Hitler and India

Title: Hitler and India – The Untold Story of His Hatred for the Country and Its People

Author: Vaibhav Purandare

Publisher: Westland Non-Fiction, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9789390679997

Pages: 206

 

The Second World War was a crucial turning point in Indian history too. There were attempts in the past by revolutionaries to ally with Britain’s rivals, but the British were never before on the verge of imminent collapse as it did in the early-1940s. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose used the opportunity to slip away from house arrest and reached Germany. Over the following months, he personally met Hitler, Mussolini and other Axis leaders and obtained their support to recruit imprisoned Indian soldiers of the British army into a new military outfit to fight for India’s freedom. With German funding and material help, Bose and his army fought valiantly in Southeast Asia but were eventually defeated along with their Axis sponsors. Seeing Germany’s sympathetic stance towards India in the War years, many Indians still believe that apart from his anti-Semitism, Hitler was benevolent to India. There are people who get excited at the initial Nazi victories during the War and regret Hitler’s disastrous invasion of the USSR for inviting a crushing defeat that led to Germany’s humiliation and his own suicide. But, was Hitler sympathetic to India and despised Britain for its colonial rule over it? This book provides the answer and it is a clear negative. Hitler was a racist to the core who believed that all other races should be subservient to the Whites. He thought the English could dominate the world through racial purity and the Englishman always knew how to be lord and not brother to the inferior classes. This book clearly describes the Nazi mindset in the period 1920 – 1945 and how it perceived Indians as sub-human. Vaibhav Purandare is a senior editor of The Times of India and has authored several books of national interest.

 

Colonial historians put forward the Aryan invasion theory to explain the disintegration of Harappan civilisation. Though this was not supported by facts and deliberately spread at the behest of the British, racial supremacists in Europe took to it with great élan. In keeping with the postulates of the theory, Hitler believed that white-skinned Aryans entered India and reached the height of metaphysical thought. Gradually, their racial purity was lost by mixing with the local population. The Germans were thought to be the true descendants of Aryans. Hitler’s view of India was largely shaped by the opinions of Houston Stewart Chamberlain who was a British who so admired Germany that he became a German citizen. Chamberlain in turn had picked up the French de Gobineau’s theory that the tall, lithe and handsome Germanic Aryans were superior to all other races and responsible for every great accomplishment in civilisation. Hitler’s close friend and editor Alfred Rosenberg termed Indians the ‘modern products of racial pollution’. In his words, Indians were ‘poor bastards’ or ‘wretched mongrels’.

 

Indian revolutionaries first engaged with Hitler in 1920-21, when the Nazi party took birth exploiting the troubled times in post-Versailles Germany. Hitler was skeptical to every effort by the Indians to team up with his party in their bid to defeat the British rulers. He refused to accept the assessment that the British empire was crumbling and deemed it to be wishful thinking. He was certain that Britain could lose India only in two ways: if it either fell victim to racial degeneration within its own administrative machinery or if it is compelled to do so by the sword of a powerful enemy. Both were thought to be impossible. As a corollary he held that colonized nations are inhabited by racially inferior people. Hitler described the Indian revolutionaries as ‘gabbling pomposities’ and ‘inflated Orientals’ in Mein Kampf, carrying in their head fanciful notions about their country’s independence from Britain. There were many Indian students in Germany who had enrolled for higher studies and industrial training. They were flabbergasted in 1926 when a bunch of Indians were displayed as ‘exhibits’ in the Berlin Zoo alongside other animals and birds. This clearest case of racial scorn exemplified the Nazi attitude to India.

 

Purandare includes more details of the interaction between Hitler and the Indian community both in India and Germany. Hitler discussed about the Indian situation in a private meeting with Lord Irwin in 1936. Irwin had taken up senior positions in British government after officiating earlier as Viceroy to India. He advised Irwin to ‘shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members, and if that also does not suffice shoot 200 and so on until order is established’. In 1935, Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws outlawing sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. Any sign of love or romance between and Indian and a German was a punishable offence as Indians were not deemed to be Aryans. Even then, strident anti-British revolutionaries strived for a consensus with Germany. Calcutta University expressed its willingness to introduce Mein Kampf as a textbook for post-graduate students of political economy if Hitler deleted all anti-India passages in the book. Hitler’s office promptly replied that the Fuhrer won’t grant permission to change of soften the wording since these were ‘fundamental considerations’ of the Nazi racial ideology. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in mid-War was to conquer it and exploit its resources like a colony in imitation of what the British were doing to India.

