History of the Communist Movement in Kerala

Title: History of the Communist Movement in Kerala
Author: E. Balakrishnan
Publisher: KurukshethraPrakasan, 1998 (First)
ISBN: Nil
Pages: 268

Kerala’s politics differ much from the Indian mainstream. This was so, right from the incorporation of the state in 1956. The state also witnessed the remarkable occurrence of a Communist movement assuming power through a democratic election based on universal adult franchise and secret ballot for the first time in the world. All the material on the origin of the Communist party in Kerala is written by the comrades themselves. This book presents a refreshing alternate review of the birth and growth of communism in Kerala. This is published by Kurukshethra Prakasan, a mouthpiece of the Sangh Parivar. Naturally enough, the party and its leaders are generally criticised, but it keeps a fine balance to present facts without omission or embellishment. The foreword is penned by P. Parameswaran, former director of the Bharatiya Vichara Kendra, a think tank of the Sangh. E. Balakrishnan was associated with the Communist movement from his school days. He was attracted to the Naxalite movement later and was imprisoned for a short time. The atrocities of Stalin and the communist government distanced him from that ideology. He wanted to follow the path of sanyasa, but later abandoned the idea to become a teacher. This book is his dissertation for doctorate at the University of Calicut.

There is a superb introductory chapter by the noted historian M G S Narayanan. It gives a lively summary of the mess Communists have created in Kerala. The commerce and industry of the state have collapsed due to the proletarian culture rampant among all sections of society. All levels of education are over-politicized. The visible prosperity and higher quality of life are artificial and was created by the parallel economy made by remittances from the Middle East where almost a tenth of the Keralites earn their livelihood. This is hailed by the Communists as an economic miracle called the ‘Kerala Model’. MGS also comments on the duplicity of EMS Namboodiripad in ‘donating’ his family property to the party. He also notes the lack of an in-depth analysis of the economic and social factors which controlled and moulded the political fortunes of the Communist movement in Kerala in the book. Balakrishnan begins the narrative with Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience Movement through which most of the founders of the Communist Party cut their teeth. People opposed to Gandhian tactics worked under the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) which in Kerala metamorphosed into the Communist Party. However, the national leaders of CSP maintained their anti-communist stand till the end. The central narrative of the book begins with the formation of the state committee of the Communist Party in 1937 and ends with the dismissal of the Communist ministry in 1959.

As was the international political norm, the Indian Communist Party was also led and subject to handholding by the Soviet Communist party. In 1920, Lenin instructed Indian communists to work alongside the Indian National Congress even though they were bourgeois. Lenin’s plan for colonies was to fight against the imperialists before playing out any ideological strategy to wrest power. M N Roy, however, refused to toe this line. After Stalin came, this policy was reversed and the Communist party assumed an exclusivist posture. When the Soviets faced threats from Nazis, a rapport was offered in 1936 to create a united front even with class enemies to fight fascism. The author critically examines EMS at many places and brings to light his contradictions and occasional pettiness in dealing with rivals. EMS took part in the 1932 Civil Disobedience from the outset as a leader nominated to that position by Kongattil Raman Menon. As a prisoner, his family requested and obtained Class A facilities for himself. This was in stark contrast to AKG or P. Krishna Pillai who enjoyed no special privileges denied to ordinary workers. AKG had a great appeal on the masses. The author alleges that the foremost contribution of the Communist party in Kerala to the struggle for independence was the sabotage of the Gandhian strategy of nonviolence by staging violent upheavals under the guise of Congressmen. Balakrishnan also identifies five features of the Communist party in the pre-independence period. The first is the sabotage referred above. The other four are, 1) disruptive activities within the ranks of the freedom movement by voicing sectarian demands exclusively for the industrial workers and peasants 2) instigation of the peasantry to violence 3) open alliance with the British and 4) inculcation of fascist behavioural patterns among its cadres.

The book elaborately narrates how the disgruntled leaders first took asylum under the shade of CSP before emerging as full-fledged Communists. Congress Socialists opposed Gandhi’s constructive programs like elimination of untouchability as religious reform because it applied to Hinduism alone. In Kerala, they introduced class-war ideas to lure the industrial workers to buttress the party. Evolution of Congress Socialism to Stalinist Communism began in the latter half of 1935. The CSP stood for a democratic, flexible and realistic political line whereas the Communists articulated a doctrinaire, dogmatic, tough and violent strategy. But they were not ignorant of the cruel and brutal repression Stalin was unleashing on his people in the USSR and his rivals in the party. News of Stalinist repression was appearing abundantly in the Malayalam press too, but these heinous atrocities did not deter the likes of EMS or Krishna Pillai who termed them ‘bourgeois and imperialist lies’. In December 1934, K P Gopalan published an article titled ‘Three World Famous Russians’ featuring Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin. Within five days of its publication, Stalin arrested the first two and later executed them after a mockery trial. Still, the Kerala leaders stayed loyal to Stalin as they had developed a trait called ‘authoritarian submission’. While Congress brought all sections of the people together to fight against the British, Communists wanted dictatorship of only the working class. Labour unions became a pawn in the hands of Communist leaders for manipulation for political ends. The first political strike organized by the Travancore Coir Workers Union in 1938 demanded responsible government based on adult franchise in the state rather than better wages or relief measures for the factory staff. Former goons of jenmis (landlords) were accepted as activists in the peasant unions. This was the beginning of the instrumentalization of violence as a political tool. Meanwhile, indoctrination of volunteers and cadres in training camps was organized under the label of KPCC as the socialists had a majority in it.

The decade following the year 1935 was one in which the Communist party in India swayed with the ebbs and tides of the Russian political sea. When Nazis was against the Communists before World War II, they united with other parties to present a common front against fascism. But after the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, Communist policy in India changed and they termed the war ‘imperialist’ and devised stratagems to defeat the British war machine which was arrayed against the Nazi-Communist combine in Europe. Violent protests were organized in Malabar on Sep 15, 1940 that led to police firing and many deaths of both the protestors and policemen. Riots, ostensible for the distribution of scarce rice, broke out in Morazha, Mattannur and Kayyur. Four men were sentenced to death for the murder of a policeman at Kayyur. Meanwhile, EMS transferred his properties to his wife anticipating its attachment by the government. However, the government, and in challenge the court also, struck down this transaction as bogus. When Germany treacherously invaded its Soviet ally in 1941, CPI again changed its policy. After the Soviets allied with the British, Communists did the same in India, betraying the independence movement. Ban on Communists was lifted in 1942. Execution of death sentence of the four Kayyur prisoners carried out at this point was the only awkward moment as far as the party was concerned. Anti-Japanese rallies were organized and Subhash Bose who sought shelter with them was abused in the foulest language. He was called a ‘rascal’ and ‘boot-licker of the Japanese’ (p.169). All peasant and labour unrest was called off to assist the British in their military effort, which was rechristened ‘people’s war’. Active campaigns were initiated to produce more in factories and farms. This cooperation was in spite of the biting inflation of 1943.

Balakrishnan neatly captures the dilemma of the CPI after World War II. Even though they wholeheartedly supported the British, the government sought to mend ways with the Congress and wanted to transfer power to them without much delay. On Dec 4, 1945, the Secretary of State informed British parliament that independence of India was its immediate goal. It was clear to all that total freedom was only months away. An interim government under Jawaharlal Nehru assumed power on Sep 2, 1946 to manage the transition. The Communists desperately wanted to do something big to usher in revolution, if possible, with Russian help. Sensing that time was running out for them, CPI called for resistance in its August 1946 resolution. They fully supported the Pakistan demand as well. Not only two, EMS was suggesting that India was a makeshift patchwork of sixteen nationalities! EMS exhorted Moplahs in Malabar to rebel in response to Muslim League’s call for ‘Direct Action’ in August 1946. Fortunately for Malabar, they did not pay heed to his call. But the Kolkata Muslims did and thousands were killed in the communal riots that ensued. The CPI also organized futile armed action, more in a bid to gain some martyrs for the party rather than effecting any meaningful change in the political scenario. Communists led thousands to avoidable death in Punnapra and Vayalar in October 1946. The author estimates the death toll at 2000, but the Communists concede only a tenth of the figure and calls them out as the only occasion in which a revolutionary party gave the number of its dead which was much less than the official estimates. Violence flared in Malabar as well. Three people were killed in police firing at Karivelloor and five at Kavumbayi. This book continues to point out the revolutionary confusion even after 1947. The Madurai Congress of the party in 1953 reiterated that the objectives of the party can be realized only through a revolution and overthrow of the current Indian state. The party still maintained that India had not achieved ‘real’ independence. The question of political independence of India was recognized only in 1956 in the party congress at Palakkad. The 1958 Amritsar Congress accepted peaceful evolution to socialism which waved the green flag for the party to contest elections.

