3500 BCE. The Sumerians were the first to commandeer the agricultural surplus grown by the community in the fertile plain that lay between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and create a privileged ruling class. By about 3000 BCE, there were twelve cities in the Mesopotamian plain, each supported by produce grown by peasants in the surrounding countryside. The Sumerian aristocrats and their retainers – bureaucrats, soldiers, scribes, merchants and household servants – appropriated between half and two-thirds of the crop grown by the peasants, who were reduced to serfdom. They left fragmentary records of their misery: ‘ The poor man is better dead than alive,’ one lamented. Sumer had devised the system of structural inequity that would prevail in every single state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilisation.

Adam and Eve, however, lived at the beginning of time, before the Earth yielded brambles and thistles and humans had to wrest their food from the recalcitrant soil with sweat on their brow. Their life in Eden was idyllic until Eve met the serpent, who is described as arum, the most ‘subtle’, ‘shrewd’ and ‘wise’ of the animals.’ Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?’ the serpent asked her. Eve replied that only the tree of knowledge was prohibited on pain of instant death. The arum serpent’s prediction of what would happen to Adam and Eve drew heavily on the terminology of Sumerian Wisdom: No! you will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.’ Of course, Eve succumbed: she wanted to transcend her humanity and become godlike, The couple did not, in fact, die as soon as they ate the forbidden fruit, as Yahweh had threatened. Instead, as the serpent promised,’the eyes of both were opened’ – words that recall the exclamation of a Mesopotamian student to his teacher:

Master-god, who [shapes] humanity, you are my god!

You have opened my eyes as if I were a puppy;

You have formed humanity within me!

Get your copy of The Lost Art of Scripture today

You might have misunderstood Muhammad Bin Tughlaq all your life. Read why in these 6 points!

Posted on by Penguin India

Muhammad bin Tughlaq – Tale of a Tyrant by Anuja Chandramouli is an attempt to recreate the life and times of Muhammad bin Tughlaq and clamber into the chaotic headspace of one who was considered to be a “mad monarch”.

Modern historians concur that he has been terribly misunderstood, and so-called scholarly accounts from the likes of Ibn Battuta, Barani and Isami reek of bias. He was exceedingly unpopular among the followers of his own faith for daring to be tolerant to his subjects who belonged to other religions, failing to zealously guard the principles of Islam from idolatry and heresy, and raising non-believers to high posts instead of dealing with them using the savagery he was infamous for.

This listicle attempts to demystify Muhammad bin Tughlaq:

The challenges of ruling an unwieldy empire where Tughlaq’s subjects in the various provinces had their own language and customs, and all of whom were uniformly proud and prickly about their roots, proved too much for him.

 

In this fictional retelling, Anuja Chandramouli, one of India’s best mythology writers, reimagines Muhammad bin Tughlaq‘s life and times in incredible detail to bring to life the man behind the monarch.

Know Anuja Chandramouli, the author of ‘Muhammad Bin Tughlaq’

Posted on by Penguin India

When his father dies, Prince Jauna Khan succeeds to the throne of Delhi as Muhammad bin Tughlaq. His reign will prove to be epic and bloody, but unsurpassed in splendour, innovation and defeat. A formidable strategist and remarkable scholar, the Sultan will go down in history for his brutality as well as his brilliance, unfairly remembered only as a cruel tyrant who might have been raving mad.

In Muhammad Bin Tughlaq, Anuja Chandramouli, one of India’s best mythology writers, reimagines Muhammad bin Tughlaq’s life and times in incredible detail to bring to life the man behind the monarch.

Here are 6 interesting facts about the author:

————–

Her highly acclaimed debut novel, Arjuna: Saga of a Pandava Warrior-Prince, was named by Amazon India as one of the top five books in the Indian Writing category for 2013. No wonder she swears Arjuna is the great love of her life. Always.

*

Anuja Chandramouli’s articles, short stories and book reviews appear in various publications like the New Indian Express and The Hindu. She says she appreciates the bouquets and doesn’t mind the brickbats or trolls just as long as readers don’t complain to her mom.

*

Anuja regularly conducts story-telling sessions and workshops on creative writing, empowerment and mythology in schools, colleges and various other platforms. She says she is grateful to all who listen to her (or pretend to) and refrain from pelting her with rotten eggs (which apparently is a recurring nightmare).

*

Anuja is a student of classical dance and yoga. She blames the former for her hips and the latter for her inability to sock the deserving in the jaw.

*
Anuja’s first novel along with the second, Kamadeva: The God of Desire and the third, Shakti: The Divine Feminine are getting translated into Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali. The author hopes to learn the above mentioned languages by then, and says she has made progress with the cuss words.

*

In 2017, Anuja achieved what many authors dream of – three books in a row released by different publishers. The author is grateful for the love and accolades she received for the triplets but wishes she would lose the baby weight already.

