Mapping the Great Game

Title: Mapping the Great Game – Explorers, Spies & Maps in Nineteenth-century Asia

Author: Riaz Dean

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9780670092918

Pages: 293

When European powers competed among themselves for colonial annexation in the nineteenth century, it became the lot of Asia to come under their hegemonic invasions and also to provide the battleground for their internecine warfare. Britain stood its ground in India quite firmly and convincingly by 1818, when they defeated the Marathas, the last native challenge to colonialism. While Britain had no ambitions on the barren wastelands of Central Asia with its sparsely populated but aggressively tribal communities, this was not the case with Russia under the tsars. Russia always coveted a land route to the warm water ports of South Asia. With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, their hopes were kindled to try something bold. Their overtures to Persia and the Khanates of Turkestan stung Britain to wake up to the possibility of a Russian invasion on India, by that time treated as the Jewel in the Crown. It too began countermeasures towoo and/or browbeat the petty principalities which controlledthe trade routes. This diplomatic and sometimes military confrontation is known as ‘The Great Game’. It continued on and off for nearly a century till 1907 when an Anglo-Russian Convention was signed to keep Afghanistan as a buffer state between the two empires. While this tussle for new land was being played out, the colonial government in India came alive to the need for making maps of the subcontinent using thoroughly scientific methods. The Great Trigonometrical Survey precisely did the same with painstaking work that spanned four decades. This book is the charming story of these initiatives along with the East India Company's desire to open trade up with Tibet which wanted to keep itself hidden in a clock of mystery and deep religiosity.Born and brought up in the Fiji Islands, Riaz Dean has travelled much of Central Asia including Turkestan and the roof of the world. He has written on the ancient Silk Road and its mapping. He lives in New Zealand. This is his first book.

The author identifies William Moorecroft as the first Britisher to investigate beyond Afghanistan. Arrived in India as superintendent of studs, he took it as a pretext to venture north in search of fine horses. It was essential to keep such secrecy as spieswere immediately executed in the war-torn principalities. He set out in 1811 and his third journey was especially important due to another unexpected development. We know that literature in India extended to the first millennium BCE, but Indians were reluctant to write down history. On this aspect, she trailed behind Greece. We had the equivalent of Pythagoras or Democritus, but no one comparable to Herodotus or Thucydides. Other than eulogies and epics that exaggerated facts to an unrecognisable mangle, India can point out only to the treatise ‘Rajatarangini’(river of kings) written in Kashmir in the eleventth century CE about its dynasty. This book was brought to light by Moorecroft’s efforts. He had some medical talents and he cured a learned Brahmin while in Kashmir and managed to obtain the manuscript of the volume as a reward.He died in Afghanistan on his last journey and the copious notes and logbooks he left behind were recovered and published after his demise.

It is amusing to know that India was the only country in the world that was mapped with state of the art cartographic methods in the early nineteenth century. This was achieved by the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) organised and kick-started in 1802. This system involved fixing three prominent pointsin the countryside as the vertices of a triangle and then proceeded to measure the angles between them. Based on the length – actual or calculated – betweenany two vertices, the other two lines can be computed trigonometrically. Hilltops were the usual targets, and even the tower soaring above the Brihadeshwara temple at Thanjavur had also been used as a point. Lambton carried on the measurements for twenty-one years in the rugged country with a most demanding climate. He died in 1823 while surveying near Nagpur. The management of the men and instruments was a herculean task. The measurement apparatus alone took thirty-four camels and three elephants to move. It employed up to 700 workers and was completed only in 1841 when it reached the Himalayan foothills. This was soon extended to other uncharted regions and the principal triangulation of the subcontinent was finally finished in 1883.

