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Tag: history

Ten Things To Learn From ‘The 108 Upanishads’

Posted on by Penguin India

Roshen Dalal in her book The 108 Upanishads presents a thoroughly researched analysis of the revered philosophical texts, the 108 Upanishads, that form a part of the Vedas. These texts contain the concentrated wisdom extracted from Hinduism over the centuries. Roshen Dalal’s explanations of the core concepts of each Upanishads and her scholarly insights regarding them, makes for one of the most informative reads.

Here we provide some words of wisdom taken from these Upanishads:

In the Katha Upanishad, Yama teaches Nachiketa the concept of the atman. In order to attain a tranquil state of life and transcend death one needs to realize the atman. Yama says that the atman is the master of the chariot which is the body. It is in all living beings and is eternal. Atman is devoid of sound, touch, taste or smell, and never decays. It is only when one realizes that that one can transcend death.

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In the Katha Upanishad, Yama explains to Nachiketa the difference between the wise Soul and a fool, saying that a wise Soul would always choose the good, whereas the fool would choose what seems pleasant not thinking of the future. Hence the fool is far away from realizing the atman.

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In the Isha Upanishad, verses 9-11 state that neither ignorance nor knowledge lead to the Truth. Avidya (ignorance) and vidya (worldly knowledge), both prove to be inadequate and it is only when one transcends both that one can attain immortality.

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In the Isha Upanishad, verses 12-14 explain how both becoming and non-becoming are refutable. It is only when one succeeds in transcending both that the supreme is reachable.

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Along with dealing with the unity of god and the world, the Isha Upanishad also talks about the unity of the paths of action and contemplation in one’s life.

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In the Prashna Upanishad, a rishi named Pippalada preaches that meditating on even a single letter of Om has many benefits. Meditating on all four syllables of Om together would result in the highest reality.

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The Mandukya Upanishad elaborates on the concept of Brahman or the Absolute and the sacred word Om, which also represents Brahman. It further goes on to say that everything is Brahman, including the atman or Self.

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It is also stated in the Mandukya Upanishad that just like the objects in a dream are unreal, so are the objects in the waking state too. It is because the atma imagines these objects through its own maya. Thus, the highest truth is the total unreality of the world.

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The Adhyatma Upanishad states that Brahman is beyond any conception of beginning and end, actions and all worldly forces. It further says that one should perpetually focus on Brahman and meditate on the true Self withinone’s self. Hence, one should not be attached to the world or identify with the body or the senses.

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In the Annapurna Upanishad, Ribhu, a knower of Brahman tells Nidagha how to attain the knowledge of Reality. In order to attain this one should renounce life and make one’s mind detached. A person might or might not act in the worldbut the knower of true reality, can never be an agent or an experiencer of the world.

The 108 Upanishads is a thoroughly researched primer on the Upanishads, philosophical treatises that form a part of the Vedas, the revered Hindu texts.

Emergency Chronicles – an excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

As the world once again confronts an eruption of authoritarianism, Gyan Prakash’s Emergency Chronicles takes us back to the moment of India’s independence to offer a comprehensive historical account of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of 1975-77. Stripping away the myth that this was a sudden event brought on solely by the Prime Minister’s desire to cling to power, it argues that the Emergency was as much Indira’s doing as it was the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics, and a turning point in its history.

Here is an excerpt from the prologue of his book.

On the recommendation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the president of India declared a state of Emergency just before midnight on June 25, 1975, claiming the existence of a threat to the internal security of the nation. The declaration suspended the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly, imposed censorship on the press, limited the power of the judiciary to review the executive’s actions, and ordered the arrest of opposition leaders. Before dawn broke, the police swooped down on the government’s opponents. Among those arrested was seventy- two- year- old Gandhian socialist Jayaprakash Narayan. Popularly known as JP, Narayan was widely respected as a freedom fighter against British rule and had once been a close associate of Indira’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1973, JP had come out of political retirement to lead a student and youth upsurge against Indira’s rule. Although most opposition political parties supported and joined his effort to unseat Indira, JP denied that his goal was narrowly political. He claimed his fight was for a fundamental social and political transformation to extend democracy, for what he called Total Revolution. JP addressed mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the months preceding the imposition of the Emergency, charging Indira’s Congress party government with corruption and corroding democratic governance.

