The Evergreen Legends of Kerala

Title: The Evergreen Legends of Kerala
Author: Sreekumari Ramachandran
Publisher: Vintage, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780143470144
Pages: 455

Anyone who has visited or at least seen pictures of Kerala need no prompting to realize that the region is incredibly beautiful physically. Kerala is tightly integrated to India’s national economy and even to international business on many levels from export of spices to extremely well-trained manpower. The impressive point to note amid this seamless connectivity with external partners is the cultural distinctness Kerala had always maintained. Its unique dance forms, artistic expressions, and inimitable festival pageantry make Kerala into a class of its own. Besides these, the people of Kerala nurtures a lot of legends, folk tales and ballads that are carried from one generation to the next. This book offers a glimpse into the rich lore and legends of Kerala where heritage and culture are not just remembered, but lived. The author promises at the outset that the book would not disappoint the reader. And she has kept the promise. Sreekumari Ramachandran is a bilingual writer in Malayalam and English. She has authored forty books including short stories, novels and biographies. Her English translation of the iconic Malayalam work Aithihyamala earned her intellectual recognition as a translator. She resides in Kochi.

Considering the antiquity of Malayalam literature, it may come as a surprise to many to learn that an anthology of legendary stories of the language was published only in the early-twentieth century. That task was undertaken by Kottarathil Shankunni, a school teacher and editor of Malayala Manorama’s poetry section. Aithihyamala (a string of legends) compiled in eight volumes, was the first of its kind and still serves as the standard interpretation of many folk tales that are in vogue. This book introduces some new stories not found in the Aithihyamala. The legend of Attukal Bhagavathy of Thiruvananthapuram is included along with the annual Pongala festival which holds the Guinness world record for the largest congregation of women. This seems to be a personal choice of the author as she extolls the experience of taking part in the festival as extremely unique which ‘must be soaked in first-hand to understand its magnificence’. This festival has gained huge popularity in the last two decades and has metamorphosed lately into a collective outing of women in so-called ‘she trips’ that helps to empower them. This book includes a section on the revered elephants of Kerala, which is the state animal. These giants hold a special place in the hearts of the people, and their significance extends far beyond the wild. Elephants are deeply woven into the fabric of the region’s culture. Their presence in festivals lend an air of grandeur and auspiciousness to the celebration. This section gets added relevance in the wake of nefarious efforts on the part of some activist judges to do away with this age-old custom through a court indictment. The author has greatly embellished the elephantine legends with fact and fiction and should be considered by the readers only as a fable. Almost all of the stories refer to a period in Kerala’s history when the caste hierarchy ruled supreme and stifled individual initiative and enterprise. However, there are some tales which exemplify the oneness of man and the futility of the caste system in demarcating people of talent. The twelve siblings born to a Pariah woman in her wedlock with Vararuchi, a Brahmin, is a case in point. The legend of Puliyambilly Nambudiri who was a Brahmin tantric but consumed liquor and meat is an extreme example. Even then, he humbled other Brahmins with his magical powers. The morale of the story is that true wisdom lies not in worldly knowledge, but in humility and open-mindedness. But Puliyambilly was not entirely above his times. His faculty to view the goddess Shakti in her corporeal form was taken away when he complained about the goddess accepting devotion from a low-caste person. This also serves as a lesson to thinkers and scholars.

Kottarathil Shankunni was a resident of Travancore and most of the stories of Aithihyamala were concerned with the legends circulating in the Travancore-Kochi region. This book makes up for the earlier tome’s omissions and includes an entire section of theyyams with eleven chapters so as to represent this unique cultural dance form of Malabar in a book professed to showcase the legends of the entire Kerala landmass. Kerala is famous not only for its breath-taking landscapes and serene backwaters but also for its mesmerizing kaleidoscope of festivals that embody the harmonious fusion of history, culture and spirituality. This book also includes a collection of the must-see festival events in Kerala.

The book is excellent for light reading and is a fine accessory as a travel companion. Pleasantness is the only experience it imparts to the reader. Several hand-drawn illustrations are included which add depth to the narrative. Each chapter is unrelated to the others but is grouped according to broader themes like famous temples, elephants, theyyams and so on. They can be read sequentially or randomly without any diminution of interest. A good thing about the narrative is that the author does not reinterpret the tales according to her worldview and in that sense does not draw upon much from artistic license. She faithfully follows the logic (or lack of it) of the original tale and takes some care to iron out the wrinkles to smoothen the reading experience for young, new readers. The author could have included a note on the criteria used for selection of topics because this is not an exclusive translation of Aithihyamala.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Nehru Development Model

Title: The Nehru Development Model – History and its Lasting Impact
Author: Arvind Panagariya
Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780143466567
Pages: 519

At the time of her independence in 1947, India was ripe for an all-out change covering all sectors touching upon the lives of the people. It was like a lump of moistened clay waiting to be kneaded by a master sculptor into a masterpiece of art. Jawaharlal Nehru was bestowed that honour by destiny to craft a modern society. His efforts fell into two broad categories of political and the economic. He was immensely successful in the first in that the political model made by him stands unchallenged even now. Despite more than a hundred amendments to the Constitution, the essential foundations of Indian democracy have remained unshaken. This was not the case of his economic policy that proved to be an abject failure. In contrast to the political, Nehru’s economic policy framework has undergone a dramatic change in 1991. India turned away from an inward-looking and control-ridden economy into an outward-looking market economy. This book is a history of the development of Nehru’s policy and is divided into three parts. The first part establishes that the economic model India adopted was almost entirely due to Nehru. The next part explains in detail the policy regime, its implementation and the economic outcomes during the Nehru era. The final part develops the theme that by the time Nehru passed away, the socialist policy regime and thought had become sufficiently entrenched that a retreat from them in the foreseeable future was unlikely. Aravind Panagariya was the chairman of the Sixteenth Finance Commission holding the rank of a Union cabinet minister. He is also a professor of economics at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University and was the first vice chairman of NITI Aayog. He has authored over twenty books.

