The Man Who Invented History

Title: The Man Who Invented History – Travels with Herodotus
Author: Justin Marozzi
Publisher: John Murray, 2009 (First)
ISBN: 9780719567131
Pages: 333

Legend is a collection of traditions handed across generations in oral form while history is a collection of traditions transmitted in the written form. This is a very loose interpretation or definition of the state of things as far as these two ideas are concerned. How did history originate? Hagiographies aside, we have a clear source of the description of past events and a resourceful attempt to pinpoint the reasons that led to specific events. Herodotus, also known as the Father of History, was a Greek geographer and historian who compiled a history of the Greco-Persian wars in the fifth century BCE. In it, he examined what prompts a king or a country to go to war and comes up with the famous axiom that 'no one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace. In peace, sons bury fathers, but in war, fathers bury sons'. Justin Marozzi is an English journalist, historian and travel writer who offers easily and pleasantly readable travel histories. In this book, he retraces the travels of Herodotus into Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Greece and provides a re-reading of the ancient Greek historian in the changed intellectual setting of the modern era and finds that Herodotus is still relevant, perhaps even more so, than in the centuries that had gone.

Herodotus' book 'The Histories' is a chronological history of the Persian wars, of kings like Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius and Xerxes. It also consists of hundreds of digressions some of which are not relevant to the storyline, but consciously incorporated to titillate the audience because Herodotus told his story in front of groups of his countrymen. 'The Histories' is somewhat huge and with full of digressions, containing illicit eroticism, sex, love, violence, crime, strange customs of foreign peoples, imagined scenes in royal bedrooms, flashbacks, dream sequences, geographical speculations, natural history, short stories and Greek myths. It's history as well as a page-turner (p. 6). The book includes rich samplings of these asides. Still, the original is beyond the reach of Marozzi as it contains stories about 'life-saving dolphins, multiple testicle slicers, other-worldly animals, beard-growing priestesses' and so on. Herodotus acknowledges the fantastical nature of his narrative and confesses that 'I am obliged to record the things I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them'. Moreover, he wrote in prose. In an era when poetry was the ultimate form of literary expression, Herodotus mastered prose. History is often said to show warnings to present society on the logic that 'if one understands the past, he will be able to avoid making the same mistake twice'. Marozzi deems this to be one of history's most enduring illusions.

Herodotus' historiography, as reported by the author, is rather straightforward. He relied for his historical enquiries on the priests, with whom he appears to have checked in on every trip. He introduced the concept of cities rising and falling as time goes on and of empires coming and going. It was a penetrating observation when history itself was in its infancy. Herodotus is the quintessential travel writer and historian and travel writing has a long and distinguished tradition of artifice and exaggeration which is abundantly exhibited by his works. What makes Herodotus' works stand apart is the supreme ideal of religious tolerance in his narrative at a time before the region was filled with the monotheistic bigotry of the Abrahamic faiths. Castigating the Persian King Cambyses who desecrated Egyptian temples after conquering the land, he remarks: "Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best; and that being so, it is unlikely that anyone but a madman would mock at such things" (p. 95). Herodotus was the first to record so much details about Egypt which provided the world with the greatest store of information about the country until the nineteenth century. He devoted an enormous chunk of his book 'Histories' to Egypt. He describes about the 'opposites', how everything about Egypt is completely different from the rest of the world such as its writing system that goes from the right to left, the practice of circumcision, and priests shaving their heads. But there is nothing scornful or dismissive in the narrative or in his tone. The richness and diversity of human life is something to be cherished, not to fear or despise, he seems to say. What Herodotus said about Greece is not much dwelt upon, even though the author has spent a considerable time there. He contents with the remark that a new era of Athenian democracy and the golden era of Greece was dawning at the time Herodotus lived and observed.

Marozzi travels to Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Greece and retrace the travels of the ancient Greek historian. He visited Bodrum in Turkey which was Herodotus' birthplace that was known as Halicarnassus at that time. At every place, the author visits local scholars and archaeologists to assess how Herodotus is still relevant to the local society. His visit to Babylon in Iraq coincided with the US invasion against Saddam's 'weapons of mass destruction' and the Iraqi society was on the boil. He spends a tense time there expecting a terror attack every time he steps out of the International Green Zone. He compares Bush's war to Xerxes' against Greece which he undertook repudiating the sage advice of his uncle to his cost. Egypt was safe, but again they 'are religious to excess, beyond any other nation in the world' as observed by Herodotus 2500 years ago. He further points out the moral decay in Egyptian society. On Greece, the author notes democracy as a significant feature of Greece then as well as now. The fact that democracy established itself in Greece but lost out to monarchy in Persia, is thought of as a defining feature of the Hellenic spirit. Two and a half millennia later, Greeks are still passionate about their democracy. They go on strike or do a protest march at the drop of a hat.

Quite obviously, Herodotus was constantly interested in religion as he is fascinated with how two civilizations with different customs come to confront each other in wars. It was like this in the fifth century BCE and it still is, in the twenty-first century except that it is the Greek Orthodox Church which serves as the bastion of Greek identity against the encroaches of Islam from the East. This being so, Marozzi displays an evident asymmetry while handling the two religions. While he maintains a respectful silence towards Islam in spite of the horrifying instances of terrorism that was running rampant around him at the time of his visit, he mocks the Greek Orthodox Church and makes fun of it in every possible way. This goes even to the extent of body-shaming senior clergy as in one instance he describes a high priest as 'a man who could eat half a cow, a couple of chickens, a side of ham and still have room for baklava and ice cream' (p. 314). But in Iraq, Turkey and Egypt, he is a disciplined school boy who does not waver from the obedient line when Islamic practices are concerned. They are never criticised and not even their perceived shortcomings are pointed out even though he has met activists in all these places. Marozzi takes particular care not to revisit the Ottoman occupation of Greece that was ended only in 1832. The centuries of Turkish dominance were a devastating period in Greek history that saw enslavement of the people to their Muslim overlords. This background must be kept in mind while evaluating the Greeks' attitude to Turkey. Without narrating this crucial backdrop, the author criticises Greeks' natural animosity against Turks who occupied them for five centuries and nearly wiped out its culture. He introduces the head of the Greek Orthodox Church and a right-wing politician who accuse the Turks as barbarians as intolerant individuals and their outlook uncivilized even though they clarify that what they mean is those Turks who actually took part in the atrocities. At the same time, he joins a protest march organised by Left student unions against the 'imperialist' policies of America and Britain, which is the author's own country. This protest burned violent in the end and clashed with the police. Wokes seem to be anti-national everywhere.