was reminded of the JP- led popular upsurge in August 2011, when I saw a crowd of tens of thousands brave the searing Delhi heat to gather in the Ramlila Maidan, a large ground customarily used for holding religious events and political rallies. Young and old, but mostly young, they came from all over the city and beyond in response to a call by the anti- corruption movement led by another Gandhian activist, seventy- four- yearold Anna Hazare. The atmosphere in the Maidan was festive, the air charged with raw energy and expectations of change. The trigger for the anti- corruption movement was the scandal that broke in 2010 alleging that ministers and officials of the ruling Congress party government had granted favors to telecom business interests, costing the exchequer billions of dollars. Widely reported in newspapers, on television, and on social media, the alleged scam rocked the country. It struck a chord with the experiences of ordinary Indians whose interactions with officialdom forced them to pay bribes for such routine matters as obtaining a driving license, receiving entitled welfare subsidies, or even just getting birth and death certificates. Venality at the top appeared to encapsulate the rot in the system that forced the common people to practice dishonesty and deceit in their daily lives. Into this prevailing atmosphere of disgust with the political system stepped Anna Hazare. Previously known for his activism in local struggles, he shot into the national limelight as an anti- corruption apostle when he went on a hunger strike in April 2011 to demand the appointment of a constitutionally protected ombudsman who would prosecute corrupt politicians. His fast sparked nationwide protests, giving birth to the anti- corruption movement. An unnerved Congress government capitulated, but the weak legislation it proposed did not satisfy Hazare, who announced another fast in protest. The hundreds of thousands who gathered in August 2011 had come to show their support for his call to cleanse democracy. When the diminutive Hazare appeared on the raised platform, a roar of approval rent the air.

Meanwhile, as the newspapers and television channels reported, the ruling Congress leaders fretted nervously in their offices and bungalows, uncertain how to respond to something without a clear political script. In a reprise of 1975, it was again a Gandhian who was shaking the government to its core with his powerful anti- corruption movement, arguing that the formal protocols of liberal democracy had to bend to the people’s will. And like his Gandhian predecessor Jayaprakash Narayan, Hazare enjoyed great moral prestige as a social worker without political ambitions. Similar to the 2010 Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, there was something organic about the 2011 popular upsurge in India. The enthusiastic participants demanding to be heard were mostly young and without affiliation to organized political parties. The Tahrir Square uprising ended the Mubarak regime; the Occupy movement introduced the language of the 99 versus 1 percent in political discourse; and the Congress government in India never recovered from the stigma of corruption foisted on it by the Anna Hazare movement, leading to its defeat in the 2014 parliamentary elections.

Since then, the populist politics of ressentiment has convulsed the world. In India, the Narendra Modi– led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) devised a clever electoral campaign that used the “development” slogan while stoking Hindu majoritarian resentments against minorities to ride to power in 2014.1 We have witnessed anti- immigrant and Islamophobic sentiments whipped up in the successful Brexit campaign and Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Across Europe, a roiling backlash against refugees has reshaped the political landscape. The role of conventional political parties as gatekeepers of liberal democracy in Germany, France, Italy, and several other countries is in crisis under the pressure of majoritarian sentiments. Strongmen like Victor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Erdoğan in Turkey, and Rodrigo Dutarte in the Philippines have mobilized populist anger as a strategy of rule. They incite pent- up anger and a sense of humiliation to fuel rightwing nationalist insurgencies against groups depicted as enemies of “the people” to shore up their authoritarian power and suppress dissent.

In Emergency Chronicles, Gyan Prakash delves into the chronicles of the preceding years to reveal how the fine balance between state power and civil rights was upset by the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation.

What if the Characters in the Ramayana could tell you their own Stories?

Posted on by Penguin India

Countless retellings, translations, and reworkings of the Ramayana’s captivating story exist-but none are as vivid, ingenious and powerful as Amit Majmudar’s Sitayana. Majmudar tells the story of one of the world’s most popular epics through multiple perspectives, presented in rapid sequence-from Hanuman and Ravana, down to even the squirrel helping Rama’s army build the bridge, and the medicinal herb Sanjeevani.

Read on to hear from six unusual voices in the Sitayana

 Sita

The daughter of Janaka, the girl who played horsey with Shiva’s own Bow. Daughter of the Earth, found in a furrow. Her fear response never developed properly. That Indian princess-in-exile. Resilient.

“‘You know what the poets call Agni, don’t you? They always refer to it by epithets: “Purifier” and “Bearer Away”. It’s really the same epithet. What the fire “bears away” are impurities. That’s why goldsmiths use fire to test gold. When Agni encounters you, Sita, what can he get a hold of? What can he carry off? He can’t purify what’s purer than he is. You don’t burn, my love, because the Fire finds nothing to burn away”

 

Hanuman

Vanara. Half wind on his father’s side. No one size or strength by nature. A most metaphysical monkey.

 

Vibhishana

God’s spy in Ravana’s court. Saboteur in waiting. Brahmin-Rakshasa hybrid. Least monster and most priest. Has an ‘unnatural proclivity for poetry.’

“It was never this way when I was a boy and my stepbrother Kubera was king. He used that aerial chariot to survey the streets for litter each morning, and come nightfall, he patrolled personally for window vandals. Lanka was a much smaller city then, and its epithet ‘golden’ came from the purity of its coinage, not its building materials. Today, our dominant trait is cruelty.”