 

A critical part of the book deals with how Bose managed the Nazis and their malicious ideology. Till the War began, Hitler always wanted to emulate Britain and make colonies for Germany elsewhere in the world. He did not permit any activity which would put unease on his relations with them. Consequently, Indian activists found it impossible to elicit even a cursory statement from Hitler sympathetic to Indian independence. However, after the war started, Germany hosted Bose to utilize the propaganda potential to embarrass the British. Bose swallowed his pride many times to get German help for his fight for India. At first, he refused to start anti-British propaganda unless Germany gave an assurance regarding freedom of India which Hitler was not prepared to do. A deadlock ensued and Nazis seriously considered shifting Bose to a neutral country but he budged eventually. A pact with Hitler was not welcomed enthusiastically by any group and a significant section of Indian nationalist press responded to Hitler’s mid-War overtures to India with sarcasm. Bose anyhow decided to use the string of early successes the Nazis had achieved in the initial phases of the War for a worthy purpose. Bose met Hitler only once and the interaction was dominated by a long monologue by Hitler. The only silver lining to emerge from this disappointing meeting was an offer to transport Bose to Asia in a German submarine. The Indian National Army was constituted from Indian POWs who took their customary oath on initiation in the names of both Hitler and Bose.

 

The book is an excellent one for reading pleasure because of the commendable style of diction. The book is rather short at only 177 reading pages, but compensates for its size with a wealth of previously unknown facts. The author could have given some more information on how the Nazis found the ancient Hindu symbol of swastika so attractive as to coopt it as the party’s icon. As a result, the swastika is conceived as a symbol of evil across the world, but in India it is an innocuous one, used since the ancient past.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star

 

Land of the Seven Rivers

Title: Land of the Seven Rivers – A Brief History of India’s Geography

Author: Sanjeev Sanyal

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2012 (First)

ISBN: 9780670086399

Pages: 331

 

India is a vast nation with varied geographical features that had shaped the contours of its civilisation and facilitated the flow of history. The dawn of India’s cultural identity was in the Indus civilisation that flourished nearly 4000 years ago. The river Indus, its five major tributaries and the now dried-up Saraswati River provided the cradle to it and the landscape is forever immortalized as Sapta Sindhu, land of the seven rivers, in the Vedas. The civilizational state that is India took root from there and continues to engage the world productively even though it had seen several ups and downs. This book is an attempt to record a panoramic picture of the country’s past right from its tectonic origins, how it was populated, the various kingdoms and ideas that dominated it, the internal and external aggressions that threatened to stamp it out and the new challenges the country faces in the modern economic framework. ‘From Gondwana to Gurgaon’ is a section’s title in the book which also describes the book’s functional objective and can even be its title. The author narrates a tale that spans several thousands of years in an uncomplicated manner fit for easy reading. Sanjeev Sanyal is an Indian economist and popular historian. He has authored several books on Indian history and was born in Kolkata.

 

When the Harappan civilization’s ruins were discovered more than a century ago, there were diverging surmises on how it ended. Colonial historians ascribed invasion of Aryan tribes from central Asia as the reason for its downfall. Sanyal argues that this is fallacious as it is not supported by any kind of evidence, either archeological or literary. This theory was crafted only to legitimize the colonial regime against its subjects as the British could easily be construed as the modern-day Aryans who conquered the country in just another chapter of invasions. Having done so, he poses the question of where did the Harappans go, if they were not decimated by the invaders. Eminent historians like Romila Thapar is of the opinion that the ‘material culture shows no continuities’. Actually, this is a hollow argument which was demolished by B. B. Lal, one of India’s most celebrated archeologists. The Harappan culture still lives on in India. The shape and design of the bullock carts used by Harappans and employed in India till quite recently are surprisingly similar. Namaste, a common Indian gesture to show respect to both people and gods can be observed in the Harappan clay figurines with palms folded in the same way. Even terracotta dolls of women with red vermillion on their foreheads were found. Experts are of the opinion that India’s traditional system of weights and measures is derived from the Harappans with many similarities still discernible. Ancient Chess pieces that look remarkably like modern equivalents have been found. All these point to the reality that Harappans did not just disappear, rather they live on amongst us. Drying up of the river Saraswati and other climatic factors led to the disintegration of the civilisation rather than Aryan invasion.

