The Ottoman Endgame

Title: The Ottoman Endgame – War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Author: Sean McMeekin

Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First)

ISBN: 9780718199715

Pages: 550

 

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ushered in the concept of separation of religion from politics of kingdoms and their interaction with neighbours. The principle of ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ (whose realm, their religion) finally lost relevance and the first seeds of modernity was sown in Europe. A century and a half later, the French Revolution introduced the novel ideas of nation states and national self-determination. While these crucial transformations were materializing in Europe, the Islamic world stubbornly stuck to their political creed of a caliph guiding the faithful both in temporal and spiritual matters. Ever since Selim I hoisted the Ottoman flag in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1517 after defeating the Egyptian Mameluke dynasty, the House of Osman jealously guarded the title of caliph. By end-nineteenth century, the Ottomans ruled over a vast land that enveloped numerous communities distinct from each other in ethnicity, religion, language and nationality. Persecution of Christians, Jews and other religious minorities was rampant. However, Europe had considerably progressed in industrial and military strength by this time. Tacit European support encouraged the subject nations to resist Ottoman hegemony. The period also saw Turkey, which was the seat of the Ottomans, being designated the ‘Sick man of Europe’. Foreign powers manipulated them at their will and carved up the empire into many pieces. With Turkey’s defeat alongside Germany in the First World War, the process accelerated and the Ottoman Empire was liquidated. This book narrates the events with long-lasting implications that led to the dismemberment of the Turkish empire that spread its geographical outreach from Morocco in the west to Persia in the east in a historically instantaneous interval of just three decades. The core of the giant Ottoman tree was already eaten by religio-nationalist worms and it just needed a push to come crashing down to the ground. Sean McMeekin is a professor of history at Bard College, New York. For some years, he taught at Bilkent University, Istanbul. This earlier career has biased his outlook and analysis of events mentioned in this book.

 

The book may be broadly divided into four sections, the first being the period from the deposition of Sultan Murad V and coronation of Abdul Hamid II and the downfall of the latter. The second part describes the run up to World War I, followed by the third part dealing with the actual war. The final section narrates the post-war dismemberment of the empire. The first part is especially important as it exhibits the reluctant steps with which Ottomans granted basic civil liberties to its religious minorities. It is surprising that this ordinary act which is taken for granted in all pluralistic societies required the intervention of external European powers. In lieu of support in the Crimean War, European powers demanded civic reforms which made the sultan grant extremely basic rights to non-Muslims. As a tentative step, churches in Istanbul were allowed to toll their bells during religious service! Apart from the hardliners, even moderate Muslims resented the reforms claiming that they were not sure why they had fought and died in a war so as to forfeit their legal supremacy over the Christians and Jews. The Ottoman system was rife with murderous intrigue and the sultan was forever anxious for his safety. Abdul Hamid was so paranoid that army recruits were not allowed to train with live ammunition. Naval vessels were not permitted to be armed while in port. Turkey entered a new era when the Young Turks usurped power and installed Mehmet V as a puppet on the throne.

 

We see shocking descriptions of the religious minorities before, during and after the Great War. Italy forcefully annexed Ottoman provinces in North Africa such as Libya in 1912. Greek soldiers regularly skirmished with their Ottoman counterparts. After the Great War erupted, Russia began incursions in the northeast along the Armenian border. Whoever attacked the Ottomans, their co-religionists were made to suffer in Turkey as hostages. As a result, they clung to the coat tails of whoever came along and had the power to defeat the sultan. The Sublime Porte responded by mass transfer of minority populations inland to prevent them from joining up with the invaders. In May 1915, Armenians were transported to the far-off and largely inhospitable Syrian desert province of Der Zar, implying that the survival of the deportees was not the caliph’s first priority. They were also forced to hand over their homes and property left behind to local Muslims at fire-sale prices. Around 700,000 or half of the Armenian population perished. This disaster, known as the Armenian Genocide of 1915, is not given due importance in the narrative. This gives the first hint of the author’s visible bias towards the Ottoman cause.