 

Indrajit

Firstborn son of Ravana and Queen Mandodari. Formerly known as Meghnad. Warrior who defeated Indra. Next in line for the throne of Lanka.

“Imagine if I’d been one of only four or five sons, coddled and praised and known by name—what an underachiever I would be today! Instead of someone who defeated Indra, chief of the Gods, in one on-one combat. I would still be ‘Meghnad’, which was my birth name, instead of Indrajit. My father gave me that name after I got home from the battle, my head bandaged, my armour so dented it looked like foil crumpled and flattened back out.”

 

Ravana

Half demon-half Rakshasa hybrid. The ten-headed one—the long-nosed philosopher, the one-eyed soldier, the wavy-maned lover, the square-jawed alpha, the messy-haired poet, the shifty-eyed gambler, the moustached actor, and the thin-lipped sociopath.

“If you think my ten heads are evil, wait till you see what’s coming—the thousand-headed bureaucracies of murder and the murderous million-armed street mobs. What are you trying to accomplish, with all your milquetoast goodness? The age of pious sons and faithful husbands is over. The future is one long dark age until the dancing Ascetic stomps it all flat in his sphere of fire.”

 

Mandodari

First Queen of Lanka. Ageing wife. Mother of Indrajit and Akshaye. Has pride of place in the household, but is humiliated in her absence by mistress after mistress.

“He will show me his true form again and love me with it. He will be once again what he always was. Temporarily eternally mine.”

 

Sanjeevani

Green medicinal herb, seven fronds—small pods. All green. Was as common as grass a yuga ago. Now only found on Mount Rishab.

“‘I’m sorry,’ said Vishnu to us plants, ‘but all those several eloquent tongues of yours, always gossiping and poetizing, are going to go still and limp. They’ll be called petals and leaves from now on, and that is that. If the world is getting nastier for the human beings and the animals they’re going to start eating soon, it’s only fair I inflict something on you, too.’”

Countless retellings, translations, and reworkings of the Ramayana’s captivating story exist-but none are as vivid, ingenious and powerful as Amit Majmudar’s Sitayana.

Praise to the River Ganga: an excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

The river Ganga enjoys a special place in the hearts of millions. In Ganga: The Many Pasts of a River, historian Sudipta Sen tells the fascinating story of the world’s third-largest river from prehistoric times to the present.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter titled The World of Pilgrims

Of the many odes written to the Ganga in various Indian languages, these lines are perhaps the most poignant:

O River, daughter of Sage Janhu, you redeem the virtuous
But they are redeemed by their own good deeds—
where’s your marvel there?
If you can give me salvation—I, a hopeless sinner—then I would say
That is your greatness, your true greatness
Those who have been abandoned by their own mothers,
Those that friends and relatives will not even touch
Those whose very sight makes a passerby gasp and take the name of the Lord
You take such living dead in your own arms
O Bhagirathi, you are the most compassionate mother of all

These Sanskrit s´lokas, taken from an eight-stanza ode to the Ganga, have been a part of the oral tradition in Bengal for centuries, and many people knew them by heart just a generation ago. They were composed—surprisingly—not by a Brahmin, not even by a Hindu, but by a thirteenth-century author who went by the popular name of Darap Khan Gaji. The noted Bengali linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji identified “‘Darap Khan’” as Zafar Khan Ghazi, who is credited with daring military exploits during the first major phase of Islamic expansion in Bengal toward the end of the thirteenth century, after the Turkish Sultanate had been established in northern India around Delhi as the new capital. To find what remains of the memory of Zafar Khan, a self-proclaimed virtuous warrior of Islam in Bengal, you have to travel to Tribeni, a small town in Hugli in West Bengal on the banks of the Bhagirathi, which is the name of the Ganga there. This place, which was considered very sacred in antiquity, is where the Ganga once branched off into three streams: the Saraswati River flowed southwest beyond the port of Saptagram, the Jamuna River2 flowed southeast, and the Bhagirathi proper flowed through the present Hugli channel all the way to the location where English traders much later erected a city, Calcutta.

Zafar Khan Ghazi was said to have struck terror among the local Hindus, attacking their temples and idols during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. He conquered the pilgrimage of Tribeni and the port of Saptagram, destroyed a large and ancient temple there, and allegedly used the spoils to build an imposing mosque. He took the title of Ghazi, warrior of Islam, and established a school for Arabic learning and a charity (dar-ulkhairat). One of the oldest Bengali Shia texts has a curious tribute to the Ghazi:

On the quays of Tribeni pay respect to Daraf Khan
Whose water for wazu [ritual ablutions] came from the River Ganga