Anuja Chandramouli’s latest novel, Muhammad Bin Tughlaq: Tale of a Tyrant  is AVAILABLE NOW!

 

10 Facts that Portray a Thriving Christian Culture in India Prior to Portuguese Imperialism

Posted on by Penguin India
‘Here are many and boundless marvels; in this First India begins another world.’

Jordanus Catalani, the first bishop of the Church of Rome in India, introduced the northern part of the subcontinent to his readers in fourteenth-century Europe in this manner. Two hundred years before the advent of Vasco da Gama, Western Christianity had already arrived in India, finding among its diverse people and faiths the Church of the East at home since the beginning of Christianity.

Siddhartha Sarma’s gripping narrative traces the cross-cultural trade of Antiquity which established the roots for the spread of Christianity in the Apostolic Age, across the intervening centuries to the alliance of Roman Catholic Church and the Portuguese crown which pursued an imperial policy.

Carpenters and Kings is a tale of Christianity and, equally, a glimpse of the India which has always existed: a multicultural land where every faith has found a home through the centuries.

The presence of Jewish communities in the western coastal region of India went back to the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

 The first Jewish communities in India are likely to have established themselves in coastal cities in the north-west around the beginning of the fifth century BCE, during the expansion of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Eventually, Jewish diasporic groups would settle along the Konkan, Malabar and Coromandel coasts. These, the oldest of India’s Jewish communities, are known as the Cochin Jews. But there have been others down the centuries, particularly after the formation of the Jewish diaspora following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Roman Empire in 70 CE.

The Acts of Thomas, which was considered Scripture by early Christians of both Asia and Europe, describe the miracles of the apostle Thomas in India.

‘Send me where you want, but send me somewhere else. Not to India.’ Thus begins The Acts of Thomas, an account of the coming of the apostle Thomas to the subcontinent. Tasked with spreading the word of Christ among the Indians, a reluctant Thomas is finally compelled to travel to the subcontinent as a carpenter. In India, according to The Acts, he preaches among the people, heals the sick and converts royal families before being martyred. While not an account of history, The Acts does convey an idea of how Jews, Christians and other people of West Asia thought of the polytheistic Indians in that early period of Christianity. India was therefore a vital part of the early Christian imagination of the known world.

The slow spread of Christianity among Jewish communities in India in the Apostolic Age itself.

By the end of the Apostolic Age, Christianity had spread among Jewish communities and Gentiles in Greece and other parts of the Roman Empire including the Italian Peninsula and Egypt, besides Persia and north-western India, but perhaps no farther than the coastal areas of the subcontinent. As the ecclesiastical structures to minister to these communities grew, it would have been difficult for smaller communities of Christians in the interiors of India to be closely connected to centres like Edessa in Mesopotamia, where The Acts of Thomas was written and where the remains of the apostle found a final resting place. In coastal India, the first Christians were almost certainly converts from Judaism. There might not even have been a conscious break from the religion of their ancestors. Conversion by Indian Jews to Christianity at that point would have been part of internal religious reform within Jewish communities, led by baptizing cults. This happened in the Middle-East in that period as well.

The famed tale of the Christian prince Josaphat and his conversion by the hermit Barlaam, appears to be based on the tale of the Buddha.

Jataka stories percolated from India to the Sassanid Persian Empire in the sixth century CE. By the 11th century, these stories had circulated in Europe, where eminent personages of the Church and ordinary Christians believed that Prince Josaphat, based on the prince who became the Buddha, had been a Christian. The tale of Josaphat and the supposedly Christian monk Barlaam became one of the first bestsellers of the age of printing, with editions of the legend selling more copies than the Bible. Barlaam and Josaphat became the most famous and lauded Indians in Europe in the Middle Ages and were canonized by both the Latin and Greek Churches. By the time the Portuguese arrived in India, there was a great deal of curiosity about what the Indians thought of the two men.

The author of The Christian Topography, Cosmas ‘Indicopleustes’ found thriving Christian communities in Konkan and Malabar in the sixth century.

 Cosmas’s reputation among later scholars was so indelibly tied with his visit to India that he became known as ‘Indicopleustes’, the sailor to India. The old ports of India were as vibrant as ever, and there was still a vast market for western goods. Sailing south from Bharuch, Cosmas arrived at the town of Kalyan where he found a resident Christian community with a bishop ordained and sent from Persia. Syrian Christians had a well-entrenched ecclesiastical order in the coastal cities of northern Konkan. In ‘the country of Male’, that is the Malabar Coast, Cosmas found both pepper and a church of respectable size. He also found an established Christian community in Sri Lanka.