 

The book provides a detailed review of the military activities involving Turkey in the War. An important point to note is the Indian involvement in combat operations. India was under colonial rule at that time and the Indian army was extensively used to fight Britain’s war. Britain wanted to control the Dardanelles in the north and Iraqi oil fields in the south. Tens of thousands of Indian soldiers died in the trenches and forts of Gallipoli and Mesopotamia. After initial successes, the invading forces were fiercely resisted by the Ottoman troops. Meanwhile Germany who was an ally of the caliph, unleashed a fierce propaganda campaign to characterize the war as a jihad by the caliph’s forces against infidels. Germans assumed the role of friends of the caliph. Kaiser Wilhelm made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Saladin at Damascus and saluted him as a holy warrior. For his efforts, the German king was called ‘Hajji Wilhelm’ in some circles. The propaganda made some impact among Muslims in India and Afghanistan. This may have led to the germination of the Khilafat agitation in India. Not to be outdone, Britain responded with appeasement measures of its own. It docked four huge grain ships permanently on the Red Sea to feed the population of Hijaz which contained the two holy cities.

 

As we have seen earlier, this book is disappointingly partisan to the Ottoman side. The intervention of outside powers after the war redrew national boundaries in the middle east that do not reflect the people’s will who are fated to live inside these artificial constructs. The Kurds are the largest group that has not been accommodated in a proper homeland. Harping on this sense of injustice, the author whitewashes terrorist organisations as nationalists in statements like ‘pan-Islamic movements like Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda and Islamic State all strive to erase European-imposed state boundaries’. What is truly unbelievable is his cleverly crafted justification of massacres of Christians that have genocidal proportions. He provides a mitigating factor for Greek and Armenian massacres after the war ended in these words dripping with cold, spineless self-interest: “After a war lasting three years, each one more savage than the last, and with recent Greek atrocities nearby in mind, the forbearance of the Turkish occupiers was not fated to last” (p.473). And so, they plundered, burnt, raped and killed..? Disparagement of the Zionist movement provides a sideshow to the eventful history. It all ended with the Lausanne Convention which transferred wholesale populations between Turkey and Greece to make the partition effective and complete. The book shifts the focus quickly and too frequently from the micro to the macro perspectives, thereby confusing the readers. The book is somewhat large and a little tiresome with very small font size of the text.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 2 Star

 

A Brief History of Ayurveda

Title: A Brief History of Ayurveda

Author: M R Raghava Varier

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2020 (First)

ISBN: 9780190121082

Pages: 172

 

Modern medicine is complemented by two main streams of alternate therapies in India – Ayurveda and homeopathy. Concerns have been raised by rationalists on the efficacy of homeopathic medicine as it is suggested that the underlying logic of their formulation is that dilution of a serum with water makes it more potent. Leaving aside the controversy for the time being, the point to note is that Ayurveda is not subject to attacks on such fundamental levels. In fact, there is a bias to the contrary. Since most Ayurvedic drugs are herbal products and hence ‘natural’, there is a tendency to consume much more than required and that too without the proper guidance of a physician. Even though it is an alternative medicine now, Ayurveda has been the mainstream healthcare program in the subcontinent for roughly 2500 years. This book is a brief history of it from Vedic times to the classical age that ended by about seventh century CE. Then comes a yawning chasm in medical knowledge in India which is at last intellectually crossed only in the nineteenth century by determined pioneers who put in place revival programs to repackage Ayurveda to the modern world. M R Raghava Varier is director general at the Centre for Heritage Studies of the government of Kerala. Prior to this assignment he was a consultant at the Museum of Ayurveda at Kottakkal. He is basically a historian and epigraphist.

