1965: A Western Sunrise

Title: 1965: A Western Sunrise – India’s War with Pakistan

Author: Shiv Kunal Verma

Publisher: Aleph Book Company, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9789390652464

Pages: 509

 

Right after partition, India and Pakistan joined battle over Kashmir in October 1947. Under the guise of tribal invaders, Pakistan occupied a portion of Kashmir now known as PoK (Pak-occupied Kashmir). Indian troops soon flushed them out, but Pakistan was always on the lookout for an opportunity to present itself to renew its effort to get hold of Kashmir. Such a chance came about in 1962 when India had miserably failed to take on Chinese aggression in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. The reasons behind this debacle were mostly political as Prime Minister Nehru had lost all connection with the military capability of the country and his hallucinations on world peace had crippled the battle-worthiness of the nation’s military. This encouraged Pakistan to try their own tricks on the Kashmir front. But the US weighed on them in preventing the opening of a simultaneous attack theatre on the western sector. Three years later in 1965, they tried their luck in Kashmir with another invasion. India strongly retaliated under the new Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri. This book deals with the war and states that it ended in a stalemate, but it disabused Pakistan of its wishful thinking that Hindu India was incapable of putting up a fight. Six years further on, in 1971, both the countries met in another warfront. This time, there was no confusion on the outcome. Pakistan lost the war, 93000 Pakistani soldiers meekly surrendered and the country itself was split into two pieces! Shiv Kunal Verma is an Indian military historian and a documentary filmmaker who has produced many documentaries on Indian defence services. His book on the 1962 war has been reviewed earlier in this blog.

 

As a backdrop to 1965, Verma comments on the legacy of Nehru and the disaster he had wrought about when China invaded in 1962. Nehru tampered with established norms and pushed his own favourites into positions of power. He appointed V K Krishna Menon, a diehard communist, as the defence minister which set alarm bells ringing in the West. Krishna Menon carried his political agenda to the job as well and polarized the army. He conveniently ignored inputs and advice that did not suit him. Pathetic conditions generally prevailing in India during Nehru’s tenure spilled over to strategic communication also. At the height of 1962 War, China unilaterally declared a ceasefire when their forces could easily have crossed over into Assam. Nehru was totally in the dark as the Indian embassy in Beijing failed to transmit the news of the ceasefire. It was the press which finally broke the news in New Delhi. At that precise moment, Nehru and his advisers were planning a program to blow up the various oil refineries in Assam to keep them from falling into Chinese hands!

 

The book then examines how the Chinese fiasco encouraged hawks in Pakistan to try their hand banking on India’s dismal performance in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. Most of Pakistan started believing that Hindu India did not stand a chance against a Pakistani onslaught. Moreover, Nehru’s foolish alliance with the Soviets had driven the US to invest heavily in Pakistan’s military infrastructure. As a part of the western alliance, Pakistan was bristling with US weapon systems that gave it an edge over India both on land and in the air. President Ayub Khan and his foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto then cozied up to China also, after their fallout with Soviet Union in the 1960s. As part of a boundary agreement, Pakistan coyly handed over the Shaksgam Valley in Kashmir over which China had lodged its territorial claim. This 75,000 sq.km region was a critical link between the Chinese occupation zones of Tibet and Xinjiang. As the Pakistani preparations were going on, Nehru died and the little known Lal Bahadur Shastri became prime minister. The outwardly frail and small physical appearance of Shastri fed Pakistani machismo as its President Ayub Khan towered over the dhoti-clad minuscule Indian prime minister. But they forgot that looks could be deceiving, as this same Ayub Khan was suspended from the charge of Punjab regiment battalion in 1945 for cowardice.