It is evident from the text that the author fancies himself as a modern-day Herodotus, the Father of History. He faithfully follows the master in his footsteps and even tries to imitate the tropes which were used to attract readers' attention. Unfortunately, he does not live up to the reputation of his celebrated role model except in making some explicit and suggestive descriptions of erotic situations. Marozzi's obsession with erotic passages in Herodotus' narrative makes the book unrecommendable to general readers. Of course, this is subjective and relative too. There are people who would enjoy them. The reason for including so much of them in the book seems to be the same as that of the original - to keep the readers or listeners amused. The author plays some tricks to extrapolate them to modern times. Herodotus speaks of a strange Babylonian custom where every woman must go to the temple of Aphrodite once in her life and sit there till a stranger comes to have intercourse with her. Then she can go home. Herodotus slyly notes that some unattractive ones have to linger for three or four years to get the chance. Here Marozzi takes over and informs us that the Polish archaeologist blonde who guided him at Babylon 'would not have had to hang around for so long'! As part of following the Herodotean tradition of recording strange events, this book witnesses the exorcism of a woman in an Orthodox Church in Thessaloniki by a priest. The interesting part is that the woman was a doctor. However, this may be doubted to have been a deliberate inclusion to accentuate the cultural backwardness of modern Greece and to stress the author's perception that it does not inherit the intellectual efflorescence of ancient Greece. This is unfortunate because the author was helped to the extreme by Greek cooperation while travelling the country and its warm hospitality is repaid like this.

The book is recommended only to serious readers of history.

Rating: 2 Star

A Walk in the Woods

Title: A Walk in the Woods
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: DoubleDay, 1997 (First)
ISBN: 9780385408165
Pages: 320

This book is an interesting addition to the Bill Bryson collection of an avid reader as he is one of the greatest travel writers of the world. He and his friend Stephen Katz hiked through portions of the Appalachian Trail in the US in the spring of 1996 and this book is a humorous account of that memorable trek through the wilderness. The Appalachian Trail (AT) is an iconic, 2200-mile public footpath spanning 14 US states between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. It is managed by a robust public-private partnership and is the longest continuous, hiking only footpath globally. It attracts three million visitors annually. There are three types of hikes in the trail: Thru-Hiking attempts to hike the entire trail in a single continuous journey; Section-Hiking attempts the trail in smaller, separate chunks over multiple years or decades; and Day-Hiking which explores short, easily accessible segments for a few hours or a single day. Bryson and his friend aspired for a Thru-Hike and started from Georgia on that note. The tough conditions on the trail and extreme weather due to a slowly-retreating winter prompted them to break the journey and attempt a sectional-hike near the end of the trail. Unfortunately, they stopped after two days probably because the hardships of the trek greatly outweighed their expectations of the possible benefits. In the meantime, Bryson did several Day-Hikes while the other was busy with work. In that sense, the duo attempted all three kinds of the trekking and in a single year. The book is eminently readable and a thoroughly enjoyable one. On the final count, the team walked 870 miles in total or just over a third of the entire trail.

A trekking route of this mind-boggling scale is a tribute to the vastness of the US since it could earmark such an expansive piece of real estate for a purely non-commercial activity. An expert hiker would take nearly five months to complete the entire trail. Bryson makes fun of similar trekking circuits in England for its shortness. It is possible to reach a comfortable inn at the end of each day's trek in England whereas the AT requires the enthusiasts to stay in the forest for many days at a stretch and even up to several weeks. The trail in the Appalachians was conceived in the 1920s by a visionary called Benton MacKaye as a hiking trail connecting a network of mountain camps where urban workers could come and refresh themselves. Myron Avery mapped it out and personally superintended the construction of hundreds of miles of path by voluntary labour. He extended its planned length from 1200 miles to well over 2000. The trail was formally completed in 1937. The path had no historical basis. It did not follow any Red Indian trails or colonial post roads and is a genuine product of twentieth century innovation. It's the largest volunteer-run undertaking on earth.

Bryson periodically snipes at the management of the trail and the surrounding woodlands by the government and there are elements which shock the readers. About 240 million acres of forests are owned by the government and its prime activity is to build roads through them! These are to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. This was written in 1996 and the author mentions that 49 million acres are available for logging. Public infrastructure such as national parks are developed along the route, but these entities are severely deficient of funds even though visitor numbers soared. Camp sites and information centres have been shut, warden numbers slashed and essential maintenance is deferred to pitiable outcomes. Environmental hazards of the indirect, organic type also abound in the American wilderness. Extinction of tree and animal species is a grave concern. The widely prevalent American chestnut trees became a memory in a few decades due to an Asian fungus that made its way to the continent for which the tree was not evolutionarily prepared. The mortality rate was 100 percent. It infected a tree and spread its spores to nearby ones through breeze or woodpeckers. The trail is also infested with wild beasts such as the bear, moose or python. Bryson also suggests that microbes carrying a whole lot of infectious vectors such as the hantavirus are there, waiting for the trekkers. To cap it all, there are human murderers who attack the trekkers for no reason, often fatally.