 

Ayurveda derives its authority and status from the Atharvaveda tradition of Vedic culture and society. The Veda prescribes the essential qualities of herbs available and the uses it can be put to. The earliest source of information to trace the history of indigenous knowledge of healing and healthcare is the corpus of the Rig Vedic hymns. Vedic medicine is generally described as ‘magico-religious’, implying that the art of healing and healthcare involved the use of medicine as well as ritualistic chanting of hymns. The author remarks that the incantations and chants were to follow a psychosomatic approach to healing which may be more lucidly described as ‘placebo effect’. Vedic medicine also included a form of surgery. In the treatment of the retention of urine, a reed was used as a catheter.

 

Varier handles the Hindu and Buddhist streams of medicinal study as something quite distinct and mutually exclusive. By the middle of the first millennium BCE, medical knowledge was developed in the Buddhist monastic institutions as the ascetic physicians travelled from place to place treating sick monks, lay devotees and common people. People who heal others were entitled to a respectable position in any society, but surprisingly in India, the early texts treated a physician as impure and forbade Brahmins from practicing it. Unlike this, surgery was done by barbers both in India and the west. Ayurveda attained maturity in the classical texts of the samhitas. There are several samhitas and each of them is attached to the name of a preceptor such as Charaka, Sushruta, Kashyapa and so forth. Not only humans, Ayurvedic prescriptions are available to horses, elephants and trees too. The author warns against accepting the ancient texts at their literal meaning by giving a list of hyperboles. Sage Dirghatamas was cut into pieces by his enemies but was restored to life by Ashwinidevas by rejoining him. Visphala, wife of Khelaraja, lost her legs in the battlefield and a metallic leg was grafted. Sage Atri’s severed limbs were similarly grafted as also Dadhici’s severed head was replaced with that of a horse. Modern practitioners should have the capacity to separate the wheat from chaff.

 

The book analyses Charaka Samhita in some detail. This treatise contains the basic concepts of Ayurveda such as the theories of tridosha, panchabhuta and so on. The human body falls into three major prakriti (natural groups) which are vata (wind), pitta (bile) and kapha (phlegm). Treatment in the Ayurveda system is for the prakriti of the patient and not for the symptom or complaint of the disease. The philosophy of Charaka is autonomous and anterior to others. It does not accept the existence of god. Two integral parts of the programs of treatment in the Samhita is rasayana (rejuvenation) and vajikarana (enhancement of virility). Charaka proposes a comparatively higher marriageable age for men and women. The practice in society had considerably fallen from the recommendations in the medieval period. Child birth at an early age is not countenanced in Charaka Samhita. It prescribes the period of sexual activity from 16 to 70 years. The marriageable age for girls is 12 and for boys 21, but reproductive age is set as 16 for girls and 25 for boys.

 

Ayurveda also performed surgery for those in dire need of it. Mutilation of human organs, especially of the nose, was a common form of corporal punishment then. Sushruta Samhita deals with surgical procedures and instruments. Obviously, anesthetics were not in use, but intoxicants were liberally used to ease pain. The text mentions 100 blunt and 20 sharp instruments used for surgery. On this point, the author accepts all traditional claims of Ayurveda at face value with very little reservations. At the same time, he links progress in medicine to societal relations in the characteristic way of left historians. He quotes Romila Thapar for all references to ancient India. The author then assigns two traditions to Ayurveda – the Indus civilization and the Vedic. This unsubstantiated classification is a corollary to the Aryan invasion theory which claims that the invading Aryans destroyed the Indus cities. The argument for Indus origin of Ayurveda has no historical basis. Any information other than gleaned from the still undeciphered Indus seals is pure conjecture. Varrier goes one step further on the leftist path. There are true as well as some false hypotheses in Ayurvedic theory. He assigns the true ones to have originated from Indus culture and all the false ones from Vedic! Acharya Bhela postulated the mind to be situated in the head, so he follows Indus tradition. Charaka and Sushruta assigned it to the heart, so they are Vedic. The author sounds illogical when he blindly follows the precepts of Marxian ideology.