 

The above was a case of continuity where tradition flows unobstructed from the ancient to the present. However, there are many instances of a break, especially in tastes and aesthetics. Sanyal presents a very relevant case. Our present society prefers people with fair skin as mates and there are cosmetic formulas available in the market to whiten one’s skin. This is a clear break from the past as ancient Indians had a preference for dark skin. The epitome of male handsomeness in Hindu tradition is Krishna whose very name means ‘the dark one’. The depiction of blue skin is a medieval artistic innovation. Marco Polo commented that the darkest man is most highly esteemed in India and that Indians portray their gods and idols black and their devils white as snow. This preference presumably switched in the medieval period probably as a result of Muslim conquests.

 

The author takes a dig at left historians who evaluate Indian history through the framework of Marxism. That ideology posits economic conflict between two rival groups as the prime mover of human change. This is plainly not applicable to India and as a consequence their explanations, though conforming to political theory, look grotesque and out of place when applied to reality. The author wants them to accept that India is a civilizational state that is outside the narrow ideological perimeter of Marxism. He illustrates this with a lucid example from Rajputana. Mewar’s fight with the Mughals was a clash of civilisations. The Mewari rulers saw themselves as the custodians of Hindu civilisation embodied in the temple of Eklingji, a manifestation of Shiva. The deity was considered the real king of Mewar and the rulers used the title of Rana (custodian or prime minister) rather than maharaja. This should be recognized first to understand why Mewar put up continuous resistance to the sultans despite suffering extreme hardships over centuries. On three separate occasions, the capital Chittor was defended to the last man and even after it fell, the struggle was sustained in the hills with the help of Bhil tribesmen. One cannot explain away this behaviour merely in rational political terms.

 

Sanyal looks into the improvements in technology related to geography that helped the imperial powers to get their hold on India. Maps of India existed in the ancient past as well, but these showed only the coast and the large rivers which can be navigated by large marine vessels. Nobody had any idea of the hinterland. Its terrain and vastness lay beyond the grasp of all, including the local inhabitants. With the growth in high quality optical instruments in the seventeenth century, surveying found eager users. The Dutch East India Company was not just helped by the efficiencies of private sector enterprise, but also by the better quality of their maps by Mercator and Ortilius. Unfortunately, Indian rulers still failed to appreciate the significance of these even when they were unfurled and displayed before their eyes. Sir Thomas Roe, the British ambassador to the court of Jehangir, presented an atlas of the latest European maps to the Mughal, but it was politely returned after four days without any query. French maps were superior to their rivals. The best was D’Anville’s, who never visited India but collected the best available information from his Paris home. The British also took cartography very seriously. They conducted the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India that produced very accurate maps in the nineteenth century. This was a Herculean task that dragged on for forty years at great cost.

 

This book is a brief history of India’s geography. It narrates in a soothing way the changes accumulated in India’s natural and human landscape, about ancient trade routes and cultural linkages, rise and fall of cities, about dead rivers and the legends that keep them alive. It acknowledges the strong influence of Indian civilisation on Southeast Asia and keeps the region under consideration in several chapters. It tracks the progress of Hindu kingdoms in that region in parallel with Indian history. The author hints that the Chinese orchestrated Islamization of the region in the Middle Ages as a counterweight to Indian influence. The many incarnations of the city of Delhi over the centuries find a prominent mention in these pages. It is a history of Delhi as well. The book gets a touch of first-hand experience as the author has travelled to all the places he describes and hints at what to visit and expect there. This is a very useful tip for readers who plan to visit those places. Taken as a whole, reading this book was a feel-good experience.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star