This book clearly exposes the brazen adherence of early Communist leaders to their ideology even in the face of plain evidence that proved the authoritarianism of its practitioners in the Soviet Union. It includes a review of reportage of Stalinist repression in Malayalam and the national media. As noted earlier, they shrugged it off as an ‘imperialist lie’ and refused to countenance the truth. Propaganda was the lifeblood of the party on which truth was not an essential component. The book lists the newspapers and other publications as well as membership figures of the party and feeder organizations in their formation period. Balakrishnan also makes a comparison of AKG and EMS, the two founding stalwarts of the party. In the early phase of the Communist party, AKG was democratic and accommodative while EMS had a closed mind and treated people on the basis of social classes to which they belonged. A great drawback of the book is that it is solely focussed on Malabar with little or no coverage of party formation in Travancore or Kochi. Great Communist leaders of these two native states had reached the top echelons of the party in future but their trail is not visible here. The narrative is much subdued after 1947 and it feels that the author somehow managed to continue the narrative till 1959 when the EMS ministry was dissolved.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Faith and Freedom – Gandhi in History

Title: Faith and Freedom – Gandhi in History

Author: Mushirul Hasan
Publisher: Niyogi Books, 2013 (First)
ISBN: 9789381523315
Pages: 555

Gandhi wrote prodigiously in many formats such as letters, articles, telegrams, comments to friends and general audience alike. And there are no shortages of books on the father of the nation even after seven decades after his death. This book comes right at a time when discussions are on to examine whether Gandhi is still relevant after the social, economic and political landscape had undergone much change in the last quarter century. This book’s intention is to link Gandhi’s moments of greatness with his dependence on all his co-workers who facilitated his task in India and South Africa and who made it easy for him to spiritually transform into some kind of semi-divine personality. All events described in this book are suffused with a personal touch in the sense that the subjective factor seems to override all other considerations – even ideological – on some occasions. This book also attempts to connect with and discuss Gandhi’s ‘big moment’ through the lens of his relations with many people of diverse backgrounds who were around him and in different kinds of relations with him along these events. This throws light on emotions that drove events or that were at their background and helps to better understand what affected and shaped Gandhi’s politics and the role these relations played in it. Mushirul Hasan is an historian, author and former vice chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He was the director-general of the National Archives of India. He was awarded Padma Shri by the Congress government in 2007.

Hasan enumerates the external influences that went into Gandhi’s metamorphosis into a nonviolent satyagrahi with rural roots, while residing in South Africa. Ruskin’s ‘Unto This Last’ transferred Gandhi from a city-dwelling lawyer into a rustic far away from Durban in a farm. Tolstoy furnished a basis for nonviolence and ideas of the moral value of physical labour and of natural diet. Kallenbach introduced elements of the Kibbutz movement and Kropotkin the idea of a country of village communes. In the final analysis, he shaped the country for his causes. Needless to say, this was highly subjective. He read treatises on religion which encouraged him to put into practice whatever appealed to him. One of them was to amalgamate ideas of quite different religions and cultural practices into a hybrid model. Gandhi’s choice of words and images inspired others because it contained ‘the rhythm of restrained emotions, self-abnegation, moral fervour and concern for the downtrodden’. He felt that politics bereft of religion kills the soul. He spoke freely in short, incisive sentences and listened as he spoke. The conversation with him took the form of question and answer and the interchange of opinions rather than rapid give and take. Mira behn – an English lady named Madeleine Slade – captured Gandhi’s engagement with the masses. The people were excited just to set their eyes on him as a holy man, a saviour on whom they had pinned all their hopes. They had no other thought than to obtain a darshan of him.

Gandhi’s total dedication to what he deemed to be true and just was legendary. He was willing to lay down his life rather than do something that negated what he regarded as supreme. Satyagraha symbolized the triumph of moral right over arbitrary power. The nonviolence creed revealed the possibilities of a new type of warfare to the millions. Even when Congress accepted office under the 1935 Constitution, Gandhi espoused utmost value to hand-spun khadi, Hindu-Muslim unity, rural education, decentralization of production and distribution rather than play with the instruments concomitant to power. His assertions or intellectual apprehensions on the goals and objectives of an industrial civilization require extensive research to prove or disprove them. However, their beauty lies in looking at life through the eyes of childhood with all its power of illusion and hope (p.80). That’s how the author weakly rationalizes what appears to be a crucial input in formulating national policy. Does such a critical thing can find traction on the flimsy bases of illusion and childish hope? Hasan prefers to leave the answer for the reader to find out himself. Gandhi was sometimes brutal in moral force to the others who argued for compromise on the issue of violence. He refused to approve the Karachi AICC resolution urging the government to commute the death sentence to Bhagat Singh (p.144). Motilal Nehru, who was always in thrall of Gandhi, went one step further and refused to allow even a motion of sympathy for Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt, who threw bombs in the Central Legislature hall, at the July 1931 meeting of the AICC. This was glossed over on the excuse that it contravened Gandhi’s nonviolent creed. Gandhi endorsed this with his remark in Harijan that ‘Bhagat Singh worship’ had done incalculable harm to the country. Gandhi’s candidate for Congress presidency lost by 203 votes in the Tripuri session. Gandhi described it as his own loss which deepened intra-party factionalism. He eventually managed to eject Subhas Chandra Bose from the party. However, the author plays down the opposition to Gandhi in the Congress party.

The book’s prime focus is in describing Gandhi’s engagement with and developing attitudes towards Muslim nationalism, Islam, various Muslim leaders, politicians and intellectuals going back to his days in South Africa. Khilafat was the only issue in which Muslims sided with Gandhi. After he withdrew from non-cooperation under the pretext of Chauri Chaura violence, they turned enemies. Muslim theologians then regarded abstinence or self-denial as a form of ingratitude to Allah, unless there were compelling reasons for it (p.379). Deoband ulema was also friendly at first but their enthusiasm waned over time. They found his views on conversion, inter-community dining and purdah as unwarranted intrusion. They resented coupling the name of ‘Ram’ with ‘Rahim’ and of ‘Krishna’ with ‘Allah’. Gandhi’s opposition to religious conversion and affinity to Hindi language over Urdu further alienated the Muslims. But this did not mean that he was dear to the nationalists who addressed him as ‘Mahmud Gandhi’. The Mahatma engaged mainly with traditional Muslim theologians because he thought the liberal and modernist narratives in Islam were weak and not deserving of much political support.

Hasan provides a sanitized review of the teachings of Islam in this book along with how Gandhi understood them. Readers feel that Gandhi relied solely on hagiographies of the Prophet and his religion because he could not read Arabic. Hence, he saw only the noble facets. He looked up to the Prophet and remarked that his tenets are compatible with ahimsa (p.325)! Ali ibn-i Abu Talib, the fourth caliph, was presented as an exemplar of satyagrahis. In spite of this, many of Gandhi’s Muslim associates were first-rate bigots. His bosom ally, Muhammad Ali, professed in 1923 that he subscribed to the creed that “even a fallen and degraded Muslim is entitled to a higher place than that of any other non-Muslim, irrespective of his high character, even if the person in question were Gandhi himself” (p.345). In several places like Masimpur and Noakhali, Muslim audience walked out of his prayer meetings when Ramdhun was sung (p.376). May be it was due to all these incidents heaping one over the other in his mind that he remarked the Muslims a bully and Hindus as docile to the point of cowardice.

Mushirul Hasan rightly touches on some of the inconsistencies and contradictions in Gandhi’s ideology and character. The Mahatma disregarded the inequities of village life. He was interested only in the general picture which was idealized and mostly imaginary. Specifics did not figure in his expositions. He believed that the wealth of Indian cities was extracted from the blood of the poorest. This erroneous notion came from the fallacious socialist idea that wealth-creation was a zero-sum game or a see-saw. Meanwhile, Gandhi was feasted and accommodated by rich businessmen. He did not want to usurp zamindari and taluqdari tracts but asked only to regulate the relations between landlords and peasants because he did not want to kill the goose that laid golden eggs (p.236). His pursuit of goals was in alliance with the capitalists, big business and captains of industry. It was a combination of both dependence for resources and personal friendships. It’s curious how Jawaharlal Nehru coped with this open frolicking with capitalists. This book includes a section on the special relationship between the two. We feel that Nehru depended totally on Gandhi for furthering his career prospects. The Mahatma was the trunk on which the Nehru creeper clung and grew. Some of Nehru’s letters to his patron are included which are full of praise and flattery, even while appearing opposed to his action plans. The letter on page 227 contains wholesome praise of Gandhi such as ‘may I congratulate you’, ‘your magic touch’, ‘epic greatness’, ‘wonderful efficacy of nonviolence’ and ‘country has stuck to [nonviolence] wonderfully’. Each line is literally rolling in with fulsome praise! As a quid pro quo, Gandhi eased Nehru’s opponents out of the Working Committee of the party. Again, the author simply reproduces the original text and leaves the readers with the burden of joining the dots.