 Tibetan Buddhist texts dating from the eighth to the ninth centuries mention ‘Jesus the Messiah’.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a sealed cave in the region of Dunhuang in western China was found to contain a treasure trove of Tibetan manuscripts from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, which reveal the impact of Nestorian Christianity on Tibetan Buddhism. One of the manuscripts, dated from the late eighth to the early ninth centuries, tells the reader to prepare for the End of Days, when ‘the god known as Jesus the Messiah, who acts as Vajrapani and Sakyamuni’ will return. This ‘judge who sits at the right hand of God’ will arrive and teach yoga to believers, who are told not to fear any demons or malevolent spirits. For Tibetan Buddhists of this period, Christ was supposed to return and fulfill the functions of Buddha Maitreya during the End Times.

The writings of Giovanni of Montecorvino have extensive notes on the Deccan and on the existing Christian communities.

In 1291, Giovanni of Montecorvino, a Franciscan friar, was directed to travel to the East from Persia. Starting from the city of Tabriz, Giovanni travelled to the Persian coast and then by sea to India, where he formally established the Latin Church. Giovanni spent thirteen months in India preaching among Syrian Christians, whom he found in abundance along the western coast, and the Hindus. He spoke of his favourable impressions of the land and the people.

 The strange case of the Four Martyrs of Thane, the most well-known historical Christian martyrs in India in the Middle Ages, also shows how the first Western Christian travellers to India came in contact with the resident Syrian Christians.

Three Franciscan monks and a lay European, Demetrius, arrived in India in 1317 and were hosted by the Syrian Christian community of Thane. The man at whose house the Franciscans were staying beat up his wife after a domestic quarrel. The woman complained to the local Muslim judge or ‘qadi’ against her husband and added that she had four male witnesses to the crime, monks from Persia. The qadi called for the Franciscans and Demetrius. The hearing then seems to have digressed into a religious debate between the qadi and other learned men present there, and the Franciscans. The qadi asked them what their view was of the Prophet, at which Thomas, one of the Franciscans, made some derogatory remarks against him. The court declared them guilty of blasphemy and they were sentenced to death.

 The writings of Jordanus Catalani, a Dominican friar from southern France which describe a largely tolerant Hindu society.

Jordanus, who originally arrived in India with the Franciscans who were martyred, spent more than a decade afterwards travelling in western and southern India. From his travels emerged the Mirabilia Descripta, the most detailed and scholarly account of India by a European in the Middle Ages. He found the Hindus welcoming towards Christian missionaries and never feared for his safety while preaching among them. In fact, missionaries would be treated with warmth and respect by Hindus across the land, and their safety would be ensured. Whenever a Hindu chose to be baptized, the people or the authorities would not create any hindrance or persecute either the convert or the missionary. This freedom, said the Dominican, was common to Hindu and Mongol societies and among other people east of Persia in his time. Jordanus met Indian Christians and discovered the deep roots of the Church of the East in the subcontinent. He would eventually be ordained the first bishop of the Church of Rome in India, with his seat at Kollam in what is Kerala today. Over the remainder of the 14th century, dozens of Christian monks and scholars travelled to India or through the subcontinent on their way to China, and wrote about Indian society.

 The Papal Bull of Pope Nicholas V seemed to have considered India as a Christian nation prior to the Portuguese arrival in Kozhikode and the beginning of European colonialism.

In 1454, Nicholas issued a second bull, the Romanus Pontifex, which expanded on the earlier Dum Diversas. The Portuguese were charged with exploring the seas and finding a route to India, ‘whose people are said to worship Christ’, and to convince the Indians to join an alliance with Europe against the Muslims. Nicholas and his advisers seem to have completely misread Church history on the situation in India, and assumed that Indians were mostly Christian.

Get your copy of Carpenters and Kings today!

Chanakya and the Art of War-Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Each and every one of us wants to become successful. We aim to fight and win in businesses, careers, relationships and, ultimately, in life. However, most of us fail to reach our full potential because of various speed breakers.

In Chanakya and the Art of War, Radhakrishnan Pillai decodes the war secrets of Chanakya as relevant to our personal and professional lives. Be it an army fighting enemy soldiers across the border, the police encountering internal challenges, a politician who wants to win an election, or the common man fighting for survival, Chanakya has a plan for every situation. In the game of life, Chanakya teaches you the winning strategies by putting into practice the Art of War.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

—
We are constantly at war.

It may be an external war—at our workplaces, our homes, amongst friends, relatives and/or with the government and its systems.

It may be an internal war—inside our heads, with time, with decisions, with what is right and what is wrong.

This is unavoidable when we live in a world full of different people and different views. From the day we are born to the day we die, the external or internal wars will continue. From womb to tomb, we will always face difficult choices.

After a point, everyone realizes that they cannot walk away from such wars. Everyone has to fight—some win, some lose. This is where the difference in our attitude towards the war becomes known. We either accept defeat, or fight on to emerge a winner.

Most of us often compromise and give up. It is a good feeling, although temporary, that there was no bloodshed, that we avoided facing an extreme situation. But later, when we sit down and analyse, we realize that we have actually lost the war in the name of compromise.

