Secular historian

R.S. Sharma (1920-2011) looked upon the discipline of history as a vehicle for combating obscurantism and evolving a scientific temper.

The passing away of Professor Ram Sharan Sharma on August 20 is an irreparable loss, not only for the world of history scholarship but for all those who envision and hope for a secular, rational and equitable India. There is hardly any aspect of early Indian history that has not been enriched by this renowned Marxist historian's penetrating analysis reinforced by a wealth of data. A prolific writer whose books have been translated into several Indian and foreign languages, he had an insatiable urge for work. When severe illness overtook him in the last few months, his only regret was that life had become meaningless as he was not able to read and write any more, notwithstanding the fact that his latest book, Economic History of Early India, was published by Viva Books this year. However, Sharma was no ivory-tower intellectual. He continued until the end to take an interest in what was going on around him and to encourage and advise historians and academics facing political confrontation to expose the manipulation of archaeological/ historical evidence by the protagonists of Hindutva. A man of unimpeachable integrity, his devotion to secularism and the scientific spirit was part of his being.

Sharma was born on September 1, 1920, in Barauni village of Begusarai, Bihar, to a poor family and received his primary education in the village school. He had to struggle hard to acquire higher education. After matriculation, he managed to join Patna College, where he studied for six years and obtained a master's degree in history in 1943. For a brief period, he worked as a lecturer in H.D. College, Ara, and T.N.B. College, Bhagalpur. He joined Patna College in 1946. He became the Head of the Department of History, Patna University, in 1958, a position he continued to occupy until 1973, when he joined the History Department of the University of Delhi as a Professor. He had been already appointed the first Chairman of the newly constituted Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi, a post he occupied from 1972 to 1977. He served Delhi University until his retirement in 1985 and was the departmental head for five years.

Full report here Frontline 

The life & mission of Maulana Azad

There is a consensus that India has failed to build a nation of the kind the Gandhi-led freedom fighters dreamt of. In fact, nowadays, there is even talk of the need for a ‘second' freedom movement, and the reasons advanced cannot be dismissed as totally ill-founded. However, it will be naïve to belittle the contribution of the anti-colonial movement.

Maulana Azad and the
Making of the Indian Nation:
Rizwan Qaiser;
Manohar Publishers
Rs 950

In this context, it is comforting that the book under review attempts to recall Maulana Azad's life and mission and bring out the relevance of his politics in the current situation. Contemporary Muslim politics needs to be understood as much from the political forces at play today as from the lives of iconic political figures such as Maulana Azad.

The Maulana's role in shaping India's anti-colonial movement was unique. Yet his legacy is progressively fading away from the national consciousness.

Owing to his less contentious personality, Azad is not as much a sought-after or written-about historic figure as Muhammad Ali Jinnah is. The fact is that so long as South Asian politics remains polarised between the ‘communal' and the ‘ secular' there will be invaluable lessons to learn from Maulana Azad's political leadership and his vision of a better world.

Full report here Hindu

Bose with his enemy’s enemy

There is an abundance of literature on Subhas Chandra Bose apart from his collected works edited by Sisir and Sugata Bose. His most recent biography, His Majesty’s Opponent, by Sugata Bose, his grand nephew and Harvard historian, has been acclaimed as the finest so far.

Romain Hayes, an independent researcher, has specialised for several years on German foreign policy during the Second World War.

This is Hayes’ first book — a comparatively short, readable and carefully documented account of the period between April 1941 and February 1943 which charts, almost month by month, the events in the life of Subhas Chandra Bose in Germany. The book’s focus is on Bose’s efforts to seek the assistance of the Axis powers to overthrow the British imperialist regime from his country by military means. That was his singular aim.

Let us go back a couple of months to February 1941. A disillusioned and marginalised Bose, who till recently was the undisputed leader of his party, escapes house arrest in what was then called Calcutta, travels incognito across India, enters Afghanistan disguised as a Pathan, crosses into Soviet Russia and is rebuffed by the country whose support he seeks. He then changes disguise and enters Germany.

Full report here Asian Age

Patrick French on India and Bollywood

He first came to Mumbai in 1996. That was also his first visit to India. He wanted to write about India.

But celebrated British writer and historian Patrick French did not expect the call for ban on his book Liberty or Death — India’s Journey to Independence and Division.

His take on Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s role in the Independence Movement wasn’t taken too kindly. The fear of being looked at as an outsider crossed his mind when he started out, but being married to an Indian woman has given him a different perspective.

“Back then, there was a feeling that people were obliged to be more respectable to the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi and they felt that I was too sympathetic to Jinnah. But today if somebody wrote a book on 26/11 nobody would be bothered in the slightest bit. I think it is to do with what is acceptable at a particular time,” says French.