 

The book is tedious and absolutely uninteresting to read as it is structured like a school or college text book. One positive aspect is that the author is genuinely concerned about the growth and development of this traditional system of healing in the current age. Throughout the text, he prefixes ‘science’ whenever he mentions Ayurveda so as to emphasize the relevance it seeks in modern society. The book includes diagrams of very specific and peculiar surgical instruments – 47 of them, to be precise – but these were taken from the Ayurveda museum at Kottakkal and it’s not certain whether they were used in ancient times. The ancient Greek medicinal system also used the concept of peccant humours which cause diseases. This postulate is the same as Ayurveda, but the author does not slow his pace to consider whether this similarity is due to mutual influence or coincidental. A common health concern regarding some Ayurvedic formulations is the high content of heavy metals such as mercury and lead which adversely affect the well-being of the patient. This issue also is not addressed in the book.

 

The book is recommended to serious readers.

 

Rating: 2 Star

 

The Disruptor

Title: The Disruptor – How Vishwanath Pratap Singh Shook India

Author: Debashish Mukerji

Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2021 (First)

ISBN: 9789354894138

Pages: 542

 

Vishwanath Pratap Singh, popularly known as V. P. Singh, was a politician who changed the course of national politics through his serving office as India’s finance and defence ministers and then as its prime minister. VP is known for his untiring crusade against corruption and unflinching commitment to social justice. Though he has served in many capacities at the national level and in Uttar Pradesh state, in each of his last three positions – as finance and defence minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet and as prime minister in the subsequent Janata Dal government – his actions made lasting changes to the national political milieu. For a person who impacted Indian politics as profoundly as V P Singh, his posthumous neglect is a disgrace. Not even a postal stamp has been issued in his name, let alone a street or state-owned institution even in his native Prayagraj. On the occasion of Singh’s 90^th birth anniversary, this biography is an effort to redress the imbalance. Debashish Mukerji was a journalist for nearly 40 years, working with numerous reputed publications. He has written extensively on Uttar Pradesh and on national politics.

 

V P Singh is known for his fierce opposition to corruption and crony capitalism. But this streak in his character came to light only after the death of Indira Gandhi who was his mentor and benefactor. His entry into politics and subtle maneuvers to acquire positions of authority are typical of a career politician with no streaks of greatness in them. Belonging to a large zamindar family who enjoyed the privilege of prefixing the title ‘Raja’ to their names, he donated large tracts of land to Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s ‘Bhoodan’ movement with great fanfare that it looked like he was trying to muster political mileage out of it. He tried to join Congress in 1957, but was rebuffed by suspicious local leaders who feared the rajas would take over the party. Then he cultivated Lal Bahadur Shastri who also hailed from Prayagraj. In a public meeting in 1965, he dramatically cut his thumb with a razor blade and used the blood that trickled out to mark a tilak on the forehead of Shastri who was the prime minister then. Unfortunately, Shastri died a few weeks later at Tashkent and VP switched his loyalties to Indira Gandhi. He lobbied for a Rajya Sabha ticket but had to settle for a nomination in the UP assembly elections, that too after several backchannel negotiations. He bypassed all local leaders and went straight to Indira with the help of his brother Sant Bux Singh, who was an MP.

 

Then came an era in which Singh served Indira almost as a slave. Mukerji narrates the events with dispassionate objectivity. Singh entered Indira’s cabinet in the 1970s and continued to be loyal to her when she declared Emergency in 1975 and stifled the democratic process. He was a minister of state for commerce in the cabinet and stood solidly with Indira even after she was thrown out of power. His calculations proved right when she returned to power and he was made UP chief minister in 1980. His selection was literally out of the blue and his name had never figured in media speculation about the likely candidates. 250 out of the 309 MLAs had not even personally met him before he was made chief minister. VP spent 31 of his first 100 days as chief minister in Delhi, seeking prior sanction for all important decisions before announcing them. He extended his loyalty to Sanjay Gandhi too, the all-powerful younger son of Indira and called him an ‘avatar of Swami Vivekananda’ (p.147). After Sanjay’s untimely death in an air crash, Congressmen wanted his elder brother Rajiv at the helm. Showing his credentials as a sycophant, Singh appealed in a public meeting to give them Krishna, referring to the Mahabharata episode in which Pandavas opted for the services of an unarmed Krishna while the Kauravas settled for his well-trained army.