This book makes a short survey of the two-nation theory put forward by Muslim League which was the cornerstone for the creation of Pakistan. It also gives a polished view of Pakistan’s heroes, Jinnah and Iqbal the poet. Even though both were zealots at heart and caused much bloodshed, the author confines his research only to their milder political utterances. Even then, Hasan is forced to concede that Iqbal had a pronounced Islamic vision, but bails him out by the claim that much of what he said in his 1930 presidential address to the League should be discounted. However, he does not mention what Iqbal actually said and hence the readers reach the conclusion that he is sugar-coating poison. Some of Iqbal’s poems are also said to pass into the realm of fantasy and betray his emotional immaturity (p.408). Strangely, this book lists out only the atrocities committed against Muslims in Punjab during the early days after Partition. Hasan’s one-sided eloquence appears all the more galling when compared to his total silence on the horrible crimes perpetrated against Hindus and Sikhs in the same region. The ideological core of the demand for Pakistan was moulded in those provinces which stayed on in India. UP and Bihar were the regions where the cream of Muslim intelligentsia repeated the Pakistan demand vociferously. But when the country was actually partitioned, most of them stayed back in India. One Islamic scholar remarked them as ‘a sword of Islam resting on a secular scabbard’ (p.418). The Muslim League’s arsenal was formed of landowners of Sind and Punjab, the Awadh taluqdars, the zamindars of Bihar and the Aligarh students. In the end, the author comments presciently on Pakistan that ‘seldom in history did so few err so monumentally in using religion for the purpose of creating a nation’.

Prima facie, the book attempts to maintain an impartial perspective on the politics of the day which was marred by sectarianism into two distinct streams for Hindus and Muslims. In spite of this facade, the author masks the real causes of historical incidents if it sullies the Muslim cause. Lord Curzon is reported to have partitioned Bengal because of his disdain of the Bhadralok whose material interests were tied to land in East Bengal. This narrative is silent on the Muslim demand for a split. However, in the very next page, Hasan concedes that its revocation in 1911 worsened Hindu-Muslim relations in Bengal (p.59). If the partition was not effected according to Muslim wishes, why should its withdrawal create problems between the two communities? In many places, the author stresses on the reform measures urgently needed in the society. It is curious to observe that Mushirul Hasan’s craving for social reforms is limited to the Hindu community. Regarding the Muslims, he would settle for half-hearted measures and proclaim them as path-breaking. In 1937, NWFP ministry passed a significant law on women’s inheritance under which the daughter inherited a share equivalent to half of that of her brother (p.162)! It’s amazing that the author – writing in 2013 – has the nerve to pronounce this as revolutionary. This is nothing but what is ordained in Sharia law and had changed nothing. At the same time, the author also notes that Bombay enacted a law to remove disabilities on Harijan temple worship. Hasan’s sympathies extend to Muslim politicians of the last two centuries and even to medieval Muslim invaders as well. He falsely comments that Mahmud Ghazni’s saga of plundering raids to Somnath temple was in great part apocryphal (p.306).

This book includes some rare pictures of Gandhi. The accounts of many people on what brought them to the leader are narrated, the most prominent among them being Mira behn. Gandhi was not a member of the Congress in the formal sense, but he controlled the party as its vital force. The Congress placed him on a pedestal, listened to him respectfully, but bypassed him on serious policy matters. Even though the book runs to more than 500 pages, it has not done enough justice to its grandiloquent title. Gandhi’s unstinted loyalty to Hindu faith is prominently described, and this steadfast relationship is alleged to be the reason behind his allegiance to many of the religion’s outdated practices such as the caste system. Being a religious man himself, he allowed rival faiths to also enjoy the unquestioned loyalty from their adherents. A good part of the book examines his relations with Muslims, which appear to be non-committal in nature regarding expressing an opinion on its nature. The author seems to belong to the progressive section among the community; Gandhi always sided with the traditionalists and kept the progressives at an arm’s length. The progressives returned the favour. However, this inner tension is not covered in this book which should have been its prime reason for existence. The author also informs on some of the quirks of the great man. His experiments to test his ‘brahmacharya’ were notorious, but Gandhi stuck to it with a clear conscience. It is noted that Mira behn decorated Gandhi’s room to which he retired after a hectic day in Wardha ashram. Kasturba’s room was next to Gandhi’s (p.122). It is odd to observe that one who tried experiments by sleeping with other women to test his will and power of abstinence did not try it with one’s own wife!

The book is recommended even though it is very tiring for most readers.

Rating: 2 Star

A Crack in Everything

Title: A Crack in Everything – How Black Holes Came in From the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre-stage
Author: Marcus Chown
Publisher: Head of Zeus, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9781804544327
Pages: 334

The strange thing about the concept of black holes is that even people with hardly any exposure to science writing are well aware of it and its propensity to gobble up anything that ventures near it. Black holes were predicted as a corollary to Einstein’s General Relativity, but they were physically traced only in the 1960s. Sophisticated instruments detected gravitational waves caused by merger of two black holes and new concepts have emerged in the last few decades that revise our understanding of these elusive celestial bodies. Latest research hints that black holes are not exactly ‘black’, but they are some of the most prodigiously luminous objects in the universe. They are not only holes down which matter is sucked in, but sources of immense jets of matter spraying outwards and extending to millions of light years across space. This book envelops the journey of black holes from the periphery of imagination into the very heart of science. Marcus Chown is a science-writer and broadcaster who was a former radio astronomer at California Institute of Technology at Pasadena. He is the author of several books and also launched the Solar System for iPad app, which won ‘The Book Seller’ Digital Innovation of the Year.

The first two chapters make a solid foundation on the theoretical concepts of black holes without appearing too scientific. The first hint of the possibility for existence of this intriguing phenomenon was made by the mathematical solution of Einstein’s General Relativity carried out by Karl Schwarzchild while fighting on the Western front in World War I. He died just five months later but the spark he lit caught on in scientific circles. Beyond a specified size, matter behaved strangely. Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar developed the theory while on a voyage to Europe by sea. Stars up to 1.4 solar masses ended up as white dwarfs when their nuclear fuel was exhausted. If the mass is around 2 to 3 times that of the sun, it may explode as a supernova but the core will turn into a neutron star. Even bigger stars collapse down to a point of infinite gravity. Space will fold in on itself and the star will vanish from view, turning into a black hole. This was hard to grasp for the conservative establishment and the book records the intellectual rivalry between Chandrasekhar and his superior Arthur Eddington which was also tinged with dark shades of racism. However, the threshold size of the star which becomes a black hole is now called the ‘Chandrasekhar Limit’, vindicating the Indian. Chown narrates some amusing effects expected at the ‘event horizon’, the fictitious surface that masks the point of no-return for matter and light falling in. To a distant observer, time at this surface appears to run slower and slower because the space-time is highly distorted. When in fact the matter had gone inside, the observer still sees that the fallen object is hovering on the event horizon. Stephen Hawking once quipped: “In space, no one can hear you scream; and in a black hole, no one can see you disappear”. If you accidentally fell into a black hole, you can be pretty sure that there will be no eye-witnesses.

Even though the discoveries of Schwarzchild and Chandrasekhar occurred much before World War II, the field lay barren and eventless till 1963. In that year, a New Zealand physicist Roy Kerr theoretically found the exact shape of the warped space-time around a spinning black hole by solving Einstein’s equations. The accepted opinion at that time was that when a crushing big star rotates, its centrifugal forces would balance at some point the push of gravity and prevent it from becoming a black hole. Kerr demonstrated that the centrifugal force of a rapidly spinning star could not prevent the formation of a black hole. He also proved that energy is also a form of gravity and the increased kinetic energy would add to gravity and enhance the formation of black hole instead of preventing it. The behaviour of mass and energy are weird when they are very large. The observational proof came just eight years later, in 1971. Paul Murdin and Louise Webster found a blue supergiant in Cygnus galaxy orbiting a black space every 5.6 days that was emitting X-rays. The first black hole was found – on circumstantial evidence. Many were found thereafter and astronomers estimate an astonishing 100 million to exist. Almost every galaxy has a black hole in its centre. Our own Milky Way certainly has a supermassive black hole at its centre. The few dozen black holes so far discovered are no more than the tip of an enormous iceberg.