 

Verma puts the blame on the failure to make much headway in the 1965 war on the army general J N Chaudhuri. He was seen by most people as being brilliant in the operations room but shaky on the battleground. Besides, he was lucky to go scot-free after his bungling during the China war. As a traditional army man, Chaudhuri discounted the use of air power. He considered himself to be the sole authority who would plan and guide operations. He was senior to air force chief Arjan Singh by ten years, which in the armed forces set them apart by a generation. The army failed to make an offensive plan to target Lahore and Sialkot which would have crippled Pakistan’s morale. This muddled thinking was the direct result of India’s defensive mindset in which an offensive stance was always relatively muted instead of planning and waging an all-out war. This timidity of brigade commanders and ranks above was visible in 1962 as well. Almost all officers at the higher echelons of command were guilty of passing the buck and sacking those under their command for lapses they were guilty of (p.468). The invading troops were not given air support. No aerial photographs or tactical reconnaissance of enemy territory was available.

 

This book also narrates some peculiarities of Pakistani military practice and propaganda. It was driven home in the minds of young cadets that Hindus are cowards and they would run for their lives when they confront an Islamic army. These people had a very nasty surprise when they actually encountered the determined and multi-religious Indian army. If the Indians did not break and run for cover at the sight of the advancing Pakistani formations, they did not seem to have an alternate plan. In effect, they fell victims to their own propaganda. Verma also states that Pakistani soldiers most often did not return the respect due to an enemy soldier who is also, after all, fighting for his own country. Whether they were irregulars or regular troops, the standard practice of the Pakistanis was to mutilate the dead bodies of enemy soldiers (p.121). The Pakistan army discriminated against their own citizens who belonged to religious minorities and heterodox Islamic sects other than Sunnis. Major General Akhtar Hussain Malik was the commanding officer of Operation Grand Slam which sought to wrest control of key areas in Kashmir. However, he was transferred in the middle of the operation, when troops were literally midstream on Manawar Tawi River. The reason for this sudden shift was that Malik was an Ahmadiyya and Ayub Khan did not want him to grow too big for his boots.

 

Even though Shastri as prime minister handled the war and ensuing crisis exceptionally well, the instinct to crush the enemy was sadly lacking in him. Instead of finishing the job, he believed in forgiving the enemy and giving him one more chance to mend his ways. Needless to say, this floundered against the Pakistani mindset which originated in religious intolerance and was shaped by the inferno of partition-related violence. Shastri’s objectives to the army were modest in the extreme. It asked them to occupy only minimum Pakistani territory to achieve India’s purposes which would be vacated after the satisfactory conclusion of the war. India directed its air force not to attack PAF airfields unless they attacked IAF bases first. Compare this strategy to Israel’s blindingly devastating strikes at enemy airfields in the Six-Days War of 1967! This outlook percolated down to military officers too. Verma describes an anecdote here. An air force officer requested his superior that a military man needed to get on a civilian flight to Dhaka and come back with information pertaining to deployment of Pakistani fighter aircrafts there. His superior rejected it outright saying what he was suggesting was most ‘ungentlemanly’ and would amount to spying (p.254)! We also read about the air chiefs of both countries talking to each other over phone and promising not to engage each other in battle with their aircrafts. However, this promise was very short-lived.

 

Much of this huge book is devoted to describe the minutiae of war and its tactics. Readers who don’t know the differences between a company, platoon, brigade or battalion – people such as myself – would find it extremely difficult to appreciate what was happening and would find it very hard to proceed. Perhaps this book is better suited to military personnel. The author exhibits a thorough knowledge of Pakistani capabilities, tactics and battle formations in 1965 and provides a respectful assessment of their potential. He unhesitatingly admits their superiority in equipment but stresses that Indian army more than made up for the difference with sheer determination and courage. The book includes many photographs and illustrations of the various battle engagements. It also includes some pictures of Pakistani service personnel who performed outstanding feats of bravery. At the same time, he comes down with sharp criticism of those Indian army officers who wilted in the face of crisis and showed indecisiveness. He remarks that if those commanders had fought in the time of Stalin or Hitler, most of these gentlemen would have been shot for incompetence (p.287).

 

The book is recommended only for serious readers of military history.