The problem continues to exist. Sooner than later, it re-emerges in a different way. The quick-fix of compromise is temporary in nature because we have not fixed the leak. The tooth now requires an extraction. That one rotten apple has already spoilt the whole bunch.

We must make sure we win the war once and for all, rather than be under the illusion that a compromise has closed the issue.

The art of winning a war can be learnt by understanding some rules and then applying them in a practical manner to real-life situations. There are various formulae and techniques. Just because we have never been exposed to a war does not mean the ‘art of war’ is not meant for us.

Swami Tejomayanandaji, the spiritual giant from Chinmaya Mission, says: ‘If you don’t stand up for something, you will fall for everything.’

True that.

Are we all just living a life of compromise and adjustment? Have we become so weak that we cannot even voice our views? Have we forgotten the skills of negotiations and strategy?

Let us not simply allow life to happen to us, let us make life happen according to our wishes. We can decide what we want, and yes, we can emerge a winner. The good news is that there is a method and a system to do this.

It starts with building some basic leadership qualities. Yes, the answer lies here.

Leaders are strong men and women who stood up with conviction, squared their shoulders and faced the challenges that came their way. They were the only hope when others around them felt hopeless. They had nothing else but tremendous will power. World history is never complete without the stories of such great leaders from various nations and backgrounds. Initially, they were ordinary people, but their extraordinary leadership qualities made them shine in situations that were challenging and difficult.

Today, the life stories of such leaders guide us. They inspire us. They bring hope and possibilities. They are the guiding beacons of societies. Their stories must be told to our children. They should be discussed at dinner tables, their books should be read by all, and more research should be done on these great men and women.

Emerging as a winner in war is not just the work of the military and armed forces. It can be part of our basic nature. If every individual is taught the art of war, she/ he will be better equipped to focus on the means and the ends towards which they are working so hard. Winning a war requires many skills. Studying our opponent, understanding human psychology, the right timing and place, keeping motivation levels up—all these and more.

If we master the art of war, we can be successful in every field of life.

Chanakya and the Art of War  draws upon lessons from the great teacher, philosopher and strategist Chanakya’s masterpiece, Arthashastra, which can help us overcome those speed breakers to become innovative and influential and realize our true potential. AVAILABLE NOW.

An Excerpt from ‘The English Maharani’ on Queen Victoria’s Bicentenary

Posted on by Penguin India

The English Maharani by Miles Taylor charts the remarkable effects India had on Queen Victoria as well as the pivotal role she played in India. Drawing on official papers and an abundance of poems, songs, diaries and photographs, Taylor challenges the notion that Victoria enjoyed only ceremonial power and that India’s loyalty to her was without popular support. On the contrary, the rule of the queen-empress penetrated deep into Indian life and contributed significantly to the country’s modernisation, both political and economic.

As the world commemorates Queen Victoria’s bicentenary today, here’s an excerpt from the book:

Victoria and Albert collected Indian exhibits of their own in the early 1850s, in the form of adopted royal children. There were two: Princess Gouramma, daughter of Chikka Virarajendra, the Raja of Coorg (Kodagu), and the Maharaja Duleep Singh, who been taken into custody by the British in 1849. Queen Victoria was godmother to many infants, including the African American Sara Bonetta in 1851, and, from New Zealand, the son of a Maori chief, who was baptised Albert Victor Pomare at Buckingham Palace in 1863. Her Indian adopted children received special treatment. Both were welcomed almost as new siblings, their acceptance into the royal home marked by rituals of conversion and depiction. Princess Gouramma arrived at the court via the Basel mission in Mysore. Persuaded by the mission, the Raja of Coorg negotiated with the East India Company to have his daughter, then aged eleven, brought up in England, under the guardianship of the queen. In exchange he hoped for the return of his wealth, seized by the British in 1834. He had already used his children as bargaining chips. Another daughter had married Jung Bahadur, the chief minister of Nepal in 1850. Gouramma was brought over from India by Mrs Drummond, the wife of a retired major in the Bengal cavalry, and came to Buckingham Palace at the beginning of June. As the terms were agreed about her adoption, the queen showed off Gouramma to her own children, and commissioned Franz Winterhalter to paint her portrait. The queen watched the sitting and made her own sketches of the Indian princess. Gouramma also played with the royal children. At the end of the month she was christened in the chapel of Buckingham Palace. The Archbishop of Canterbury performed the service, Lord Hardinge and James Hogg (of the East India Company) were Gouramma’s sponsors and, with all the royal family in attendance, the queen led Gouramma to the font, naming her Victoria. Controversy flared after the baptism, when her father objected that Gouramma’s guardian, Mrs Drummond, was not of sufficiently high social standing and claimed that he had been misled into the wardship of his daughter. As a compromise Gouramma remained looked after by Mrs Drummond but at the homes of various families with connections to the Government of India, such as the Hoggs, the Hardinges and the Woods. Her father’s grudge against his treatment by the Company continued until his death in 1859, whilst Gouramma eventually married a lieutenant colonel, John Campbell, and with him she had a daughter of her own, Edith.Queen Victoria celebrated the little princess Gouramma as a Christian convert from the east. Winterhalter’s portrait shows Gouramma in her Indian clothes: a fitted blouse, pleated sari with a wide embroidered pallu, gathered by a gold belt. She is heavily jewelled with an elaborate headpiece. In her hand she holds a small Bible. The queen also commissioned the sculptor Carlo Marochetti to capture the moment of Gouramma receiving her crucifix, executed in pale marble. The queen then had the bust painted to enhance Gouramma’s facial features. An almost identical pattern was repeated with Duleep Singh. He arrived at Buckingham Palace two years after Gouramma, in the summer of 1854. As an eight- year- old boy, Duleep Singh had been taken into the care of the British forces under Henry Hardinge, who pitied the plight of the ‘beautiful boy’. Dalhousie was far less sympathetic to Duleep Singh, ‘a brat begotten of a bhistu – and no more the son of old Ranjeet than Queen Victoria’. Nonetheless after the surrender of the Punjab in 1849 Dalhousie authorised the boy to be placed into the guardianship of Sir John Login, former surgeon at the British residency in Lucknow, and his wife, Lena. As temporary governor of the citadel at Lahore, Login was in charge of the dispersal of the Lahore treasury. Duleep Singh proved one piece of booty over which he was especially careful. Whilst his mother was exiled to Kathmandu, the young maharaja was taken to Fatehgarh for his safety, and there began his western education with the Logins, converting to Christianity in 1853. The switch of faith surprised many, including Dalhousie. In the meantime, arrangements were made for what portion of the Lahore treasury would be kept for the prince, for the costs of his maintenance in England, with some set aside for the construction of a tomb for Ranjit Singh at Amritsar. By the time Duleep Singh arrived in London, he was a well- groomed fifteen- year- old, with good English and refined manners, as the queen noted. Just as she had with Gouramma, she sat and watched Winterhalter paint Duleep on successive days, as well as sketching him when he joined the family at Osborne. Winterhalter’s portrait is a grandiose full- length study, depicting Duleep as a proud Sikh ruler, richly dressed, adorned with pearls, a sheathed sword in his right hand, and a temple in the background. One small detail hints at his conversion. Around his neck is a miniature portrait of Queen Victoria, the very same one that had been given to Ranjit Singh by Lord Auckland in 1839. Two years later, as she had done with Gouramma, Queen Victoria commissioned a bust from Marochetti of Duleep, and had it coloured, although was disappointed with the result. As well as sketching Duleep Singh, the queen kept a record of their conversations that summer. She went over the details of the narrative of his life, getting him to confirm some of the awful events – in particular, the murder of his uncle, Sher Singh, astride an elephant while Duleep was his passenger – and she questioned him about his conversion to Christianity and the ostracisation he had suffered from his family as a result. In an ironic twist she revealed to Duleep Singh some of her own souvenirs of the Punjab. She showed him Charles Hardinge’s sketches of him as a small boy, and let him see the Koh- i-Noor, which he was allowed to stroke. But she ensured that he did not view the captured Sikh arms on the terrace. Her fondness for Duleep was clear, but there was also a certain wallowing in his submissiveness. Passing on her congratulations for his sixteenth birthday she noted he ‘would have come of age, had we not been obliged to take the Punjab’.Duleep Singh returned to stay with the royal family at Windsor and Osborne again over the next two years, and on each occasion the queen was able to observe the progress of his education under the guidance of the Logins. Some of this took a conventional form. There was a lot of hunting and shooting in the