The little we can surmise about Zafar Khan’s life and death reminds us that the sacredness and the value of a river and the landscape that it flows through are entwined with the practice of everyday life. He seemed to have realized this later in life. He became a friend of the poor, donned the robes of a Sufi mystic, learned to write beautiful Sanskrit, and eventually won the hearts of the local people he had tried to convert forcibly to Islam in his youth. For generations to come, Zafar Khan became an emblem of the composite culture of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, which shared a sense of enchantment with the landscape of the delta. The noted Bengali critic, novelist, and historian Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century in his utopian history of India, imagined a country where people of all faiths paid obeisance to the river by singing the hymns of Darap Khan.4 Mirza Ghalib, the foremost Urdu poet of his time, echoed a similar sentiment when he visited Varanasi (Banaras) in the early spring of 1828 and fell in love with the city, composing a poem in Persian called “Chiragh-e-Dair” [The Lamp of the Temple], a memorable tribute in which he named the city the “Kaba of Hindustan”:

May Heaven keep
The Grandeur of Banaras,
Arbour of bliss, meadow of joy,
For oft-returning souls
Their journey’s end.

He almost wished that he could have left his own religion to pass his life on the bank of the Ganga with prayer beads, a sacred thread, and a mark on his forehead.

One of the oldest explanations for this abiding faith in the purity of the waters of the Ganga has to do with the practice of pilgrimage that has for centuries provided a stage on which to reenact the difficult inner journey
of reconciliation and atonement, often imagined through the pristine Himalayan landscape of mountains and glacial melts—a terrain that the great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa describes as “dis´ı¯ devata¯tma¯” [the country of divine beings]. Ritual baths and offerings at sacred spots along the river are tied to this sense of geography, which is steeped in ideas and images drawn from history, myth, and nature as shared forms of reckoning, an experience (tı¯rthabha¯va) difficult to capture in words. When Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, traveled in search of wisdom on the Hindu pilgrimages of the east, as recorded in the Janam Sakhi, it was not the usual places of ritual obeisance that impressed him. He was entranced instead by a flock of migratory swans alighting nearby. They appeared much closer to heaven than did the throngs of pious Hindus. With their shining silver-white plumage and burnished eyes, the swans were messengers who flew across the Himalayas, from India to Central Asia and back, year after year.8 It is the journey, the story conveys, and not the destination, that defines the purpose of pilgrimage. Such convictions and practices, along with other aspects of Hindu practice, have been misunderstood by an array of observers and critics from the West, including missionaries, colonial administrators, authors, and travel writers.

Seamlessly weaving together geography, ecology and religious history, Ganga: The Many Pasts of a River paints a remarkable portrait of India’s most sacred and beloved river.

5 Reasons Why ‘Emergency Chronicles’ is a Must-read

Posted on by Penguin India

On the recommendation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the president of India declared a state of Emergency just before midnight on 25 June 1975, claiming the existence of a threat to the internal security of the nation. The declaration suspended the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly, imposed censorship on the press, limited the power of the judiciary to review the executive’s actions, and ordered the arrest of opposition leaders.

It is no wonder that the Emergency is remembered emotively in India. But its onset is also seen as a sudden eruption of authoritarian darkness and gloom.

Gyan Prakash’s Emergency Chronicles explores the challenge of popular politics in India’s postcolonial history and studies Indira’s Emergency as a specific event in its broader experience as a democracy. What follows is an Indian story in the global history of democracy’s relationship with popular politics.

Here are the 5 reasons why you must read this book:

Tells the story and the circumstances of the advent of politics into JNU

‘Founded to embody Nehru’s vision of a progressive, plural, an internationalist India, the university had witnessed no clashes over caste, religion, or region characteristic of national politics. The Emergency’s disruptive arrival on campus served notice that it would no longer be exempt from the convulsions of Indian politics.’

Explains how and when politics came out of the parliament and government offices and entered the streets

‘In framing the Indian Constitution, the lawmakers had assumed that adult suffrage, Fundamental Rights, and the social policies outlined in the Directive Principles would keep politics off the streets and in the institutions. This was not to be.’

It tells the story of the birth of the ‘Ambassador’ car in India

‘Faced with these impediments, Sanjay turned his access to power into his capital. His project failed, but it signaled that the Ambassador was destined to become an object of nostalgia, “a way into India” and its economy and culture of control.’

Highlights how exceptional and uncontrolled power can change and impact state and social relations and status

‘The lines between politics, law, and personal ambitions and opinions became blurred. This exceptional power remapped state–society relations and coerced the poor into complying with the revamped elite-driven modernization.’

Introduces and tells the story of Prabir Purkayastha and his resistance and criticism of the Emergency

‘When morning broke on September 25, 1975, PrabirPurkayastha had no idea that his life was about to change.’

On the day Prabir was abducted, Maneka arrived on campus just before 9:00 a.m. for her class in the School of Languages. She got out of her black Ambassador and walked to the elevator to go up to her classroom. As she waited, Tripathi, accompanied by other students including Prabir, asked her to heed the strike call and boycott classes. “You are one of us, Mrs. Gandhi Junior!” Maneka exploded in anger. “Just you wait and see. Your heads will roll on the ground!”19 Then she stomped off. An hour later, another Ambassador entered JNU, and Prabir was whisked off.