 

Rating: 3 Star

 

False Allies

Title: False Allies – India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma

Author: Manu S. Pillai

Publisher: Juggernaut Books, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9789391165895

Pages: 528

 

All of India was under native kings when Europeans descended on India in the age of explorations. They managed to obtain a toehold at strategic locations and then fought their way to the interior and local hegemony. The lust for colonial possessions was so powerful that they tried to annex kingdom after kingdom at the slightest provocation or pretext. Then came 1857 and India erupted in rebellion. Though it was eventually crushed, the Rebellion forced the British to re-calibrate their policy towards the local rulers. When the sepoys recruited and trained by the British turned against them, it was the maharajahs – especially of Rajputana, Punjab and the South – that stood fast with them. It inaugurated a new era in which British intervention was minimal and the native states urged to bring in progress by building roads, hospitals, schools and irrigation projects. There were hundreds of native states and that many kings. The maharajahs were typically cast as ludicrous idiots who served no cause other than their own and played no role in the making of modern India. This stereotype served the purpose of the British, which infantilized Indian rulers and cemented the claim that natives were incapable of serious government. Nationalists saw them as British proxies having no role in the future of India. This book examines five Indian states during the period 1860 – 1910 united by the artistic career of India’s most famous painter, Raja Ravi Varma of Kilimanoor, among the nobility of these states, which are Travancore, Pudukottai, Mysore, Baroda and Udaipur. Manu S. Pillai is the best-selling young author and all his three other books have been reviewed earlier in this blog.

 

A clear goal of this book is to explain why the native states were important to the nation-in-the-making. Two-fifths of the subcontinent’s territory and a quarter of its population were contained in it. However, most discussions of Indian history just leave them out. The difference in public’s perception of politics in the states differed very much from the British-ruled provinces. Public mobilization in the provinces was within nationalistic bounds of Indians versus the Raj, but in states it was divided along caste lines. Being natives themselves, the maharajahs fervently hoped that they could get away with their rule. Earlier, Congress also left the states to their own devices. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the Raj was forced to respond to nationalistic aspirations, but maharajahs did not follow suit. In the nineteenth century, the idea of India as a nation in the Western political sense was a novelty, but in the twentieth, it fast became an emotional reality. At this crucial moment, the rajahs rowed against the current and wrote their own obituary. The native princes were till that time cushioned by the British and protected from internal turmoil. The maharajahs no longer needed to mollify local society in terms of caste networks, commercial guilds, the nobility or otherwise. So long as they paid tribute to the Raj, they could be left in security and this in turn caused them to neglect their people.

 

Ravi Varma employed European techniques in painting. This total shift from traditional representative methods and aesthetics transformed Indian painting. Pillai argues that Ravi Varma was symbolic of a much larger transition in Indian society as well. The ease with which it absorbed this in its stride is truly remarkable. Also, Ravi Varma’s art straddled the rajahs and nationalists. They were on the same page and a future without the maharajahs was yet to be imagined. It is this phase that is the subject of this book. Sanskrit offered the most inexhaustible stores of pictorial representation in the form of stories from mythology. As this had fastened on the national memory and animated the national voice, it also generated a national imagery. In a country with seemingly irreconcilable diversity, the epics were a common passion encapsulating pan-Indian aspirations. Ravi Varma’s strategy was unrivaled in recreating a romantic past for modern India. He idealized a heritage capable of moving audiences anywhere in India, giving visual confirmation of a shared cultural inheritance. Scantily clad women of old Indian art were ill-fitted for the Victorian age. Attractive Indian elements were matched with modern methods and ideals. Ravi Varma’s goddesses were dressed in sarees and high-necked blouses.

 

The period is also emblematic of the rise of capable native statesmen who were well-fitted to administer the land with enlightened principles to guide them. A usual British trope was that they were forced to rule over the country as the natives were unsuitable to provide an administration that can lead it to progress. We see many capable officials cutting their teeth with British training and then moving to the dewanship of native principalities based on recommendations of British superiors. Many of them did a splendid job in lifting the kingdoms out of medieval mindset and provided a role model for others. This buoyed up their own careers as they could not hope to reach prominent positions under the blighting glare of racial prejudice in British India’s administrative services. Dadabhai Naoroji was the dewan of Baroda and he came up with accurate statistical analyses of how Britain plundered India. Dinkar Rao offered a detailed opinion on how to govern India as early as 1862. T. Madhava Rao made a constitution of sorts to bind native rulers to set principles. This sought to put an end to arbitrary will with well-entrenched laws, to ensure such laws were obeyed, to protect public funds from royal misappropriation, to preserve the rights and liberties of the people and to do justice without bias, all while staying loyal to the Raj. The book includes descriptions of how these officials performed.