Bryson's humorous take of his experience during travel is what makes his literary work a treasure for the readers. And there are lots and lots of it in this book. He observes that time loses its meaning during the trek which is expected to last several months. When it is dark, one goes to his sleeping bag and when it is light, he gets up and everything in between is just in between. You exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, with your brain like a balloon tethered with string - accompanying, but not actually part of the body below. When a person is on the Appalachian Trail, the forest is his universe - infinite and entire. It is all he experiences day after day. Eventually it is about all he can imagine. He is aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but there in that part of the country, where woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules (p. 138). Even small pleasures away from the toil of hiking brings a flavour of paradise. The author quips that the greatest reason for being grateful to live in the twentieth century is the joy of stepping from outside on a really hot day into the crisp, clean, surgical chill of an air-conditioned establishment. This is a fact we Indians would readily acknowledge and agree to! Several people carry high-tech equipment to the trail to monitor the weather and all but Bryson admonishes this tendency by claiming that the mountains are not for them and they perhaps shouldn't have ventured to the trail. He also takes stock of what he and his fellow trekker gained for their arduous journey of several weeks. Though it didn't change their lives, he gained an appreciation and respect for woods and wilderness and the colossal scale of America. He lost a lot of weight as well and was remarkably fit for a time afterwards.

There are some interesting aspects related to the trail. Every 20 minutes on the AT, a trekker walked further than the average American walks in a week. The near-total dependence of American life on the automobile is seen here. Since the trek begins in early-spring, dangers of very cold weather predominates in the early phase whereas heat is the main concern towards the final stages. This book discusses about hypothermia (death due to low temperature). It tells the story of 16 Danish seamen who were rescued from the North Sea after only 90 minutes following a shipwreck, suddenly dropping dead on the rescue vessel due to earlier exposure to severe cold. This is just an urban myth and there are no official records of it. Bryson estimates in 1996 that about four million people visit the trail every year. But given its immense length it is never crowded, but the shelters sometimes are because they are few as compared to the number of hikers. The Appalachian is a geologically distinct feature in that these mountains are really very old, in fact one of the oldest landscape features on earth. When simple plants colonized the earth and first creatures crawled out of the sea, it was there at a height of three times its present figure. Most of it had withered away by erosion in the meantime. This is not so surprising. A typical mountain stream will carry away about 1000 cu.ft of mountain in a year in the form of sand granules and suspended particles. That's equivalent to the capacity of an oversized dump truck, but over millions of years, the mountain would grind down to a hill. Bryson cites several instances where the American authorities allows the degradation of its environment either by lack of resources or by wilful negligence. He remarks that the attitude of America to nature is peculiar. Either it is ruthlessly subjugated for commercial profit or is deified as something one drives to. Seldom it occurs to anyone that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit. The AT need not be all wilderness; it could be routed through rural villages with grazing cows and tilled fields.

Bryson did this trip with a friend whom he had not met for a long time. There were moments of friction, but he manages the situation without descending to ill feelings. The rest-shelters are unattended and in the middle of the forest. You can't reserve them for yourself as it is planned to be occupied on first-come-first-served basis. This necessitates meeting and cooperating with strangers every evening. There were all kinds of people and our duo both saw the heights of magnanimity and the depths of selfishness. Bryson had discontinued the trail a few days after the start and visited portions of it in his car. During this time, he generally substitutes his travel adventures with historical and geological snippets just to keep the readers amused.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Stone Tower

Title: The Stone Tower – Ptolemy, the Silk Road and a 2000-year old Riddle
Author: Riaz Dean
Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2022 (First)
ISBN: 9780670093625
Pages: 225

Rome flourished in the first century BCE by establishing colonies and client-states all over the Mediterranean littoral which pushed up trade like never before. They consumed spices and silk from Asia and supplied gold in exchange for them as they did not possess the items which the Asians would accept in lieu of their produce. A network of trading routes and caravanserais developed in central Asia as a conduit for the flow of trade from China and India to Rome and Egypt. This network was later christened the Silk Road and proved to be a unifier of the east with the west. It was not only trade that was carried along the road. Religion, culture, language, script, sculpture and technology changed hands. This road was thus instrumental in coining the destiny of all modern Asian societies, particularly China. This book is an attempt to solve a 2000-year old question of ancient geography about a stone tower at the exact middle of the Silk Road. Riaz Dean is an independent scholar and author. This book is the result of a solo journey the author made retracing the old Silk Road.

The term ‘Silk Road’ was coined only in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen. This was only an academic exercise as the actual route was copiously mentioned by ancient and early-medieval historians. A first century CE treatise called ‘Geographia’ by Claudius Ptolemy listed thousands of places along the Silk Road. It was he who first suggested the presence of a feature called ‘Stone Tower’ on the exact middle of the road. This was a special place high up in the mountains situated on the doorway to China’s western extremity called the ‘Roof of the World’. The book is split into three parts, the first of which explains the birth of the Silk Road, the second covers key events in history that determined the tower’s establishment at the halfway mark and the third pinpoints where the tower was actually located. The author narrates Chinese history of the second century BCE to explain how the trade route was established in the first place. Zhang Qian, a commander of the palace guards of Han empire led several missions to the west in an effort to find an ally against the hostile Xiongnu barbarians. Following Qian’s epic first mission, the Han began sending out more envoys to engage with newly found nations to the west. Other than goods to trade, they took expensive gifts for the nobles and their courts, an armed escort for protection, servants and ample supplies. For these long and arduous journeys, they needed caravans and the trade route came into being.

An overland route presents problems of its own, in the form of border protocols, brigandage and vagaries of extreme geography such as steep snow-clad hills and inhospitable deserts along the way. Naturally, the maritime spice route offered a better alternative for the movement of goods although the distances by sea were greater between the east and the west, particularly during times when the Silk Road became too dangerous. The rivalry between Rome and Parthia did not make the situation any better. The Romans controlled the maritime routes but the Parthians would not let them deal directly with the Chinese using overland routes. Rome then tried to bypass trade out of Parthia which levied heavy taxes for protection. This rivalry soon developed into full-fledged warfare that led to the doom of both the empires. Initially, silk was very costly, effectively worth its weight in gold. Even the very wealthy could not afford it, who sewed small patches of it on their clothing. Production of silk was a jealously guarded secret in China. On pain of death, no person was permitted to remove its eggs or cocoons; foreigners were not allowed near nurseries and guards searched merchants leaving China. However, paper was the most important item traded from the east, considering its impact on the transfer of knowledge through the printed word. Other forms of agriculture and technology, like cultivation of grapes, wine making and manufacture of coloured glassware travelled from west to east. Buddhism also spread along this route from India. This book describes Aurel Stein’s explorations in Xinjiang and central Asia which contributed greatly to archaeological and literary corpus of the ancient world. However, his appropriation of literary manuscripts by bribing Chinese monks was controversial.