Early theories of black holes posited them as truly black, set in a black universe and so impossible to identify. This was logical and shaped the minds of many enthusiasts. However, later investigations exposed the fallacy of this postulate. It failed to realise that black holes are likely to be embedded in an environment of interstellar gas and ripped-apart stars. In consuming the material, black holes would superheat it to such high levels as to emit even X-rays, apart from visible light. This idea suggested that, far from being black, black holes could be the most brilliant beacons in the universe. In 1963, quasars were discovered which emitted radiation hugely in excess of its size. These were found to be powered by spinning, supermassive black holes when matter swirls down into such a black hole like water going down a plug hole. This is also a source of energy in the universe. Nuclear fusion which powers the sun has a conversion rate of only one per cent whereas the new source provided up to 40 per cent. In the 1980s, better radio telescopes observed jets of matter stabbing out of the black hole core of galaxies into adjacent radio lobes. It definitively erased the idea that nothing comes out of a black hole. Another concept that changed along with the new influx of data was that supermassive black holes were a rarity that powered only one per cent of galaxies. Observational data from the Hubble Space Telescope proved the existence of many such entities. In fact, one is found to be present in virtually every galaxy, including our own.

Apart from the theoretical and observational aspects of black holes, the author investigates whether these have any significance for the human race. Supermassive black holes have an essential role in the birth and evolution of a galaxy. Through its huge outflow of energy, it transfers the energy into the surrounding galactic environment, gradually clearing the central regions of gas and throttling back star formation. If this did not happen, galaxies would have used up all their gaseous raw material soon after its birth. There would not have been time to produce higher elements which are very much required to sustain higher forms of life, like ours. In this sense, we owe our very existence to the black hole feedbacks that ensured that star formation continued at a sedate rate after the birth of our galaxy and that there was gas left over to give birth to the sun. Chown updates the readers of the recent revolutionary discoveries in relativistic physics such as the experimental detection of gravitational waves from merger of two black holes in 2015. In 2019, intense light was observed from the accretion disk of the merger of two supermassive black holes. Merger of such heavy-gravity stars churn up interesting material too. When two neutron stars merge, gold is generated in copious quantities. The book follows a diligent timeline of the major events related to black holes and the readers observe a conspicuous gap between 1963 and the launch of the Hubble telescope in the 1990s. The reason for this barren period – if it was not coincidental –is not elaborated. One is tempted to assign it to the manned lunar missions of NASA which riveted America’s attention and resources for the race they ran with the Soviets in a bid to reach the moon first. However, the Soviet Union did not make it to the moon.

The book is very agreeably written so as to be interesting to readers having no advanced training in science. Chown has taken care not to include any equations or unnecessary numbers. Hawking had one remarked that had he omitted the lone equation E = mc^2 in his epic book, ‘A Brief History of Time’, it would have doubled its sales. A lot of scientific facts are seamlessly interspersed with interesting biographical accounts of the inventers along with amusing asides. It appears that the nomenclature of ‘potential energy’ which we had studied in school has now changed to ‘gravitational energy’; just as kinetic energy is now referred to as ‘energy of motion’ in this book. A good popular book on physics was the need of the times as the old crop ended in the first decade of this century. This book neatly fits the bill. Latest findings and information till 2023 are updated in the book. However, the last third of the book seems to be full of somewhat uninteresting speculation and unnecessary elaboration of not very important ideas, some of which may never be discovered or disproved. They may remain just intelligent speculation for a long period to come. In spite of this minor hiccup, this book is a must-read for enthusiasts of physics, astronomy and cosmology.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries – The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity
Author: Manu S. Pillai
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780670093656
Pages: 564

Hinduism is a constantly evolving religion. This characteristic is also a proof of its vitality. Contrary to what happened to Paganism in Greece and Rome at the end the classical period, Hinduism withstood the crushing impact of not one, but two Abrahamic religions one after the other and still survived to tell the tale. Hinduism is flexible enough to accommodate any number of gods or even to incorporate external deities somewhere on the branches of its vast mythology. It successfully employed this strategy to absorb strangers into its fold till the arrival of Islam which could not be reconciled due to its professed exclusivity and monopoly on divinity. The same thing happened with Christianity too. At the same time, the Hindus also felt compulsions of various sorts to convert them to the new ‘monotheistic’ faiths. Evidently, Hinduism had to change subtly to effectively engage with the new threat. This was felt more seriously on interactions with the Christian faith. Though the Islamic invasions were militarily brutal and materially exhausting, it proved to be intellectually bankrupt. It somewhat transformed Hinduism but never on the immense scale Christianity did. This book tells the story of how gods (reinvention of Hinduism by anchoring on its philosophical past), guns (colonial power) and missionaries (evangelical efforts at proselytization) completely reformed Hinduism in the last four centuries after the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. Manu S. Pillai is a talented, young author and this is his fifth book. You can find reviews of all his earlier works here. This book’s title involves a little bit of plagiarism with Jared Diamond’s incredibly well-written book, ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’.

Pillai begins his exhaustive survey with the practical adjustments Hinduism made on the ground even before the arrival of Semitic religions. Brahmins acted as a repository of theoretical knowledge and provided the mechanism to bend it constructively to make life easier – at least for themselves and their patrons. Brahmins bypassed awkward corners between theory and reality through the manipulation of tradition. Kings of low birth changed caste and varna by a ritual in which they symbolically emerged out of an artificial gold cow. The four-fold division of varnas – which is often portrayed as rigid and unchanging – was only an idealized aspiration of the Brahminized world that never existed in such perfection anywhere in India. Hinduism is not what Brahmins actually wanted; instead, it is the story of their negotiations with a bewildering variety of counter-thoughts and alternate visions. Change is coded into its DNA (p. xix). This book is the study of Hinduism of the last four centuries. Its motive is to survey the historical setting and emotional stimulus empowering present-day Hinduism. The author also claims that it is not a history of Hindu philosophy or of the lofty ideas of ancient sages. It deals with human actions and reactions in the context of political conquest, cultural dominance and resistance.

Hinduism met Christianity on many fronts and in different time periods. In the pre-medieval and early-medieval accounts of European travellers and merchants, India was portrayed as a heathen country where the devil was worshipped and was home to revulsive sexual practices. Hindus didn’t care. They lay diffused across the country and were nonchalant as to be concerned with what was being said of them in distant lands. But with European powers establishing trade with India and meddling in internal politics by the seventeenth century, they sat up and took notice, but still in isolated pockets. It was in response to the European portrayal of Hindus that Hinduism took its contemporary modern form, drawing pride and confidence from certain aspects of its past and shame from others. The book describes the early interactions of missionaries with Hinduism. Hindus listened to them with genuine interest and was even willing to accept their precepts as true, but stoutly refused to concede that this was the only way of knowing divinity. Hinduism always made space for ideological diversity and could not acquiesce in to claims on monopoly of truth. The Hindu philosophers never accused Christianity to be false, but that it might be adapted to the missionary’s part of the world. Quite contrary to this expression of tolerance, the missionaries thought everything else as diabolical pretension of primitive paganism. Over time, the missionaries collected and began to study Hindu texts and were gradually compelled to admit some goodness in it. One scholar grudgingly remarked that ‘even though much reeked of the dung pit, Hinduism had pearls by which white men too could benefit’ (p.56). This attitude grew with further study. In the peak of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, white intellectuals dismissed the Hindu society of the present, but romanticised its past. The formula would be amplified by Hindus in future. The Western philosophers, disillusioned with the religion at home, felt the need to idealize an alternative Hinduism which was presented as just the item with the mysterious Vedas.

The eighteenth century saw the dawn of a fresh chapter in Hindu-Christian relations with the entrenchment of British power in Bengal and North India. Warren Hastings and William Jones researched on Indian law and literature respectively. The aim was to reformulate ancient Hindu law so that the present society could be administered on its basis. But the law they painstakingly unearthed had no universal applicability. Customs of caste, region and sect were what guided people’s lives. It only suited the empire’s purposes to have a set of rules of whose legitimacy the subject people could not challenge. Intellectual emphasis focussed on scripture above custom and the enthroning of philosophical Hinduism as more legitimate than the ‘lower’ form. Pillai also amusingly notes how Victorian morals censored portions of open sensuality in Indian texts. While on one occasion Kalidasa describes Shakuntala as sweaty, it was translated into English as ‘glowing complexion’! When faced with such censure of their ancestors’ tastes, natives unnecessarily developed feelings of shame. All in all, Indian confidence ballooned as an unforeseen by-product of Orientalism. Its retrieval of past heroes and celebration of Indian accomplishments injected pride into the colonial subjects. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, the British oscillated between promoting traditional learning and introducing Western ideas through school education in English.