 

The author suggests that Rajiv Gandhi and V P Singh made an attempt to liberalize the Indian economy in their first budget in 1985. The Left protested and they quickly made a U-turn. The subsequent budgets firmly trod on the ‘socialist’ path until finally the economy verged on collapse and a new direction was shown by P V Narasimha Rao in 1991. However, Singh took on the industry with a vengeance that is rarely seen in a politician. His relentless struggle against the Reliance group is neatly catalogued in the book. The systematic raids by agencies rattled other industries as well, which seemed to proceed industry by industry like textile, real estate, jewelry, cigarettes and film production. The same business forums that had hailed his budget complained loudly, but VP replied that ‘he had only turned the ignition on and not yet started moving’. In his tenure as finance minister lasting two years, the country witnessed about 6000 raids with 100,000 premises searched and half a million people interrogated. He engaged a US investigative agency named Fairfax to spy on Reliance without proper security clearance and finally Rajiv transferred him to defence and then dismissed.

 

V P Singh is still hated by a section of the upper castes for introducing 27 per cent reservation for OBCs, drawing on the recommendations in the report of the second Backward Classes Commission chaired by Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal. They accuse him of taking this step at a time when even the OBCs were not vocally clamouring for it. Singh was in the midst of several crises threatening his government which reached the crescendo in August 1990 when he suddenly announced the reservation in government and public sector jobs. This book tells a different story in which the preparations had started right from Singh’s swearing in. The Janata Dal poll manifesto had declared that Mandal recommendations would be implemented if it was voted to power, but nobody took them seriously. Politicians Sharad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan supervised the proceedings which were initiated by P S Krishnan who was a secretary in the social welfare ministry of the 1956 IAS cadre from Andhra Pradesh. Krishnan submitted a note on Mandal report to the cabinet on 1 May 1990, pointing out that enforcing it needed no parliamentary approval but a mere executive order. VP, as prime minister, wrote to all state chief ministers in June 1990, but only Bihar and Uttar Pradesh replied, promising their support. Singh’s deputy, Devi Lal, had raised the flag of revolt in the meantime seeking better prospects for his son Om Prakash Chautala. Lal was ousted from the party on 1 Aug 1990 and Mandal issue came up in the next day’s cabinet meeting. A meeting of the MPs of National Front was also held on 2 Aug in which the implementation was scheduled for 7 Aug. When parliament reconvened, Singh announced it in the Lok Sabha. The official notification was issued on 13 Aug 1990. Many parts of India witnessed violent protests against the measure including self-immolation. It is estimated that 152 people burnt themselves of which 63 died. But the government stood firm. The Supreme Court stayed the order initially, but upheld its validity after excluding the creamy layer among OBCs. 1200 backward castes common in the Mandal list and corresponding state lists were thus entitled to 27 per cent reservation in government jobs. It is to be remembered here that such jobs constitute only one per cent of the total jobs in the country, but they are better paid.

 

The book is a very good read. Mukerji has made sufficient background research to present the facts with a clear sense of direction. His style is immensely appealing that is comparable to renowned international works of this genre. The author examines his subject with sympathy and grace, but has never allowed his personal emotions to cloud his judgment. Whenever criticism is due, he doles it out in the required proportion. Though written after two decades of Singh’s demitting office, the book has been able to present the narrative as something fresh out of the political arena.

 

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star