The author’s quest for the Stone Tower fails to enthuse the reader on multiple counts. One reason is the uncertainty on the nature of the landmark. Ptolemy does not say whether the Stone Tower was a settlement, natural feature or a manmade structure. The inexactness in the suggested Ptolemaic coordinates signifies an area of 30,000 sq.km in which the Stone Tower could be found. Aurel Stein explored the regions in search of it in the first quarter of the twentieth century based on these coordinates and warned about the unreliable character of the information. Stein identified a settlement at Daraut-Kurghan in southern Kyrgyzstan as the location of the Stone Tower, because the Perso-Turkish name roughly translated to ‘a tower at the gorge’. Along with this, Dean also suggests three plausible locations – Tashkurgan in Xinjiang, Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Osh in Kyrgyzstan. Out of these four, the author selects a sacred mountain near Osh called Suleiman-Too as the Stone Tower. Unfortunately, the entire episode fails to excite the readers.

This book is an excellent source of Chinese and central Asian history and ethnic movements in the three centuries starting from 150 BCE. It describes the unsettling periods in which the Xiongnu tribes made repeated onslaughts on the Han empire which has some parallels to the ravages Roman empire encountered about half a millennium later. It also truthfully captures the domino effect created by fleeing nomadic tribes in displacing more units on their run to safety. The Xiongnu displaced the Yuezhi, who upturned the Sakas who in turn rode into India and disturbed the political balance. The book also neatly summarizes the commercial, literary and cultural interchanges across different societies along the Silk Road. The Taklamakan desert harbours many secrets of the ancient trade and its unnaturally arid climate preserves the artefacts with surprisingly little damage. A well-funded archaeological mission backed by technology is sure to unlock many treasures from the dry sands of Taklamakan. Apart from these, the actual quest to find the Stone Tower appears to be ‘much ado about nothing’. At least, Dean is not much successful in convincing the readers about the absolute necessity of the perilous adventures he undertook in central Asia looking for the tower. The book is effectively a sequel to the author’s earlier book, ‘Mapping the Great Game’ (reviewed earlier here). The book includes many photographs which would have been breath-taking had they been in colour instead of monochrome.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Banaras – City of Light

Title: Banaras – City of Light
Author: Diana L. Eck
Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 1983)
ISBN: 9780140190793
Pages: 427

The root of the Sanskrit word ‘Kashi’ (Banaras) is ‘kash’ which means luminant. Literally, this may refer to the legendary jyotirlinga which is said to have filled the city in the beginning of time. Setting aside the myth, Kashi was the source of light that illuminated the religious life of Hindu India. People from all walks of life flock to Varanasi for pilgrimage. If they could die in the city, moksha was guaranteed to them. Hundreds of temples, ashrams, ghats and religious seminaries sprang up in due course of time. This refreshing book is a study and interpretation of Banaras from the standpoint of one who acts as a bridge between the Hindu and Western academic and religious traditions. It examines all origin myths connected to the birth of the city, the temples for their significance to specific rituals or legends, the practices and objectives of pilgrims and also how this city, liberating one from the ties and knots of life repeating again and again, is reconciled with the general philosophical outlook of Hinduism. Diana L. Eck was professor of comparative religion and Indian studies in the department of South Asian studies at Harvard University. She has written three other books on Hindu religious tradition. She has also worked commendably for American religious pluralism.

India is very diverse and has had political unity only for a very short time in its history spanning several millennia. But one thing Hindu India has held in common is a shared sense of its sacred geography (p.38). There are pilgrims who would carry a pot of Ganges water from the Himalayas all the way to Rameshwaram in the South in order to pour that water on the Shiva linga there. And from Rameshwaram they would carry the sands of the seashore back to deposit in the Ganges on their return north. Pilgrims who visit Kashi stand in a place empowered by the whole of India’s sacred geography as it is a single place that embodies all tirthas of India. The rise and sanctity of Kashi is simply beyond easy comprehension. Eck quotes a missionary who commented on it and put in such a way that it can’t be improved upon. His remark was that ‘when Babylon was struggling with Nineveh for supremacy; when Tyre was planting her colonies; when Athens was growing in strength; before Rome had become known or Greece had contended with Persia; or Cyrus had added lustre to the Persian monarchy or Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem and the inhabitants of Judaea had been carried into captivity, Varanasi had already risen to greatness, if not to glory’.

The author has gone into the details of worship of deities in Kashi. The number of deities is considerably small even though they are adored in numerous aspects relevant to a tale or incident in the epics. It is generally accepted that Kashi is the city of Shiva where the other gods have no jurisdiction. Even the god of death Yama is powerless here and Shiva himself is believed to chant the sacred mantra to cross the ocean of worldly ways to attain bliss into the ears of the dying. Anyone who dies in Kashi is said to attain nirvana straight away. However, it is not the city of Shiva alone. He shares the place with the whole pantheon of gods without rancour. The so-called Shaivism and Vaishnavism go hand in hand here. To an outsider, Kashi may appear as a disordered, crowded jungle of temples. But to those Hindus whose vision is recorded in the mahatmyas of Kashi, these temples are all part of an ordered whole with its divine functionaries and its own constellation of deities. Their vision is embodied in the sacred geography of the city. The deities of Varanasi envelope the entire spectrum of Hinduism which even contains goddesses or yoginis whose origins were non-Vedic and non-Brahminical. These are found in abundance here.