The nineteenth century saw another marked shift in the religious equation. Having successfully set up a colonial regime and also keeping internal security on a firm footing, the colonial masters again took on an aspect of complacent disdain on the native religion. Meanwhile, Hindus felt the days of Sanskrit education was over even though it was supported by the colonizer. A Hindu college to teach Western literature and science was set up in Calcutta in 1817 by Indians and dissenting British men who collected Rs. 1,13,000 locally, while the entire government budget for education in Bengal was only Rs. 1,00,000. The Orientalists objected to this, but the transition from Sanskrit to English was most pointedly expressed in the mid-1830s when state funding was reserved only for modern education in English. Meanwhile, the missionaries encouraged vernacular education, the only target being the conversion of pupils. The author cites a geography textbook in one of these schools that urged ‘the people of India’ to ‘accept the message of Christ’ and ‘endeavour to spread it’. By 1850s, British political power reached the zenith and even the son of the ‘Lion of Punjab’ Maharaja Ranjit Singh, named Duleep Singh, was converted to Christianity. Viceroy Dalhousie was restless to spread the Christian faith in India. It was he who cleverly stage-managed the conversion of Duleep Singh. A prominent cleavage in the conception of India among the British society became very evident at this point. Orientalists praised the glories of India, its ancient philosophies and Sanskrit literature, while the evangelists were producing material that cast Hindus as a class of ‘infant-murdering, wife-burning debauchees, in desperate need of reform’ (p.177). With the East India Company’s charter amended to accommodate evangelical work in 1813 and 1833, officials’ attitudes stiffened. Patronage extended to temples was withdrawn. In 1857, however, India responded with a full-blown revolt that forced the British to adopt a technically neutral stand on the issue of religion in future. In 1790 itself, Governor General Cornwallis had written that the company’s security rested on native troops and to meddle in the religion would jeopardize security. The book however keeps silent on the religious aspects of the 1857 rebellion's causes. The issue of greased cartridges was only the fuse that lit the fire, while the powder had been accumulating for years. Anyhow, I am fairly sure that the current breed of Indian secularists, including the author, would accuse the rebels of narrow-mindedness and communalism for their refusal to handle cartridges lubricated with the fat of cows and pigs.

After the Rebellion, the religious kaleidoscope shifted once again. Reform movements sprang up everywhere to give a facelift to the ancient religion. Demands for equality for the oppressed lower castes followed close on its heels. At the peak of these two, nationalism blossomed – both of the secular and cultural varieties. Pillai finds a strain of resemblance between the Protestant movement in England and the Hindu reformers. Like Protestants, Indian reformers placed scripture over custom and accumulated tradition. They parked blame for Hinduism’s decline from unparalleled purity on the Brahmins, just like the Protestant battering of Catholic priest craft. Ram Mohan Roy was vocal in denouncing Brahminic obfuscation of Vedic ideas on monotheism. This blunted the Christian threat to Hinduism as the Catholic Church’s liturgy differed not much from full-blooded idolatry. But very few Hindus practised what they preached and ordinary temple worship thrived as vigorously as before. Dayananda Saraswati’s Arya Samaj began venerating the cow as a formative rite to unite Hindus. The author deliberately hints here that cow worship began at this point, while in fact it was followed from very early times. Reconversion back to Hinduism through ‘Shuddhi’ was also developed. By the latter half of nineteenth century, untouchables began to assert their identity. Jyotiba Phule repudiated everything Hindu, from Vedas to idol worship, while Narayana Guru of Kerala accommodated some degree of Sanskritization, himself a Sanskrit scholar. Guru’s reforms lay in rejecting Brahminism as a social practice, while democratising Brahminic Hinduism (p.253).

The book’s final chapter, ‘Drawing Blood’, is reserved to heap scorn and mockery on Tilak and Savarkar, the two glowing figureheads of Hindu nationalism. A reasonably true biography of both are given, but interspersed with skewed and derisively paraphrased quotations. It seems the author’s pique against the duo is for the fact that they tried to unite the Hindus socially, perhaps for the first time ever in Indian history. This might be going against the grain of Western philosophical theory that could not comprehend the coming together of such diverse peoples under a common banner. This book is part of the anti-Hindutva movement and is relentlessly chipping away at its roots. Pillai does not mention this openly, in variance to what Charles Allen openly confessed in his recent book, ‘Aryans – The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth’ (reviewed earlier here). Tilak started the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals to gather people together as a means to move political work forward. Fun and play were the vehicles to impart political awareness among grumbles of turning faith into spectacle. The author nit-picks on Tilak’s speeches in order to find snippets against untouchables. With this in mind, he quotes a little known research paper at an obscure Canadian university to claim that Tilak made a disparaging remark about two communities as “which have no job avenues left other than thieving” (p.282). The source of this discovery is only a paper by Amar Khoday submitted at Manitoba University, but this information is concealed deep in the thick jungle of notes at the end of the book.

The book is very big at 564 pages, 238 of them nothing but notes totalling 2308 which are thoroughly researched entities that appears as a corporate effort rather than of a single person. However, Pillai has not acknowledged it. A very large number of books and papers have been consulted obviously but unusually for such an effort, no bibliography is given at the end. This is somewhat strange, forcing the reader to go through each and every note to find the sources. Quotes from Wendy Doniger and Audrey Truschke are given prime spots of accommodation though – or because of? – they are outspoken critics of Hinduism. Some parts of the book are recycled from the author’s previous works. The activities of the monk Roberto de Nobili who dressed, worked and lived like a Brahmin, wearing even the sacred thread, to convert Hindus can also be found in Pillai’s book, ‘The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin’ (reviewed earlier here) and stories about Serfoji II of Tanjore are in ‘False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma’ (reviewed earlier here). The book includes early sketches of people and events starting from the sixteenth century and sourced from rare collections in Europe and the USA. Islam makes only a cameo appearance in the book, but when it does, the author treats it with kid gloves unlike what he does with the others. He remarks that Brahmins ordered the world into castes while Islam proposed egalitarianism. Instances of proper justice meted out to Hindus in the Mughal period, however rare, are unearthed from little-known works to generalize it. The sentence construction in the book is a bit laboured with lots of commas, hyphens, semicolons and brackets that affect readability. Of course, some may enjoy them. Even though the author’s views on the making of modern Hinduism are not agreeable to most readers, he has provided a lively survey of the encounter between Hindus and the Europeans in their various avatars as missionaries, orientalists and colonial administrators.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Saga of Kalpathy

Title: Saga of Kalpathy – The Story of Palghat Iyers
Author: M K Das
Publisher: Prism Books, 2017 (First)
ISBN: 9789386506108
Pages: 228

Kerala, on the southwestern coast of India, is gifted with abundant rain and a lush tropical climate that are good for leading a peaceful life. Unlike many parts of India, Kerala has not witnessed any large-scale military operations in a millennium, save perhaps the invasions of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan. Not for nothing is it called ‘God’s Own Country’. In fact, the princely states of Travancore and Cochin are perhaps the only region in mainland India that has never come under Muslim rule. Now you realise why the Padmanabhaswamy Temple at Thiruvananthapuram still possesses an immense hoard of wealth accumulated over centuries. However, the land offered a hearty welcome to others who chose to migrate here such as Tamil Brahmins, Konkani Brahmins, Gujaratis and Jews. People fleeing religious persecution sought refuge in Kerala which provided ample opportunities for trade, being a prominent exporter of spices and forest-produce. This book studies Tamil Brahmins who settled in Palakkad – in the famous Kalpathy town and its surrounding villages. This is in fact a coffee-table book with a large font size and a simplified narrative of history. A large number of sketches are included in the book, but no photographs. M K Das is a Kochi-based journalist who had worked in the New Indian Express group. He has authored some books also. E P Unny, who has drawn the sketches in this book, is a newspaper cartoonist also from the Indian Express group.

