Indian Summer

Title: Indian Summer – The Secret History of the End of an Empire

Author: Alex von Tunzelmann

Publisher: Pocket Books, 2007 (First)

ISBN: 9781416522256

Pages: 464

On August 15, 1947, a bright new chapter opened in Indian history. After nearly a millennium of continual warfare and subjugation, the Indian spirit broke free and the nation finally awoke to freedom. This outstanding feat was achieved by ousting the British Empire, on which the sun never set. The astonishing feature of India’s freedom struggle was that it was more or less peaceful. This is hardly surprising, as the intelligentsia which led the revolt was born and brought up in a political and intellectual climate fostered by the British themselves. After the Second World War, when it became painfully evident that India can’t be ruled with the meager resources at Britain’s disposal, Clement Attlee and his Labour government decided to give away the jewel in the Empire’s crown – India – to its rightful owners. Lord Mountbatten, nicknamed Dickie, who was the supreme commander in South East Asia during the War, was assigned the onerous task of dividing the country on religious lines and transferring power to local leaders. His task was further complicated by the intricacies of India’s religious landscape and the subcontinent’s theocratic prejudices. His years in India were further brought into focus by the alleged love affair between Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Edwina, his wife. The essence of the book is the events played out in the fifteen months from March 1947, when the couple set foot in India as the Viceroy and Vicereine, and June 1948, when power was handed over and they returned home jobless. This core narrative is preceded by a long buildup of incidents that led to 1947, and succeeded by descriptions of the main actors’ lives thereafter till their death. Alex von Tunzelmann is a historian and author, and this is her first book. The funniest part of it all was that I had taken the author to be a male from the name and only learned the true fact much later. This required some last minute changes in the review!

Part 1 of the book sets the stage for opening the final act in India’s independence, with the Mountbattens’ leaving England in style. In this section that spans more than a third of the book, the social and private lives of the main characters are analyzed in nitpicking detail – especially when it tends to be controversial. The author puts Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi under the scanner. Of these, the Father of the Nation gets the most reprobation. Gandhi’s political life was an extension of his personal one, or rather; they melded seamlessly so that no one could say for sure where one ended or where the other began. The tactics employed by him in the struggle for freedom from the British included civil disobedience, passive resistance, logical argument, nonviolence in the face of violence and emotional blackmail. Gandhi has admitted that he learned these traits from his wife Kasturba, in her deft dealing with Gandhi’s mother and her own mother-in-law. Gandhi’s handling of his sons left much to be desired in discharging parental duty. His experiments in testing sexual abstinence with his female acolytes were notorious. Tunzelmann tells of an incident in which a police team that searched the ashram in the middle of the night found Gandhi in the company of an eighteen-year old girl. This incident was soon hushed up. His impractical proposals on how the newly independent India should be moulded provoked cries of reprehension from all concerned parties. The author has painted most of her major actors in a not so flattering light. Royalty and their associates like Mountbatten get a severe drubbing. Lackluster performance in education and naval service had made Mountbatten a pampered, but inefficient commander. Even the Prince of Wales is not spared the author’s sharp rebuke though the author had acknowledged with thanks the permission granted by the Queen to access the Royal Archives at Windsor.

Tunzelmann trounces two arguments commonly used by nationalist elements in Indian society, that the presence of Gandhi reined in communalist elements in Indian politics and that Britain left India with extreme reluctance and immense pressure from Congress’ struggles. The author asserts that while Jinnah’s ascendancy coincided with the rise of political Islam, Gandhi’s spiritually inspired programmes gave confidence to religious chauvinists to take part openly in Congress politics. Fundamentalist Hindus were a rare presence before the coming of Gandhi on the scene. However, this argument contradicts with another of the author that Gandhi reached the zenith of his career during the Salt Satyagraha in 1930 and thereafter entered a descent to near irrelevance by 1947. His fanciful proposals first on how to avoid partition of the country and then on how to do it were rejected out of hand by the Congress, who were becoming more and more embarrassed by the Mahatma’s utterances. Gandhi rose to prominence again only in August 1947, when his moral authority could prevent communal violence breaking out in Calcutta by staging a fast unto death. While thousands of armed soldiers miserably failed to curb the fratricidal bloodbath in partitioned Punjab, a weak and unarmed man could ensure calmness in partitioned Bengal was nothing short of a miracle. A few months later, he did it again in Delhi, where the communal frenzy abated by his presence and another fast. Gandhi’s fast would force the Indian government’s hand to release payments due for Pakistan on account of partition of assets, but kept frozen on account of its support to assailants in Kashmir. These two incidents catapulted the Mahatma to the most ‘powerful’ position in India, though the irony of the word as applied to the prophet of nonviolence is glaring. Besides, he was gunned by a fundamentalist Hindu. So what is the logic in correlating Gandhi’s career with communalization of politics?