The book describes the pathways Nehruvian economics followed in its quest for ideological nirvana rather than building up the country’s economy on sound and practical financial policies. Nehru was enamoured by socialism and favoured heavy industries to be installed first, which he fancied would make the nation self-sufficient. He then wanted to meticulously plan everything and to restrict the private industry to certain fields. He regulated the private sector through extensive licensing to keep large manufacturers away from products the small-scale industry was mandated to manufacture. Political ideology permeated the top echelons of decision making and the obsequious professionals engaged by the government based on their political opinion competed among themselves to be more loyal than the king. The panel of economists who evaluated the draft framework of the Second Five-Year plan formulated by Mahalanobis came out fully in support of it. They had no faith in the concept of prices and markets which was a sine qua non of economists and firmly believed that the government had to control and regulate every aspect of economic activity. They were out to outdo the socialists in socialism and planners at planning. Several foreign statisticians and economists who were consulted to finalise the second five-year plan were predominantly left-leaning and often admirers of the Soviet model. This went well as long as India enjoyed healthy foreign exchange reserves which she had built up through trade surplus during World War II. The surplus in foreign exchange (sterling balance) ran out in 1957-58 and the government adopted strict foreign exchange control. Even then, it frowned upon devaluation of the rupee to bolster exports.

Panagariya clearly elucidates his argument that Nehru singlehandedly moulded India’s policies and shall bear the blame for its dismal performance on the economic front. In his writings, Nehru described international trade as an instrument of imperialism and sought self-sufficiency for India. In an instance of sheer folly, Nehru discouraged exports by imposing an export tax on many items. While India had export controls on jute, Pakistan subsidized it and captured a good share of the world market. Even after the sterling balance ran out, government efforts to boost exports were lukewarm for five more years. India’s share of total world exports in 1947 was 2.5%. It fell to 2.1% in 1951, 1.4% in 1956, 1.2% in 1961 and to a measly 0.9% in 1966. This was Nehru’s track record! The presence of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel ensured that the 1948 Industrial Policy Resolution (IPR) provided a larger space for domestic and foreign capital. Nehru’s dominance after Patel’s death in 1950 found expression in the 1956 IPR which expanded the areas of public sector monopoly. India was unique in placing the social revolution ahead of the economic revolution through its high protection of industrial labour in the organized sector. Furthermore, the government controlled distribution and fixed prices for several commodities such as cement and automobiles like scooters and cars. Only those few who obtained allocations could purchase them when stocks were replenished. This led to widespread corruption. A used scooter commanded a higher price than a new one because a new one could be obtained only after years of waiting. An entrepreneur needed to obtain a license to start an industry. Applications for such licenses were evaluated in terms of their technical feasibility but not economic efficiency. Aggressive applicants with superior knowledge of the system got their applications quickly approved while more efficient producers who were late in making their requests were denied a license.

The author shines a torch into the darkness surrounding Nehru’s policies and brings to light the shortcomings which are so glaring as to make us wonder why the top-notch economists and professionals of that time failed to notice them. Agriculture was subject to benign neglect during the Nehru era. Food grain production failed to keep pace with demand. Any unexpected increase in output may be attributed to an increase in the cultivated area. This curse was lifted only after the arrival of Lal Bahadur Shastri as the prime minister who initiated steps towards Green Revolution and Indira Gandhi sustained his efforts with equal vigour. The book provides a brief look at India’s import policies from the British period onwards and how Nehru continued to hold on to a war-time arrangement even long after the end of the war. India’s import policy was comparatively free and liberal from 1882 onwards with some protection for domestic industry allowed in tariffs during World War I. The Second World War brought with it foreign exchange control and systematic direct import controls for the first time. This was relaxed towards the end of the war, but the Balance of Payments crisis in 1957 made the regime to revert to more or less war-time severity for two more decades. Some piecemeal liberalization was seen in the 1980s, but the system was genuinely dismantled only in 1991. The 1957 crisis was also due to poor management of the economy. India had accumulated a decent foreign exchange reserve (sterling balance) due to trade surplus accumulated during World War II. In the early 1950s, higher inflation in India than abroad caused by huge deficit financing for infrastructure projects combined with a fixed nominal exchange rate rendered the domestic product progressively less competitive. This led to a steady rise in import demand and stagnation in export revenue. Sterling balance was near zero in 1957 and the government scurried to control imports. Devaluation of the currency was the best option but Nehru was dead against it. Even though the author does not mention it, this might have been because the measure would have adversely affected the British staying back in India after independence. In 1966, when Indira Gandhi devalued the rupee by 57 per cent in one stroke, all the British returned to their homeland.

The book also analyses the path India had chosen to move forward in economic planning after Nehru passed away. It is obvious from the discussion that greater damage to the national economy was inflicted during the time of Indira Gandhi. Nehru and Indira’s economic policies led them to nationalize partially or wholly several sectors and enterprises and subject private sector economic activity to strict government control. The result was low growth for many more decades that condemned India to continued high poverty levels for nearly half a century. The Nehru legacy was faithfully followed by Shastri and Indira. The years 1969 to 1976 saw India rapidly swerve to the political left. Banks were nationalized in 1969 and insurance in 1971. Corporations with Rs. 20 crore or more assets were categorized as monopoly and harassed through the MRTP Act of 1969. Foreign exchange transactions were tightened by FERA in 1973. Foreign equity share was capped at 40 per cent in enterprises. The modified Industrial Disputes Act made it impossible in 1976 to lay off workers in industries with a head count greater than 300. Urban land ceiling was enacted in 1976. Constitution itself was amended to include the new words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ in the same year during Emergency. Personal income tax brackets touched 90 per cent. Rajiv Gandhi was the first prime minister without a socialist baggage. He introduced a few piecemeal reforms but developed cold feet after two years. It was Narasimha Rao’s stellar achievement to scrap Nehru for good. Even after Rao liberalized the economy, the business community was not overly enthusiastic. They only wanted to be freed of the shackles of investment licensing but did not want the competition from abroad through liberalization of trade and foreign investment. Even the export-oriented enterprises from India did not care to support negotiations that led to greater scope for entry of foreign entities. Vajpayee carried forward the reform process at a brisk pace. The power behind the Manmohan Singh regime (2004-14) was Sonia Gandhi and she had none of the liberalizing instincts of her husband. The reform process came to a standstill in this period. Matters got much worse in the time of UPA 2. Modi continued the reforms steadily but his stress on import-substitution industrialization is a fall-back to the old ‘self-sufficient’ thinking.