The first two chapters furnish the historical groundwork for the arrival of Tamil Brahmins beginning in the fourteenth century. Some parts of it are purely legendary, such as accounts of Krishnadeva Raya of Vijayanagar personally invading Malabar. Some legends try to reconcile and connect all the subjects of a ruler to him. Such a story recounts that the Brahmins were the invitees of a ruling raja of Palakkad, Sekharivarman, who wanted them to take over the religious duties of Namboodiris who were expelled by him to nearby Valluvanad for opposing his marriage to a tribal girl he loved. In a curious way, he was anticipating Henry VIII and the birth of the Protestant Church! The reason for the Tamil Brahmins’ ready acceptance of the offer is also noted. The thirteenth century was a period of great socio-political churning in Tamizhakam. The collapse of Cholas and the folding out of Pallavas and Pandyas made the land vulnerable to any adventurer. Malik Kafur, the general of Ala ud-din Khilji, invaded Madurai in 1310. Hindu temples were plundered, desecrated and hundreds of thousands of people were butchered. According to Ferishta, Kafur returned with 312 elephants, 20,000 horses, 96,000 manns of gold and several boxes of pearls and jewels. Even allowing for a fair amount of exaggeration, it is clear that a large chunk of Tamil wealth was being taken out of the country by the Delhi sultans, never to return. Haider Ali’s invasion in 1781 caused similar distress and another wave of migration, but the ancestors of Palghat Iyers had reached Kerala much earlier.

Das reiterates on several occasions that the Palghat Brahmins never aroused animosity among the local people. The Palghat Raja was only a minor feudal lord and the patronage he could extend to the migrants was limited, quite unlike the Travancore Maharaja who favoured them in government jobs thereby inviting the wrath of locals who demanded a more judicious distribution. Absence of any clash of interest eased coexistence. The amiability of settlers matched with affability of the natives. This was hugely advantageous to both as Kerala witnessed economic prosperity due to opening up of sea trade with the Portuguese after 1498. This proved a catalyst for more Tamil Brahmin migration. They streamed in from Thanjavur, Kumbakonam, Mayavaram and Chidambaram into Palakkad. They effortlessly blended in by adopting Bhagavathi, which was a Kerala goddess, as kuladeivam (family goddess). The original Kerala cuisine was quite bland, with limited choice of vegetables. Tamil Brahmins introduced the popular sambar, rasam, pappadam, dosa, vada etc. The book also discusses about other groups of immigrants like Jews, Konkani Brahmins and Gujaratis to other parts of Kerala and concludes that the pattern remains the same as of Tamil Brahmins. They have strictly adhered to their socio-religious and cultural mores and resolutely resisted any attempt to dilute them. How long they will be able to stick to tradition and customs is something none is prepared to bet on (p.92).

Several specificities of Palghat Iyers are examined in this book. An agraharam (street where the Tamil Brahmins live in a group) has almost become a geographic indicator by its fame. A typical agraharam has a row of houses on both sides of the road with a temple at one end and an open well at the other. Each house has a common wall separating them. The street formed an integral part of the community, which was the venue of all religious, familial and social functions. The smaller agraharams consisted of anything between 50-100 houses and the bigger ones upwards of 300 units. Those persons who turned to various professions in the modern economy quickly carved out a niche for themselves as they possessed an inclination to be content with backroom operations and total loyalty to the authority (p.189). Curiously enough, these were the same traits that so endeared the Tamil Brahmins to the royalty in past centuries. They worked for persons with money or power, but never tried to graduate into industrial entrepreneurship. Many have turned to trade, however. Carnatic music is posited to arrive in Kerala along with Tamil Brahmins. Palakkad earned the sobriquet of the ‘Thanjavur of Kerala’ on account of the numerous maestros in vocal music and accompanying instruments the region produced. Every girl in a Brahmin family learns classical music as if it is a pre-requisite to being married off. Noorni Parameswara Bhagavathar and Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar were the doyens of vocal music. The Palghat Iyers also popularized Harikatha, a musical narration of Puranic stories set in Carnatic ragas. Kerala’s own kathaprasamgam evolved out of this. Mridangam virtuoso Palakkad Mani Iyer was also a name worthy of eminent mention in this regard.

The author also addresses some of the issues and historical remembrances related to Palghat Iyers. Haider and Tipu spared them of plunder and pillage quite unlike other Hindus in Palakkad. Tipu’s excellent rapport with the Sankaracharya of Sringeri is said to be the reason behind this magnanimity on the part of that bigoted sultan. The book points out the disadvantages faced by the community following revolutionary agrarian reforms legislation. Being traditional moneylenders, the Iyers had amassed vast landed property from their debtors insolvent to pay them back in cash. Bulk of this wealth was eventually lost to tenants or as surplus to the government. Strict segregation of castes was practised at Kalpathy with people of the lower castes not allowed to come near the Brahmin settlements along public roads. When agitation for equality broke out in the 1940s, a few conservatives opposed the entry of low-castes to Kalpathy, but progressives among them strove for granting this basic human right to all people. The book describes the migration of educated, young Iyers to India’s metro cities in search of jobs and career growth. The social organizations they have set up in those urban areas serve as a model of cohesion. Das finishes his narrative with briefly touching upon the reverse or second migration back to Kalpathy where Tamil Brahmins who had retired from service in the institutions located elsewhere return to Kalpathy to live out a quiet and happy old age. In view of the Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu and their strident anti-Brahmin posture in the middle of the twentieth century, many Tamil Brahmins preferred to settle in Kerala where no such discrimination was experienced by them.

This book sports a foreword penned by the noted historian M G S Narayanan. While he offers only a vague support for the many historical incidents mentioned in the book, he goes overboard with the unwarranted assertion that Keralites harbour an undercurrent of jealousy towards Tamil Brahmins which he likens to anti-Semitism of European Christians against the Jews. This preposterous comparison doesn’t stand factual scrutiny and is blatantly uncharitable considering the ease with which the immigrants were absorbed into Kerala society. Das has chosen sketches instead of photographs in the book to ‘evoke an old-world charm and capture the spirit and soul of the period and people’ in the narrative. There are a total of 62 sketches in the book which also covers subjects outside the Kalpathy area. The author has maintained old colonial names like ‘Palghat’, ‘Calicut’ and ‘Alleppey’ as they seem to ‘resonate with history and the romance that goes with it’ (p.15). However, for some places like Puducherry and Thiruvananthapuram, he forgets this rule and uses the new names. A diagrammatic plan of a typical agraharam could have been included instead of the verbal description that may confuse readers who are not familiar with local patterns. Almost half of the book is actually a primer on Kerala history and the social peculiarities of the people. This is unrelated to the intended topic, but the author keeps sufficient leeway to claim that these passages are essential to make the footing for explaining how Tamil Brahmins interacted with the land and its people.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Invisible History of the Human Race

Title: The Invisible History of the Human Race – How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Future
Author: Christine Kenneally
Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 2014)
ISBN: 9780143127925
Pages: 355

The first point of reference in the case of narrating the history of an object is the written record mentioning it. Royal proclamations, edicts on rocks and other non-perishable surfaces, literary sources and oral traditions certify to the existence or origin of a thing. If we go a little bit more into the past – before the beginning of language – other material objects substitute the place of written records, such as potsherds, tools, funerary paraphernalia and architecture. By evaluating these specimens, experts can recount many facts about the society who made it. Going further backward brings up fossils, pieces of bone and skull and footprints on a congealed lava flow that provide testimony to endless lifeforms which had once walked on the earth. When man examined all these ideas emanating from outside his body, he turned to the inside by intuition and saw that the book of life was written and lay unread inside each of his cells’ nuclei in the form of DNA. We know that DNA is the marker of heredity, but what is perhaps not widely appreciated is that the DNA carries the story of all ancestral lifeforms which had gone before us. True to the postulates of evolution, the human genome still carries the traces of not only our ancestor human beings but also the genes of other species from which we split and evolved in a different direction. This book provides an interesting overview of this extraordinary field of study which promises a great deal to shed light on our genetic past as well as to make our future life a bit more comfortable by addressing health issues specific to the genome. This book handles aspects of inheritance evaluated in studies from psychology, economics, history and genetics, anecdotes and data from business, science and the lives of many fascinating individuals. Christine Kenneally is an award-winning journalist who has written for many prominent newspapers and magazines. She is the author of two books and lives in Melbourne, Australia.