The book presents the grievous atmosphere in UK after the Second World War. Pyrrhic victory is only a mild term for the tremendous cost it had to pay in terms of human lives and material to crush the Axis powers into a pit even more terrible than they found themselves in. Isn’t it sheer madness for two prosperous nations to pick a quarrel up between them, then try to sort it out using violence on a scale not witnessed heretofore, and then ending up as paupers solely dependent on the handouts from a third power, the USA, in this instance? Devoid of resources and power, Britain was anxious to leave India for good. Tunzelmann writes that hundreds of thousands were dead, millions expended, normal industries battered, towns destroyed, families broken up and stuck back together and food supplies restricted to the minimum with strict rationing in England. This contrasts markedly with the boastful claims of a few overly patriotic fellow Indians that we had kicked the British out!

Though the book is fundamentally about the indefinable relationship between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, it effectively answers the question whether retaining Mountbatten as the Governor General of free India was a wise decision for the new nation to take. It is heartless and unfounded on facts to argue that he was appointed on the express desire of Nehru on account of the illicit relationship India’s first prime minister was running with the governor general’s wife! The book mentions a decisive episode in the finalization of the Punjab boundary. Gurdaspur district had a Muslim majority, but if it was to be given to Pakistan, Amritsar would’ve been mostly surrounded by Pakistani territory and India’s only route to Kashmir would’ve been cut off. Even though Cyril Radcliffe took a decision based only on population, it was said to be amended under pressure from Mountbatten. Eventually, Gurdaspur stayed a part of India, thereby facilitating quick movement of troops and material to Kashmir, when insurgents swooped on it two months later. Indians should not lose sight of this great service. Besides, Edwina made a commendable effort to mobilizing material for refugee camps and to make its administration more efficient and refugee-friendly, on account of her close relationship with the nation’s prime minister. It is curious to note that the ends of the four major figures shared something in common. Gandhi was assassinated, Nehru and Edwina died of heart attacks and Mountbatten was killed in an IRA terrorist attack that detonated a bomb in the boat he was sailing in.

On the whole, the book is rather gossipy in style. Of course, the facts are there in full, and the author had done extensive research to compile the diverse material into an immensely readable homogeneity; yet, she has not omitted anything which one would utter only in a hushed tone in respectable company. If it can be said without prejudice or sexist bias, the book looks a bit too feminine to general readers! It is, however, very pleasing to read. There is a lengthy section of Notes and a commendable Index. A set of monochrome plates adds variety to the narrative.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Zealot

Title: Zealot – The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Author: Reza Aslan

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2013 (First)

ISBN: 9789351360766

Pages: 296

Few other characters have influenced human minds over the ages more than that of Jesus Christ. He is the veritable god incarnate for nearly half of the world population, and a revolutionary preacher for others who are swayed more by rational thought. Where does the truth lie? The New Testament includes conflicting versions of narratives that dwells on Jesus as Christ, the messiah, the divine and as the man from Nazareth in his human form. Reza Aslan, who is an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, has written this excellent book by critically examining biblical passages to sift the actual happenings from mere conjectures. His vast scholarship of the books that made into the Bible and those who were rejected as apocrypha helps him to reconstruct a plausible sequence of events and the logic followed by the early church fathers in finalizing the creed of Christianity. Aslan is basically an Iranian Muslim, whose family escaped from the country in the wake of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. Reaching the U.S., and tired of Islam on account of the harrowing experience his family had to endure in Iran, Aslan was deeply attracted to Jesus Christ and the Christian religion. After an exhaustive study of the Bible, Aslan began to have doubts on blindly believing what is written. This prodded him into dedicating himself into research on the origins and development of Semitic religions. He has published many books on religion and now lives in Los Angeles. This book is a delight to read on account of its extensive coverage of events and the author’s pleasant style of telling a story.