When Modi scrapped the Planning Commission, its demise was little lamented because this institution had outlived its utility. The author argues that the Commission was riddled with short-sightedness and incompetence right from the early years because Nehru had stuffed the Planning Commission with academic stooges and only those economists who shared his political vision. The Commission earnestly believed that the root cause of food crisis ripping the country apart was hoarding by a few vendors and not the poor farm output. This made them suggest price controls and monopoly trading by the state. The food ministry was, however, right on their contrary finding. They stressed on the incentives for farmers to grow more food. Planning Commission again opposed this saying that this would increase the disparities between commercial farmers and the masses of subsistence cultivators and deprive the industry of much-needed investment. It was the stubbornness of the food ministry that led to the Green Revolution. After the 1991 reforms, entrepreneurial decisions rather than licensing authorities determined sectoral allocations and little rationale remained for formulating five-year plans. The Commission continued its purposeless existence for two more decades until Modi disbanded it in 2014. The 12th Five Year Plan was the final one India had and it ended in 2016-17. Panagariya affirms that Narasimha Rao spearheaded the 1991 liberalisation program by his own conviction that India needed to be guided to the right track of progress and not through any compulsion exerted by the IMF as claimed by some scholars. However, it's a fact that Rao never claimed credit for the 1991 reforms which were so profound in nature. The book also makes a crucial reference to the doubtful quality of economic thought being produced in our academic institutions. Left or left-leaning faculty in economics uniformly dominate Indian academia of higher education, whether they be public or private (p.381). Even though the academicians and the budding talents trained by them have been slower to shed socialist era economic thought, reform-minded economist-bureaucrats are overwhelmingly found in government.

Coming from an economist who had adorned the topmost positions in Indian macro finance, this book presents facts quite authentically and substantiated by immense research. It seems the author has perused all relevant reports of the period under consideration which were in any way connected with economic policy administration. Several charts and graphs are included and are very informative. However, they do not have the visual appeal in monochrome print because the lines and bars are created in different colours. The book provides the reasons for the 1957 BoP crisis in considerable detail, but the causes of the 1991 foreign exchange crisis which compelled Indian politicians to change course are not elucidated. This is a minor shortcoming of the book. In the final part, the book considers the hypothetical case of what would have happened had Sardar Patel became the prime minister and outlived Nehru, instead of the other way round. He concludes that in such a scenario, India would have followed the right path in the 1950s itself and would have eliminated poverty many decades earlier.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Worn – A People’s History of Clothing

Title: Worn – A People’s History of Clothing
Author: Sofi Thanhauser
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2022 (First)
ISBN: 9780241389539
Pages: 375

Clothes not only differentiates man from other animals, it also demarcates mankind into various categories according to rank, function or utility. The language uses many words, phrases and idioms derived from clothes and how they are worn. Making clothes was an important household activity in every civilized society till a few centuries ago. In the pre-industrial world, people devoted as much labour hours to making cloth as they devoted to producing food. Now, this work disappeared from everyday life and moved into the factory. But this has its own implications. The fabric industry produces a fifth of global waste water and emits one-tenth of global carbon emissions. Plant and animal fibres, namely linen, cotton, silk and wool, formed the basis of human clothing until the advent of rayon and then petro-fabrics in the twentieth century. This book talks about the historical development of each of the five types of fibres and examines the current issues in fabric production such as outsourcing to developing countries, exploitation of labour, rampant pollution in production centres which are not acknowledged nor owned by western companies. The book also touches upon the latest fad in the US and UK to return to hand-weaving using local resources and connoisseurs. This book blends reportage with historical research. The impulse for writing this is claimed to be to answer the craving to know where things – quite ordinary things – come from. Sofi Thanhauser is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in numerous publications. She lives in the US and teaches in the writing department at Pratt Institute.

Thanhauser presents brief historical sketches of the five fibres and stresses on the tales of exploitation of labour and natural resources in the case of each. Humans began clothing themselves in hides and pelts about 170,000 years ago. Shortly after this, people learned to weave plant fibres into textiles. The advent of clothes made the rapid expansion of habitation zones possible. The first intact cloth in the archaeological record is of linen. Imperialism and slavery built the cotton trade in the modern period. Mono-cropping cotton quickly exhausted the land. Planters then moved on to virgin lands with their slaves. This need to find fertile land helped drive expansion of the newly formed United States. Indigenous occupants were brutally evicted from new territories which the Whites conquered. Cotton was also exchanged for slaves in Africa. Meanwhile it proved to be the instrument of colonial expansion in India. Mechanization raised productivity in the eighteenth century and labour costs in England dropped below India’s. Massive imports – also assisted by tariffs – broke the backbone of India’s cotton industry. Industrial Revolution was a fabric revolution. The new textile machinery allowed huge productivity increase and the capital thus generated was also employed in other sectors to increase the prosperity.

The book includes some interesting historical facts about how the British imposed their cotton fabrics on India and how the crop itself was a symbol of rank exploitation. As noted earlier, when cheap fabrics were imported from England, cotton weavers in India lost their markets and were forced to turn to cotton farming for sending out as raw material for English mills. This additional manpower pulled down wages in agriculture. Colonialism thus devastated the Indian cotton industry. Genetic diversity of cotton in India was also reduced in this period as the American cotton was widely cultivated at the expense of local varieties. Traditional Indian varieties did not require much irrigation but were unsuited to textile machinery imported from Europe which was designed for the American variety. The East India Company replaced all Indian types with American in the 1840s. Cotton is a very thirsty crop – incredibly thirsty, for that matter. To produce one kg of cotton, it needs 8500 litres of water whereas rice requires 3000 litres, maize 1350 litres and wheat just 900. The author appears to harbour all the colonial prejudices against India. Visiting a well-run cotton factory in Tamil Nadu, she hints at child labour and also at many poor women submitting to polygamy. This has no relevance to the topic under discussion. As is usual with white supremacists, she can’t help notice a power failure while she was in the factory, suggesting that long and frequent power outages are common in India. Also, she compares the Noyyal river in Coimbatore to rivers which ran through American and British cities in the 1840s and the food produced from this water is alleged to be laden with toxic chemicals. This is another clear accusation that Indian industry still lags behind their western counterparts by about two centuries.

