The History of Ancient Sri Lanka

Title: The History of Ancient Sri Lanka – Its External Trade and Cultural Contacts from Earliest Times to 1200 AD

Author: Manisha Tyagi

Publisher: Khama Publishers, Delhi 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9788185495873

Pages: 331

 

Sri Lanka is a lush, nature-enriched tropical island situated adjacent to India’s southern coast. The physical distance between the two is a few kilometers over the Palk Straits, but the two have never been under a common political administration. Indian kingdoms and Islamic invasions never reached Sri Lanka. The British managed to annex both, but not under the same yoke. As a result, the two countries are so near, yet so far away in spirit. This does not belittle the cultural contacts between them which began in third century BCE with Ashoka’s missionary work in Sri Lanka. Generally, Indians are unaware of the historical course undertaken by their southern neighbour. This book’s title promised a rich source to fill that vacuum, so I thought – foolishly, as it eventually turned out. Manisha Tyagi is an assistant professor of history at Meerut, UP. She has more than fifteen research papers to her credit and this book is her doctoral dissertation.

 

Sri Lanka was known by many epithets in the past. Indians called the island Tamraparni on account of the tamra (coppery) hue of the earth. This was changed to Taprobane by the Graeco-Romans. Owing to its strategic position overlooking the Indian Ocean sailing routes, most of the ocean’s ships sailed in close proximity to it. When the Arabs entered the fray, they called it Serendip. Chola-era Tamils named it Elam or Elamandalam. According to Sri Lankan chronicles, Prince Vijaya from east India landed on the island with 700 followers during the sixth century BCE, which was also the day of Buddha’s parinirvana. The prince was believed to belong to a family of lions, so the land was called Sinhala. The book does not mention how ‘Ceylon’ came about. The pattern the author deduces is that north Indian kings spread culture and religion on the island in an earlier period while south Indian kings established commercial links. It is noteworthy that Ashokan rock edicts II and XIII mention Tamraparni.

 

The book makes a detailed description of the items for which Sri Lanka was famous in the past. Pearl fishery was the most lucrative business with an abundance of the precious material at many places on the island’s rim. The plentiful availability made the king exert only a nominal tax on the collected pearls which ensured rich revenue. Silver and cloth were also traded. The author is confused in the case of elephants which are claimed to be exported on some pages while import of elephants is mentioned at other places. To cover this ambiguity, the author argues that high demand in some places could not have been met by the island’s beasts and so they might have imported it from Burma for the purpose of re-export. This is not quite convincing, however.

 

The author tries to establish artistic and cultural influences with neighbouring regimes in the time period under discussion. Indian art was transported to the island with the necessary local adaptations. Anuradhapura has Buddhist stupa structures similar to north India while Polonnuruva display Chola-period structures of south India. Sri Lanka was very active on the religious front with various missions to other countries, even going as far away as China. Buddhism required that female nuns should receive ordination into the order from a nun only. When the religion spread in China, there were shortage of nuns and the emperor arranged a group of Sri Lankan nuns to travel to China and initiate hundreds of their Chinese sisters into the monastic order. The noted Chinese traveler Fa Hien who visited India to obtain spiritual guidance and rare manuscripts returned to his homeland through the sea and stayed in Sri Lanka for a brief period. Lankan missionaries had regular interaction with Burma and we see Lankan architecture influencing pagodas there.

 

The book seeks to analyse Sri Lankan contacts with India, Graeco-Romans, Perso-Arabs, South East Asia and China as derived from the historical sources, trade centres, trade routes, items of import and export and cultural interaction. Needless to say, this has resulted in boring duplication, especially in the case of trade routes as they would be the same irrespective of the trade partner at the other end. On the other hand, many contradictory statements can also be seen, like the claim that elephants and textiles were both imported to and exported from Sri Lanka. A crippling disadvantage of the book is that it does not provide a primer on Lankan history which it assumes the readers to know beforehand. Actually, this defeated the very purpose of my reading this book. It only talks about trade routes, items of trade and with whom they traded. There is an irritating repetition of facts. Hippalus’ discovery of the monsoon winds which enabled cross-ocean sailing is repeated nearly fifteen times! Similarly, the ancient manuscript ‘Periplus of the Erythrean Sea’ which is a rich source of data on Indo-Roman trade is mentioned as an author on page 18. However, on many other occasions it is rightly denoted as a book. The book is also silent on the Tamil political conquests of the Chola period which is another great disappointment.