 

The rajahs were also in a difficult situation around this time. Unlike in art and administration, we see much wider range here. There were rulers who readily agreed to colonial demands and vied with each other to be in the good books of the British. At the same time, there were other princes who did not speak a word of English. The kings managed to keep a footing in both tradition and modernity for different audiences. The Wadiyar dynasty of Mysore led all other states in the parameters of industrial progress. Mysore city became the abode of the maharajah – a museumized landscape – while his modern government was conducted from Bengaluru under the British commissioners. The king and state were traditionally inseparable, but they occupied designated spaces in which the ruler served as a hands-on executive, rather than a monarch. On the other side of the country, in Rajputana, things hardly improved from what it was several centuries ago. The ceremonial status of rulers still depended on the thickness of cushions on which they rested and the colour of the cloth draped over it. All signaled status and were carefully managed. For some vassals, the king might rise only on their arrival but for others, on their departure also. Some nobles were entitled to be received at the palace door by the ruler, as opposed to others who met him in the durbar.

 

Pillai encapsulates a vignette of the making of a modern nation in this book. Culturally the land was united from a very long time ago, but it had not been moulded into a form that could be called a nation state in the modern sense. Political unifiers had to be invented and incorporated into the national whole. The overarching Indian identity was in its infancy. People still thought of themselves as Banias and Brahmins, Marathas and Mewaris, through prisms emphasizing difference rather than oneness. The author claims that nationalism was not a given. It had to be slowly constructed. The nationalists and maharajahs took their part in weaving the national narrative in the period 1860 – 1910.

 

The book is very nice and easy to read. A really huge research had gone into the preparation of this work, with 129 pages of notes and 28 pages of bibliography. Selected Ravi Varma paintings constitute a welcome familiarization with the royal personages under discussion. Even though the book covers five native states, the prime stress is on Travancore, the author’s native place. There was another book, ‘The Ivory Throne’ from the same author detailing the history of the Travancore royal family from the 1920s onwards. It is certain that a portion of the research has been salvaged from the effort spent on that book. However, a clear unifying structure is absent in the narrative which looks more like a series of anecdotes.

 

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

 

A Thousand Cuts

Title: A Thousand Cuts – An Innocent Question and Deadly Answers
Author: T J Joseph
Translator: K Nandakumar
Publisher: Penguin, 2021 (First)
ISBN: 9780670094455
Pages: 305
 
Kerala leads other Indian states on several parameters, including literacy, general education, health infrastructure and rural development. On some factors like life expectancy and sex ratio, it comes even close to western nations. However, its society is deeply divided on caste and religious lines. Kerala tops the list of people who fled India to join the Islamic State terror movement. It is also an open secret that Islamism in India is mostly financed by organizations in Kerala. However, Kerala itself has not witnessed much violent Islamist action. Like the tens of thousands of its people toiling for their livelihood in the Middle East, Kerala exports jihadi elements to other parts of India to create havoc there. It is in this background that the events mentioned in this book occur. It is the story of how Islamists physically attacked a college professor and chopped off his right palm accusing him of insulting the Prophet through a question he had set in an internal test paper. The incident is not a novel one as we continue to see similar happenings – sometimes even more serious – almost on a daily basis in many parts of the world. What is shocking in this case is the union of the state government machinery with the Islamists in hunting down the professor who had absconded for his safety and the Christian management which dismissed him from service to please them. Having lost the sole livelihood of the family and driven to despair, the professor’s wife committed suicide. This pathetic act persuaded the management to revoke the dismissal and reinstate him two days prior to his superannuation. T J Joseph reminisces on those events in this book.
 