Dean notes down the enthusiastic participation of native surveyors in finalising the route surveys to Tibet. It was a forbidden country for foreigners, but a few tribes in the Kumaon sector were permitted to travel there and carry out essential trade. The British saw this as an opportunity to explore the theocratic kingdom under the nominal suzerainty of China. They trained Indian volunteers in the art of surveying and taught them to walk all the way to Tibet in a consistent fashion. Their trained steps of standard length were then carefully counted from specially made prayer beads. They then walked into Tibet and other uncharted territory under the guise of merchants or religious mendicants. They were called pundits and the most famous among them was Nain Singh who made it to Lhasa in 1866. Kishen Singh made another great feat by traversing 2800 miles entirely by walking in a span of two years. These pundits were on their own on these long travels. In the absence of modern communication facilities, they were often presumed to be dead. When Kishen Singh returned, he found his two-year old son already dead and his wife had taken up with another man. Abdul Hamid is another noteworthy figure who had made more than fifty explorations. In all, these pundit mapmakers route-surveyed over 25,000 miles of territory worth of India’s frontiers, covering a staggering one million square kilometres. Much of this region was previously uncharted and where most European explorers had dared not venture.

This book also presents the picture from the Russian side too, where the kingdom gradually gobbled up the Central Asian states. The towering Hindukush mountain ranges made it difficult for transporting troops from the Indian side. But no such geographical features hindered the Russians. The Volga River flowed into the Caspian Sea and a rail line was laid from the other shore of this land-locked sea to Tashkent. What is remarkable is the relative ease with which the Russian forces overwhelmed the fabled Turkish defences. These remained firmly under Russian control till the fall of Communism in 1991 when they turned independent one by one. Turkestan was in effect divided into two parts by the imperial interests of Russia and China. China renamed its half Xinjiang which remains under sectarian rife even now. The Great Game came to an end after Russia’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905 and the rise of Germany as a concern for both powers in the run up to the First World War.

The book is very easy to read. It has three major sections – those dealing with the power struggle with Russia, surveying of India and opening up of the trade route to Tibet. These three are practically mutually exclusive with nothing to link them. It thus takes extraordinary coordination on the part of the author to seamlessly join them so that the readers’ attention is not jarred. The author always exhibits an understanding of the sensibilities of the Indian readers in exposing the blatant racial prejudices in favour of the British geographers whose only physical trouble was the exposition of the efforts of their Indian subordinates and translation of their narrative into English.

The book is highly recommended

Rating: 3 Star

Why I am a Hindu

Title: Why I am a Hindu

Author: Shashi Tharoor

Publisher: Aleph, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9789386021106

Pages: 297

Shashi Tharoor is a politician well known for his cosmopolitan views and liberal outlook. He contested for the post of UN Secretary General in 2006, lost to Ban Ki-moon and returned to India as a junior minister in the Congress government headed by Manmohan Singh. Tharoor is an intellectual having several well-researched books to his credit. However, he is known for mixing his ideas with partisan politics and presenting them as time-honoured truths. Sensationalism is his hallmark as seen in the strange assertion in his last book titled ‘An Era of Darkness’ (reviewed earlier) in which he claimed that India's caste system was a flexible one and that it got solidified during the British rule. In this book, he eulogizes the Hindu religion’s credentials as an inherently tolerant belief system that is well adapted to the spiritual requirements of the 21st century world. He is piqued by the attempts to reduce Hinduism's message to religious bigotry made by his political opponents in the Hindutva-inspired rightists of India.

The book’s attempt to present the basics of Hindu philosophy and ethos in a format that can be easily understood by the readers is remarkably effective. Most of it is lifted from more famous references, but the credit for the lucid condensation must be given to Tharoor. Hinduism has no founder or prophets, no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no uniform conception of a good life and no single sacred book. In this sense it has no fundamentals and hence no fundamentalism. There are no binding requirements to being a Hindu, not even a belief in God. The authorial diversity of Hindu scriptures and tenets is so vast that the author likens it to Wikipedia. Right in the beginning, Tharoor points out two reasons for writing this book. One is to himself try and understand the extraordinary wisdom and virtue of his faith and the other is to show that the intolerant and violent forms of political Hindutva went against the spirit of Hinduism. This itself is idiosyncratic as he describes aspects of Hindu thought that matter to him and questions practices that he is less enthusiastic about.