Full report here DNA

Smoke and mirrors

The author of a new book on the Opium Wars on how these kick-started a rare century of decline for China, their place in modern memory, and what they can tell us about globalization today

The Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars of the mid-19th century have sprung back into public memory in India recently. River of Smoke, the second instalment of Amitav Ghosh’s swashbuckling naval Ibis epic, which was published last month, is set in the bustling global city of Guangzhou, or Canton, and follows its Indian, Chinese and European characters, enmeshed in the opium trade through to the brink of the war.

The Opium Wars, conducted in two phases—1839-42 and 1856-60—were a bitter conflict between a British empire eager to expand its global trade, and Qing Dynasty China opposed to British ideas of trade and political relations, and severely displeased with the illegal British supply of opium (which came from the poppy fields of north India) entering the country and raising addiction rates among Chinese at alarming rates.

China’s defeat in the wars is considered the mark of a long period of decline for the country. The world’s oldest nation, and one of its most powerful for much of human history, was to spend the next century fighting against Western empires on the one hand, and the belligerent Japanese empire on the other.

Full review here Mint

The mother of all goddesses

In a fascinating recounting of the story of Hariti, a child-devourer whom the Buddha brought to the path of Righteousness, and who then went on to become one of Buddhism’s — and

From Ogress to Goddess: Hariti
Madhurika K Maheshwari
IIRNS Publications
Rs3,000; pp 244

India’s — foremost Mother Goddesses, Madhurika K. Maheshwari’s From Ogress to Goddess — Hariti — A Buddhist Deity focuses on a deity that once enjoyed more prominence in the Indian subcontinent and beyond than it does today. Maheshwari’s study is very readable and wide-ranging, with its focus being the erstwhile prominent deity.

According to early Buddhist tradition, Hariti the Yakshini (yakshas and yakshinis being divine beings with benevolent and malevolent aspects), was an ogress who also became the city of Rajgriha’s protector demi-goddess, changed her wicked propensity for devouring children after Gautama Buddha helped her understand that her anguish for her missing child was no different than the sorrow felt by the parents of children she had eaten. Following her repentance, the Buddha raised Hariti to a divine status, making her protector not just of children and expectant mothers, but also of the Buddhist Sangha and its stupas, viharas, monastery-structures, people and morals.

Hariti became the predominant Mother-Goddess in India from about circa 1st century BC to 1st century AD and retained her relevance over the centuries, often becoming incorporated with local sub-regional goddesses, and with goddesses called upon to protect children from disease, death and disaster. It may be noted that Hariti became not just a protective deity and  fertility goddess — in common with other yakshinis in Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism — but she was also the consort of Panchika Kubera, king of the Yakshas and Lord of Wealth.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Ode to a hero

‘The sword of revolution is sharpened at the whetstone of thoughts.' You mention ‘Bhagat Singh' and see the spark in his eyes. He is Chaman Lal, author and educationist who teaches Hindi but breathes Punjabi and Urdu. For long Lal has been relentlessly trying to paint the ‘true picture' of the revolutionary through his writings.

His latest book, Bhagat Singh Key Rajneetik Dastavez, published by National Book Trust and translated into Urdu by Hasan Musanna, titled, Bhagat Singh Ke Siyasi Dastavez has just hit the stands. Timely too considering Bhagat Singh's anniversary has just been observed across the country. This 233-page paperback is priced at Rs 85.

Lal, former Chairperson, Centre for Indian Languages, JNU, is a man on a mission. Delivering lectures, writing articles and books on Bhagat Singh has made Lal an authority on him. It all started four decades ago in his native place, Rampura Phul, Bhatinda. Then Hind Pocket Books brought out a series on the freedom fighters which was serialised in “Desh Bhakt Yadan” in Punjabi. This got Lal interested in Bhagat Singh. He has not looked back since.

Full report here Hindu

Stories from the underground

An intricate fabric that dazzles in parts but falls apart in the end.

This is a story told across continents and by multiple voices. There is the narrator, a modern-day writer in the dusty town of Phansa in Bihar, making serendipitous discoveries in his grandfather's abandoned library.

There is Amir Ali, a reformed Indian thug, telling his story through the yellowing pages of Notes on a Thug: Character and Circumstances (1840), by Captain William T. Meadows (a takeoff on Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug, first published in 1839, in which the protagonist was called Ameer Ali.)