Some chapters give an overview of how fashion developed and transformed in the face of tectonic political events and pressing societal requirements. The flourishing of fashion in Paris during the Bourbon rule is described along with its collapse after the French Revolution when luxury was shunned in the wake of regicide. At the same time in America, most people wore clothing made at home while those who could afford it dressed in clothes made by a tailor or seamstress. During the course of the nineteenth century, clothing became mass-produced. Before the Civil War, readymade outer garments were made only for sailors and slaves. The chemical pollution generated during the production of artificial fibres such as rayon and nylon are examined in this book which exhibits a distinct leftist outlook. The American Standards Association (ASA) recommended safe exposure to cadmium sulphide (which is a material involved in rayon production) at 20 ppm. The author then proudly remarks in a foot note that this limit in the USSR was 3.2 ppm, less than a fifth of the American limit (p.173). We know that the erstwhile USSR was not very famous for any environmental or safety concerns. The story of rayon and nylon synthetics is saturated with dangerous chemicals eating away at the lives of workers. She accuses the US of fostering the language of anti-communism which boosted the garment and textile industries in Asia on outsourcing contracts without any accountability to American industries.

The dwindling away of textile production in the developed economies, especially in the US, in the aftermath of globalization is a persistent theme in the book as if a very essential aspect of western societies was alienated for making profits for business tycoons. As late as 1997, over 40 per cent of all apparel purchased in the US had been produced domestically. In 2012, that figure was less than 3 per cent. The author remarks about the pollution and exploitation of labour in the countries to which the garments are outsourced for production. This book also talks about a conscious drive to return to the sustainable production of fabric, especially wool. Handcraft societies are returning to the US to serve niche markets. These efforts are claimed to produce less emission and carbon dioxide, but the author incongruously flies in a plane to reach these sites, oblivious to the conservatory effort expected on her behalf since she is so complaining about the carbon emissions engendered by others! A trace of transgender activism is also visible in the text. In a tradition-reviving society of Navajo Indians, the author finds a transgender person in control of things and speculates that the transgenders keep traditions alive. She uses the pronoun ‘they’ to denote this person.

This book is counterintuitive in every sense and is a product of the woke culture predominating among the elite society in the US. It is focussed on American issues, themes, icons and society. It rails against chemical fertilizers, pesticides, industrial scale production of food and clothing fibres, large scale transportation of commodities, outsourcing production to developing countries and instead advises the Gandhian way to spin one’s own thread and get it woven in a local cooperative. This sounds utopian and that’s the one thing which clearly stands out in the entire narrative. This is not a people’s history but a leftist and woke commentary on the unfinished business of organized labour obtaining a controlling stake in the enterprises they work in, according to Marxian economic speculations. It also exhibits feminism in a high dose.

The book is not recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

Nehru’s India

Title: Nehru’s India – A History in Seven Myths
Author: Taylor C. Sherman
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2022 (First)
ISBN: 9780691245775
Pages: 284

When India became independent in 1947, her economy was in shambles brought on by a world war and two centuries of colonial loot. The new nation needed to show the direction in which to move forward, especially for its economy and international relations. Jawaharlal Nehru, being the first prime minister and a well-read man, sought to guide India during the first seventeen years of post-colonial India till his death in 1964. Even though the paths he trod were reversed later because of the great economic pitfalls along the way, it was critical for the new republic to stay united under a strong man. Although panegyrics of Nehru praising him as the architect of modern India and a visionary emanated from certain quarters – mostly patronized by his own party – the grave flaws in his socio-economic and political perspectives were starting to come into public scrutiny. Nehru’s premiership is associated with a set of ideas, policies and institutions related to non-alignment, secularism, socialism, the strong state, democracy and high modernism. This book argues that these supposed tenets of the Nehruvian period are nothing more than myths. Taylor C. Sherman teaches in the department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has authored other books on India and its secularism.

Sherman claims that Nehru fulfilled the role of an educator, patron, mediator and symbol to the Indian people. He is often lauded as the architect of modern India on the basis of his image as the titan of post-colonial India. The author points out that this image was created by the Congress party to ‘persuade him to stay on in power’, especially after 1958 when he expressed the desire to retire or take a sabbatical. This book is a product of the left-liberal ecosystem pervading every nook and cranny of the Western academia. This book is a paean to Nehru depicting him as a great man who can do no wrong. Every shortfall or anomaly in his character is glossed over or ignored or alleged to be someone else’s fault. Even his political tricks like threatening to resign when confronted with stubborn opponents in the party are naively taken at face value and immense inferences are drawn from these false premises. Sherman criticizes everything in Nehru’s India – even the very idea of India – except the great man himself! She argues that Nehru was no architect of modern India because he had no blueprint in his head or articulated in five-year plans. Then comes the surprising but wrong conclusion that Nehru wasuncomfortable with blind devotion and consistently resisted the iconization that is central to a cult of personality (p.205). She conveniently does not mention that Nehru awarded himself the Bharat Ratna in 1955 – India’s highest civilian honour – or cause his own birthday to be celebrated as the national children’s day. Any way you look at it, these two acts cannot be taken to be an exemplar of humility! When a tunnel was opened in 1956 to connect Jammu with Kashmir Valley, Nehru ‘allowed’ it to be named after him as the Jawahar tunnel! Still, the author claims that this was not an attempt to develop a personality cult around carefully crafted imagery to maintain absolute power (p.16). Nehru personally chose the country’s first ambassadors to prominent nations on the basis of their ‘eminent’ status in the national movement as well as their wit, charm and intellectual abilities (p.23). But the author forgets to explain why he chose Vijayalakshmi Pandit – his own sister – as the ambassador to the US. The book is riddled with so many of these omissions.