 

Apart from these charitable observations, a shocking fact is that the book is poorly written with pathetic proof-reading. There are very few sentences in the whole book which does not have a spelling or grammatical error. The book is unappealing and has very poor readability which makes the reading experience miserable. Many maps are included but all of them are not legible. As this book fails the reader on every parameter of evaluation, it may be argued that the book’s somewhat stiff cover price of Rs. 990 may enable a reader to approach a consumer protection forum on the charge of cheating the customer.

 

It is advised to avoid this book.

 

Rating: 1 Star

 

Hitler’s Pope

Title: Hitler’s Pope – The Secret History of Pius XII

Author: John Cornwell

Publisher: Penguin, 2008 (First published 1999)

ISBN: 9780143114000

Pages: 426

 

Racial hatred against the Jews was the hallmark of Germany in the Second World War. It disenfranchised, evicted and deported them to concentration camps to finish them off at leisure. After the German homeland, the Nazis continued the practice in those places which they conquered in the first years of the War when the tide was decidedly in their favour. Germany, as we know, is predominantly Christian, but the Protestants enjoyed a majority in numbers with the Catholics constituting a sizeable and powerful minority. This book analyses the relations between Eugenio Pacelli – later Pope Pius XII – with the Nazis before and after he ascended the papal throne. This book argues that Pacelli enabled the Nazi onslaught by his silence and failure to organize efforts to check Hitler so that he is known as Hitler’s Pope. This was neither because he favoured Hitler nor he was anti-Semitic but because he was an ideal church leader for Hitler’s purposes. He openly colluded with the Nazis before the war and this appeasement dignified the Nazi regime in the eyes of the world. John Cornwell is an award-winning journalist and author with a lifelong interest in Catholic and Vatican affairs. He has profiled Pope John Paul II and has written on Catholic issues for many publications.

 

The book opens with the concerted effort of the papacy to become the absolute ruler of Catholicism in the near term, of Christianity in the medium term and of the entire world in the long term. Modern means of communication has facilitated a single man to rule the church in a vastly unequal power relationship. This replaced those old times when Catholic Church’s authority was widely distributed through many councils and local discretion. The Pope was declared infallible in the First Vatican Council of 1869 and the curia prepared a code of law applicable to the church to solidify papal prominence. This Code of Canon Law was enacted in 1917 under the supervision of 2000 scholars and 700 bishops. Eugenio Pacelli, who was a church lawyer, was the main architect. Canon 218 in the document assured supreme authority to the Pope over the church. Till that time he had to consult local European governments in the nomination of bishops. It was Pacelli’s principal task to reach an agreement – a concordat – with those governments in implementing the code. Being the largest and most powerful Catholic population in Europe, Germany proved a formidable obstacle. Compared to this, it was easier to reach a consensus with Mussolini who ruled Italy. In the Lateran Treaty of 1929, he permitted imposition of Canon law over the church in Italy. The Pope was granted sovereignty over the tiny territory of Vatican. In compensation, Vatican paid the equivalent of $85 million. Also, the Catholic Popular Party was disbanded and the Fascists thrived in the political vacuum. Pope Pius XI, Pacelli’s predecessor, spoke of Mussolini as ‘a man sent by Providence’!

 

Pacelli had a special relationship to Germany as he worked there as Papal Nuncio for many years. After his elevation as the Cardinal Secretary of State, he entered into protracted negotiations with short-lived regimes of the Weimar period. These instable administrations were not prepared to concede total control of their churches to the Pope. Germany also had a powerful Catholic presence in internal politics. Bolstered by the strength of the Catholic Centre Party during the post-1919 period, there was an unprecedented growth of German Catholic life and activity. There had been a proliferation of Catholic associations like workers’ unions, religious vocations and public fervor. Hitler took control of a favourable situation in diplomacy. In 1933, Pacelli negotiated with Hitler to form a treaty which authorized the papacy to impose the new church law on German Catholics and granted generous privileges to Catholic schools and clergy. In return, Catholic political and social associations withdrew from activity and gave the Nazis a walkover. Hitler wanted a two-thirds majority for an Enabling Act to bring in dictatorship. The Catholic Centre Party supported his coalition and voted in favour due to Vatican’s pressure. This Act enabled Hitler to pass laws without consulting the Reichstag and to make treaties with foreign governments. When the Concordat was ratified, the church organisations were authorized only to indulge in social and religious activities. The nature of the social work was subject to bureaucratic interpretation and the organisations and their workers were targeted for intimidation and harassment by Nazi workers and Gestapo.