Scottish Highlands, and a tour to Europe at the end of 1858. Other episodes in the grooming of the maharaja reflected Prince Albert’s enthusiasms. He was taken on a tour of the sites of Staffordshire in March 1856, including a descent down a pitshaft, and later that year attended the Birmingham cattle show and helped set up a refuge home for Indian lascars. He joined a volunteers regiment in 1859, and once he left London in 1859 to live at Mulgrave House, near Whitby, he represented the queen at various local functions. By the time he was a young adult, Duleep Singh was pining for the Punjab. To the consternation of Queen Victoria, he remained close to his mother. Duleep yearned to return to India, and finally travelled there in 1861, bringing his mother back with him to England, only for her to die two years later. He made another trip to India to scatter her ashes, and passing through Cairo on his return he met and married Bamba Müller, a young woman of German and Abyssinian descent who lived in the American mission there. They settled down to country life on a Norfolk estate, raising a family of six children, the first of whom, Victor Albert Duleep Singh, born in 1866, became the queen’s latest godson. Duleep Singh’s frustrations in forced exile in England radicalised him, and by the 1880s he was planning to renounce his Christianity, return to India and claim his succession as Sikh leader. He sought allies for his restitution as far as Cairo and Moscow, and finally died in Paris in 1893, separated from his homeland and from his family. For much of his life Duleep Singh proved a headache for the British government at home and in India, and on occasion he was a major strategic risk. Despite his reputation as a pampered prince, he remained a credible focal point for Sikh nationalism throughout his lifetime. For all his justifiable resentment against the British, Duleep Singh was considered an intimate member of the queen’s extended royal family until his death. From the marriage of Princess Vicky in 1858 through to the funeral of Prince Leopold in 1884, he attended every major royal ceremony, including the funeral of Prince Albert in 1861 and the thanksgiving for the recovery of the health of the Prince of Wales in 1871. On each occasion he sat on one side of the queen (her own children were on the other) along with the other foreign princes, mostly those from the smaller German states who were related to Victoria and Albert. Queen Victoria’s own dedication to Duleep rarely wavered. She defended him from suspicion that his loyalties lay elsewhere during the Indian rebellion of 1857–8. In 1868 she pressed Disraeli’s government to make further provision for Duleep Singh’s growing family, although that had not been part of the original terms under which he was included in the civil list (the public funds used to finance the royal family). Even in 1886, once his machinations with Russia were known, and she conceded that he was ‘off his head’, she still insisted that the government look after his family properly, in the event of his not returning to Britain. There was a final meeting between the queen and the maharaja in Grasse in the south -east of France in March 1891, two years before he died. Queen Victoria’s obsession with these two young exiles in the mid-1850s defies simple explanation. She undoubtedly had a genuine sympathy for the Indian royals whom her own government had done so much to displace. It extended to the old as well as the young. The same year that Duleep Singh came to the court, she had an audience with Prince Ghulam Mohammed, the last living son of Tipu Sultan, who had come to London to argue the case for ongoing support for his own sons and any descendants they might have. To support his claims Prince Ghulam republished the history of Tipu, already reasonably well known. The queen noted in her journal her respect for Prince Ghulam’s quiet dignity as he went about his appeals, whilst observing that had Tipu survived then all might have turned out very differently. Her magnanimity always came from belonging to the winning side. There was also a strong element of mothering. Tipu was widely depicted as a neglectful father. Queen Victoria’s wrath against Duleep’s mother and also her contempt for the Raja of Coorg betrayed the same indignation over poor parenting, the very reversal of the patriarchal household that she and Albert had developed around their own children. Her own maternal instinct was more than matched by Prince Albert’s vision of a princely confederation that might include his own sons, as well as the minor German princes and Duleep Singh. They were of royal blood after all. After his death, Victoria remained loyal to Albert’s dynastic aspirations, with her inclusion of all the princes in all the family ceremonies thereafter. Particularly in the case of Duleep, there was also a heavily romanticized appreciation of Sikhs and Sikhism, fuelled by the first- hand accounts from the battlefield and also by travel literature popularised by various German and English writers in the 1840s. As a war- like but conquered people, there was not a little vanity and conceit contained in the way in which the royal family not only captured Duleep in his Sikh finery, but also appropriated it for themselves. Most telling of all, the addition of these young India royals to the court represented the high- water mark of Queen Victoria’s evangelical aspirations for India. This can be seen in the rituals around conversion, that is to say, Gouramma’s baptism at the Palace, and Duleep being made to recount the trials he suffered surrounding his own conversion. It is also evidenced in the portraits and busts that the queen commissioned of the two, depictions emphasising their racial difference, whilst at the same time detailing the tokens of their new allegiance to a western monarch and to a Christian god. Here was Christianity in India making rapid strides at her very feet. Three days after she introduced Gouramma and Duleep Singh to each other for the first time, she wrote to Lord Dalhousie, saying how she approved of their future marriage (it never happened), and also how she hoped that the growing network of railways in India would ‘facilitate the spread of Christianity which has hitherto made very slow progress’. The Bible and the steam engine –religion and industry: for all their curiosity about the east, Victoria and Albert understood India from a largely western perspective. The year of rebellion, 1857–8, changed all that.