Unashamedly reflecting an air of colonial haughtiness, the author hints that India was not doing enough to prop up secularism in the Nehru era and that it should have accommodated more Muslim demands. She claims that Indian secularism is largely figurative and was focussed on the celebration of exceptional individuals and reverence for great monuments. But this iconic approach did not tally with the everyday in practice. India introduced permits for controlling the re-entry of Muslims who had already migrated to Pakistan in 1948. Around 2000 Muslims were doing this each day. Nothing in this gesture was related to patriotism, but a clever ploy to prevent their real estate from being reassigned to Hindu and Sikh refugees who were forcibly evicted from their homes in Pakistan. The Hindus and Sikhs were not allowed to re-enter Pakistan. This just measure is portrayed as injuring secularism! After Hyderabad was annexed by military force, the government sought to reduce the number of Muslims in the state service from 85 per cent to 50 per cent. This is construed as another failure of secularism (p.64). What the author deftly conceals is that Muslims constituted only 13 per cent of Hyderabad’s population but the Nizam had exclusively stuffed them in his services. Moreover, the book employs the old imperialist ploy to drive a wedge between Dalits and other Hindus and to club the former along with Muslims as a minority community separate from Hindus. In her study of secularism in the 1950s, the author implies that Dalits and Muslims had a stake in secularism (p.59). The book further claims that India’s non-alignment was only a political trick to work with superpower competition to its advantage. India was enmeshed in the Anglo-American economic system which provided two-thirds of India’s imports in 1964 while the USSR provided only a tenth. Aid from the US was six times more than Russian aid in 1945.

The book makes a survey of India’s economic policies and concludes that everything smacked of failure. Nationalization was claimed to be only a relatively small feature of Indian economic life in the early period of Nehru’s tenure. The top rate of income tax was 80 per cent, which most people evaded by paying bribes. The author examines the land distribution reforms assisted by Vinoba Bhave’s Bhudan movement. In the end, this philanthropic exercise is portrayed as a hypocritical one in which the land donated is shown as non-productive and inaccessible. This is a recurring theme in the book. Reading these lines, one would feel wonder at the mere fact that India is still existing intact as a nation. Rather than challenging existing hierarchies, Indian socialism attempted to co-opt them and awaken in elites a sense of trusteeship and responsibility towards their fellow countrymen. Instead, the elites simply enlisted the new institutions and worked them for their own benefit (p.113). Sherman rightfully points out that India succumbed to political corruption at this point in time of license-quota-permit raj. A single mill in Mumbai had to fill out some 577 forms each year. A license was only a permit which entitles the holder to apply for numerous other sanctions and permissions. Within this tangled bureaucratic complex, corruption naturally reigned. The primary inconvenience to the industrialists lay in all the efforts to evade government control rather than in submitting to it. The ruling party nonchalantly extracted its pound of flesh from the industry. Tata Steel (TISCO then) obtained permission from court to allow them to donate to Congress party because the ‘stability, security, profits and future expansion of the company were linked up with the continuance of Congress government’ (p.160).

This book is a propaganda piece of the American left academia that thrives in developing countries through NGOs and seeks to displace the national spirit in those countries. The contribution of the Ford Foundation to the development of many social projects in the 1950s is extolled at every opportunity while wholly Indian experiments are deemed to be failures. Contributions of Indian pioneers are narrated only if they are educated overseas at some point in their career. Sherman frequently appears unduly concerned about inequality in society and accuses paternalistic local societies for all the problems they have to endure. After a brief charade of appearing to be objective, the political agenda slips into the open. She alleges that the Indian government ‘assaults on free press, universities and courts from 2015 onwards’ and that some international organisations (meaning the cabal that funds the NGOs) have downgraded India’s democratic rating, as if this act was a huge indictment on India for which every Indian has to hang his or her head in shame. Mind you, the author never mentions the Emergency years (1975-77) but implies that democracy in India is eclipsed only from the year 2015. The book provides an interesting portrayal of modernity which is said to be a group of processes set in train somewhere around the fifteenth century and gaining pace by the nineteenth. These concerned economic connectivity and technical innovation, as well as state-making practices, changing understandings of the self and new experiences of time (p.178).

It has been a long time since I encountered a book on India written by a westerner who still retains the imperial and condescending outlook on our country. Such books invariably talked about peeling plaster in government buildings, pot-holed roads, frequent power outages and omnipresent filth on streets. This colonial memsahib is flustered with Indian archives which are said to be kept in a most careless and inefficient way. She limits the coverage of the Bengal famine of 1943 to just one sentence because it was engendered by Churchill’s apathy to Indians but castigates the Indian government under Nehru for mishandling the ‘perilously close to famine conditions in 1950 and 51’ (p.104). The author has made extensive research for this book, but the experience appears to be marred by lack of insight and the knowledge of how Indian society works.

The book is just a piece of the Left narrative and not recommended for general readers.

Rating: 2 Star

Eminent Distorians

 

Title: Eminent Distorians - Twists and Truths in Bharat's History
Author: Utpal Kumar
Publisher: BluOne Ink, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9789365477184
Pages: 290

India’s post-colonial historiography was under the absolute control of Marxist historians who were tolerated at the highest echelons of institutions by Nehru and Indira Gandhi. These people created an ecosystem of their own which stifled dissent of any kind from the established view. Academic positions, research grants, publication of research papers and publicity in the mainstream media were jealously guarded by this coterie of scholars whose sole purpose of existence was to churn out a version of Indian history that stuck to leftist notions defined by them. There were some lone voices which opposed the vested interests but they ended up as a cry in the wilderness. This book vows to expose them. The author is inspired by Sita Ram Goel who was the single individual who moved the left intellectual mountain in India and took the entrenched ‘eminent historians’ by the horns and exposed their distortions, often deliberate and mischievous. This book’s title is indebted to Arun Shourie’s work on a similar theme titled ‘Eminent Historians’ reviewed earlier here. The idea is that these scholars distorted history and hence this group is called ‘distorians’. Utpal Kumar is an editor at News18 and FirstPost who has more than two decades of journalistic experience. This is his second book.