 

The Darkening Age

Title: The Darkening Age – The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

Author: Catherine Nixey

Publisher: Pan Books, 2017 (First)

ISBN: 9781509816071

Pages: 305

 

When the ISIS occupied parts of Syria and Iraq for a few years since 2014, the world was forced to watch the ghastly spectacle of the terrorists blasting away remains of ancient temples that were thousands of years old. Their logic was simple – the very existence of these buildings once used to worship other gods was a blot on the landscape and culture prescribed by their holy book. But one thing was noticeable in the entire charade. The temples destroyed by the ISIS were already in a ruined shape, similarly destroyed by somebody much earlier. Whatever standing upright was due to the careful restoration work of archeologists. Who was that somebody who broke down these temples and when? This book answers this puzzle and little of what is covered in this book is well-known outside academic circles. We were taught that when Christianity spread in the Classical world of Greece, Rome and the regions where their culture held sway, the pagans who worshipped gods such as Jupiter, Zeus, Athena or Minerva simply melted away in front of the advancing Christianity. Some scholars even suggest that they were somewhat grateful to renounce their silly religion and embrace Christianity. Nothing is further from the truth. In fact, as Christianity gained hold in the kingdom, it unleashed a violent intolerance against the native religious practices. It destroyed their temples, smashed the idols to pieces, mocked the ceremonies and forbade them to practice their old religion even in the privacy of their homes. This book tells of the darkening age when Christianity subsumed the old belief systems into a strict form of monotheism. Catherine Nixey was a Classics teacher who is now a journalist working on the arts desk at The Times. She is a British Catholic and the daughter of a former nun and a former monk.

 

Medieval and modern scholars continuously harped on the theme of how Christianity preserved the classical knowledge. Christianity’s good works in preserving pagan things has been told again and again. Such books proliferate in libraries and bookshops. However, the history and sufferings of those whom Christianity defeated have not been elaborated upon. This book fills this crucial gap. It is because of this meritorious service that I grant it a five-star rating. The arrival of Christianity introduced a profound change in the nature of spiritual philosophy. Before this happened, there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there were right and wrong philosophies with no scope for interpretation. People who opposed Christian dogma were destined to hell. Before it preserved, the church destroyed classical art and knowledge. During the fourth and fifth centuries CE, it demolished, vandalized and melted down a staggering quantity of art, destroyed statues, temples were razed to the ground and books were burnt. The Library of Alexandria with 700,000 volumes was burnt down by the bishop of the city. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings in number. To preserve the old parchment manuscripts, they needed to be re-copied but mostly, classical texts were not. Medieval monks simply scrubbed away the pagan text when parchment was expensive and reused them to copy the Bible or other prayer books. The author estimates that only a tenth survived to modern age.

 

This book provides a rich source of information on the Christian persecution of pagan religion and its practitioners. All traditional gods were demons in the eyes of Christian scholars who reminded the faithful in violently disapproving language that the pagan religions were inspired by the devil. Paganism had no structure in the sense of a modern religion. It was merely an overarching framework of various cults practiced in different parts of the kingdom. There is a striking similarity between this religion and Hinduism till the medieval period. A good Christian would spit on the altar of a pagan and blow out the incense than accidentally breathe in its fumes. Christian speakers asked their congregations to hunt down sinners (pagans) and drive them into the way of salvation as relentlessly as a hunter pursues his prey into nets. As Christianity gained adherents, it forbade people from worshipping the old gods. Eventually, it restrained anyone to dissent from its teachings. Even arguing about the precepts in public was made equivalent to high treason and punishable with death.