Joseph explains in detail the thought process that went in for the selection of the question in dispute. He wanted to present some matter for adding punctuation marks for B.Com students studying Malayalam as second language during their second semester. The author selected a book titled ‘Thirakkathayude Reethishastram’ (Methodology of Screenplay) by noted filmmaker P T Kunju Muhammad which was suggested as reference material by the university. There is a dialog in the book between a mad man and god which ran thus:
 
Mad man: “Creator, Creator”
God: “What is it, sonofabitch?”
Mad man: “A mackerel – if one cuts it – how many pieces will there be?”
God: “You dog, how many times do I have to tell you it’s three?”
 
Now, Joseph wanted to add a name to the mad man. Since the man calls god padachon (Creator in Malayalam) it was obvious that he was a Muslim. The professor thought of a common Muslim name that was also carried by the film maker and named the protagonist Muhammad. And all hell broke loose!
 
The Muslim community of Thodupuzha, where Joseph was teaching at Newman College, came out in droves to protest against what they perceived as an insult to the Prophet and blasphemy on the words attributed to god. The agitation turned violent and the college authorities suspended the professor, in effect accepting the mob’s charges as true. The police also filed a case against him for fomenting enmity among communities. Joseph left his home and remained a fugitive for a few days by which time he had hoped to arrange anticipatory bail. His plans did not materialize as his friends did not want to be seen as associating with a tainted person. He then surrendered to the police and the court remanded him to judicial custody for a few days before granting bail. His ordeal was just beginning when he came out. Three months later, a group of Islamists armed with knives and machetes waylaid his car while coming back home after attending a church service. They hacked his right palm off and inflicted several cuts on other limbs. The chopped off palm was later surgically reattached. At this point, the management dismissed him from service. When it became evident that he will not be taken back even after four years, his wife committed suicide in a fit of depression. The management of the college, which was manned by Christian priests, then relented and allowed him to rejoin on a Friday while he was to retire on Monday with the intervening days as holidays for the college. The author has made a touching narrative of the incidents that devastated his family.
 
What we find alarming in the whole episode is that the law enforcement of Kerala cozied up to the Islamists and made their path smooth for inflicting the punishment prescribed by Sharia law for blasphemers. When a militant organization initiated violent action on the streets, the police chased the professor without asserting facts. Joseph’s leaving the scene is also culpable since nobody was then present on the ground to explain his side of the story. The mob’s interest got weightage over anything else, even if those interests were born out of ignorance, against truth and flagrantly unethical. In addition to this, the police took the innocent professor’s son into custody and brutally tortured to make him divulge his father’s hiding place and also to force him to surrender. When Joseph was released on bail after preliminary investigation, they did not accord him any guards for protection. However, after he was assaulted and right hand hacked, he was given round-the-clock police protection in a classic instance of closing the stable door after the horse had bolted.
 
The police’s slovenly attitude is expectable even though it cannot be pardoned. What is totally embarrassing is the college management’s vengeful attitude. This was a Christian minority institution and the professor was a member of the same congregation. Even then, they joined the protestors in declaiming the author, became their mouthpiece and abused him. It ensured that the case was filed solely on his name and worked to create evidence by scouring the wastepaper basket and retrieving the crumpled written copy of the question paper in the author’s own hand. The management even convened a press conference and apologized to the Muslim community for wounding their religion and sensibilities. This in fact added fuel to the fire and protestors turned rioters. The author does not mention any antecedents that might have prompted the priestly management to behave in this fashion. Joseph claims that his actions as a professor was impeccable and he had engendered no issue for the relationship to fray. However, in the second part of the book in which he reminisces on the events prior to the incident, he does not speak anything about his experience with the management. There is a chapter on his interview for the post of lecturer, but a deep silence ensues thereafter. The author does not seem to be very forthcoming on this point.
 
The book is very absorbing to read and reminds the readers of the disastrous consequences attached to seemingly trivial mistakes. It also provides warning signs on the radicalization of Muslim youths and the government’s tacit acceptance and passive encouragement in the hope of securing vote banks. No cultural leader or intellectual in Kerala voiced his or her protest. No author has used the name ‘Muhammad’ for their characters thereafter. The author’s deep roots in farming and his family’s early espousal of agriculture is a model to all. The translation by Nandakumar is a very fine example of conveying the ideas without missing any of the nuances though on a few occasions, it appears too pedantic.
 