Different voices
Ah, but Amir Ali is not what he seems — our narrator chances upon some letters written in Farsi by Ali to his Jaanam (beloved), the maid Jenny, in which he declares, “I am not what the Kaptaan wants me to be — I am not Amir Ali, the Thug.' So we have a third voice — that of Ali without his thuggee turban on. And briefly, there is a fourth — the “opium-befuddled” Irishman Paddyji (but more about him later).

Full report here Hindu

Balance sheet of the British Raj

It is crude to declare that Britain ‘ruined’ India, as the Congress oath of allegiance asserted in 1930, writes Roderick Matthews in The Flaws in the Jewel: Challenging the myths of British India (www.harpercollins.co.in). India is still fertile and full of natural resources, not least of which is her population, he reasons. “British rule did not destroy these assets. However, it did fail in most of its attempts to develop India, except in terms of an educated political class, in which it succeeded brilliantly.”

Tests of a modern government
In the author’s view, the British had no interest in ruining India, and levying the Home Charges could never have done this by itself. He concedes, however, that the proportion of military expenditure within the government’s budget, frequently 50 per cent, helped determine what kind of governance the Indians actually got.

“And unquestionably at the widest strategic level the imperial authorities did not need to stimulate India beyond a certain level of prosperity; holding her was enough. This was not exactly ruination but these deficiencies were enough to disqualify Britain as a guardian power,” Matthews observes in a concluding section of the book titled ‘the balance sheet.’

Full report here Hindu

Manmohan Singh releases Monuments of Delhi

The Prime Minister (who is also the Culture Minister) Dr. Manmohan Singh here today released a special volume titled ‘Monuments of Delhi’ published by the Archaeological Survey of India. Speaking on the occasion the Prime Minister said that the ‘city of Delhi is a living museum. We have the obligation to preserve, protect, study and document the rich legacy of one of the great cities of the world. This book will be of use not only to the many visitors who we will welcome shortly to Delhi but to its residents as well.’

Here is the full text of Prime Minister’s speech:

“I would like to compliment the Ministry of Culture, the Archaeological Survey of India and the producers of the book ‘Monuments of Delhi’ for putting together this excellent publication. Delhi is rapidly transforming into a modern metropolis and the skyline is constantly undergoing change. But we should not forget that Delhi is among the most historic cities in the world.

The city’s history spans many millennia from early historic times up to the present day. Delhi is better known for its adventures in later periods in Indian history, particularly during the Mughal period. But a Minor Rock Edict of the Ashokan period shows that Delhi was located on the trunk route connecting the main cities of Ancient India in the 3rd century BC.

This well illustrated work has been aesthetically designed and produced to provide some interesting glimpses of some of the lesser known, as well as the better known edifices, of Delhi. They include the World Heritage sites, as declared by the UNESCO. Many of these remains are often spoken of as collectively constituting the ‘Seven Cities’. The book also contains a wealth of information on historical relics, dating back to the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Rajputs, the Sultanate, the Mughal and the Colonial periods.

Full report here PIB

Study on Harappan world

This account of the Harappa civilisation presents, in 11 somewhat repetitive chapters, a history of discovery, environment, prehistoric background, the formative period, urbanism and states, subsistence and craft economies, trade, “landscape and memory” (the cemeteries mainly), religion, and the decline. The best parts are the ones on topics the author knows first-hand: patterns of settlement along the Beas and the Ravi; the development of village life at Mehrgarh; exquisite grey pottery with black-painted designs; and the sequence at Harappa. Rita Wright worked with the Harappa Archaeological Research Project, and we are reminded that a consolidated report is long overdue.

After the recent flooding in Pakistan — its scale now ascribed to deforestation and interference with river flow — environmental change is of special interest. I wish there had been more detailed accounts of the use of spring water and of flood water capture as sustainable systems. (Until recently, spate irrigation has been important for the region from the Helmand to the Sutlej-Jumna Divide.) There is useful material about changes in river courses and the relative incidence of monsoon and cold-weather rainfall, a factor that probably affected crop choice.

Wright does not, however, mention Pakistani work on shifts of the Indus delta or changes in the level of the Arabian Sea and hence the Ranns. The deep tank with baked brick walls at Lothal belongs to an environment quite different from that of the rock-cut reservoirs of Dholavira, and these cannot be clubbed as representing the same phenomenon as she has done. Let not the unsuspecting student believe that American research along the major rivers is all that we need to know about recent trends in Harappan archaeology.

Full report here Hindu

'India still battles woes Alexander the Great did'

If Greek conqueror Alexander the Great was to visit India nearly 2,500 years after his first incursion into the country, he would find it beset with 'similar issues', says Aniruddha Bahal, whose novel, The Emissary, was launched here.