 

We have been served with tales of how poor Christians were forced into gladiatorial fight with lions to entertain the spectators as part of Roman persecution. Nixey finds this exaggerated. Polytheism is inherently tolerant as they won’t mind the introduction of one more god for people to worship. Even Christian observers looked on the tolerance of their non-Christian neighbours with astonishment. Augustine marveled at the fact that the pagans were able to worship many different gods without discord, while the Christians, who worshipped just the one, splintered into countless warring factions. Moreover, the Christians steadfastly proclaimed that theirs is the only true god and all others are demons. Naturally, that would hardly endear them to others in a pluralistic, multicultural society. Sacrificing to the gods and emperor was expected of every citizen and adherents of the new faith refused to perform this duty. Even then, Christians were persecuted in fewer than thirteen years in three whole centuries of Roman rule. We know of no government-led persecution for the first 250 years of Christianity with the exception of Nero. But Nero was truly wicked and persecuted everyone. Emperor Trajan specifically ordered that Christians should not be hounded. This grace and liberty was denied when Christians finally gained control. A decade after Constantine – the first emperor to accept the Christian faith – came to the throne, laws were passed to ‘restrict the pollution of idolatry’. Sacrifices were banned. Fifty years later, death penalty was awarded to one who sacrificed. A century later, any pagans who still survived were suppressed.

 

One drawback of the book is that it does not analyse why the pagan religion crumbled like a pack of cards against the attacks by Christians. There were powerful oratory and rhetorical literature in support of the old faith, but on the ground, there was no organisation uniting them. When the temples were destroyed in one city, people of the neighbouring cities simply watched on helplessly. Moreover, the Christian fighters were unafraid to court death while committing a religious war. Martyrdom held considerable benefits for those willing to die. Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability. Martyrs went straight to heaven and were provided an exalted place there. Their aim was to die as painful a death as possible – greater the pain, greater the gain. The similarity to modern jihadi suicide squads is striking. This book also describes how the early Christians determinedly undermined paganism. Constantine ordered the idols to be taken out of temples. All precious material was recovered from them and then destroyed. Despite the horrible destruction, little resistance was offered by the pagans as the spirit had gone out from them. His destruction emboldened other Christians and the attacks spread. The temples in many cities were destroyed and churches erected in their place. It is a shocking reminder to all multicultural societies that at the time of Constantine’s conversion and persecution of the traditional religion began, Christians constituted only about seven to ten per cent of the total population.

 

Were these destruction taking place without the knowledge of illustrious church fathers, as isolated acts of vandalism by hooligans? Nixey’s answer is a resounding ‘No’ and the author shows the early church figures red in tooth and claw. St. Martin is said to have destroyed many temples and shrines in fourth century France. These violent acts were not seen as embarrassing, but as proof of a saint’s virtue. Benedict of Nursia was a celebrated destroyer of antiquities. His first act upon arriving in Rome was to smash an ancient statue of Apollo and destroy the shrine’s altar. St. Augustine reminded his flock that destruction of temples, idols and sacred groves were the express commandment of god. In 401 CE, Augustine told Christians in Carthage to smash pagan objects because that was what god wanted and commanded. Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, destroyed the magnificent temple of Serapis and the great library attached to it which housed 700,000 volumes. John Chrysostom sent violent bands of monks to destroy the shrines in Phoenicia. Chrysostom was a stout anti-Semite too. He likened Jewish synagogues to brothels and his writings were reprinted with enthusiasm in Nazi Germany.

 

Historians mark the beginning of Dark Ages over Europe with the closure of Plato’s Academy at Athens in 529 CE. The last nail in the coffin of paganism was the result of a well-calculated move, this time by Emperor Justinian. He put forward a law that forbade the teaching of any doctrine by those ‘who labour under the insanity of paganism’ so that they might not corrupt the souls of their disciples. This law caused the Academy to close. After a century of physical annihilation of pagan symbols, Christianity turned its attention to wipe it clean from people’s minds too. We can only stare in astonishment at the brutal effectiveness and total success of this project. Centuries later, Edward Gibbon declared that the entirety of barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was.