 

Every year on 26 June Indian newspapers publish articles remembering the day in 1975 when Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency. Writers recall the midnight knock and press censorship. Lest we forget, readers are reminded of the suspension of constitutional rights and the restrictions imposed on the judiciary. The commemoration of the day, however, portrays the Emergency as a momentary distortion in India’s proud record of democracy. Gyan Prakash’s book aims to explore how the present times are also reflective of an Emergency-like situation without the actual declaration of one.

Today, there is no formal declaration of Emergency, no press censorship, no lawful suspension of the law. But the surge of Hindu nationalism has catapulted Narendra Modi into the kind of position that Indira occupied only with the Emergency. When she could not get the constitutional democracy to bend to her will, Indira chose to suppress it with the arms of the state. Today, the courts, the press, and political parties do not face repression. But they appear unable or unwilling to function as the gatekeepers of democracy in the face of state power spiked with Hindu populist ressentiment. Like Indira, Modi is his party’s undisputed leader.

With a powerful leader like Narendra Modi at the helm of Indian democracy, the last words belong to B. R. Ambedkar.

 

The 108 Upanishads – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

The Upanishads contain the most crystallized bits of wisdom gleaned from Hinduism.In The 108 Upanishads, Professor Dalal explains the concepts at the core of each Upanishad clearly and lucidly. Moreover, her vast, diverse philosophical and theological readings add priceless scholarly context, making this volume indispensable for students of religious studies.

Here is an enlightening excerpt from the introduction.

“The Upanishads are a series of Sanskrit texts which contain a profound philosophy. They form part of the literature of the Vedas, the most sacred texts of Hinduism. The term ‘upanishad’ is often interpreted as ‘sitting near the feet of a master’, the word being broken up into ‘upa’ (near) and ‘nishad’ (sitting down).

However, different interpretations arise when ‘ni’ and ‘shad’ are separated. ‘Ni’ means ‘totality’, and one of the meanings of ‘shad’ is destruction’, and ‘upanishad’ therefore, is ‘that which destroys ignorance’. Shankara (Adi Shankaracharya), the eighth- to ninth century philosopher and the greatest exponent of the Upanishads, suggests this meaning. However, the original meaning of the word, provided in early texts, is ‘secret doctrine’. Yet another meaning of Upanishad is ‘a connection’ or ‘equivalence’; thus, the texts discover and reveal the connections between different topics.

Vedic Literature

How do the Upanishads fit in with the rest of Vedic literature? ‘Veda’ comes from the Sanskrit root ‘vid’, to know, and the word implies ‘divine knowledge’. The main texts of Vedic literature are the four Vedic Samhitas, that is, the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda and Atharva Veda, along with the Brahmanas, Aranyakas and Upanishads. All these texts are said to be ‘shruti’ or ‘heard’, and are believed to be directly revealed from a divine source. These four categories of texts are broadly divided into two parts, the first consisting of the Samhitas, and the second of the rest. These texts are interrelated, yet different. Even the four Samhitas differ. The Rig Veda is the earliest text, usually dated between 1500 and 1000 BCE, though it could be earlier.”

The 108 Upanishads is a thoroughly researched primer on the 108 Upanishads, philosophical treatises that form a part of the Vedas, the revered Hindu texts.

 