The book opens with observations on the study of genealogy and the surprisingly stiff opposition to it from some quarters. Genealogy can be traced to the Bible. Romans painted portraits of their forebears on the walls of atriums. Modern western genealogy began with the rise of aristocracy. This may be the reason why socialists oppose any move by a commoner to know more about his ancestors. The author assuages these concerns with the observation that it is only an attempt to build one’s own identity and help others view them, may be in the hope that the person may be a long-lost distant relative. The criticism on this hinges on the premise that the more people turned to their genealogy especially to elevate their status, the more out of step they become with the spirit of an egalitarian republic (this was raised by scholars in the US). They asserted that this attempt to research one’s past was developed of snobbishness and vanity and hence unworthy of honourable attention. Birth and heredity are inevitably tied to racist undertones in a white, western country. The infamous ‘one-drop rule’ determined the race of mixed couples at least in the first hundred years of the American republic. It said: “the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (p.60). This racist concept has an exact reflection in India’s caste system where the offspring of two different castes belonged to the lower of the parents’ castes. The author has not observed this Indian connection. In fact, she has not effectively studied Indian society in any detail.

Kenneally examines the birth and development of the scientific basis of heredity in genes and DNA. Darwin’s theory of evolution was a revolutionary concept in 1859 when it was introduced but he did not know of genes. He postulated ‘gemmules’ that were passed from parent to offspring to stamp the hereditary traits on the latter. This was a flawed concept, but the idea of something resembling a gene was essential to explain how traits that were not apparent in parents might appear in a child. Even though the structure of DNA as a double helix was discovered in 1953, it was only in the late-1990s that a study of the genome could become meaningful. Computing power at the command of academia and pioneering industrialists exploded manifold in this period. The author observes that most of our genome is not coding DNA which expresses proteins that are vital for the wellbeing of that organism. Non-coding or junk DNA may influence our genes in significant ways. Even if they don’t, we may learn how to read the book of our history in it. Ancestry is marked by mutations in a being which is passed as such to its progeny. If the mutation is on a coding gene, it may adversely affect a vital protein and endangers its reproductive prospects. That’s why non-coding – sometimes remarked ‘junk’ – part of the DNA becomes crucial for studies about ancestry.

We are inured to accept Nazis catalogued as extreme racists who devised brutal pogroms to cleanse the society of people undesirable to them. This book provides several examples of these devious ways but what startles the readers is the information that the US also followed some of these projects with vigour though to a less sinister degree. Forced sterilizations were practised in the US as part of eugenics. The first man was sterilized in 1907 who was characterized as belonging to a group of ‘shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of antisocial whites’. Between 1907 and 1970, at least 60,000 were judged inadequate and forcibly sterilized by their state administrations to prevent those genes entering the next generation. Ideas about ‘racial hygiene’ were popular even before the Nazis came to power. The interest in genealogy culminated under the Nazi regime and the right to live became virtually dependent on one’s family charts. There were registers maintained by civil government noting down Jewish blood in the family. Hitler’s T4 program was merciless. Parents were encouraged to send their disabled children to special centres for treatment where they were killed by starving or lethal injection. 200,000 people died in these institutions and falsified death certificates were issued to their relatives.

Personal history related to ancestry is sometimes closely guarded by societies, most often to shield the present from unpalatable associations echoing from the past. These efforts make history invisible to some. The perpetrators of the Holocaust, the early descendants of the convicts who helped establish Australia and the victims of the Irish famine of mid-nineteenth century originally suppressed information passing down to their children. Several of the author’s ancestors were convicts, which were exposed only as the outcome of her own genealogical research and to which her parents were ignorant of. Kenneally points out that after the 1960s rights movement, more transparency arrived and people became more relaxed to accept that one or two of their great-great-great grandfathers were not as decent as to make a great-great-great grandchild proud. Kenneally also finds a link between genetics and anti-Semitism in Germany by observing that Jews were attacked and killed more in those towns which had a history of pogroms during the Black Death in the fourteenth century. She do not hint that the people living in those towns in the Nazi period were direct descendants of the medieval society, but this finding sticks out like a pseudo-scientific hypothesis. This book points out the long-term damage inflicted by slave trade on some African nations. The countries that lost more people to slavery were also the poorest countries today. They were, however, among the best developed economies and best-organized states during the slave trade with central governments, national currencies and established trade networks. Many slaves were betrayed by people to whom they were close. Some evidence is presented to conclude that this engendered distrust among people which persists even today. Without some form of general trust, economic activity cannot flourish. The idea that mistrust and silence on a shameful aspect could be passed down for centuries is profound and requires more corroborative evidence.

The book includes some passages which support a biological basis for human races. Since this topic is very controversial, the author wriggles out of an embarrassing position of openly admitting it. Eugenics extolled the racial differences and postulated the superiority of the white race. This was discredited after the Nazi regime’s collapse, but science then took a swing to the other extreme that there is no genetic basis for race. Studies by Lewontin in the 1970s concluded that genetic differences are between individuals only – they may be in a race or across races. This ruled out any genetic basis for race. The Human Genome Project reiterated this by declaring that two random individuals from any one group are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world. This underwent a transformation in 2007 when the resolution of genetic analysis improved to evaluate thousands of nucleotide pairs than the earlier hundreds. It is now convincingly displayed that a person’s racial roots can be found by analysing his genome. The book includes a good coverage of DNA testing services now widely available and the uses they can provide to people susceptible to genetic diseases, some of which are capable of decimating a person’s quality of life. Huntington’s disease is a deadly malady, but can be easily predicted if you know where to look in the genome. Pre-natal tests can establish if the foetus carries the disease and can then be terminated. Some communities, such as the Ashkenazi Jews, are inherently endogamous which cause genetic diseases in offspring when the population size is small. In Israel, genetic screening and counselling in the pre-marital and pre-natal stages are a normal part of the culture.

The book can be comfortably read by any class of readers. It drifts slightly out of focus in the initial stages when readers get confused that the author is pointing solely to the ethical aspects of charting family genealogy. It makes precocious conclusions on cultural inheritance of psychology. The author argues that women were freer in plough-based societies (farming communities) than those employed shifting cultivation. This is a long shot with doubtful accuracy. Another assertion is that people tend to cooperate more and divorce rates are less in rice-growing societies. This is because rice is more demanding in the case of irrigation requirements which needs better coordination between people. Another claim is that distant historical events may influence the character of a modern family and the choices of families can illuminate history. In another section, she mentions that carbon dioxide levels dropped by 0.1 ppm because of economic stagnation in the wake of Mongols’ killing raids which exterminated 40 million people in the thirteenth century that caused reforestation on a large scale (p.180). No evidence for this bold assertion is cited. Genetic peculiarities thrown by DNA testing provides some amusing results such as Chengiz Khan’s DNA being found in living people. On the other hand, it is also disclosed that if you go eighty or hundred generations back, there would be very few DNA lines in common with our ancestors so that we can be termed biologically unrelated to many of our blood-relatives. The book strictly follows political correctness in its observations, conclusions and generalizations.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Tipu Sultan

Title: Tipu Sultan – The Saga of Mysore’s Interregnum (1760 – 1799)
Author: Vikram Sampath
Publisher: Vintage, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780670094691
Pages: 904

Around midnight on Sep 7, 1965, in the middle of India-Pakistan war, five battleships of the Pakistan navy surreptitiously sailed to Indian waters and struck the temple town of Dwaraka in Gujarat. The target was ostensibly a radar station installed there. But Pakistan had named this mission ‘Operation Somnath’, so the real intent was clearly to destroy the temple there so that the attack would add one more item in the long list of Islamic invasions on Hindu holy places. The attacking vessels were carefully chosen. They were named PNS (Pakistan Navy Ship) Babur, PNS Jahangir, PNS Shah Jehan, PNS Alamgir and PNS Tipu Sultan. The first four were Mughal emperors and their empire geographically overlapped the territory of modern Pakistan. So, there is an iota of justification in selecting them because the Pakistanis may have wanted to relish their legacy of Hindu-bashing. But what about the fifth vessel, the one named after Tipu Sultan? Tipu’s kingdom was entirely bound by South India and which was in no way affiliated to Pakistan. Then why did they choose to honour this Kannada-speaking South Indian? In the answer to this question lies the true legacy of Tipu Sultan. The shrewd Pakistanis had learnt their history lessons well, unlike the pea-brained Indian ‘secular’ historians who dominated Indian academia who still portray Tipu as a tolerant and innovative ruler and a freedom-fighter too! On the other hand, there is a considerable and growing head of opinion judging the sultan as the Aurangzeb of the South. This huge yet excellent book by Vikram Sampath successfully analyses the interregnum in Mysore between 1760 and 1799 filled by the reign of the father-son duo Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan. The book has 904 pages, 775 of them containing the narrative and others cataloguing the immense notes, bibliography and index. This seems to be the largest book ever on Tipu Sultan.