The book is highly recommended.
 
Rating: 3 Star
 

Coromandel – A Personal History of South India

Title: Coromandel – A Personal History of South India

Author: Charles Allen

Publisher: Little, Brown, 2017 (First)

ISBN: 9781408705391

Pages: 411

 

South India is in many ways different from the north such as in language, costumes, social organisation and political outlook. While the north was always susceptible to invasions from the northwest frontier, the south interacted with foreign powers mostly as trade partners rather than opponents in the battlefield. Whatever invasion the south had to endure was from those foreign powers that had subdued the north. Even though the differences between the two regions appear formidable to some, even a cursory examination would prove that it is only skin-deep and the same culture runs through the veins of both the north and the south. However, the Dravidian Movement in Tamil Nadu blows these petty differences out of proportion as something fundamental in nature and harps on the distinctness of the south. They have not yet been successful in convincing even their brothers in the southern states other than Tamil Nadu. Sane people find it difficult to palate their fanciful claims that Tamil was the original language spoken in the world in a now submerged continent of Lemuria. In spite of this, they find support from some foreign NGOs and evangelist groups. This book is also a clear marker of support to the movement. It is based on the personal travels the author and his wife had made to the south in a number of years. There is no chronology, story line or structure for the content and any chapter can be read independently without loss of context. Charles Allen was born in India during the last days of British Raj as the son of a civil servant. He is the author of many bestselling books on India and the colonial experience elsewhere.

 

A crucial distinguishing factor that sets apart the south in academic circles is the Dravidian identity. Even though the term was coined and used to denote the southern language group, Tamil supremacists denote a human race by it who was the founders of the Harappan Civilization. But here the author refutes Mortimer Wheeler’s Aryan Invasion Theory. Wheeler uncovered a number of skeletons from Mohenjo-daro and declared them to be victims of a massacre of Harappans by invading Aryans. This violent invasion theory has since been disproved by more solid archeological evidence which points to the arrival of predominantly pastoralist people by degrees and over an extended period (p.56). Allen then makes a leap of faith by assuming that the Aryans displaced the Dravidians. He goes on to say that to understand the huge cultural gulf between the Harappans and Aryans, you have only to consider what is and is not to be found in the Rig Veda! But Harappan script is not yet deciphered and we can only guess at the content of Harappan thought. Later Aryan texts show loss of importance to some objects such as soma. Does he mean to say that the plant had gone extinct in Punjab? The sole source of such arguments is the leftist historians such as D. D. Kosambi and Romila Thapar. Allen then works overtime to establish the Aryan out-of-India theory. He suggests the Harut River in western Afghanistan as the Saraswati and that neighbourhood as the Aryan homeland. As in North America, the autochthonous people were demonized as savages in the victor’s literary texts. This comparison, however, is outright bunkum. The present Hindu pantheon is a smooth assimilation of Vedic and non-Vedic divinities, with the non-Vedic ones gaining predominance. Now, who has heard of Red Indian gods being worshipped by whites in America today?

 

The book gives a short survey of the origin of the Dravidian Movement and how it sought to rewrite Tamil history to suit their needs. The term ‘Dravidian’ was coined by the maverick British civil servant Francis Ellis and the Christian missionary Robert Caldwell. Both were ardent supporters of British colonialism and Protestant Christianity. The most ironic fact is that Ellis chose ‘Dravidian’ as it was already used by Sanskrit philologists to denote the south Indian people and languages. In short, the word ‘Dravidian’ itself comes from Sanskrit! The author blindly accepts the colonialist argument that Brahmins introduced idol worship, ‘Puranic’ system of religion, caste system and undermined and reduced the status of Tamil literature by replacing it with Sanskrit. As you can see, the Dravidian Movement was kindled by the ideas of missionary Caldwell who tried his best to drive a wedge between various sections of people and persuade some of them to convert. Allen presents a few fanciful examples – most of them not sufficiently authentic – of how Jainism and Buddhism were replaced by Hinduism in the south and alleges that this was a clever ploy of the Brahmins to impose their religion on the natives. However, he fails to consider that both those religions were not indigenous to the south and that they too had come from the north!