While remaining the most important religious centre of Hinduism, Varanasi was also a place of substance for Buddhists where Buddha had delivered his first sermon at Sarnath. It had a significant Buddhist presence until the twelfth century CE, when Qutb ud-din Aibak’s armies demolished Sarnath as well as Varanasi’s great temples. While the Hindus recovered from the blow, the Buddhist tradition which was dependent entirely upon its monks, monasteries and centres of learning was virtually eliminated (p.57). The book then glances upon the devastating centuries in which Muslim powers ruled over the ancient city and either destroyed or converted many ancient temples as mosques. In a classic case of understatement, Eck remarks that ‘the Muslim centuries were for the most part hard’ (p.83). The temples of Kashi were destroyed at least six times during these years. Muhammad Ghuri, Firuz Shah Tughlaq, Mahmud Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur, Sikandar Lodi, Shah Jehan and Aurangzeb destroyed the temples on a large scale. Aurangzeb was very particular in razing prominent temples including Vishweshwara, Krittivasa and Bindu Madhava. Their sites were forever sealed from Hindu access by the construction of mosques. Aurangzeb even named the city Mahmudabad but the name didn’t stick (p.83). The situation is so pathetic that there is no religious sanctuary in Varanasi now that predates the time of Aurangzeb. So exhaustive was the destruction wrought by this Mughal.

The author has visited all the religious places described in the book and asserts how effortlessly they blend with the cosmopolitan faith of the devotees. She confesses that ‘some of the temple I sought out, which had clearly been important in the era of the Sanskrit literature, no longer exists. Some such sites are now occupied by mosques’ (p.xiv). Despite its fame, today’s Vishwanatha temple has none of the magnificence, architectural splendour or antiquity as India’s great classical temples in Odisha or South India. Today, atop the ruins of old Vishwanatha temples, sit two different mosques, one built in the thirteenth century by Razia and one in the seventeenth century by Aurangzeb (p.120). The mosque of Aurangzeb is said to have transformed the old Hindu edifice without entirely purging its soul. One wall of the old temple is still standing, set like a Hindu ornament in the matrix of the mosque (p.127). The book also places on record the universal reverence the city of Kashi evoked from all parts of India. An inscription of twelfth century in South India records that a certain king of Karnataka set up a fund to help the pilgrims of his area pay the Muslim-imposed tax so that they could visit Vishweshwara in Varanasi (p.132).

It is a great blessing for Hindus to live and die in Varanasi. Then why doesn’t everybody live there? This book looks into the intricacies of lore and finds that Dandapani, a member of Shiva’s entourage, is the judge in this matter. He is the divine sheriff who sees into the many lifetimes through which a person has travelled. From Dandapani’s divinely advantaged point of view, the learned Brahmin may be no better than the poor beggar. Life and death are two simultaneous aspects of living in Varanasi and it is also a living and transforming symbol with double-edged power. Several tirthas with life-giving waters of creation and also the cremation grounds with its burning fires of destruction and liberation occur side by side here. One need not travel the globe in search of the sacred, for he has come to Kashi. Other sacred places of India are replicated in the city, be it tirthas, temples, lakes or even geography. Varanasi is witness to the union of Shiva and his Shakti and is a visible and earthly ford in the crossing to the far shore of liberation. The relevance of Kashi in the philosophical scenario of Hinduism is also examined. If one internalizes the truly luminous wisdom, he need not go on a pilgrimage anymore; and yet pilgrims continue to come to Kashi to walk on its streets, to bathe in the waters, to see the divine images and to see the city itself. Banaras is a good place to die and this fact makes it a good place to live. Moksha is only the last of the four stages of life. Only by ripening the fruit of life in each stage is one truly ready for the fruits of death. The throbbing heart of the book is the part which links Varanasi to the pulsating life of the society living within it. Kashi is not the city of moksha alone; it belongs to dharma and kama also. In India, kama is more than sexual pleasure. It is the attitude that informs all that people do for the sheer love of doing it, all that they enjoy simply because it is enjoyable. It is also the aesthetic enjoyment of music or art. Kashi is famous for its traditions of music and dance. Its courtesans in history were famous and wealthy right from the time of Buddha himself.

This book is a mandatory read for anyone who wants to understand the city better and to feel the spirit of the city in a meaningful way. A tourist to the place should read this book. So does a pilgrim, an administrator, a politician, a student or even a businessman. Whatever may be their field of specialty, everybody who treads the ancient streets and bylanes of Kashi should try to grasp something of the soul of Kashi, for which this book is absolutely essential. It observes that ‘there’s little in the world to compare with the splendour of Banaras, seen from the river at dawn’. Likewise, it provides other perspectives to comprehensively absorb the psyche of the city. It includes several illustrations of notable places of Varanasi made by James Princep, who was an archaeologist, numismatist and epigraphist, in the early nineteenth century. The book was first published 41 years ago in 1983, but due to its fame as the ‘eternal city of India’, all parts of the book and its descriptions stay relevant and applicable with little modification or revision.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 5 Star

Unravelling the Silk Road

Title: Unravelling the Silk Road – Travels and Textiles in Central Asia
Author: Chris Aslan
Publisher: Icon Books, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9781785789861
Pages: 334

In its strictest historical sense, globalization is not a new or even modern concept at all. Exchange of products and services coupled with transfer of wealth across administrative frontiers is what we call globalization now. It does not need ships, aircraft or the internet even though these would greatly aid the trade. In fact, man traded across his tribal borders most of the time and a nation is a somewhat larger tribe. Textiles, spices, tools and jewellery were some of the material interchanged. Central Asia was a major land route of caravan trade between India and China on the eastern side and the Roman Empire and medieval European kingdoms on the western part before maritime navigation had not developed. Out of the cargo, textiles comprised of wool, silk and cotton in the chronological order. The history of the discovery of these materials and how it transformed the societies through which it was carried through provides intriguing reading. Chris Aslan was born in Turkey and spent his childhood there. He lived in the deserts and mountains of Central Asia for fifteen years and still returns regularly to the region. He is a British national. The author has embroidered the wool, silk and cotton roads with his own experiences of living in the region. The book focusses on the crossing points of the roads in Central Asia rather than their termini.