Get your copy of The English Maharani on Queen Victoria’s 200th birthday!

The Begum-Rediscovering Shared History

Posted on by Penguin India

A conversation between the Indian and Pakistani authors of The Begum, Deepa Agarwal and Tahmina Aziz Ayub

Deepa:

Dear Tahmina, writing this book has been an amazing process of discovery for me and I’m sure for you too. I had heard a lot about Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan while growing up in the small town of Almora in Kumaon. Her name was mentioned in awestruck tones—the fact that this local girl, Irene Pant, had married Liaquat Ali Khan, the first prime minister of Pakistan and after his death, served as ambassador to different countries and been the governor of a province was the stuff of legends. My father was close to her younger brother Norman Pant so there was a connection with her family, which created a personal interest in me. However, since she never visited her home town after marrying Liaquat Ali Khan in 1933 and left for Pakistan in 1947 my image of her was hazy and distant. When the idea of her biography came up, I felt it would be a fascinating to find out how she had travelled so far from her birthplace. The events of her life convinced me that she was a woman whose story needed to be told. What was the source of your interest in Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, Tahmina, this woman who played an significant role in sub-continental history, but is unknown in India and almost forgotten in Pakistan today?

 

Tahmina:                                     

Deepa dear, first of all I must share with you my delight at the choice of the words for describing this joint blog of ours, “Rediscovering Shared History”. Yes, and this is precisely the reason for my spontaneous response in accepting this writing cum research project when it was offered to me by Namita Gokhale in August 2016 during our meeting in Thimpu at the Mountain Echoes, Bhutan’s Lit Fest.

We here in Pakistan had heard about the achievements of this great lady in so many fields and yet we knew so little about her roots and her early life in India.   So for the first time this biography would manage to bring to light so many of those facets of her life which helped to shape her personality and prepare her for the tests of time she was to face in her later years.

The other aspect that made me wake up to the need for this biography was the fact, as you rightly pointed out, that many people of the present generation had mostly forgotten about the unusual and amazing story of this great lady and more so the trials and tribulations she had to face and soon after their arrival here, especially when she was to lose her husband to an assassin’s bullet.

 

Deepa:

The freedom movement was a long drawn out struggle, which ended in the Partition of India and Pakistan. While researching the life of Begum Ra’ana I uncovered many facts that I had only been superficially acquainted with. For example, the history of the Muslim League and Liaquat Ali Khan and Ra’ana’s contribution to its revival and growth and their relationship with Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Also, the undercurrents among the political parties that led to the formation of separate countries and the role World War II played in bringing freedom from colonial rule. Your research must have led you through the growing pains of a new nation and the movement for women’s emancipation to which Ra’ana made a huge contribution. You also discovered the extraordinary personality of a woman who was determined to soldier on against all odds. What have you taken away from the experience of writing this book?

 

Tahmina:

Yes, my primary take away from this experience of charting her life’s journey that it was no easy task that she fulfilled all that she had decided to undertake. It was obvious that she was no ordinary woman but one who had always a goal ahead that she was to focus on which took her far beyond the confines of her own personal existence. She left no stone unturned and allowed nothing to stand in her way in order to fulfil the mission she had started, along with her husband right from the early years of her marriage to him. She was indeed a unique personality and stands tall even today among the pantheon of leaders of Pakistan’s history.

 

Deepa:

For me one of the most fascinating experiences in writing this book was that it led me through the journey of the development of education for women in India. Ra’ana’s life is an outstanding example of how education transformed the career course of one particular woman. She was the product of missionary institutions like Wellesley School in Nainital, Lal Bagh and Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow. Her closest lifelong friend and companion, the British lady Kay Miles, was the principal of Karamat Husain College set up for the education of Muslim girls in the same city. Irene/Ra’ana later taught in Gokhale Memorial School in Kolkata and Indraprastha College, the first women’s college in Delhi. Sifting through my sources, it was a revelation to learn how difficult it was for the pioneers in this field to find qualified women for teaching jobs, as Leonora G’meiner, the Australian principal of Indraprastha College bemoans in her correspondence. Then the hostility from the patriarchal system which early educators had to counter—from Isabella Thoburn’s need to hire guards against irate opponents when Lal Bagh School began, to Ra’ana’s own experiences of harassment during the course of her MA in Economics at Lucknow University. Do you think these early battles honed Ra’ana’s fighting mettle and prepared her for the greater challenges that she had to face in Pakistan?

 

Tahmina:

The first part of her story which you so painstakingly researched and penned Deepa tells us about her steely determination to secure a firm educational base for herself and later a career too as lecturer in her chosen subject of Economics. In this respect she was far ahead of her times as this was a subject that did not interest females in general at the time.  Interestingly many years later my own M Phil thesis would be on the subject of Women’s Labour in Agriculture as was hers in her M.A. thesis. Her firm belief in the role of formal education in the substantive lives of women led her to adopting this as her primary mission for helping women adopt a meaningful role in the fledgling state of Pakistan. She was an instrumental figure in setting up many centers of learning both formal and non- formal all over the country for the benefit of women, in the very early years of the development of new state of Pakistan.

Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan was the wife of Pakistan’s first prime minister. Three religions-Hinduism, Christianity and Islam-had an immense impact on her life, and she participated actively in all the major movements of her time-the freedom struggle, the Pakistani movement and the fight for women’s empowerment. She occasionally met with opposition, but she never gave up. It is this spirit that The Begum captures.

Kim Wagner on New Discoveries while Writing ‘Jallianwala Bagh’

Posted on by Penguin India

The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 was a seminal moment in the history of the Indo-British encounter, and it had a profound impact on the colonial relationship between the two countries.