Historians such as Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, R S Sharma and others fit the bill of distorians. The book includes a catalog of the errors and disasters they had heaped on the national intellect. They are accused to have subverted the minds of people, turned them rootless and apologetic about the past. They regarded the essence of Indian culture, the very ‘Indianness’ to be a regressive phenomenon. Anything and everything emerging out in this land was seen to be the result of either an invasion or migration from the outside. They rivalled each other in duplicity or masquerade to play down the violence inflicted by Muslim invaders on India in the form of destruction and conversion of temples into mosques, forced conversion of Hindus, abducting women as sex-slaves and plunder of the national wealth. The author prudently points out that truth and reconciliation, and not duplicity and deception are the first steps towards amicable relations between Hindus and Muslims in today’s India. Forgiveness cannot precede an admission of guilt. Kumar ascribes the distorians to stoop low to any level to confront their rivals. Writing matter-of-factly about a Muslim tyrant spontaneously becomes an act of Islamophobia. So, Mahmud of Ghazni’s obsession to become a ghazi (holy warrior) or but shikan (idol breaker) is projected in economic terms and sanitized.

The author then makes a survey of Indian history in the remaining chapters and classifies the doctored theories of the distorians according to chronological periods. Their falsification starts with the Aryan Invasion theory in which a set of outsiders from central Asia invaded India and destroyed the original Dravidian civilization and dislocated the natives. However, the contradictions and inconsistencies in this flawed theory are so grave that the distorians are now forced to modify the theory as one of Aryan migration, and not invasion. But it still contains the riddle of the illiterate, pastoral Aryans producing one of the most profound texts in human history (the Vedas) while the urbane, sophisticated Harappans ending up without having any literature of their own. The author argues that ancient Indian civilization is indigenous. Desiccation and drying up of the Saraswati river which took place around 1900 BCE led to the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization. Excavation of archaeological detritus and genetic analysis of human remains found at Rakhigarhi in Haryana prove that there is no genetic overlap from the outside and the present inhabitants share the genome. Kumar alleges that the distorians could not comprehend any non-Muslim dynasty far away from Delhi could step into greatness which is exemplified by the cavalier treatment they had given to the Cholas of Tamil Nadu who were reduced to being a regional power though the dynasty had a vast maritime realm to rule. This was the only time Indian forces conquered far-off places. This wicked lot of distorians is interested only in eulogizing defeat and ignoring victories.

The author dispels the false assumption of many people that the Islamic invasions which started in 712 CE were continuous and indefensible. In fact, they were held in check by several Indian dynasties. Arab incursion to Indian coast began in 637 CE, at the time of the second caliph himself. It was only in 712 they could gain a foothold in Sindh with the military victory of Muhammad bin Qasim. There is another false notion circulating regarding the different racial lineages among Muslim invaders: Arabs are said to be gentler but India had the misfortune to give in to Turks or Afghans the most number of times. The book compares the atrocities committed by Turkish and Arab invaders and proves that both were equally cruel and bigoted in decimating the Hindus. This deflates the distorians’ assertion that India had the misfortune to be conquered by the ‘uncivilized Turks’ than the ‘cultured Arabs’. The author identifies the root cause of the similarity in violent actions between the two in the religious tenets of Islam itself which call for these acts to be performed on infidels and concludes that ‘cultured’ Arabs were therefore as brutal and barbaric as the ‘uncouth’ Turks (p.116). Kumar also weighs Akbar’s reign for his tolerance of other religions but this study does not go much deep. It is true that during Akbar’s ascendancy, the state officially relinquished its anti-Hindu stand. Jizya and pilgrimage taxes were withdrawn. However, his acceptance of Hindu princesses into his harem should not be considered as an act of charity or broadmindedness. In his reign, 38 Rajput princesses were married to the royal household: 12 to Akbar, 17 to Jahangir, six to Daniyal, two to Murad and one to Shah Jehan. There were five weddings in Jahangir’s reign, five in Shah Jehan’s and nine in Aurangzeb’s time. Even then, not a single Mughal princess was married to a Rajput prince and all of the Hindu princesses were first converted to Islam before the wedding ceremony. To use modern parlance, this was in no way nobler than the ‘love jihad’! A survey of Tipu Sultan’s real character as a hard-line Islamist and the fall of the Sikh kingdom in Punjab are also included. It also explains why the Sikh contingent fought alongside the British in suppressing the 1857 rebellion. However, his contention that the Sikhs were mortally against any descendant of the Mughal dynasty appears to be an oversimplification.

Another aspect in which the distorians excel is in making us believe that the British took over India from the Mughals. This is total falsehood, since before the British could establish themselves, the Marathas were the numero uno power. Peshwa Baji Rao I was undefeated in over forty battles. Other local rulers could outsmart the Mughals but this fact is obfuscated in the distorted history which is thrust down the bills of unsuspecting students. Defeat of the Mughals at the Battle of Saraighat in 1671 at the hands of Lachit Barphukan in Assam which checked their spread in that region is a largely unknown saga. Moreover, India has never holistically examined the predatory nature of British rule nor sought an apology. It was an era of wanton violence which killed 200 million people and institutionalized loot that drained off at least 45 trillion USD from India to Britain between 1765 and 1938.

The book then examines the freedom struggle and the initial decades of post-colonial India in which power was usurped by the Gandhi faction. In the manipulative historiography, one is made to believe that India’s freedom struggle was all about Gandhi after his arrival from South Africa in 1915. The revolutionaries had played an equally important, if not bigger, role in getting freedom. The presence of revolutionaries and their successes helped Gandhi bargain better deals with the colonial masters who in turn handled them with kid gloves at a time when revolutionaries were made to go through the worst of hardships at the Cellular Jail and elsewhere. When it came to power-sharing negotiations with the British, there was no one left in their ranks to do the talking. This moment was seized by the Gandhians to their advantage who obliterated them from history. The author claims that the free nation born in 1947 was unapologetically Hindu and cites in its support the Vedic rituals held in Rajendra Prasad’s residence in his official capacity as the Chairman of the Constituent Assembly which were also attended by Nehru himself. The illustrations in the original Constitution which freely used Hindu symbols reiterate this point. However, as Nehru’s rivals vacated the political arena, the situation changed and mechanical secularism took their place. It was the Nehruvian conspiracy in the 1950s that saw further ascendancy in the 1960s and 1970s which pushed the country towards a socialist, secular order much against the civilizational grain of this land.