Under American Eyes: Mark Twain in Bombay

Posted on by Penguin India

For 230 years, America’s engagement with India, Afghanistan and Pakistan has been characterized by short-term thinking and unintended consequences. Beginning with American traders in India in the eighteenth century, the region has become a locus for American efforts-secular and religious-to remake the world in its image. Even as South Asia has undergone tumultuous and tremendous changes from colonialism to the world wars, the Cold War and globalization, the United States has been a crucial player in regional affairs.
In the definitive history of the US involvement in South Asia, The Most Dangerous Place by Srinath Raghavan presents a gripping account of America’s political and strategic, economic and cultural presence in the region.
Of the many interesting incidents and lesser known anecdotes in the book, one interesting narrative is Mark Twain’s visit to Bombay. Here is an excerpt from it.
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On a sunny morning in January 1896, the visiting American— decked out in a white suit and straw hat—took a stroll on the outskirts of Bombay. On seeing a row of Indian washermen sweating it out, he asked his guide, ‘Are they breaking those stones with clothes?’ Samuel Langhorne Clemens had kept his sense of humour despite the fact that he had practically been forced to travel to India. A failed venture with a typesetting machine and the bankruptcy of his publishing firm had left Mark Twain ensnared in a web of debt: of over $1,00,000. To shake this off, the fiftyyear- old writer had embarked on a year-long lecture trip covering a hundred cities in Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and the British Isles, Ceylon and India.
In Bombay, Twain’s first appearance was in the Novelty Theatre before an overflowing audience worshipping ‘at the shrine of the world’s great humourist when he made his debut before his first Indian audience’. Twain spoke of, among other things, how there were 352 different kinds of sins, so that ‘the industrious persons could commit them all in one year and be inoculated against all future sins’. He told stories, some apocryphal, about George Washington and other great Americans, and also read a chapter from Tom Sawyer. Twain lunched with the Governor in his official residence and met Jamsetji Tata over dinner.
Like many well-informed Americans of his generation, Mark
Twain had thought of India as a land of fantasy: ‘an imaginary
land—a fairy land, dreamland, a land made of poetry and moonlight
for the Arabian Nights to do their gorgeous miracles in’. Ahead of his trip, he had written jocularly to Kipling, ‘I shall come riding my ayah with his tusks adorned with silver bells and ribbons and escorted by a troop of native howdahs richly clad and mounted upon a herd of wild buffalos; and you must be on hand with a few bottles of ghee, for I shall be thirsty.’3 After spending two months in the country and visiting over sixteen cities and towns, Twain concluded that India was the most interesting country on the planet. But his view of India was a tad more realistic: ‘This is indeed India—the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle . . . the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.’
Twain was a curious and sympathetic traveller. The people, he wrote, were ‘pleasant and accommodating’. ‘They are kindly people . . . The face and bearing that indicate a surly spirit and a bad heart seemed rare among Indians,’ he added. The sight of an Indian servant in his hotel being needlessly struck by a European manager reminded him of his childhood in the American South and the stain of slavery on his own country. The ‘thatched group of native houses’ along the Hooghly River took him back to ‘the negro quarters, familiar to me from nearly forty years ago—and so for six hours this has been the sugar coast of the Mississippi’.5 Even Indian religion and spirituality, of which he had had no high opinion, Twain encountered with an open mind. On the massive Hindu religious festival in Allahabad, he wrote, ‘It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that.’ Meeting an Indian saint in Benares, Twain gave him an autographed copy of Huckleberry Finn and noted his admiration for men who ‘went into the solitudes to live in a hut and study the sacred writings and meditate on virtue and holiness and seek to attain them’. Twain had heard of the storied tradition of ‘thuggee’ or ritual strangling as a boy in America and wrote at inordinate length about it in his account of the passage through India. Nevertheless, he also observed, ‘We white people are merely modified Thugs; Thugs fretting under the restraints of a not very thick skin of civilization.’
All the same, Twain’s views of India were shaped by a sense of civilizational hierarchy. While India was ‘the cradle of human race, birth place of human speech’ and so forth, it was a civilization that had no notion of ‘progress’: ‘repeating and repeating and repeating, century after century, age after age, the barren meaningless process’. India had been the ‘first civilization’ and remained stuck there. If this was redolent of Britain’s ideological justification for the conquest of India, Twain more explicitly endorsed the political rationale of the Raj: ‘Where there are eighty nations and several hundred governments, fighting and quarrelling must be the common business of life; unity of purpose and policy are impossible.’ The beneficence of British rule flowed logically from these premises. ‘When one considers what India was under her Hindoo and Mohammedan rulers, and what she is now; when he remembers the miseries of her millions then and protections and humanities which they enjoy now, he must concede that the most fortunate thing that has ever befallen that empire was the establishment of British supremacy here.’

Demystifying the Spirited Queen of Chittor, Padmini

Posted on by Penguin India

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Ala-ud-Din Khilji became infatuated with the famed beauty of Rani Padmini. He arrives at her doorstep in Chittor and lays siege to her fort. Despite putting up a brave fight, when defeat came to her doorstep, she chose jauhar over dishonour.
Mridula Behari in ‘Padmini’ gives a voice to the famed queen and brings to life the atmosphere and intrigue of medieval Rajput courts.
Here are a few facts about the legendary queen.
“Once an eminent astrologer had visited Tamragarh…Mother had invited the acharya to her chambers.  On his arrival, she had asked him to carefully study the stars of the daughter of the Pratihar Pawar king and foretell her future. Upon hearing about the prophecy, little Padma had watched her mother beam as though her heart had turned into a heaven-kissing tower of joy and a vast ocean of love at the same time . . .”

“There were already murmurs about her beauty, of the poetry that spun out of the lips of those who had seen her. There were those eager to see her and those who waited to scoff at the beauty they had only heard about. Yet, when the ghunghat was gently raised, it rendered everyone speechless.”
“Veerbhan had thought that he could sweet talk Padmini into accepting the decision… What he saw of her was beyond his wildest imagination. Her eyes, her cheeks, her forehead turned red with indignation. Affronted by his brazen retort, she felt aggressive and resolute in her conviction.”
“Her eyes were fixed on the tip of her nose. She stopped breathing. She appeared to be taking the agni samadhi, meditating in the lap of the leaping flames. More firewood was thrown in. With the ghee being poured in, the flames rose higher and higher, and her delicate, beautiful body became one with the fire.”