 

Cornwell attempts to find the reason why the church tried appeasing totalitarian ideologues even though what they practiced was diametrically opposite to what the church preached. The church was mortally opposed to atheism and communism which had strong roots and pockets of influence in west European nations. With the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the ingress of communism under various guises were intensely resented and resisted. The church fathers found the Nazis and Fascists as wary of the Communists as they themselves were. This aversion extended to centre-left political parties as well. From the 1870s, Vatican encouraged a distrust of social democracy as a precursor of socialism and thus of communism. Since Nazis had declared open war on socialism and communism alike, they became a natural ally of the ecclesiastical authority.

 

Even with this mitigating factor, the book contains sufficient references to prove the church’s anti-Semitic stand beyond a trace of doubt. Here, the church merely echoed the sentiments of the community at large. Even Pacelli was not above partisan mistrust of the Jews. Speaking at the 1938 Eucharistic Congress in Hungary, Pacelli declared, “As opposed to the foes of Jesus who cried out to his face, ‘crucify him!’, we sing him hymns of our loyalty and love. We act in this fashion, not out of bitterness, not out of a sense of superiority, not out of arrogance toward those whose lips curse him and whose hearts reject him even today” (p.185-6). Taking a cue from their pontiff, thousands of German priests took part in the anti-Semitic attestation process, supplying the Nazi regime with details of blood purity through marriages and baptism registries. The author also presents a racially prejudiced face of Pacelli. After the Second World War ended, when the Allies were about to enter Rome, Pius XII asked the British ambassador that no Allied coloured troops should be among the soldiers garrisoned in Rome.

 

The Catholic Church’s silence on the Nazi war crimes did not end with the Jews, but extended to Orthodox Serbs too. The combined forces of Hitler and Mussolini overran Croatia and they appointed Ante Pavlic as the dictator. Ethnic cleansing and forced conversion of the Orthodox Serbs followed. Pius XII recognised the new state of Croatia without demur. Direct involvement of the clergy in sectarian violence was shocking. Priests, invariably Franciscans, took a leading part in the massacres. Many went around routinely armed and performed their murderous acts with zeal. A father Bozidar Bralow was accused of performing a dance around the bodies of 180 massacred Serbs at Alipasin-Most (p.254). In Sep 1941 in Germany, Hitler decreed that all Jews must wear the Yellow Star which naturally had a devastating, stigmatizing and demoralizing effect on those forced to wear it. Catholic bishops lodged a complaint against this in which they asked for the stars to be removed, not from all Jews, but only from those Jews who had converted to Christianity!

 

The Second World War got into motion with the German invasion of Poland. Their Soviet allies invaded Eastern Europe. Pius XII failed to denounce the attack. At last, Rome itself fell to the Germans after Mussolini’s ouster by nationalist forces. Nazis rounded up hundreds of Jews from the Roman ghetto, right under the nose of Vatican, but what Pacelli offered was a feeble protest in vague language presented half-heartedly. At the same time, he tried to forestall Allied bombing of Rome to capture the city. The author surmises that apart from the likely loss of his own life, Pacelli was also worried at the probable damage to priceless art stored in the churches and cathedrals of Rome. However, irrespective of the subtle anti-papal stance of the author, it also tells about numerous priests and bishops venturing to help the victims in their personal capacity. Pacelli himself organized an impressive charity work that brought solace to the oppressed Jews.

 

The book presents an absorbing style of diction that is bold, sharp and lucid. What makes it stand out from the rest is its handling of both the dark and bright sides of the protagonist. The first edition of the book was subjected to seething criticism from the faithful as the beatification proceedings of Pius XII were well under way. Cornwell gives fitting replies to many allegations in a special foreword to the second edition. What is also evident unbroken throughout the narrative is the assumption of unchallenged supremacy of the Pope over all spiritual and ecclesiastical matters, starting from Pope Pius IX to John Paul II. The book came out in 1999, so we don’t know how the two recent popes fared on this issue.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star

 

The Myth of Hindu Terror

Title: The Myth of Hindu Terror – Insider Account of Ministry of Home Affairs 2006-2010

Author: R V S Mani

Publisher: Vitasta Publishing, 2019 (First published 2018)