It is unfortunate having to note that the book has not justified the thunder in the title. Instead of a roar arising from painful indignation at the disservice these distorians have been inflicting on the social and political fabric of the country, the author coolly diverges to put together his view of Indian history. I had purchased this book having been sufficiently impressed by the grandiloquent title but it has not been value for money. Of course, Kumar’s perspective on India’s history is very interesting, informative and up to date, but that was not the purpose implied by the title. Instead of going deep into the modus operandi of the distorians – how they secure plum positions in government and academia, how a coterie is formed around them, how they manipulate NCERT textbooks, how they distribute patronage among their acolytes and how they zealously attack dissenting sane voices with the ferocity of a pack of wolves – the author digresses to offer a nationalist perspective of history in a highly condensed form. This exhibits a clear subjective bias which a distorian can easily exploit to discredit the entire narrative. To quote just one example: the author’s attempt to place the Mahabharata war coinciding with the drying up of Saraswati river around 1900 BCE is a little laboured and appears to be not much convincing. On the other hand, his take on refuting the Aryan Invasion Theory is superbly presented.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Iconoclast

Title: Iconoclast – A Reflective Biography of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar
Author: Anand Teltumbde
Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780670093885
Pages: 676

Babasaheb Ambedkar is the architect of the Indian Constitution. He was also the figurehead of Dalit emancipation, rising from a low social and economic background to reach the topmost constitutional positions in the country. There have been numerous biographies of Ambedkar and precisely because of this, the author notes what is different in this book. It claims to follow Ambedkar’s approach of weighing facts on the touchstone of rationality and also to add reflections of the author to the story already told many times. The reflections are in the form of comments, questions and discussions on points deemed to be consequential to the lives of Dalits as well as others. Ambedkar defined himself as an iconoclast – a breaker of icons. It is hence ironic that he himself was elevated to the status of an idol in recent times. His writings are characterized by a direct, incisive, hard-hitting and combatant style. Anand Teltumbde is an engineering and management expert who turned to social work while employed in the highest management cadre of a central PSU. He is the husband of Ambedkar’s granddaughter. He was arrested in 2020 on the charge of instigating the Bhima-Koregaon violence and incarcerated for two years along with other urban naxals. The author is peeved at this and goes on a tirade accusing the Modi-led government of being fascist, authoritarian and totalitarian throughout the entire length of the book.

Ambedkar lived for the uplift of Dalits. His writings on Dalit causes may appear to be a one-sided narrative, declining to extend credit to others even when it is due. But his wisdom on public finance and political economy is unparalleled and out-of-the-box. His solution to the development of Indian agriculture is logical while sounding extraordinary. It was believed that the low productivity of land holdings was because of its small size. He showed that economic size of this land is not determined by the size in geographical area but by optimal provision of factors of production. A large surplus population was superficially engaged in agriculture with no capital. Ambedkar proposed India’s industrialization as a solution to its agricultural problems which would absorb surplus labour and generate savings to be ploughed back into agriculture. It is unfortunate that Jawaharlal Nehru could not see this truth even in 1951. There is no doubt that Ambedkar denounced Hindu society for casteism and the discrimination it heaped on the downtrodden people. Still, he notes in his essay ‘Castes in India’ that there is a deep cultural unity in Hindu society but this larger cultural unit is parcelled into bits by castes. However, the author challenges and negates this prudent observation. Ambedkar metaphorically compared Hindu society with a multi-storeyed tower with no stairs to connect one storey to the other. Each storey represented an individual caste. Teltumbde do modify this metaphor to a tower with five storeys, each housing innumerable castes in contention with each other.

This book covers the early work of Ambedkar in good detail, especially after completion of his education in the US and UK. A satyagraha was organized in Mahad for the use of Chowdar water tank for Dalits in 1927. This faithfully followed the Gandhian model of nonviolence and carried a portrait of Gandhi on the dais. This agitation failed. Babasaheb opposed separate electorates to Muslims in his minority report submitted to the Simon Commission in 1928. He suggested general electorates with reserved seats for Muslims and Dalits. The author narrates how the Congress mainstream ignored the wails of Dalits right from the 1920s. A committee headed by Motilal Nehru drafted a Swaraj constitution in 1928 and it did not provide representation for Dalits. Congress did not even invite any Dalit organisation to discuss on it (p.143). This was also the time that convinced Babasaheb that untouchability was practised by other religions too. During one of their journeys to Aurangabad, Ambedkar and his team visited the Daulatabad fort nearby. They washed their faces and feet on the pavement in the fort with water from a tank outside the monument. As soon as they did this, enraged Muslims confronted and abused them menacingly for daring to pollute the tank. Babasaheb noted that it could have led to a riot in the town (p.192).

The 1930s were the formative decade in Ambedkar’s career, bringing out the constitutional expert in him. He attended all three Round Table Conferences (RTC) convened to settle contentious issues before an anticipated constitution of India coming into force in 1935. He shifted his focus in the RTCs from untouchability as a socio-religious issue to a political question. He used the opportunity to internationalize the problem of untouchability. The British favoured him at that time because it justified the continued presence of their rule. Closer to the actual transfer of power, the issue ceased to be useful for their interests and they discarded the issues of caste/untouchability as well as Ambedkar himself. Gandhi attended only one RTC and Teltumbde observes that he was ill-equipped to participate in it. When grave constitutional and communal points were raised in the conference, he had only platitudes to offer, rather than views or suggestions of a constructive character. In the end, Babasaheb was victorious in getting adequate representation for Dalits in legislatures. However, he had to compromise on the issue of separate electorates while yielding to Gandhi’s fast unto death against this attempt to divide the Hindu society. In the 1937 elections, he was elected to the Bombay provincial assembly. He tried to unite Dalits and workers with communist support. He backed the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan acknowledging the validity of their claim that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations and the two cannot live peacefully together.