The history of Israel/Palestine wrought its societal mind in the first millennium BCE in the way things eventually evolved. Aslan writes a beautifully crafted synopsis of it, which amply illustrates why the Israelites were waiting for a savior (messiah) at around Jesus’ birth. Jewish dominance on the land was practically cemented with the reign of David on the region conquered from subject peoples after great violence sanctioned by the one true god. The Jewish kingdom was supplanted in 586 BCE by the Babylonians and its subjects taken into captivity. They were released from slavery and their lands restored when the Persians overran Babylon. Israel was politically only a backwater as far as the Persians were concerned. Jewish rule continued for a few more centuries before contending princes sought the help of the Roman emperor, who had gained great strength by then. A vassal kingdom was established in Judaea under King Herod, who was a Jew in all but name. Herod accepted Roman hegemony and allowed Hellenization to proceed in the social sphere. His sops to devout Jews like the re-establishment of the Temple and a priestly class of administrators of it – though they were servile to him – did not endear the monarch to the ordinary faithful, because of his hefty taxes, rich tribute to his Roman overlords, establishment of Roman insignia in Jewish places of worship and the merciless suppression of rebel Jewish movements. After Judaea became a Roman protectorate in 63 BCE, several revolutionaries had turned up in the meantime to offer hope to the populace. They were inflamed by the zeal of god’s work and hence called zealots, without the negative connotation we usually assign to the word now. The authorities were also vigilant. Uttering the words “kingdom of god is near” was seditious as it might mean wresting Judaea away from the control of Rome and keep it separated from people believing in pagan religions as the Romans did. Herod died in 4 BCE and the thousands of labourers and peasants he had commandeered in Jerusalem for his lavish building projects had to return home jobless. This seething population meant trouble for the rulers.

Part 2 of the book covers the life and times of Jesus. This was a period rife with revolutionaries and insurrectionists. Hezekiah, Simon of Peraea, Athronges the shepherd boy, and Judas the Galilean came before Jesus, while Theudas came after him. Many of them claimed to be messiahs. All of them met the standard penalty reserved for sedition – death on the cross. Jesus’ Galilee was a restive province from the beginning, subject only to a tenuous control from Jerusalem. Aslan argues that Jesus was a disciple of John the Baptist and rose to prominence after his master’s incarceration by Herod Antipas. Jesus professed his ministry in the rustic towns and villages of Galilee, carefully leaving out cities like Sepphoris and Tiberias where Roman garrisons were stationed. A lot of miracles and healings were performed in this period. This is not something extraordinary as evidenced by the list furnished by the author. Honi the Circle-Drawer, Abba Hilqiah, Hanan the Hidden, Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa and Apollonius of Tiyana are said to have performed the same feats as Jesus. After testing out the suburbs, Jesus and his disciples entered Jerusalem on a donkey at the head of a great procession fit for a king. He drove out the moneychangers and released sacrificial animals from the Court of Gentiles in the sacred Temple of Jerusalem. Jewish priests and elders who were already tired of Jesus’ revolutionary program of reversing the social order in the coming Kingdom of God couldn’t tolerate this blatant assault on one of the holiest places of Jewish worship. He was brought before the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, who, against his inner voice and submitting to popular frenzy ordered him to be crucified. This biblical story is challenged by the author. Pilate was a very cruel official having no regard to his Jewish subjects. It is unlikely that he would tend to show mercy on a rebel who had threatened to upset the order and hoisted the banner of sedition against Roman rule of Israel. A novel theory is suggested to account for the beneficial light in which Pilate, the Roman governor is portrayed in the gospels. They were written many decades after the crucifixion. In the meantime, Jews rose up in armed revolt against Rome in 66 CE. After a brutal reprisal, Rome reasserted control in 70 CE. The retaliation was horrific. In addition to destroying the temple, Jews were massacred en masse and scattered the living ones to the four corners of the empire. The early Christian evangelists had the Roman intelligentsia in mind as the target for conversions. This explains the haste to absolve Pilate for all wrongdoing, at the same time setting in motion anti-Semitism among Christians which continues to this day.