ISBN: 9789386473271

Pages: 219

 

There were a series of terrorist attacks and bomb explosions in India in the first decade of the 2000s. Several cities were traumatized by unexpected loss of life and property of its residents. Islamic militancy was at the root of all of them, but the ruling UPA government accused some fringe Hindu groups of carrying out some of the attacks like Malegaon, Samjhauta Express and Ajmer Sharif. The rallying cry of the secularist caucus was that terrorism has no religion and this could get some sustainability among people if it could be proved that Hindu groups are no better in carrying out bomb blasts that indiscriminately killed innocent people. This book is written by R V S Mani, who worked in the Ministry of Home Affairs during 2006-2010. He alleges that two home ministers who were in charge during the period – Shivraj Patil and P. Chidambaram – colluded with politicians and some senior police officials to coin the term ‘Hindu terror’. I read this book hoping to get some details on how the government found the members of little known Hindu organisations and charged them with terrorism in order to provide a counter narrative to Islamic terror. What I could see here was a paranoid author who believes that the whole world is conspiring against him. Apart from narrating some inside-office hype typical of government establishments, readers find nothing of value in these pages. This is just a personal service story of the author.

 

Mani remarks that an endemic rot had set in during 2004-2013 in India’s governance space. This is also the period when the government was run by the UPA and headed by Manmohan Singh of the Congress. This alliance believed in appeasement of organized vote banks by going slow on matters which affected a particular community. The author observes that no cause can justify terrorism, but still, there are political and non-political groups in India standing up for justifying terror acts and seek pardon for its perpetrators. These groups forced the Indian Supreme Court to convene in the dead of night preceding a terror-convict’s execution in the early morning, for reconsidering his review petition to annul the death penalty. Terror has very powerful accomplices in India.

 

The terror attack that rattled Mumbai in November 2008 which killed 175 people in several incidents of indiscriminate gunfire on passersby using lethal automatic weapons, also shook the nation to its core. The author suggests Pakistan government’s collusion at the highest levels. Home Secretary-level talks between the two countries were progressing in Islamabad the day prior to the incident. The Indian delegation, which included the top brass of its Home department, was forced to extend their stay by one more day on feeble grounds. The top officials were taken to Murree, a mountain resort where communication facilities were poor. This book argues that on the day of the Mumbai attack, senior security officials of the Indian administration were buttonholed in Murree by a clever strategy played out by Pakistan. The incompetence of the then home minister Shivraj Patil also put obstacles in the path of security agencies in putting up a fight. Patil wanted to accompany the highly trained NSG commandos flying to Mumbai on the night of 26/11, then went incommunicado for several hours. Permission to deploy locally available armed forces in the meantime was also delayed. Mani concludes that the intervention from some top office in the country had rendered the security forces ineffective, in spite of their proven capabilities.

 

The book explains the heinous acts of P. Chidambaram, who followed Patil as home minister in the aftermath of 26/11. Chidambaram stepped into the office with the single agenda of institutionalizing the idea of Hindu terror, even at the risk of the real perpetrators going scot-free. He is said to be ‘overbearing, all-pervading, all-powerful with an illusory sense of having monopoly over wisdom’ (p.104). The investigation agency NIA was formed in 2009 in the wake of Mumbai attacks. The first two Directors General of the agency was handpicked by Chidambaram, overlooking the selection process already initiated. The investigative history of NIA through 2009-10 was all about introducing a new, non-existent ‘Hindu terrorism’ concept. In every case assigned to the NIA – from the Samjhauta Express blasts, Malegaon and Ajmer Sharif – they overlooked the first set of evidence and replaced it with evidences supporting the Hindu terror narrative.

 

The book has failed in its primary objective to explain how innocent people were framed under the new target set by political bosses. It also keeps silent on the investigation into these incidents. What we see here is a continuous rant on how others victimized the author in an official capacity. He also suggests that he was targeted for kidnapping to force the government’s hand on Ajmal Kasab’s detention – the lone terrorist captured alive in the Mumbai attacks. Kasab had tied a red consecrated string similar to Hindu tradition on his right wrist and had in his pocket forged identification papers declaring him to be a Hindu. If he was killed in the attack – as was his intention - the agencies would have recovered these artifacts and come to the conclusion that he was a Hindu, thereby buttressing UPA’s Hindu terror initiative. This crucial information is not at all mentioned in the book. You can find it in Rakesh Maria’s remarkable memoir, ‘Let Me Say It Now’. Instead, this book contains references to imagined instances of stalking, especially when the author was driving a vehicle. It also depicts Hemant Karkare, the chief of Maharashtra ATS who was killed in the Mumbai attacks, as one of the persons behind initiating the campaign on Hindu terror.