 

Charles Allen seethes with a severe variant of anti-Hindu bias. His handling of Sabarimala which is one of the most popular Hindu pilgrimage sites in South India proves this point. The author is so hostile to the temple and its devotees whom he describes as ‘looking alarming at first and can be mistaken for rowdies who have had too much country liquor’. He then puts forward the nonsensical claim that the temple administration has installed a scanning machine that detects menstruating women (p.106). The book purports to associate Brahmins with every kind of misfortune or misdeed the southern society had had to endure. The second century BCE Chola king Elara conquered Sri Lanka. He placed a bell outside the court room which a person seeking justice was free to ring. One day, a cow rang the bell and complained that her calf was run over by the prince’s chariot. In the interests of justice, Elara ordered his son to be killed in the same manner. Allen claims this story to denote the beginning of Brahminical influence. Pathetically, he forgets that this was taken from the Buddhist text Mahavamsa and that Jains and Buddhists were as much against cow slaughter as the Hindus.

 

This book presents many ideas which were in circulation for a long time, but have since been discarded in the light of new discoveries and consensus. Tamils were said to inhabit a continent named Lemuria which submerged in the Indian Ocean. They were the progenitors of all world cultures. The amazing truth is that this ridiculous idea is still taught in Tamil Nadu as established history! For this to be true, mankind should have evolved into existence at the time when continents were drifting across the earth’s crust and sea level much below what it is today. Similarly a sect among Kerala Christians believes that they were the descendants of Brahmins converted to Christianity by no less a person than the Apostle Thomas a few years after crucifixion in the first century CE. This theory has also been rejected by historians. However, the author claims that since there were many Roman settlements in Muziris which is now in Kerala, ‘one of these Roman citizens could well have been the Christian missionary Judas Thomas in 52 CE’ (p.179). To bolster this outrageously pseudo-historical comment, he remarks that hoards of Roman coins were found near two churches believed to have been built by Thomas.

 

As is the usual practice by left historians to discount atrocities by Muslim invaders, the author claims that though the Jagannath Temple at Puri was destroyed sixteen times by Muslim generals, they were ‘for the most part motivated by politics rather than religious fanaticism’ (p.220). How can these scholars pronounce such outright lies? Dravidian fundamentalists usually consider Brahmins and north Indian Hindi-speakers as having oppressed the Tamils in various ways over the centuries. But this book describes the greatest plunder of the Tamil country in the fourteenth century when Sultan Ala-ud-din Khilji invaded the south. He removed 9600 maunds of gold (anywhere between 1000 to 6000 tons in modern measure). When paraded in triumph through the streets of Delhi, along with 612 captured elephants and 20,000 horses, this booty created such a sensation that it passed into folk lore within the Muslim world, eventually to be transformed by way of the Arabian Nights into Aladdin’s Cave (p.258). Anyway, today’s Dravidians are okay with this particular loss!

 

The author professes himself to be an atheist/agnostic but consciously or not, his scholarly outlook so closely matches the colonial evangelist viewpoint that we would suspect the book to have been written a century ago. This book is only as authentic as an Amar Chitrakatha designed for kids. His fixing of the site of Kalinga war is amusing. Mark Shand, an elephant enthusiast, rode on his elephant through the fields of Dhauli in Odisha. This elephant refused to go forward when it reached a particular place. Whatever Shand and the mahout did could not persuade the animal to cross the open ground in front of them. Hundreds of elephants were killed in the Kalinga war and Allen ascribes the elephant’s behavior to ancestral memory! So much for the authenticity of the narrative! The Vijayanagara Empire is not even mentioned in this history of the south. The author is highly critical of Hindu influence and even its mere presence in South Indian culture though this is caused mostly by ignorance than mal-intent. Though knowledge of established facts is very superficial, the author often assumes the airs of a scholar.

 

The book is recommended only for very light reading, such as when you embark on a long train journey and have nothing worthwhile at hand to spend your time.

 

Rating: 2 Star