Ambedkar reached the pinnacle of his achievements in the 1940s. He was nominated to the Viceroy’s Executive Council in the war period. However in 1945, his party AISCF was trounced by Congress in the elections which won 123 out of 151 seats reserved for SCs while the former could win only two. This convinced the British that Congress was the true representative of depressed classes and Babasaheb’s bargaining power fell. His memoranda to the Cabinet Mission of 1946 regarding safeguards for SCs were ignored. Ambedkar did not find a place in the interim cabinet and Congress’ Jagjivan Ram was included in his place. The colonial rule transformed the rebel in Ambedkar into a statesman during the war period and then he was side-lined when the British deal with the Congress was fructified. The author alleges that Gandhian strategy then embalmed his as a ‘modern Manu’ (p.338). It was with this intention that he was co-opted as the chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution. Author accuses Babasaheb of then endearing himself to the Constituent Assembly as an ultra-nationalist even though he had opposed Congress’ nationalist movement till then. He who had voiced for separate electorates for SCs would oppose it later and accept joint electorates (p.333). Teltumbde then argues that all crucial decisions were taken without involving Ambedkar. Out of the various subcommittees of the Constituent Assembly, Nehru presided over three panels, while Patel and Rajendra Prasad headed two each, strategically controlling all decisions of the Assembly. Babasaheb’s task was alleged to be limited to document decisions in constitutional language.

A great contribution of this book is the inferences it provides readers regarding Ambedkar’s relations with Hinduism. It is true that he renounced it and termed it as the sole reason for oppression of the Dalits. What he fought tooth and nail in this equation was the caste system. When he opted for conversion, he chose Buddhism which some scholars say was nothing more than Hindu Protestantism in the early stages. Babasaheb was emotionally as well as culturally anchored tightly to Mother India. During Partition, he called for the division of Kashmir along Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist lines and the Muslim areas were to be given to Pakistan if they wished so and proved in a plebiscite. However, he declared that the Hindus of Jammu and Buddhists of Ladakh belonged to ‘our religion and culture’ and to protect them is not communalism (p.427). The author criticises Ambedkar for Islamophobia on his warnings in the Rajya Sabha against the possibility of Pakistan teaming up with other Islamic countries against India. He even feigns to point fingers at Babasaheb for not toeing the author’s line of thinking. Ambedkar accepted the two-nation theory but did not trace its roots in the Brahminic aspirations to recreate their hegemonic control (p.325). But Teltumbde does this with a ridiculous set of arguments that has no substance. His criticism of Babasaheb is unnecessarily sharp so as to put the great man in a bad light. He corrects Ambedkar himself even on the name of his ancestral village to Ambadava and claims that Ambedkar had wrongly spelt it as Ambawade! The author further arraigns him to be of having a ‘faulty understanding of socialism and communism’. Moreover, strategic incoherence is alleged to be a trait on his person (p.425). This is in spite of Ambedkar’s own justification for the occasional inconsistency in his words and actions with the rhetoric that consistency was the virtue of the ass. This biography is not only ‘reflective’, it is actually critical. The author goes after later followers of Ambedkarism too, because they packaged him into an icon endowed with infallibility. Any view or act that does not reflect devotion to him could be blasphemy. This is contrary to Ambedkar’s opinion of the relationship of great people to ordinary ones. This leads us to doubt whether this book is an attempt to strike hard on the blind followers.

What is evident in this book is the inveterate hostility Congress under Nehru displayed towards Ambedkar. He was defeated from a Bombay constituency to reach the Constituent Assembly. He then managed to enter the Assembly from East Bengal. Gandhi then intervened to call a truce to utilize Babasaheb’s talent in drafting the Constitution. He entered Nehru’s cabinet as law minister but had to resign soon. Again, he was defeated in the elections by Congress candidates. He was then elected to the Rajya Sabha. Probably because of being fed up with all these manoeuvres and side-linings, Ambedkar exploded in the Rajya Sabha that he was merely a hack and made the Constitution against his will. He said he was quite prepared to burn it because ‘it does not suit anybody’ (p.437). What he meant was that decisions were already taken by a clique in the Congress party and then he was forced to translate them into constitutional language by the drafting committee. It is also to be remembered that Nehru awarded himself the ‘Bharat Ratna’ in a most petty act of aggrandizement while ignoring the Babasaheb, who was awarded the highest civilian honour posthumously only in 1990 by V P Singh. The author narrates the mental conflicts Ambedkar had to undergo in converting to another religion and to choose Buddhism for it. He ascribed rationalism and scientific spirit in a religion which he deemed to be Navayana Buddhism in contrast to Mahayana and Vajrayana. Teltumbde claims that transmigration of soul from one body to another is a Buddhist belief which Ambedkar denied. This claim is doubtful because it is well known that Buddhism does not recognize the soul while karma is believed to be transmigrating. The author also confirms that Buddhism did not abolish casteism and in fact, castes are present in the societies of Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Nepal. Howsoever intensely Babasaheb detested Hinduism, his voice cracked and tears rolled down his cheeks when he declared that he was renouncing it before the huge crowd at Deeksha Bhumi in Nagpur.

The book is divided into seven phases of his life and a posthumous phase is added to explain how the Ambedkar icon was turned into a divine avatar in the later decades while the political organisations he spawned splintered and crumbled one after the other. Ambedkar paid little heed to organisation. His parties rallied mainly on his charisma. When he was no more, his shoes proved too big for his successors who turned to fratricidal warfare that led to the collapse of all factions. In the 1960s, Congress began to woo Dalits as a vote bank. They lured its leaders with power and the masses with the Ambedkar icon as a proxy for their identity aspirations. Some of the militant organisations like the Dalit Panthers which was modelled on the Black Civil Rights movements in the US and came into being in the 1970s, denounced the Ambedkarite vision of using only constitutional methods to resolve grievances and openly allied with the far-left rebels. It is to be kept in mind that Ambedkar was a staunch opponent of communism and its class-based theories of political action.

At 676 pages, the book is a bit too large, but the reading process is hassle-free and enjoyable, despite the occasional political outbursts of the author accusing the present Indian government under Modi to be autocratic. This political bias seems to have turned him into a cynic who is unable to find anything good even in the case of the protagonist of the book – none other than Babasaheb himself. Considering the fierce criticism levelled against him on all areas of his work – social, political, constitutional and legislative – one wonders whether this book is part of a cancel culture. Ambedkar’s remarks on the desirability of women entering politics and the relationship of several women politicians with Nehru given on page 477 are indeed shocking. If you respect Ambedkar, several parts of this book would make you uncomfortable by pointing out inconsistencies, contradictions and even personal quirks in his character and life-work. The book includes more than 200 pictures covering various phases of his life. This effectively makes it a pictorial biography. However, many photographs are group photos involving many people. After completing the book, what is obvious and standing out is the personal stamp of the author, particularly his prejudices.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 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