Tharoor reiterates time and again that he subscribes to a creed that is free of the restrictive dogmas of holy writ, one that refuses to be shackled to the limitations of a single volume of holy revelation. It is the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. Its tolerance to other faiths and modes of worship is legendary. An example presented in the book is that of Bene Israel, a community of Jews who reached India in the first century CE. It was astonishing that their Hindu neighbours did not see them as people practicing a different religion through all these centuries until a wandering Rabi from Jerusalem identified the tribe in the twentieth century.

The revival of Hinduism began with the British rule, or so the author claims. In the early period of the colonial administration, native reformers were somewhat embarrassed at the dark superstition and malicious rituals accreted on mainstream Hindu practice. Raja Ram Mohan Roy exemplifies this stream. However, the religion bounced back with full vigour in a few decades in which Swami Vivekananda becomes the representative figure. Tharoor contrasts this with a sharp observation: “It took a Vivekananda, not a Roy, to preach seven decades later, a robust, modernist and universalist Hinduism, anchored in its own precepts that could look the rest of the world’s religions in the eye and oblige them to blink “(p.115).

One great drawback of Tharoor is his propensity to mix politics with his literary work as he is a sitting MP of India's major opposition party. He laments that today's national leaders talk only about GDP growth, fiscal balance and foreign direct investment. They wear imported sunglasses and highest quality tailored linens. What do these have to do with our present topic of discussion? And this rebuke at markers of wealth coming from a flamboyant political icon as Shashi Tharoor is rather amusing. During his tenure as minister, he reportedly rued to a friend that as part of an austerity drive, he is forced to fly on ‘cattle class’ (economy class) along with other sacred cows!

Any discussion on Indian tolerance to other faiths must address the issue of how this salutary feature of Hinduism was battered mercilessly during foreign invasions that lasted a millennium. Tharoor faces this task but passes off with an apologist stance in favour of the invaders. He concurs that ‘some’ Muslim warlords had a proclivity to attack temples for their treasures and demolish them in the process. Similarly, he condones forced conversion as ‘an inclination’ of some of the conquered people to adopt the religion of their conquerors (p.103). After a few vaults of such intellectual riffraff, he grudgingly confesses to the existence of religious zeal in the Muslim warriors to smash the seats of idolatry (p.104). Tharoor also comments on the immense resilience of Hinduism. It survived innumerable invasions, raids, attacks and outright conquest. Each time, it stood strong and bounced back where lesser faiths in other countries crumbled before the invader and the majority of the population converted to the conqueror’s faith. However, Islamic invasions led to a defensive closing of the ranks and the adoption of retrograde protective practices that entrenched restrictions and prohibitions previously unknown. Restriction of entry into Hindu temples came about probably with a view to safeguard their treasures from prying eyes. Child marriage was instituted as protection for girls and even the practice of Sati were all measures of self-defence during this turbulent period of Indian history that evolved into pernicious social practices wrongly seen as intrinsic to Hinduism rather than as a reaction to assaults upon it.

The author’s firm opposition to Hindutva ideology flow out like a great stream throughout this book. As is usual in such rhetoric, a lot of half truths and plain falsehoods are also included. Anyhow, this tirade does not stop him from accepting that a temple indeed stood earlier at the site of Babri Masjid (p.181). Concerning the outrage caused by noted painter M F Husain’s nude and obscene portrayal of Hindu goddesses, he advises the Hindus to feel flattered by the fact that a Muslim artist had drawn liberally (italics mine) from Hindu ethos! This does not stop him from observing that Husain was much more circumspect and reverent towards Muslim figures he represented on the canvas. He once painted the prophet's wife as a fully clad woman in a saree which even covered her head (p.236). This articulation of freedom of expression is not extended to the Danish cartoons which portrayed the Prophet. Tharoor acknowledges them as insulting! Double standards, indeed. In another twist, he also admits that the Sangh Parivar, having seen successive governments pandering to the offended sentiments of minority communities, now want to show they could be offended too, and thereby bend society to their will (p.233). Tharoor even admits that Savarkar’s idea of Hindutva is so expansive that it covered everything that a scholar today would properly call Indic (p.145). In another self goal, he concedes that there is much to admire in Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s thinking (p.194). India's secular existence is made possible by the fact that the overwhelming majority of Indians are Hindus (p.199). With such arguments it seems to readers that Tharoor keeps a political backdoor half open to India's right wing ruling party.