Aslan was drawn to Central Asia as part of his doctoral research in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was not much appeal for democracy in these republics and all of them became ensconced in the palms of former communist party officials who ruled them like dictators. The author first took up a job for promoting tourism in Khiva, Uzbekistan with tenure of two years which got extended to fifteen years. He was involved in work that touched the soul of these lands. He set up a project for de-hairing the fibre from the wool collected from yaks known as yak down. The down is one of the lightest, warmest fibres in the world, three times warmer than sheep wool. This was commercially harvested only from the 1970s and is still often passed off as cashmere. However, the raw fibre is scratchy because it contains the rugged outer hair. Separating this irritant thing is a very tedious process which the author established in the barren landscape of Uzbekistan. History records that Babur employed slaves to do this all day and usually ended up with half a kg a day. Aslan worked in Central Asia under the aegis of a Swedish organization called Operation Mercy which the author glosses over as a Christian organization. Probably, this was an evangelist outfit engaged in religious conversion and missionary work on the sly. This is all the more prescient as the author was expelled from all three countries in which he worked – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan – for causing social unrest as claimed by the governments and in one case for translating the Bible to the local language.

The Central Asian republics still show scars of Russian colonialism first under the Tsars and then Communists. The Tsars annexed these lands in a bid to extend their borders to the Arabian Sea. This put them on a collision course with British colonial regime in India who was trying to nibble its way towards the north, in opposition to the Russian move. This hide and seek match which was the Cold War of the times is called the Great Game. The Bolsheviks employed great effort to settle the nomads and turn them into agriculturists. What began as incentives later transformed into coercion since the nomads were not eager to change their traditional ways. Anyone who owned more than 400 cattle were termed ‘class enemy’ and forcibly dislocated to gulags in Siberia. In an assault on the family unit, wives could be spared exile and destitution only by divorcing their husbands. Stalin launched his notorious five-year plans in 1929 with forced collectivization at its core. All nomads in Turkestan were expected to settle in collective farms. Under-resourced, badly planned and without adequate housing, these farms failed. Livestock died, crops failed and everyone starved. This entirely avoidable, manmade famine killed 1.5 million people but Stalin achieved his objective of largely wiping out nomadism. Family businesses in handicrafts like silk weaving were banned by the Communists as part of an attempt to break down pre-Soviet society and force them into factories instead. Centuries of artistic skill and talent was destroyed along with the complex guilds and training mechanisms that passed down these skills (p.182).

Even though the book’s title flaunts silk prominently, it is not the sole point of concentration in the text. Even then, it describes the various stages of silk production right from the hatching of eggs. The voracious appetite of silkworms is legendary and Aslan narrates some first-hand experiences of dealing with these useful insects. Ancient China was the birthplace of silk and they jealously guarded its production a secret from the outside world. The book includes some stories that look more like legends about how silk eventually transgressed the Great Wall. The Roman Empire was a huge consumer of Chinese silk. One bolt of silk was worth then around 60 kg of rice. Several bolts made up a bale and large camels could carry 250 kg on a long journey. The immense profit accrued on these hazardous journeys across the deserts of Central Asia was worth the risk in attempting the trade. The risk was enormous – an unexpected dry well in an oasis could end up in the death and destruction of the whole caravan. By Justinian’s time, silkworm eggs reached Constantinople and silk-weaving industry flourished in the metropolis. They found the maritime route quicker and more economical. Silk Road then fell into decline. This was not a single long road; it was a network of trading routes. The name was coined only in the nineteenth century.

The book gives equal emphasis to cotton in the narrative. It also brings out the ecological damage this fibre is causing to desiccated Central Asia. Cotton requires ten times as much water as wheat. Scarce water resources were diverted to cotton fields through canals to irrigate them. The Aral Sea, which is a land-locked water body that is roughly the size of Sri Lanka, dried up as a result of this water diversion. The book describes the author’s visits to former harbour towns where the rusting boats are stranded now in the middle of the desert. It we look at the history of cotton, it is seen that exploitation was woven into its fabric from the colonial times. Colonialism exploited India for getting raw cotton, African slaves were captured and transported to the New World to grow cotton and British children were exploited in appalling conditions in the textile mills of Manchester. Cotton manufactured in mechanized looms in the British Northwest undercut Indian produce and India was deindustrialized. Workers went back to fields for cultivation again which ushered in a doomed period of misery and abject poverty. Aslan finds a piece of Dhaka Muslin cloth which is a rare specimen of cotton that is extremely densely woven but exceedingly light and almost transparent. It was worth sixteen times the price of silk. Amir Khusrau noted that a hundred yards of it could pass through the eye of a needle and is described as ‘webs of woven wind’. Only one type of cotton plant found in the hot and humid banks of Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers could create a thread fine enough to make Dhaka Muslin. Production of just one bolt of it could take five months of labour. The type of plant that produced Dhaka Muslin fibres cross-pollinated with hybrid American upland cotton and became extinct. The last of the muslins was woven in the 1860s. Now, a search is on for rediscovering the plant. The book includes a photograph of Dhaka Muslin in a London antique shop. It is so translucent that the glint of the gold ring on an attendant’s finger behind the fabric is clearly seen on the other side.

The book provides a pleasant reading experience and almost a tactile feel of the dressing material described in exclusive detail. Many years of stay and intermingling with local people enable Aslan to dwell authoritatively upon the cultural practices as well as handicrafts. The magical charms used by the Central Asian people to ward off the evil eye makes for a nostalgic touch as we encounter many similarities to those in India. The author had a very adventurous life in living with nature. He was once gored by a yak which mistook his approach to her kid as with malicious intent; had scorpion stings on his chest; swam across the Panj river into Afghanistan which was frequented by narcotics smugglers and had crossed an ice-cold rivulet on a yak while clinging to the herder who was driving it. The author has made a very thorough research for this book and has given many remarks made by early European explorers in nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to leave an impression that these societies were by and large static and not much has changed. Several good books of this genre are listed in the bibliography. On the negative side, the nitty-gritty of weaving a cloth or carpet may be boring for the ordinary reader when it is repeated many times as they will be having no clue of the technical names of the weaving process or machinery.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Chasing the Monk’s Shadow