Aren’t these facts fascinating?


 

The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Cyrus Schayegh in ‘The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World’ traces how a Eurocentric world economy and European imperialism molded the Middle East from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.
Here is an excerpt from the book.
“I dreamed I was in Jerusalem.” Thus start dozens of entries in the diary of Khalil Sakakini, a Palestinian educator and intellectual born 1878 in Jerusalem, during his stay from the fall of 1907 to the summer of 1908 in New York City and Maine. By day he works in America; he barely makes ends meet, translating Arabic texts for a Columbia University professor, proofreading for a local Arabic journal, sweating in a paper mill. By night he crosses the ocean; he visits his extended family, including his best friend, Dawud Saidawi, other friends and neighbors. Particularly after Dawud’s death in January 1908 his longing is dark; his dreams often plummet into anxiety, horror even. And almost without fail the place that gives his dreams their shape is his hometown.
The family house is center stage. In April 1908 Sakakini dreams that “I entered the house and asked about my mother and was told she had died, then I asked about my brother Ya‘cub and was told he had died, then I asked about Shafiq and was told he had died and about Na’ifa and was told she had died, and I started to slap my face in despair, shouting oh mother, oh brother, oh Shafiq, oh Na’ifa.” Around the house twist and turn the alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City. Soon after hearing of Dawud’s death Sakakini writes that “I was in Jerusalem, walking in the Christian Quarter, opposite our shop, . . . When I got to the steps of Dayr al-Rum, women descended in a procession ordered in rows, in the first row girls wrapped in a white shawl, but their cloths and headscarves black and their forearms bare, behind them four rows of elderly women, all of them drowning in black.” Beyond the Old City stretch new neighborhoods and buildings. Shortly before Dawud’ death, Sakakini dreams that  

I was walking from place to place looking for Dawud, on my way I met the teacher Ya‘qub Andria, then I suddenly met [Dawud] and anxiously greeted him and he greeted back. He carried a bolero on his shoulder and wore glasses. We walked together, I asked how he was and he answered me: like shit. We walked a bit further until we reached the train station and he said: hurry before the train leaves, and started to dance as fast as lightning and jumped onto one of the roofless wagons and before I got to [it] the train moved, tearing through the land with tremendous speed and I almost succeeded in jumping on the wagon but could not and I waved at him and bode him farewell and told him wait for me at the next train.

There is no way to ascertain one true interpretation of these dreams, a fact compounded by our inability to tell Sakakini’s dreams from his accounts thereof. Take the last dream. At its start, is Sakakini walking through a vague dream-world- Jerusalem or is he in particular places but does not care telling? And why does he meet the teacher just before seeing Dawud? We cannot know. Besides, are not these Dreams unexceptional, timeless even, and hence useless to the historian?
Not quite. Sakakini’s dream accounts are part of diary entries; in return, these form part of a larger range of texts like letters; hence they have contexts and in this sense are open to interpretation. Many letters are for Sultana—a neighbor’s daughter, beautiful, and an educator and Greek Orthodox like him—with whom Sakakini fell madly in love the summer of his departure. They are always emotive and often come with more than one tear. (Sultana is more down-to- earth: “What’s this, Khalil?! Do not make crying all-consuming business!”) And in these letters as in Sakakini’s dreams, Jerusalem is the arena. At its center is, again, the family’s house. In the last letter that Sakakini gives Sultana before leaving, he implores her “remember me when you visit the house, stand in your window that overlooks our house and say ‘peace be upon you, oh Khalil.’” And beyond the house extend, again, the city and its environs. Sakakini asks Sultana “to visit as often as you can our beloved rock” in the Shaikh Jarrah neighborhood, and recalls the day “we . . . with my sister Milia walked on the road of the Mount of Olives and I felt like gaily striding on the peak of my happiness.”
Was the geography of Jerusalem that of Sakakini’s longing, then? Put awkwardly, was “the local” all that mattered to the emotions of somebody who crossed an ocean and “went global,” as it were?
Yes and no. “The local” was key to Sakakini’s emotions; it grounded them. But just like the “real” Jerusalem of bricks and stones started spilling beyond its old walls by the mid-nineteenth century, the Jerusalem of Sakakini’s dreams and love was not walled in. It was not simply local.
And the way it was not simply local was neither indistinguishably commonplace nor sakakinesquely idiosyncratic, but specific enough to tell us a thing or two about the time and place the writer lived in.
By the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Jerusalem started interacting with the world in ways both new and transformative. (Outside worlds had of course been present in this city holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims for millennia.) While the center of the Ottoman Empire—Istanbul— was not very present in its provinces from the late 1600s, from the mid-nineteenth century a new era of state formation bound center and provinces closer together. European powers, too, became more active. Interacting with these changes, Jerusalem’s ties with its rural surroundings grew stronger. All these changes found reflection in Sakakini’s Jerusalem, including that of his dreams. He may have dreamed of Dawud racing away on a train not simply because he was afraid to lose him but because Dawud—his very best friend—had moved from Jerusalem to Jaffa. From here, a French company had built a railway to Jerusalem in 1892. And it was here that Sakakini met Dawud for the last time, as it was in this port city that he commenced his maritime journey to America.