It is well known that Tharoor is assisted in his literary effort by a team consisting of people with remarkable talent. It may be due to this team work that some of the ideas are seen repeated with slight changes at different locations. This has not precluded some unconscionable errors from creeping into the narrative. Babri Masjid is said to be demolished in December 1991 rather than 1992 (p.206). Similarly, the author contends that hundred elephants are decked up for the Pooram festival at Thrissur in Kerala (p.39) whereas the actual figure is around thirty. These are no big deal, being clerical mistakes, but the carelessness of the editorial team is shocking. So is the claim that Jainism is only a separate sect in Hinduism rather than a separate faith which maybe offending to Jains (p.24). But the author might be confident that the peace-loving Jains would not go after him with brickbats, which is the only consideration some authors have in publishing sensitive content. The book is easy to read even though the author tries his usual tricks with the rich source of vocabulary at his command. Almost the entire latter half of the book is a worthless rhetoric of political correctness, having no connecting link to the issues at hand.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

Ten Caesars

Title: Ten Caesars – Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine

Author: Barry Strauss

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9781451668834

Pages: 410

History is punctuated with ambitious leaders of men who aspired to conquer the world. Alexander the Great was the first ruler who could successfully carry his banner to three continents. However, his empire began to crumble at the very moment he breathed his last at the very young age of thirty-two. It was the Roman Empire that deserved the epithet of a lasting superpower from contemporary historians. It grew out of the ancient city of Rome, spread quickly around the Mediterranean littoral, challenged the highly cultured kingdoms of Persia and conquered the barbarians of northern Europe and Britain. Rather than falling back on the talent and resources of the city to administer the far-flung empire, it permitted first the elites in the provinces and then the reformed barbarians to enter its services and finally to reign as monarchs. The empire then turned into a true universal state by having emperors who had never visited Rome and the capital itself was shifted many times before finally settling on the distant eastern city of Constantinople. The Roman emperors were also colourful figures who lighted up the imagination of others and still continue to be celebrities in the true sense of the word. Epics, poems, plays and movies have all appeared that featured their deeds and fascinated the masses. This book features ten Caesars – the legendary title of Roman kings – from Augustus who assumed power in 27 BCE to Constantine who demitted the throne in 337 CE. Julius Caesar is kept out of the narrative as he is thought to be a politician of the Republican period of Rome. Barry Strauss is a professor of history and classics at Cornell University and has already authored seven books on ancient history.

Rome’s fabulous capacity to integrate people from diverse regions and races deserve unstinted respect. Strauss provides enough hints to reach this conclusion. The army was the most powerful Roman institution and even that was laid open to people from outside Italy. Legionaries were Roman citizens, but they rarely came from Rome or even Italy. Increasingly, Italians lost interest in military service as a direct corollary to the long periods of uninterrupted calm realised by the Pax Romana. They turned into successful farmers enjoying peace and prosperity. Recruits came from other areas such as southern France, Spain and the outer provinces. In 212 CE, Emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to all free people in the empire. To ensure a mix of the populace, later emperors after Marcus Aurelius prohibited a person from becoming the governor of his own native province. Rome’s greatness lay in its readiness to offer even the throne to people from outside the inner circle of power. Vespasian was the first ruler to ascend the throne who came from outside the nobility. Being the son of a tax collector, he was the first commoner on the Palatine Hill. Trajan was the first man from the provinces to become emperor. One of the empire’s strengths was its ability to co-opt the wealthy elite of the provinces. First, it offered them citizenship, then a seat in the Senate, and finally made them emperor.