Title: Chasing the Monk’s Shadow – A Journey in the Footsteps of Xuanzang

Author: Mishi Saran

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2005 (First)

ISBN: 9780670058235

Pages: 446

 

Ancient Indians were not too keen in writing history. As a result, historians are forced to resort to annals of invaders, memoirs of visiting dignitaries and oblique references in literary sources. Xuanzang was a Chinese monk who travelled to India in the seventh century CE for collecting rare religious manuscripts on Buddhism and to train himself in debating the finer points of philosophy. Born in 600 CE as Chen Yi, Xuanzang was the name given by the Buddhist order at the time of his enrolment as an ascetic. He travelled for eighteen years (627 – 645 CE) through western China, central Asia and the length and breadth of India. He meticulously wrote down what he saw and what he thought about the land and people he encountered. ‘Xuanzang’ is the reformed rendition of ‘Hiuen-tsang’ familiar to most Indians and adopted as the Pinyin system by China in 1958. Mishi Saran travels through the routes used by the monk 1400 years ago and similarly notes down her own reflections of the land and people she came up with. This journey was made in 2000-01. The author is a journalist based in Hong Kong and interested in travel writing. She was born in Prayagraj but has not lived in India since the age of ten. She is a graduate in Chinese Studies and handles the language well.

 

The importance of Xuanzang in patching up the missing pieces of not only Indian but the entire central Asian histories also is not fully appreciated by the public. So exact the monk had been in his directions that archeologists in each of the countries he traversed had used his pointers to fix and then dig up the old cities of the seventh century. The author meets with archeologists in the countries she travels in who share their findings and acknowledge the Chinese monk’s role in defining it. Xuanzang was accustomed to his country’s meticulous records, volumes of dynastic histories and genealogies copied and recopied for posterity. He could not know that his own record, inked for the Chinese emperor, would provide modern Indian historians with one of the few sources of information about the subcontinent in that era. His Chinese spelling and pronunciation is different from the common practice in India, but since it follows well-defined rules, scholars have no difficulty in identifying the places.

 

It is clear from the monk’s description that Buddhism was declining in India as well as in other places where it once held sway. Xuanzang notes with mild consternation the inconsistencies and contradictions in the Buddhist texts available in the Chinese language. This was the reason he undertook the arduous journey through inaccessible mountains and deserts infested with hostile brigands. Xuanzang learned Sanskrit in India which was the ecclesiastical language of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism to which China belonged. At the same time, he studied Hinayana treatises also, so as to argue and defeat them in discourse. Futile disputes on the finer points of religion had become fairly common even in Central Asia as attested by Xuanzang’s arguments with Mokshagupta at Kucha in Kyrgyzstan. Patronage extended by royal houses was running thin. Buddhist monasteries in the western and central regions of India were already abandoned by the time Xuanzang arrived. There were few monks and certainly no eminent Buddhist teachers.

 

Saran’s condescension on everything Indian is jarring. Having lived most of her life abroad, she looks at the country with anglicized eyes and insistently repeats the things a typical foreigner would record, such as peeling paint on building walls, vehicles that break down twice a day, potholed roads and garbage accumulated everywhere. Even then, she remarks that ‘somehow India held together. Somehow the garbage got collected; somehow there was ginger and milk for tea; somehow the rickety government buses got me to places. I had not worked out how’ (p.217). Such grudging admiration does not extend to expressing gratitude where it is legitimately due. The author’s family had connections at high places that an armed guard and a security vehicle were exclusively provided for her transport in strife-torn Kashmir. Under that security canopy, she went places and faithfully records the one-sided observations made by extremist elements or their sympathizers. This attitude is common in liberal authors who gleefully accept the comforts provided by the administration and then make a partisan narrative of the conflict. She mistakes Kapilvastu to be in Uttar Pradesh and excoriates the state government for the poor upkeep. It’s amazing that her research could not identify the place to be a part of Nepal! On the destruction of Nalanda, she places the blame on ‘central Asian invaders’ in 1197 as if history does not record their names. Every Indian knows that it was destroyed by Bakhtiar Khalji in the pre-Sultanate period characterized by frequent Muslim invasions.

 

The author’s faculty of criticism and mocking disparagement is entirely suspended when she crosses the border from India to Pakistan. On every step, she is shadowed by the security establishment, harassing even the people who help her by providing accommodation, for instance. She raises no complaints about this in the book though it was published a few years after the event. The author unconditionally yields to hardline dress codes and gets self-conditioned to accept them as good for her and the whole womanhood. Later, on seeing college girls in Swat Valley with uncovered heads, she notes that ‘they looked vulgar and their heads seemed naked’ (p.365). Saran herself takes extra care to keep those body parts – commanded by Sharia to be covered – fully in conformity to it without any grumble. Donning a burkha, she ‘sensed the power of concealment, the power of only revealing what is absolutely necessary’ (p.371). In the usual liberal fashion, the author meekly surrenders to religious injunctions when they are accompanied by an implicit threat of violence otherwise.

 

The author’s journey on the footsteps of Xuanzang was interrupted at the Uzbekistan border because the road to Afghanistan was blocked due to internal violence between the Taliban and local militias in the year 2000. So she directly flew to India. After completing the travels in India and Nepal she obtained a visa to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan. The author could not visit any monument of her choice in the Taliban territory and was forced to travel the routes prepared by her male guide assigned by the Islamist regime. Public transport was non-existent and unsafe where they plied. She tried for UN aid agencies’ resources for travel and accommodation, but they refused to entertain her. Irritated by the lack of special consideration of the type she was familiar in India, the author makes a tirade against the agencies prompted by frustration. She accuses corruption in the international aid agencies. Even the funds contributed by well-meaning people gets sucked up in the great funnel of overheads and hefty staff salaries and finally only a trickle reaches the Afghans. The UN needs to have transparency regulations, provide accounts and pay attention to the bottom line. Most importantly, the author calls for a provision to fire staff when times get tough. The aid agencies would have done better if they had at least provided a car for Saran’s travel in Afghanistan!