In Kim Wagner’s Jallianwala Bagh, which takes the perspectives of ordinary people into account, the event and its aftermath are strikingly detailed. Wagner argues that General Dyer’s order to open fire at Jallianwala Bagh was an act of fear and its consequences for the Indian freedom struggle were profound. Situating the massacre within the ‘deep’ context of British colonial mentality and the local dynamics of Indian nationalism, Wagner provides a genuinely nuanced approach to the bloody history of the British Empire.

In this piece by the author, he talks about his learnings while writing and researching for the book.

As I was writing the book about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, one of the things that struck me was the abiding belief in the benevolence of the British Raj on the part of the local residents of Amritsar. Above the entrance to the memorial there is today a sign that says: ‘A Landmark in Our struggle for Freedom’, and the events of April 1919 are often referred to as a key moment in the independence movement that came to its fruition in 1947. In this narrative, the hundreds of civilians who were massacred by General Dyer, were martyrs to the cause of an independent India and it is as such that they are today commemorated. The interesting thing is that no-one in Punjab in 1919 even thought of independence.

Indian nationalists at the time, such as Drs Kitchlew and Satyapal, were thinking exclusively in terms of dominion-status within the British Empire – similarly to Australia or Canada. Despite the socio-economic dislocation and hardship caused by the First World War, the global flu pandemic, high food-prices and failed crops, the disappointment of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms and the anger caused by the Rowlatt Act, the population of Amritsar never lost their faith in the Sarkar, or British Government.

As locals sought to petition the authorities for the release of their two leaders who had been deported on 10 April, they did so using the terms Ma Bap – the traditional supplication entailed by the line ‘You, My Lord, are my mother and father!’ After the confrontation turned violent and stones were thrown at the military pickets, who responded with indiscriminate shooting, people were shocked that the British would open fire on ‘innocent’ people. That is also why crowds twice sought to cross the railway bridges leading from the old city of Amritsar and into the Civil Lines, and twice were fired at.

As late as 13 April, local residents maintained their faith in the British Government whom they believed would ultimately act in a benevolent and righteous manner. Shortly before Dyer arrived at Jallianwala Bagh with his strike-force, a British airplane flew over the city and when people in the crowd became restless, the Satyagraha activists, who had organised the meeting, reassured them: ‘We need not fear anything. The Sarkar is our father and mother: why should Government kills its own children.’ While Dyer mistakenly believed that he was facing an armed crowd of rebels, and therefore opened fire to prevent a second ‘Mutiny’, people in the crowd did not see themselves as engaging in anything unlawful. The ban on public meetings had not been widely disseminated in the city and there was widespread confusion as to the actual nature of the meeting at Jallianwala Bagh, which furthermore coincided with the festival of Baisakhi.

The massacre, and its aftermath, brutally disabused Indians as to the true nature of British oppression and it was from April onwards, as a result of what had occurred, that people more generally began to think of independence. Before any details of what had occurred in Amritsar reached beyond Punjab, the poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore famously returned his knighthood at the end of May 1919, stating that: ‘The enormity of the measures taken by the Government in the Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has, with a rude shock, revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India.’ It was not, however, till the following year that Gandhi initiated the non-cooperation movement and finally took up the cause of independence.

The Amritsar Massacre has since been recognised as a crucial watershed in the history of British India, and the in the freedom struggle, yet it is important to remember that this was far from evident to the people involved at the time. It was not till 1947 that the events of 1919 could be seen as the beginning of the end of British rule in India.

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When it comes to British contemporary perceptions of the ma

6 Things You Didn’t Know About Krishna Sobti

Posted on by Penguin India

A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There by Krishna Sobti is a tale of young Krishna and her journey of making an identity for herself in the state of Delhi in 1947. Krishna applies for a position at a preschool in the princely state of Sirohi, which is beginning to transition into the republic of India. She boldly faces various challenges that come her way regarding her refugee status and sexist backlashes by the man in-charge of hiring at the school.

An opportunity to serve as a governess to the child maharaja Tej Singh gives her the perfect chance to make Sirohi her new home. However, it remains to be seen how long this ideal job opportunity lasts. Immerse yourself into this exceptional tale of Partition loss and dislocation to know more.

Here we give you 6 interesting facts about the author:

Krishna Sobti was born in Gujrat which is now in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

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Krishna Sobti spent her childhood in Delhi and Shimla.

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Krishna Sobti won the Sahitya Akademi award in the year 1980 for her renowned book Zindaginama.

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In the year 1996, Krishna Sobti was awarded the highest award of the Akademi, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship.

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Krishna Sobti had also written a few of her works under the name Hashmat.

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Krishna Sobti is considered to be the grande dame of Hindi Literature.

Part novel, part memoir, part feminist anthem, A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There is not only a powerful tale of Partition loss and dislocation but also charts the odyssey of a spirited young woman determined to build a new identity for herself on her own terms.

 

 

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