Revisiting the Past in order to Recapture and Relive it!

Posted on by Penguin India

By Anuja Chandramouli
People are always curious to know why I have opted to write persistently in the genres of mythology and history, some going so far as to insinuate that it is most fuddy – duddy of me to do so, mistakenly assuming that it has neither the oomph factor nor the glam quotient. Those inclined towards calculation are convinced it is the financial aspect of writing about controversial topics in current times where people are working themselves into a tizzy over stories blasted out from the past that sets my creative registers ringing. Well-meaning readers are always trying to persuade me to give up on ancient, dusty tales and churn out a torrid contemporary romance or lurid pulp fiction convinced that it is the only way to get Hollywood head honchos to sit up, take notice (not Harvey Weinstein, thank you) and hand me the golden ticket to instant fame and fortune. As for me, all I can say is that I tend not to analyse the nitty gritty of my literary choices and it is somewhat scary how impulsive I am when it comes to these things. If pressed though, I would say that the real reason I do what I do is incurable wanderlust.
That is right. I am afflicted with a wicked case of wanderlust! I have always been consumed by an intensely strong desire to travel and see everything there is to see not just in the known Universe but whatever lies well beyond the ken of all things documented and experience things that nobody has before.  Ever since I heard about them, I have been ridiculously resentful of the likes of Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Hiuen Tsang for obvious reasons and even every astronaut or cosmonaut who has been space hopping when it seems most unlikely that I will ever get the chance to do the same. However, if there is one thing to be learned from the objects of my envy, it is that there is no time like the present to pack up and go where the path leads without allowing yourself to become uncomfortably bound by circumstance. So I do just that, even if it is in my own head, and then before I know it, I am soaring on the wings of my thoughts to parts unknown, in search of adventure and in the thick of a treasure hunt for ancient truths in the shifting sands of time.
Thanks to the limitless capacity of a restless, insatiably curious mind, it is possible not only to take off wherever you wish to go but to inaccessible regions that are beyond the reach of the marvels of technology. Armed with little more than a few dusty tomes and a hyper imagination it is possible to dive deep into the past, tumbling pell-mell into the hidden caverns of history, floating like a sliver of a ghost into the shadowy, magic strewn realms of myth and legend, or gambolling aimlessly in the wildest outposts of pure fantasy with fairies and monsters. Every nook and cranny of this marvellously meandering journey is usually crammed with nuggets of all things intriguing, and it is always exciting! You never know what you will unearth, what or who you will run into or where you may land up even if you have mapped out the path with a specific destination in mind.
Having indulged in this mode of travelling often enough, I can confidently extol its many virtues, not the least of which is that you don’t have to put yourself through the tortures of crowded popular tourist spots where you get jostled while standing in interminable queues, heckled by obnoxious folks or be forced to endure fellow travellers in confined spaces where children howl and too many subject others to their flatulence and other gross bodily eructations. Thankfully there need be no narcissistic posing or incessant selfie-taking either. Why bother with capturing the moment when you are actually living it up in the moment and creating indelible memories to be ever treasured and shared with all who are willing to relive your travels through your words?
Writing in history and mythology is like clambering up Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree to explore the wondrous lands beyond. Thanks to my passion for my chosen subjects, I have held Arjuna’s hand as we explored the fabled, wondrous landscape of his life against the staggering backdrop of the Mahabharata; taken a rollicking ride into the very heart of desire and its tantalizing dark side with Kamadeva ; experienced the all-encompassing power of Shakti, the Divine Feminine; rooted about in the realms of death and damnation with Yama’s Lieutenant; unravelled the puzzle that is Kartikeya, the Destroyer’s loveable son; caught up with my childhood crush Prithviraj Chauhan, celebrated his triumphs and cried over his tragic losses; and watched in mute horror as Padmavati burned…
My work is something that has my unconditional love even when I am tempted to throw it all away with its attendant frustrations, solitary travails, rich rewards, pitiful returns and crushing insecurity. Still, when I am not feeling hopeless, I will remain ever grateful for the precious gifts that are words and stories, which has enabled me to transcend the limitations of a cruel world and go wherever the heart leads. And people wonder why I do what I do!
About the Author
Anuja Chandramouli is the bestselling author of Arjuna: Saga of a Pandava Warrior-Prince, with Kamadeva: The God of Desire, Shakti: The Divine Feminine and Yama’s Lieutenant. She is an accomplished storyteller who is regarded as a one of the well-known names in mythological fiction.

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