Aslan identifies two distinct currents in post-crucifixion Christian theology. Apostles and Jewish elders continued to treat Jesus as a Jewish messiah, even though he couldn’t fulfill the promises expected of one – the end of days didn’t come, God didn’t liberate Jews from bondage, the twelve tribes of Israel were not reconstituted and the kingdom of god never arrived. There was a mother assembly in Jerusalem under the leadership of James the Just, who was Jesus’ own brother. Peter, Simon and John, who were the foremost among apostles, were also a part of the assembly. They were observant Jews who didn’t violate scriptures – just like Jesus. They considered Jesus as a man, the messiah, who died on the cross but resurrected on the third day. Early Christianity was a sect of Judaism. If a gentile wanted to become a Christian, he had to first become a Jew by circumcision and other rituals. The divergence of Christians from mainline Jews was perhaps initiated by the martyrdom of Stephen in around 35 CE at Jerusalem. Stephen was a Christian and refused to recant that Jesus was the messiah. He was stoned by the populace. The last trace of the historical person known as Jesus of Nazareth was buried with this death, which was occasioned by the devotee’s suggestion that he saw Jesus sitting on the right side of God. Jesus movement obtained traction among Diaspora Jews.  The movement was divided into Hebrews (those inhabiting Israel) and Hellenists (who were Greek-speaking and domiciled in foreign lands). The Hebrews were mainly farmers and fishermen, while the latter were more sophisticated and urbane. Paul, who was a converted Pharisee, evangelized the Diaspora and gentiles. He wavered from Mosaic Law and welcomed even uncircumcised gentiles into his fold. He was reprimanded for this breach of custom by the church elders, especially James. They nominated another missionary of their own to spread the holy word in Paul’s congregations. Paul’s resentment knew no bounds. He introduced a new liturgy in which he introduced Jesus as Christ, the divine, who existed along with God. When Jerusalem was burnt down in 70 CE and the inhabitants slaughtered after the insurrection, the Jerusalem assembly disappeared from the world, paving the way for a Romanized version of Pauline Christianity that quickly unshackled itself from Jewish precepts and inaugurated itself as a new religion. The rest is history.

The book is very easy to read and comprehend. Aslan’s erudition is impressive, as evidenced by the numerous references not only to books in the two testaments, but also to apocryphal texts. The Notes section covers almost a quarter of the book. Bibliography is extensive and the Index is excellent. Even with all this, the author’s selective assignment of suspicion on uncomfortable Biblical verses that don’t tally with his argument should have been avoided. Altogether, the book is a commendable introduction into Christology.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Box

Title: The Box – How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

Author: Marc Levinson

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2006 (First)

ISBN: 9780691123240

Pages: 376

The period after the death of Soviet Union in the early 1990s is taken to be the time globalization took birth. Though historians would propose the early 19^th century in the aftermath of Napoleonic wars, or even the late 16^th century after the settling of the New World as the contenders to the start of globalization, there is no denying that the last decade of the last century saw tremendous improvement in international trade. Whereas raw materials came in one direction and end products travelled the other in earlier times, that pattern became increasingly blurred. Manufacturers could easily source intermediate products from far off places and that too, just in time. The Barbie Doll was made entirely in the U.S. earlier. Now the doll is manufactured in China, with clothes from Korea, hair from the U.S., colour from Japan and likewise. In this catalog of the tremendous pace of manufacturing in the era of globalization, one thing stands apart as the prime factor in helping achieve the goals – cheap and fast transport of cargo from one corner of the world to the other in containers. Hardly 50 years before, nobody had used it, while now, those who don’t use it is a nobody. Marc Levinson tells the thrilling story of containers from its conceptual stages to the modern era. The style is crisp and witty. With extensively researched data on cargo, Levinson has made an excellent work that presents the complexities of international trade simplified as to be enjoyable by general readers as well. The author is an economist in New York and has authored three books earlier. He had associated with leading economics publications like the Economist.

As an introduction, Levinson presents the sorry plight of dock workers and the enormous time and money wasted in transporting goods from one end of the globe to the other. A ship normally carries tens of thousands of discrete items in one journey. In the pre-container era, each of these items were separately packaged and stowed on board. This evidently led to wastage of space, which resulted in loss to the shipping company. As a result, manufacturers preferred to set up shop as near to customers as possible. Rapid industrialization seen after the Second World War in the western countries is the result of this trend. As market dynamics shifted and low-cost, long-distance shipping was made feasible with the use of containers, employers got the upper hand in bargaining with unions. If they proved too belligerent the factory owners could relocate to a Third World country, where the labour costs were dead cheap and the transportation costs were also low. In fact this factor contributed a great deal to the rise of globalization which we now take for granted. Dock workers were a tough lot before, in terms of the job they were doing and also when they were assessed on the personal level. The longshoreman had difficulty in finding a daily job for loading and unloading the ships. The work was hard, steady and not intellectually challenging. Supply far exceeded demand which encouraged cronyism and bribery on the part of harbour masters. Sometimes the workmen had to literally fight their way for a day’s work. With the advent of reforms, such practices were curtailed and with the coming of containers such jobs were effaced out of the industry altogether.