'If Alexander visited India to take stock of the last 10 years of history, he would find that the nation is spending its resources on the same things that cannot be contained -- wars, flood and disease -- problems that he had to overcome to conquer the plains of Punjab and the frontier provinces,' says veteran journalist and novelist Bahal.

Bahal's novel, launched in the capital Wednesday, is a historical fiction set in Macedonia and Olympia in ancient Greece during the time of Alexander the Great. It is narrated through the voice of Seluecus, the son of Nicanor, who learns to cope with treachery at a young age.

Seleucus's father Nicanor, an ace chariot racer, is run over by his own horses commandeered by rival charioteer Argus at a practice session. A distraught Seleucus vows to avenge his father's death and soon masters the art of deceit. His journey from a renegade citizen to a powerful public figure is testimony to his skills.

Full report here Sify

Stones that speak

After 32 years in IIT, Delhi, what inspired Professor S. Swaminathan to write about Mahabalipuram? Gowri Ramnarayan meets the engineer-turned-author

How did a mechanical engineer turn into an expert in ancient monuments? How did Professor S. Swaminathan, after 32 years at IIT, Delhi produce a coffee table book on Mahabalipuram: Unfinished Poetry in Stone with photographs by Ashok Krishnaswamy?

A casual trip to Ajanta in 1963 triggered a life-changing experience. Swaminathan realised that he had no background on the breathtaking wonders of the 29 caves. “Our monuments have become picnic spots. We have no understanding of heritage.” His anguish took positive shape when he devised a course in art and technology. “IIT is an export zone. The student's mind is in the U.S., he knows Cincinnati, not Tiruchirapalli. But a 5,000-year-old heritage cannot be trivial! Where is identity without culture?”

Five years of research on Ajanta resulted in a book with exhaustive details about every cave and fresco — location, layout, stylistic phases, politics, patronage, theme, composition, technique, pigment — even details about portrayal of women and methods of rendering limbs.

Full report here Hindu

Kanakadasa’s literary works hailed

Bhakti movement saint-poet Kanakadasa was a unique personality having a combination of philosophy, economics, sociology and music, Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily said on Sep 21.

Inaugurating a two-day national seminar ''Saint-poet Kanakadas''s Literary Contribution towards Bhakti Movement in India'', Mr Moily said the 16th century poet was a person who combined "the intellect and the heart" to send across his message.

"Today, Kanakadasa has been launched to the world. Even before Karl Marx came out with a class struggle (theory), I think a seed of the caste struggle was injected by Kanakadasa through his works," Mr Moily said.

Full report here Mangalorean

Two-day seminar on poet begins

Bhakti movement saint-poet Kanakadasa was a unique personality having a combination of philosophy, economics, sociology and music, Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily said ob Sep 20.

Inaugurating a two-day national seminar ''Saint-poet Kanakadas''s Literary Contribution towards Bhakti Movement in India'', Moily said the 16th century poet was a person who combined "the intellect and the heart" to send across his message.

"Today, Kanakadasa has been launched to the world. Even before Karl Marx came out with a class struggle (theory), I think a seed of the caste struggle was injected by Kanakadasa through his works," Moily said.

Moily also released poems, literary works and other works of the saint in English.

The two-day event will also witness papers being submitted on the varied works of the legendary figure from Karnataka in Hindi and English.

Full report here MSN

Anne Frank book unveils letters, photos

More than 6,000 letters, photographs, and documents said to be found recently in the attic of the Frank family home are being transformed into a new book, Treasures from the Attic, set to be released in November 2010.

The Bookseller (bookseller.com) reports the book will include letters from Anne Frank's father, Otto, when he was held in Auschwitz as well as his descriptions of the search for his family after the Second World War and his discovery of Anne's diaries.

"Treasures from the Attic reads like a novel: it's an epic, fateful, family saga, and tells the full story of Anne's family both before, during and after the war," stated Michael Dover, editor-in-chief of the book's publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. "It contrasts the normality of family life with the horrors of persecution, deportation, and the concentration camps. And through it we gain new insight into Anne and her iconic diary. It's one of those unique documents that portrays innocence and humanity, suffering and survival in the starkest and most moving terms."

Full report here Hindustan Times

His hour of infamy

Churchill’s hand fed the appallingly dire Bengal famine. He comes off here as the fevered colonial of a caricature.

It is an interesting footnote that the death of Winston Churchill in January 1965 was solemnly commemorated throughout the lands that had till recently been part of the British empire. In Calcutta, a city that enjoyed a strange love-hate relationship with the British Raj, The Statesman covered his state funeral in London with a meticulous sensitivity that would have baffled Britons, not least the deceased. The bumptious principal of my school even had a portrait of Churchill put up at a discreet corner near the library.