 

Even though generally of little use to the reader, it narrates a few anecdotes which illustrate the ‘don’t care’ mindset of the then government towards terrorism. India’s permanent representative to the UN asked for evidence on Dawood Ibrahim to produce at the UN in 2009 to proscribe his activities, but the CBI did not furnish the data. He also states that contrary to the claims by UPA politicians that many surgical strikes against Pakistan on border areas were carried out in 2006-10, there was no information in the Home ministry regarding these strikes and the claims are false.

 

This book does not evince any interest from the reader. It is more in the form of a service memoir in which there was many scores to settle. It lacks a coherent structure and the narration is haphazard. It also contains verbatim transcripts of affidavits submitted in court, parliamentary debates and dossiers given to Pakistan to prove their culpability in terrorist acts on Indian soil.

 

The book is not recommended.

 

Rating: 2 Star

 

Age of Entanglement

Title: Age of Entanglement – German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire

Author: Kris Manjapra

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2014 (First)

ISBN: 9780674725140

Pages: 442

 

After a brief period of fraternization with the Indians, the British assumed a haughty attitude as their power consolidated in India. From the types of William Jones who learned Sanskrit and observed its proximity to European languages, it took only half a century to the Macaulays who believed that the entire classical books of India can’t fill a decent shelf in a European library. British interest in the study of India’s epistemology thus declined in inverse proportion to their grip on India as a colonial subject. The flowering of Enlightenment in Europe set up norms of universalism with a Western European perspective in which Britain played a large part due to its vast colonial outposts scattered across the globe. Germany was split into many mutually contending states at this time and had no foreign colonies. German intellectuals resented their fatherland’s position and sought to develop an Asian/Aryan connection in cultural legacy that could challenge the British. Intellectual give and take occurred between German scholars and their counterparts in India, China and Persia. This book covers the period from 1880 to 1945, when the Second World War remoulded Germany in a brand new setting. It studies the interactions, which is indicated in a stronger sense with the word ‘entanglement’ on many fields from religion, literature, politics, art and even cinema. In this period, many German and Indian intellectuals operated within shared horizons of nationalist and anti-Anglocentric politics. Kris Manjapra is a professor of history at Tufts University and has mixed African and Indian parentage.

 

The origin of German academicians’ engagement with India began soon after its opening up by British orientalists with their pioneering work on comparative philology. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, German Indologists revealed north India, in addition to ancient Greece, to be an origin point of world civilisations. In 1808, Friedrich Schlegel maintained that Sanskrit was not only within the same language family as Greek, but was the original language out of which Greek emerged. German scholars had a flair for Sanskrit as seen in the likes of Max Muller, but it must be remembered that they applied European social norms to evaluate and interpret ancient India’s societal interactions. However, the author fails to mention this crucial fact.

 

Manjapra clearly describes the upward tilt of the balance in favour of Germany by the middle of the century. After the Macaulay years in the 1830s, the British institutional commitment to orientalist scholarship was largely discontinued. Most renowned Sanskritists in mid-nineteenth century were to be found in German universities. Works of German intellectuals also involved transfer and eventual loss of precious artifacts as far as India was concerned. George Buhler obtained manuscripts from temples, monasteries or royal libraries of princely states. He added it to government collections and sent them to European universities and libraries for research. It was the time at which the area of contact widened. Not only philological or linguistic concepts, but the teams extended their surveys to ethnography and natural geography of India. In the early stages, there was a partnership between British and German scholars based on the Universalist signs of Empire, Enlightenment and Europeanness. These began to disintegrate and fall apart during the imperial competition after the unification of the German state in 1871. The partners thereby became rivals.