Malcom (sic) Purcell McLean was the man who turned pivotal in the development of containers. Curiously he had no idea about shipping when he began his business of transportation through trucks. He used containers for lorry transport, which reduced the loading and unloading times. In a bid to expand his operations, McLean transported entire trucks on board ships to save costs. This gradually led to the containers themselves placed on the deck, which can be loaded to a waiting truck at the destination. McLean acquired shipping companies to try his novel ideas and his Pan Atlantic shipping line introduced the Sea-Land service, which later became a byname for container freight. On April 26, 1956, a ship sailed from Port Newark to Houston with containers, heralding a new era in the history of maritime trade. However, the new device didn’t find favour with labour unions that effectively ruled the Atlantic and Pacific costs of the U.S., wringing concession after concession from the shipping lines. Limitations of geography and traffic congestion were eating into the worthiness of New York’s ports, shifting the business to New Jersey coast. Unions took a demanding line in negotiations with the management in the general atmosphere of New York’s declining business and loss of jobs due to automation. Levinson paints a gruesome picture of the dock environment in which unions exercised their will under the always present threat of strike. In any industry, the management exploits the workers till they are organized into unions. The tide then reverses, in which the power conferred by collective bargaining constrain the management in no small measure. On the west coast of the country, ILWU, the more pragmatic of the unions reached a mechanization and modernization agreement with the ship lines in 1960, which was realized by the employers paying a huge sum of money in the form of guaranteeing income of workers who stood to lose their jobs on the account of automation and also to ensure sufficient funds for retirement of the workers. The east coast workers also reached a similar agreement in the form of guaranteed annual income. The chapter titled ‘Union Disunion’ presents a ring side view of the dock labour environment in the U.S. during the 50s and 60s.

When we look at the inventions that have since became ubiquitous, we tend to wonder at how the society could have lived without it, before it came into being. Electricity is one such thing and judging from the book, containers also deserve mention in that group. The entire shipping is now dominated by containers, thanks to its inherent advantages like low cost and less time for loading and unloading. However, Levinson presents a different story in the first decade since the first ship sailed with containers in 1956. The size of the box was not standardized. This released a huge set of problems in the shipping arena that was still smarting from its introduction. The cranes, trucks and rail cars used for transporting one company’s containers couldn’t be used for containers of other ship lines. Standards-making agencies like American Standards Association (ASA) and International Standards Organization (ISO) immediately entered the fray to make norms for sizing individual containers. After hectic deliberations that involved countries from both sides of the Atlantic, the world eventually settled on boxes having lengths in multiples of 10 feet, the most commonly used being 20 footers. As the standard war was heating up American shipping, Europe and Asia waited for finalization of it. So when the standards were adopted, they quickly came on the fray and derived maximum benefit out of it. Even now, the top six positions in terms of world container traffic are occupied by Asian ports – Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Busan and Kaoshung. Containers got a big boost in international shipping which helped ease the logical nightmares faced by the U.S. military in Vietnam in 1956. Over a period of a few months, the military was thoroughly convinced of the efficiency of containers. Even with all this, it is ironic to learn that the father of containerization, Malcom McLean died a bankrupt, having lost his money in shipping after his plans were upset by geopolitics in the form of unexpected falls and rallies of oil price. All the container ships around the world sounded their whistles at the instant of McLean’s cremation as a mark of respect.

The book could have done better with a few photographs that would add interest. Levinson sells his ideas on containers with conviction, but some of the claims seem to be a little too tall. He assigns the great increase in international trade to the better conditions provided by containerization. This is hardly the case. Apart from easing some of the bottlenecks that was hindering trade expansion, containers were greatly affected by the oscillating equations of global commerce and its pricing policies. Instead of asserting one to be the direct offspring of the other, we can only grant that globalization and containerization are the two streams that merged to produce the revolution that we see today. The book includes a fine section of notes, a good bibliography and a thorough index.

This book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star