 

This book is very pleasing to read on account of its fine diction. The style is so easy-flowing and entertaining with caustic remarks embedded in flowery prose. The research is well done, but could have been more comprehensive. The author is a journalist and a professional historian’s rigour is not expected from her. But still, I awarded this book the five-star rating because it opened a vista that was dark to me even though I was reading books of this sort for nearly three decades now. I read this book literally with bated breath because most of the events portrayed in the book were already played out in India by colonial invaders, missionaries and the native converted flock. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hinduism stood trembling against the onslaught of colonial Christianity like the pagan religion did thirteen centuries earlier. However, the result was not repeated as Christianity had a new competitor and they could not find a Constantine in India, even though the Jesuits tried their best to convert Emperor Akbar. Like what they did to pagan gods, the missionaries denigrated Hindu deities as demons openly till the middle of twentieth century and clandestinely even now. In that sense, Indians can easily relate to what is described in this book and hence this effort deserves a perfect ranking.

 

The book is highly recommended to all and is a must-read for Indians.

 

Rating: 5 Star

 

India and the Silk Roads

Title: India and the Silk Roads – The History of a Trading World

Author: Jagjeet Lally

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9789354227240

Pages: 415

 

India and China were the powerhouses of ancient trade. China exported porcelain and silk and India traded in jewelry, textiles and spices. The trade routes carrying these commodities from the east to the west came to be called the Silk Road as an eponymous tribute to the most glamorous item on the camels’ back. With the discovery of a direct sea route from Europe which was emerging into a superpower after the Renaissance lessened the importance of land routes.  With the reemergence of China as the manufacturing hub of Asia in this century, it is actively trying to reestablish the silk route trade using modern means of transportation such as railways and ports connecting interior hubs in the continent. This book is an incomplete effort to relate India to the Silk Roads. Even though the book boasts a grandiose title, the period of analysis is hardly 150 years from 1750 to 1900 and that too, limited in geographical extent to Pakistan’s Punjab province. Jagjeet Lally is a lecturer in the history of early modern and modern India at University College, London where he is also a co-director of a centre for south Asian study.

 

The author briefly analyses the items of trade that ran through the difficult mountain passes of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges and the scorched desert roads of the Gobi and central Asian deserts. Four commodities were especially important in terms of volume, value, commercial, cultural and political significance: horses, cotton cloth, indigo dye and raw silk yarn. Lally argues that the decline in Silk Road trade in the wake of the discovery of direct sea route to Asia, which transferred the east-west trade to the sea lanes, was not so straightforward. Historians are now starting to appreciate that the discovery was both trade-diverting and trade-creating so that the increase in maritime trade resulted for the most part from the expansion of shipping traffic through enhancement in trade and production activities. The overland trade suffered some decline and it remained marginal rather than experiencing complete extinction.

 

The book’s observation window opens with the decline of Mughal power in India and Perso-Afghan domination of the country’s northwest regions brought home first by Nadir Shah’s invasion and plunder and followed closely by Ahmed Shah Durrani’s invasion and plunder. The late-Mughal India’s need for horses was in the range of tens of thousands because they required replacement every seven to ten years. Mansabdari system required nobles to maintain a specified number of horsemen and footmen. Cavalrymen were the highest paid and highest esteemed. Even though the Durrani period saw the collapse of Indian political and economic ambitions, this author makes his view from the Afghan side towards which the looted treasures of India flowed. Lally claims that in the medium and longer term, the impact of Durrani expansion was to invigorate the economy of western Punjab. He also makes a startling claim that the decline of Mughal dynasty was caused by climate-change induced desiccation – a global cooling which set in by the mid-seventeenth century. These political changes created a society which worshipped money. Alliances of convenience, rather than principles, were forged in northwest India and Afghanistan. Men who were accused of brigandage might the next year be organizing long distance commercial exchange. Men who offered themselves in the campaign season might join fellow mercenaries in the pursuit of political power.