 

Germany did not fare well in the colonial race, so they supported anti-colonial struggle in British colonies as part of the power game in Europe. Indian nationalism surged with the partition of Bengal in 1905. In the years leading up to World War I, Germany was portrayed in Indian nationalist press as the chief geopolitical opponent of Britain and the country that could challenge its world power. Many Indians were trained in warfare and supplied with ammunition to instigate attacks against the British. At the same time, Germans in the early twentieth century used Indian Asianness in order to make themselves stand out against the old aspirational norm of ‘the European’ embodied in the image of the English gentleman. Whatever may be the pretensions, German policy towards India was self-centred on its interests in Europe. With the stabilization of German economy by mid-1920s, it integrated into European systems with British support. In this context, the Germans cooperated with British requests to expel anti-British colonial activists in Berlin. Consequently, German police suppressed the activity of Indian revolutionaries. They were also lured by British promises of providing German producers easy access to Indian markets.

 

Though the book is silent on the rise of Aryan consciousness in Germany, it observes that the popularization of orientalism created a context in which the image of the ‘Aryan’ could be used for vastly different ends by different kinds of popular and academic writers. The growing interwar field of Aryan studies generated intellectual authority for Nazi rule. The fancifulness of many of the claims made by Aryanists was the very mark of their new paradigm. Obviously, a few Indian scholars would have helped the Germans navigate the murky depths of ancient knowledge. The author terms these nationalist scholars ‘small individuals trying to defend a myth of their greatness’. The book includes several chapters of the entanglement in various fields such as politics, linguistics, science and technology, cinema, life sciences and other topics. Meghnad Saha and C V Raman were two prominent scientists among them. The most high-profile visit was in 1910 by the Crown Prince Wilhelm who visited Calcutta and met leaders of the Bengali revolutionary movement and even promised financial and artillery support for the Indian resistance movement.

 

The author does not give much attention to the growth of Nazism and its symbolic linkage to Indian icons like the Swastika. This carelessness extends to the military links to revolutionaries and Khilafat volunteers. He remarks that during World War I, the German foreign office recruited expatriate, high-profile Hindu revolutionaries to join the German war effort as propaganda consultants. This contingent of radical anti-colonial activists and ex-POWs formed the kernel of a significant Indian community in Berlin after 1918. The biographies of many major Indian nationalist figures of midcentury bear the watermark of German diaspora. Hitler, on the other hand, abhorred Indian nationalists and called them ‘fakirs’ and ‘travelling jugglers’ in Mein Kampf. With his ascent, prominent Indians were placed under house arrest and Nazis cracked down on Indian institutions. It is only in the crisis of World War II that the Nazi regime revised its India policy and decided to support Subhas Bose to destabilize Britain. During the Nazi era, Germany became less and less a terrain for actual Indian scholarly activity and more a remembered land for major work in the Kaiserreich and Weimar periods.

 

Muslim scholars were also part of the entanglement, who contributed mainly on economic thought rather than linguistics, culture or science. Aligarh faculties routinely studied in Germany for higher qualifications. Many of them returned to India for a bright career in varied fields. The book discusses three scholars who essentially shared the same outlook on all nationalist or political issues but whose trajectories diverged later in life. Zakir Husain was the wonder boy of Aligarh who enrolled for his PhD in Germany. His dissertation encapsulates all that the left-liberal-Islamist historians have been forcing down the throats of pliable students in Indian classrooms all these years. Husain argued that modern economic life of India started only with the arrival of the Mughals. Muslim rule broke the social stagnancy of Hindu village society by establishing a strong political centre and challenging local Brahmin authoritarianism (p.166). Other notables like Abdul Jabbar Kheiri and his brother Sattar Kheiri imitated these arguments for their own purposes. It is to be kept in mind that the Kheiri brothers had demanded partition of India to create an Islamic state in 1917 itself. Eventually, they ended up as the most vocal proponents of the call for Pakistan but lived on in India. The irony is that Zakir Husain went on to become the President of India!

 

Though the author is of Indian descent, his outlook is thoroughly Western and he has no idea of the ground reality of Indian intellectual movements. Apparently, he has learnt that caste rivalry is common in India and attributes this as the cause of all intellectual conflicts he comes across. The tussle between Meghnad Saha and C V Raman over the latter’s transformation of the Indian Institute of Science at Bengaluru into a centre for theoretical physics was a purely professional one, but Manjapra claims the animosity was due to Saha being from a lower caste and Raman a Brahmin. Likewise, all his arguments are only half-baked and based on preconceived western notions. The author seems to have no grasp over the actual facts. The book is really a burden for ordinary readers with its tiresome diction and poor structure. The book looks more like a doctoral thesis than reading material for laypeople.

 

The book is recommended only to very serious readers.

 

Rating: 2 Star