 

The book’s title and beginnings are exciting, but the narrative gets lackadaisical once the going gets tougher. Often the script degenerates to a plain travelogue with nothing to enhance the historical content. The author has connections to very high places and scholars, but entirely fails to capitalize on it as far as the quality of the content is concerned. On the other hand, she has been successful in delineating the currents of identical cultural streams that unite central Asia with the Indian subcontinent. Even though separated by religion, they show similarities in the attitudes to life and the way to treat guests. The word ‘mehman’ for guest is common everywhere outside China. Altogether, we reach a conclusion that the book has failed to deliver what it promised in the title.

 

The book is recommended.

 

Rating: 2 Star

Indica

Title: Indica – A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent

Author: Pranay Lal

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9788184007572

Pages: 468

We have come across many ‘histories’ of India. Some will cover the British period, some would include the Mughals too and a few might cover everything from the Indus civilization. Beyond a few centuries, such narratives are constrained in scope by current political boundaries. Any meaningful exposition of the story of India prior to 1947 must include those events occurred within the present frontiers of Pakistan to be of relevance and objectivity. Natural history, on the other hand, quite freely does away with political boundaries conjured up in the twentieth century. The origin and development of the flora and fauna, of continents, mountain ranges and geography in general is a truly global study. With this in the background, I was a little surprised at the boldness in the book’s subtitle ‘a deep natural history of the Indian subcontinent’. Anyhow, this book turned out to be an informatively extravagant affair in which India acts as the pivot of the narrative. It does not mean that India was something special or different from others. Going by the author’s scientific outlook, the converse is vindicated in this book, that is, India was just like any other landmass across the globe and it was pure chance that lifeforms emerged and evolved here, just like anywhere in the world. Whatever little speciality it can claim is the speed – in geological terms – with which it shot through the ocean and hit the Eurasian landmass to make the Himalayas. Pranay Lal begins the story at the beginning of it all. He addresses the question of how the earth came into being and how rocks, continents and lifeforms emerged. Each topic is made richer by recounting examples from India. In that sense, this book is a great motivator for people who want to travel and explore the country. The author is a biochemist and an artist who works in public health and environment. He has extensive publications in the areas of public health, global trade, ecology and mysterious fevers.

As noted above, the book is dedicated to India. It points out examples and comparisons of the theories that explain geographical and biological concepts. The Pranhita-Godavari Valley is truly remarkable for it holds within it the entire spectrum of vertebrates from primitive fish and early amphibians to the first dinosaurs and early mammals. Even hand tools made by early humans have been discovered here. The author brings in objects and ideas familiar to Indian readers to express notions of natural science. The early lungfish that stepped on land is said to have grown to the size of a scooter or an auto-rickshaw. The comparison of the physical dimensions of a creature to the two most popular kinds of vehicles prevalent in India sets the tone of the discussion. It lists out the remnant fossils of sea life and creatures found in the Himalayas and Rajasthan and the strange tectonic events that has the immense power to elevate an ocean floor to a continent or transform a dried-up lake to a plateau.

Travellers to Hampi in Karnataka are captivated by the strange assortment of all types of volcanic rocks found in large quantities there. Boulders are found at other places in the Deccan too. Lal discloses the profound events that caused this massive upheaval. Around 68 million years ago, one of the most massive volcanic eruptions occurred in the Indian Ocean and continued for four million years. This happened near the present location of the Reunion Islands and just when the Indian subcontinent was moving above the spot on its onward journey to collide with Asia. This had a huge role in shaping the landscape and life in Greater India. There was a series of eruptions and the second one lasted a million years and produced nearly eighty per cent of all the lava released. It decimated almost all large animals on land, most large reptiles and many fish in the seas. Noxious gases cut off sun's rays and aggravated extinction on a planetary scale. Here, the author follows a slightly different argument than the established repertoire by hinting that this event had caused the extinction of dinosaurs in the world. He accepts that ‘a 5 to 15 km-sized meteor struck the earth at Chicxulub in the Gulf of Mexico close on the heels of the second eruption’. But the meteor impact is given only secondary importance. The Deccan eruptions were the greatest lava floods in earth’s history. The exposed lava flow in India covers an astounding area of 500,000 sq.km (roughly the size of Spain). It is only natural to expect that such a cataclysmic event will engender persistent acid rain and change of climate which would spell doom for the big animals.

This book is a general history of the world till the time the earliest Homo sapiens arrived in India on their exodus from Africa. It identifies three triggers that catalyzed the evolution of ape-like ancestors into full-fledged hominins. They are the ability to walk on two legs; a constantly growing brain and intelligence which led them to make tools, tame fire and cook meat. Homo erectus was the most prolific ancestor of humans, but very few fossils of them have been found so far in India and no complete skeleton has been found anywhere in the world. It is interesting to note that the largest ape ever walked on earth and which is supposed to have lived between 9 million and 120,000 years ago, was a ‘native’ of India. This giant ape is named Gigantopithecus bilaspurensis, as its fossil was found from Bilaspur in Himachal Pradesh. It used to have a height of three meters and though believed to have gone extinct 120,000 years ago, is there any chance that a few of them might still be alive and form the basis of the legend of yati, a large snowman believed by some to live in the inaccessible Himalayan mountains? The author, however, does not mention this probably because even the slightest reference to yati may take away the sheen of scientific rigour from the book. This book gives an ingenious tip to measure variations in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by counting the stomata in leaves collected over a number of years. This is very helpful for aficionados and is delightfully simple.

Pranay Lal claims that this book is the culmination of over twenty years of research, travel, conversations, interviews and a lifetime awe of nature. Every page in the book attests to this proclamation. It has the ordinary reader in mind when it explains the way in which scientific names are coined. The parts in the nomenclature are split and the Greek words elucidated. For example, the ape named Shivapithecus has the first part of its name ‘Shiva’ derived from Sivalik Hills which was its habitat and ‘pithecus’ means ape. The copy I had read was a hardback with very fine quality pages and excellent colour photographs lavishly thrown in. Naturally, this makes the book somewhat heavy. Indica is a book which is a must-have for all science enthusiasts who also love India.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star