Both Haider and Tipu did not oust the titular Wodeyar king but ruled as his regents, concentrating all power in their hands. Haider did not possess any daring or generous spirit of the hero. He is better known for the steady pursuit of his aims and the moral flexibility of his means. His career was marked by implacable vindictiveness and gross ingratitude since revenge was profitable and gratitude expensive. He adroitly used the machinery of fraud and force to establish and consolidate his authority. Sampath analyses the contrast in personal character between the father and son. Haider, though treacherous to his benefactors, treated his Hindu subjects with goodwill and toleration. He never allowed any reduction in the allowances of temples and even ordered against cow slaughter (p.79). He engraved images of Shiva and Parvati in the newly minted Haidari pagoda coins he introduced in Bidanur. He always dishonoured his promises which included forcefully appropriating the wife of the Prince of Bidanur who was his ally and working closely with him for securing the city against enemies. In battle, he was very firm and ruthless. During the Malabar invasions, Haider offered five rupees to anyone who brought him the head of a Nair that was able to fight; if it was an old man, he gave four rupees and if a boy, three. A price of three rupees was also paid for every Nair woman captured alive (p.107) for sexual slavery. His carnal lust for women was notorious and there was no level to which he would stoop to satisfy his desire. Haider employed nomadic women playing the drum with songs to roam around the country. They collected information on what people thought of him and also about beautiful women in the locality. Haider’s men would then go to the suggested house and brought these beauties to his harem either through coercion or wilful surrender. Sometimes, he ‘graciously’ permitted them to go back to their parents after using them or partitioning them amongst his followers (p.270).

There was much contrast between Haider and Tipu, both physical and mental. The father was fair in complexion like a Persian while the son was exceedingly dark. In some other books, there are even references to him resembling a Siddhi – a descendant of Africans who worked in the royal household. Tipu was imparted a strict religious education which Haider accused as to make him fit for a moulvi than a ruler. Haider also lamented prophetically that the religious bigotry imparted to his teenage son would cause the ruin of their kingdom. True to his father’s concerns, Tipu decimated in sixteen years all that his father conquered in twenty-three years, while not adding anything to his inherited domain. Tipu was not even as brave as he is sometimes made out to be. Of course, he died with a sword in his hand and in battle but that was the immediate outcome of a hopeless situation when the enemies suddenly charged through a breach in the fort walls while he was inspecting it. He was scared of the confederate forces marching to Srirangapatna in the Third Anglo-Mysore war in 1791. He had frescoes and caricatures painted on the outer walls of the town featuring a tiger seizing an Englishman, a horseman cutting off two British heads and the Nawab of Arcot – his enemy but a British ally – in chains. When the opponents neared the capital, he quietly whitewashed it all (p.458). While Haider’s perversities may be excused in view of the mores of the time or even to human frailty, Tipu’s conduct was nothing but monstrous. Tipu thought out novel ways of killing infidels. He ordered 700 families of Vaishnavite Brahmins called Mandyam Aiyangars to be locked inside the Lakshmi Naramsimha Temple in Srirangapatna and let in armed soldiers and elephants into the crowded premises at night. Many of the victims were trampled to death on the eve of Deepavali festival. The reason for this massacre was that one of their caste-men – who was not in the punished crowd – plotted against the sultan. In Calicut, he devised a diabolical way of killing very young children along with their mothers. First the mothers were hung, followed by their children similarly hung from their mother’s necks (p.730). The book includes a glance on Tipu’s register of dreams in which he diligently wrote down his dreams and interpreted them. These also show a deranged mind vehemently wishing for the extermination of all infidels. Sampath also records a few instances in which he acted to the contrary such as patronizing the Ranganathaswamy Temple in the capital and Sringeri Math. But this was after his defeat in 1792 and was more of an effort to rally his Hindu subjects to his cause.

Tipu’s claims to be a freedom-fighter are examined in this book. The only logic behind this fantastic assertion is that he fought against the British. But what he fought for was only his personal wealth in the kingdom which he ruled. He was materially and spiritually allied to foreign powers all the time. Tipu sent an embassy to Caliph Abdul Hamid I in Istanbul and obtained permission to assume the title of an independent king of Mysore. The diary of this embassy titled Waqai-i-Manazil-i-Rum compiled by Mohibbul Hasan was reviewed earlier here. His embassy to France seeking military alliance and partitioning of Indian territory failed to impress Louis XVI only because he was reluctant to antagonize the British. The diplomats were then politely asked to leave. Two of the leaders of the mission – Akbar Ali Khan and Osman Khan – were put to death by Tipu when they came back home. Haider was even more unprincipled in the case of alliances. In 1764, he sought alliance and help from the British at Bombay when he was besieged by Peshwa Madhava Rao. Haider offered the entire sandalwood and pepper trade of the coast to the British and to cede lands north of the Tungabhadra river. Here again, the British were ambivalent as they were wary of offending the Marathas. So much for freedom-fighting!

The book includes a comprehensive review of Mysore’s wars with her neighbours and foreign powers in the four decades after 1760. This seems to be the time when modern Tamil Nadu was completely under the yoke of external rulers like the Nawab of Arcot, governors of Nizam, the Mysore sultans, and the Anglo-French. Mysore’s battles had a profound impact on the twists and turns of Indian history in this century. The First Anglo-Mysore War was the instance that shattered the myth of the invincibility of European powers against an Indian force. Sampath has included many gruesome details of Tipu’s suppression of the natives of Malabar and the inhuman atrocities he inflicted on them in 1789-90. This was in addition to torture, murder, pillage, rape and religious conversion on a large scale. Finally, all powers in the region – British, Nizam and Maratha – joined hands to fight Tipu in the Third Anglo-Mysore war. Governor General Lord Cornwallis himself led the forces. Tipu was totally defeated in the war and was forced to cede half of his kingdom to the victors. As a surety for the pending payment of war indemnity, two of Tipu’s sons, aged four and five years, were handed over to the British as hostages. They returned to their father only after two years when the payment was made in full. After this humiliation, Tipu was not allowed to strengthen his forces. The Allies were waiting for a ruse to oust him. In a sense, his position was comparable to that of Saddam Hussein after his defeat in the First Gulf War in 1991. Alleging that he possessed weapons of mass destruction, he was defeated in 2003 and killed. In a similar vein, Tipu was alleged to be forging links with the French which was in violation of the 1792 ceasefire treaty. The British and Nizam combined their forces and defeated Tipu again in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War in 1799. Tipu himself died defending his citadel. While there was widespread discontent and treachery against Tipu, his own bad leadership, terrible follies, missed opportunities and lack of strategic moves at critical points cost him dearly in the decisive battle.

The book has given great care to see if Tipu can be termed a tolerant ruler at least in the medieval sense but concludes with a negative response. The sheer discrimination of his subjects on the basis of religion was a shame to humanity. Rule 73 of Tipu’s revenue code stated that persons who converted to Islam were entitled to a discount of half of the assessed revenue if he was a farmer. If he was a merchant, his goods shall pass tax-free (p.677). The author also debunks the efforts of modern Left-Islamist historians to add a secularist sheen to the image of Tipu. Several misrepresentation made by Mohibbul Hasan are called out at various points in the book. The atrocities committed on the people of Malabar or Coorg or the Mangalore Christians or Mandyam Iyengars definitely fall in the modern definition of genocide. Sampath concludes that that all kings were violent and all wars were bloody is a flimsy, insufficient cover to show that some were indeed more violent than the norms and manifested a deep-seated theological intent to commit these acts (p.768). Tipu was a mixed bag of arrogant bigotry and trembling superstition. This extraordinary combination made him show occasional respect for the object of persecution amidst general intolerance. In the final stages, he implored Hindu priests to perform pujas for him. Tipu employed several Hindus in his administration and military and they willingly worked their best for him without making even a single attempt on his life. This glaring irony is actually a reflection of the absence of a feeling of belonging to a common community and the lack of an organization that united the Hindu community. They were divided as always even under extreme oppression and the enemy mercilessly cut them down.

The book is an authentic and unbiased version of Tipu’s history with a long list of references, notes, variety of sources, citations and bibliography. Many of the observations made by the author naturally follow from antecedent events which ‘secular’ scholars are loathe to write down even though true. The book is adorned with an excellent foreword by noted Kannada author and historian S. L. Bhyrappa in which he thunders with indignation whether the nation can reinforce secularism by a false portrayal of history. The book gives more prominence to battles that readers get a feeling of always standing on the battlefront. But that was the nature of Tipu’s political policy. The book includes some rare paintings of major personalities produced during Tipu’s rule or immediately after his fall. The author has given some attention to reproduce samples of oriental fascination of British art, theatre, poetry, prose and literature on the subject of Tipu Sultan.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star