Europe’s destiny undoubtedly changed its course when the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity which was made the state religion about eight decades later. The author describes the interaction between Christianity and paganism which was the majority religion in the empire. Here, Strauss deviates from a fundamental aspect of analysing ancient religions. Paganism is not a religion per se; it is simply the absence of one or more organised religions. It could easily accommodate an additional Christian god, but not vice versa. Semitic religions denied any legroom for other gods and religions. Pagans were not against Christians preaching or practising their religion but only demanded that they acknowledge and show respect to some pagan rituals which were recognized as part of their urban etiquette. Strauss acknowledges the strain of toleration running through the Roman society. However, simply adoring their own god was only a necessary condition for monotheism. Negating the existence of other divinities was the sufficient condition. Romans considered their own religion time-honoured, state-sponsored and carried out in public. It was the very foundation of civilization as far as they were concerned. Christians not only did not worship the gods but also did not offer sacrifices for the emperor. This was taken as a threat to the very fabric of society. Moreover, Christianity was relatively new and Rome was suspicious of novelty. Judaism was also considered superstitious, but it was tolerated because of its antiquity. Early Christians were tortured with macabre games of death. According to Christian tradition, two of the apostles or early missionaries of the church, saints Peter and Paul, were among the victims of Nero in the purge that followed the Great Fire. However, this is not proven.

The interaction between the Roman Empire and Christianity was not a one way street. Readers are amazed at the level of fluidity displayed by the supposedly rock-solid religious system of Christianity in assimilating the rituals and customs of the nation which they inhabited. This creeped in even into the most fundamental structure of Christian worship. The Roman father was a priest as well as the head of his household. He was responsible for the family maintaining a proper relationship with the gods. This structure was then extrapolated to political leaders as well. As chief priest, or Pontifex Maximus, the emperor did the same for all of Rome. We find the Christian clergy and Pope or Patriarch as its homologues in Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy. Even the nomenclature is borrowed from Roman administration. Emperor Diocletian grouped the provinces into regions called dioceses, each with its own administrator. This is now the jurisdictional area of a Christian bishop. The term ‘Holy City’ began to be used for Rome in the early 200s during the reign of Septimius Severus.  This was on account of the presence of some of the holiest shrines of paganism. Catholicism swallowed this as a whole. Till the time of Constantine, the first emperor who converted to Christianity, Christ was portrayed as an ordinary person or a simple shepherd. After Constantine, Jesus began to be depicted as sitting on a throne in a fine toga, like the emperor himself, surrounded by disciples who look like senators.

This book faithfully portrays the shifting focus of the empire away from Rome. Constantine established a second seat in Constantinople in the East, but Rome could not hold on to the seat of power for long. With increasing influence of naturalised military men from the Balkans and also due to the need for intercepting the onslaught of barbarians from Germany, the capital was shifted a number of times to Trier, Ravenna and other towns in Gaul. The home ground of the Roman Empire had one consolation amidst all these travails. Italy was exempt from taxes and was subsidized by revenue from elsewhere. Diocletian put an end to this practice and treated the peninsula like any other province. City of Rome and senators also had had to pay taxes thereafter.

Strauss does not expect a scholarly audience for this book. He treats Rome’s adoption of Christianity as the best thing that could come out of Rome and a most natural phenomenon like the blooming of a flower from its bud. He characterizes Constantine’s conversion as the noble act which ‘gave us Christ as our Lord’ (p.287). Edward Gibbon, in his magnum opus ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ had pointed out that Christianity played a big role in the fall of Rome because it sapped the fighting spirit of its people. This so enrages our author that he calls this hypothesis ‘nonsense’ (p.317). You can criticize an argument, but ridiculing it is foolhardy, especially such a celebrated scholar as Gibbon. Strauss then discloses his owns reasons for the empire’s downfall as bad leadership, poorly deployed military resources, internal division, strong enemies, unfavourable geography and a decline of resources.

This book discusses about ten Roman emperors – Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Diocletian and Constantine. However, he also narrates the story of the other emperors who ruled in between, so that the thread of continuity is not broken. This book reproduces several famous quotes such as ‘Rome is where the emperor is’, ‘make haste slowly’, ‘too many Caesars is not a good thing’ or ‘money has no smell’ in their proper context. It is also a pleasure to read as it is written for a typical Sunday school-going American with average intellect.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star