This posthumous adulation of a man who had waged a determined campaign in the 1930s to prevent limited self-government for India and had once described Mahatma Gandhi as a “half-naked fakir” may seem inexplicable. Yet, it is important to remember that the nationalist mythology of an impoverished mass of Indians rising to boot out arrogant, exploitative colonials in a frenzy of anti-imperialism is a recent creation. The reality was an India that saw British rule in different shades of grey. The enlightened Indian quest for political freedom stemmed only nominally from hate; the seeds of national assertion were contained in the conviction that British rule had become ‘un-British.’

Full review here Outlook

The thing about thugs

The props all work, but the cast refuses to perform. The narrator as a spectator of himself as spectator can get precious

The thing about Thugs is that we can’t quite credit the definition anymore. Stranglers, yes; organised, yes; ritualistic, perhaps; but Thuggee wasn’t the national institution the British made it out to be. William Henry Sleeman ‘suppressed thuggee’ in the 1830s by rounding up 1,500 Thugs on the basis of ‘information received’. More famously, Philip Meadows Taylor told all England about it in his Confessions of a Thug (1839). Young Queen Victoria lapped it up. While not preparing them for 1857, it made the British grimly certain of what to expect. Every 19th century writer worth his salt took a shot at Thuggee. Dickens died without deciding if John Jasper had a taint of Thuggee in Edwin Drood. John Masters’s The Deceivers (1952) trailed the spoor of James Sleeman’s account of the life and times of his granddad William. The empire was writing back by the 1990s when Parama Roy’s cogent essay questioned the creation of Thuggee as a construct. Unfortunately, Roy’s arguments were based not on a direct engagement with archived records, but on the fictional idea of Thuggee.

Syed Amir Ali ‘Feringhea’—the confessing Thug of Meadows Taylor—has long awaited a fictional reprieve, and here it comes, in Tabish Khair’s The Thing About Thugs. Khair approaches these shark-infested waters with extreme caution. In the much-mythologised family mansion in soporific Phansa, specifically the library where nobody reads anymore, our narrator chances on a bundle of Persian letters written by one Amir Ali, who says: ‘Because I was not... I am not what the Kaptaan wants me to be—I am not Amir Ali, the Thug.’ So, what is Amir Ali’s true story?

Full report here Outlook

In the footsteps of Ibn Battutah

There are probably as many forms of travel writing as there are journeys. In fact, as the great 19th-century storyteller Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “There is a sense ... in which all true books are books of travel”. Reading, rambling, writing are all connected in a delightful chicken-and-egg circularity. The Arabic language recognises this: the related words sifr, a scroll or volume, and safar, travel, are both to do with unrolling – of paper in the hand, of ground beneath the feet.

Given the vastness of travel literature, we’re all bound to have our likes and dislikes. Patrick Leigh Fermor, in his nineties but yet to finish his great trilogy on walking across Europe in the 1930s, is a particular favourite of mine; so too are the almost forgotten Norman Douglas, brilliant illuminator of the Italy of a hundred years ago, and Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, describing their rambles in the highlands of18th-century Scotland. Freya Stark and Wilfred Thesiger are my giants of Arabian travel, while among the Arab travellers themselves, the14th-century Moroccan Ibn Battutah is the colossus (so colossal, indeed, that I sometimes feel my own three books on him have only scratched his surface). Among my dislikes, I particularly recall a book entitled Baghdad Without a Map as having nothing at all to recommend it except its rather catchy title. It was an example of travel narrowing a mind that was prejudiced before it set out.

Full report here National

Empire at a crossroads

Thirty years into Shah Jahan’s reign, as his empire descends into intrigue and civil war, two real-life European travellers, Venetian Niccolao Manucci and French Francois Bernier, find themselves mixed up in the battle. Sudhir Kakar’s novel follows a conceit straight out of Salman Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence (which also featured Manucci), presenting not one but two viewpoints on the Mughal court. Manucci and Bernier take turns narrating events, often contradicting or correcting each other.

The two physicians have a mutual antipathy, so it’s just as well that they end up ranged on different sides of the tussle for the Peacock Throne. Manucci, a more exuberant personality, serves under the generous if self-absorbed Dara Shikoh. The more supercilious Bernier becomes part of the retinue of Danishmand Khan, Shah Jahan’s foreign minister, who eventually sends him to Aurangzeb’s camp to observe matters. Kakar uses these two alternating accounts to outline the crossroads at which the empire finds itself, oscillating between Dara’s brand of Sufism (which incorporates some dubious astrology) and Aurangzeb’s austerely Sunni Islamism.

Full report here Timeout Mumbai