 

Gujarat and Bengal were the prominent textile centres for ocean trade, while Punjab catered to central Asian caravan routes. Silk yarn was sourced from elsewhere and woven in Punjab. Multan was a great centre of weaving. Two types of technological changes affected Punjab’s textile industry. Mechanizing of manufacture reduced the cost of English textiles. The transportation revolution in railway, steam ships and telecom enabled the cost reduction to be passed on to the consumers. These changes made English cotton more competitive. Punjab’s industry was upset and displacement of labour from certain aspects of the production process helped it face up to the challenge. Indigo farmers underwent a similar jolt when artificial aniline dyes substituted indigo in 1897. Luckily for the Punjabi farmers, canal-irrigated lands proliferated at around this time and the agriculturalists turned their attention to wheat, sugar cane and cotton. Expansion of the Romanov and Qing empires into central Asia restricted Punjab’s commerce to those areas. Historians now emphasize that the 1750s to 1840s was a moment of reconfiguration amidst the encroachment of empires.

 

This book paints the Afghan and Punjabi merchants in a glorifying light while Indian traders are disparagingly referred as banias who are riven by caste rivalries. Lally cleverly pushes in the lower versus upper caste dichotomy into the narrative as in a formulaic way to explain the degeneracy of Hindu society. The book mentions that slave trade was prominent in the northwest but keeps silent on the traders and slave runners. Each Islamic invasion of India produced thousands of slaves who fetched good prices for the owners in the slave markets of the Muslim world. Even Guru Nanak was once captured by Pashtuns for sale into slavery. The author admits that slave trade was a component of the caravan commerce that flourished into the nineteenth century (p.140), but he is reluctant to disclose the identity of the organizers of this heinous trade. The Rohilla Afghans’ origin is traceable to horse and slave trade. Such a prominent trade is neglected in the book with the author’s deliberate reluctance to expose the Afghans as slave-traders.

 

This book accuses the British government in India to have intruded into the societal and commercial space of the Afghans and Punjabi Muslims. Till the advent of the British, different trading communities paid different duties and rates according to their status (p.63). This is the author’s euphemistic way of telling that Muslim traders paid taxes at a rate half of that of their Hindu counterparts. The British equated the rate for all communities which make the author resent the decision! Moreover, ‘the East India Company freed the trade and eliminated perquisites and privileges’ which is satirized as the ‘Permanent Settlement of market places’. The northwest was a lawless region and nothing the government did could make it more so. The state privileged certain groups and elite men in them, sanctioning them to rule on its behalf. The result was a highly personalized form of governance. This was what existed in those regions. The Pashtuns’ continued hostility to the British was alarming. Lally claims that this was due to careless policy such as the increase in salt tax, ignorance and despoiling of the Pashtuns’ sacred geography of shrines in the process of surveying the physical geography of the Indo-Afghan region (p.192). Probably the author is not aware of the sacred tower of the Brihadeeshwara Temple at Thanjavur which was used as a node in the Great Trigonometric Survey of India which required several instruments to be hurled to the top of the tower. But nobody thought it despoiling. This book then goes on to praise Wahhabism as it ‘helped Islamic societies assertively confront European colonial regimes across the world’.

 

This book sports ‘India’ in its title only for commercial purposes while its real sympathies and focus of interest is Afghanistan and Pakistani Punjab. The utmost disdain and hostility of the author to Indian societies – both past and present – is mind-boggling. Hindu traders were a successful group in the central Asian trade, but they were targeted and persecuted on religious lines. The author accuses the victims of provoking the predators. He argues that Hindus and Hindu temples were noticeable and hardened the sense of separation as against Muslim Afghans (p.105). Does he mean that the Hindus have no right to be what they were? That they have no right to build a temple in a Muslim land? Lally then targets the Sikhs at the receiving end of his fury. Sikh misldars (Sikh rulers of states called misls) and their officials charged a number of duties and the burden was heavier on merchants from outside Punjab (p.111). He makes it sound like the Sikhs were the only administration that overtaxed commerce. Any hardships to the Afghans would make the author cry! Most parts of the book look like a research paper and sounds like empty jargon. It lacks a focus as well as a sense of direction. At the end of the text, readers would be at a loss to find out the purpose of the book. The diction is dry and totally unappealing. Altogether, it can presumed that the author has wasted a good opportunity to enlighten the readers.

 

The book is recommended only to serious readers.

 

Rating: 2 Star