A History of the Pakistan Army

Title: A History of the Pakistan Army – Wars and Insurrections
Author: Brian Cloughley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1999 (First)
ISBN: 9780195790153
Pages: 384

India has a belligerent neighbour on her west, which fought with her in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999. The army is the greatest institution of the Pakistani state. Occasionally, the army is the Pakistani state. India is posed as an existential threat to this Islamic state from the very beginning of its existence. The resulting paranoia helps the army achieve whatever privileges it want – money, land, control of industries, prestige and even civil power. The politicians and soldiers in Pakistan are locked together in a zero-sum game. If one party is weak, the other encroaches on its domain rather than keeping themselves functionally and healthily engaged. This book is a history of the Pakistani army from 1947 to 1997. Though written by an Australian author, it provides a fresh, local perspective as the author has close links to senior army officials in Pakistan. Colonel (retired) Brian Cloughley served in the British and Australian armies in Germany and other theatres. He was the deputy head of UNMOGIP in Kashmir in the 1980s and Australian defence attaché during 1989-94 in Pakistan. While working on this book, he hoped that the army was unlikely ever again to be used to suppress democracy, but this was exactly what came to pass in 1999. This book was published before the Kargil war and the subsequent military takeover of Pakistan.

Cloughley notes on many occasions that many Pakistani army officers are secular in outlook. But this salutary trait was fading away in the 1990s as quite a number of young officers were radicalized and easily swayed by fanatics who blare out against the West in general and the US in particular because they are the powers which stand between them and their ultimate goal of Islam’s takeover of the world. Whatever may be the personal preferences of its officers, the army as a whole used religion and Muslim bigots to the fullest extent against their enemies. The invasion of Kashmir in October 1947 was made by tribesmen motivated by religion and intent on destruction, pillage and rape (p.14). Not only that the Pakistani army did not feel any compunction, it actually encouraged the ‘irregulars’. The author talked to a nun who ran a hospital that fell victim to the tribesmen’s carnal lust and contents to merely record that her disclosure of how her colleagues were killed after inflicting ‘appalling indecencies’ was shocking. The incident is also mentioned in Collins and Lapierre’s ‘The Freedom at Midnight’. This book also shows how Pakistan descended into martial rule regularly. Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan and Zia ul-Haq are the three generals described in the book who held the nation in their palms. After this book was published, Pervez Musharraf also entered this list. In the early 1960s, the army had a high opinion of itself without having done very much except expand a bit and conduct some mediocre training with its new American equipment (p.56). A defence assistance pact was signed with the US in 1953 and the army was modernized.

The book observes the dismissive and haughty attitude the army harbours toward local politicians. In 1953, Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Bogra attempted to introduce legislation to cut the size of armed forces, but had to withdraw it under pressure. Meanwhile, Ayub Khan was promoting his henchmen to senior army positions and consolidating his hold on power. The politicians were also corrupt and incompetent and the army was disdainful to them who saw them as more a nuisance than an essential functionary of the state. This book does not examine the issue of corruption in the army. This is not even presented as an afterthought nor an aside. However, appointments and promotions to senior positions were on grounds of loyalty to the chief, which is cited as a structural problem of the Pakistan army especially when the chief nourished political ambitions. Rarely did the army was held accountable by the society. One such moment was the abject failure in the 1971 Bangladesh War, in which 29 senior officers were shunted out in one go that included two generals, eleven lieutenant-generals and ten major-generals. 70,000 soldiers and 20,000 civil servants and military dependents were captured by India as prisoners in that war who were released only after two years. The author claims this to be a violation of Article 118 of the Geneva Convention.

The book reiterates the doubtful role of the US as a trusted ally of Pakistan. They supplied weapons, equipment, spare parts and training to Pakistan, but when the latter was engaged in an actual war against India, the US ditched them in view of the higher priority they accorded to their own international commitments. In 1965 and 1971, US cut off military aid in the middle of hostilities causing a shortage of ammunition and spare parts. India was not much dependent on the US, sourcing the material mainly from USSR and France. The coverage of 1965 and 1971 wars is exhaustive on the micro-scale with details of troop movements and field manoeuvres that are not interesting to general readers. In 1965, Pakistan scored some wins in the preliminary minor skirmishes in the Rann of Kutch and buoyed by this false sense of euphoria went ahead head-on with a futile invasion of India’s Kashmir state. The 1971 war was the culmination of decades of oppression and ill-treatment of the people of East Pakistan. Bengalis were regarded as inferiors by Pathans and Punjabis who had met them, especially in the military. Pakistani soldiers inflicted atrocities on Bangladesh that ‘beggared belief and its details confound description’ (p.150). Cloughley remarks wryly that the soldiers readily obeyed the orders and even relished them. He then provides a backhanded justification to the army’s brutality by describing instances where Bengalis had killed Pakistanis in a gruesome manner and concludes that ‘no one can understand how our fellow human beings could act in such a fashion’.

India is a very strong presence in the book as well as in the Pakistan army’s psyche. The attitude is usually one of contempt and hatred. Ayub Khan, as president of the country, informed his military chief that ‘Hindu morale would not stand more than a couple of hard blows delivered at the right time and place’ (p.71). It seems the author also inculcated a part of this mindset, albeit in a minor degree. He runs helter-skelter to compile possible reasons for Pakistan’s rout in 1971 and comes out with a handsome list such as poor leadership of commander A A K Niazi and shortages of airpower, armour and manpower. One divisional commander was said to be spending ‘most of his time on the prayer mat’ (p.210). The causes of failure on the western front is even more exhaustive – poor planning, indecision about deployment, hasty and countermanded regrouping, inadequate or even non-existent coordination between formations, inability to seize the moment for exploitation, lack of cooperation between GHQ and Air HQ and bungling of movement control procedures. The list is endless but better skill and bravery of Indians does not even for a moment crosses his mind. The author generally employs neutral language and occasionally praises Indian troops precisely in those encounters which they had lost. Pakistanis had always considered themselves superior to Indians, so the defeat of 1971 in which half of the country vanished overnight into thin air was difficult to swallow. Expressing his poor opinion of India, the author remarks that ‘Indian officers are genial, comradely and good company when sure that the intelligence services were not looking over their shoulders’ (p.255). He goes on to comment that ‘India’s defence forces are large but their equipment is aging and attempts to design and manufacture advanced weapons were largely unsuccessful. Hence the threat posed by India is not as great as it appears on paper’ (p.339). This was his reading in mid-1990s. He also cautions India on domestic problems such as ‘violence by Dalits’ as an unsettling factor. Here, he simply echoes the Pakistani strategy to drive a wedge between various Hindu communities.

After the 1971 war, the remaining part of the book is a monotonous recapitulation of what happened in Pakistani politics beginning with the usurpation of Bhutto by Zia ul-Haq and ending in 1997 which envelopes the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Mujahideen resistance. The cursory narrative is in stark contrast to the fact that this was the period when Claughley had actually worked in Pakistan. The Kargil crisis is not covered, but Siachen is. The conspiracy angle of General Zia’s death in a plane crash is not examined. A notable aspect of this part of the book is that it is very shallow. The Islamization of the military which began under Zia is also given short shrift. Besides, readers smell occasional whiffs of white racial superiority in such descriptions as ‘the bureaucratic system created by the British with its checks, balances and counterchecks played into the hands of those given to laziness and manipulation’ (p.27). He is referring to the fall in standards after the colonial masters left. The book makes a sensational but long-discredited allegation against Morarji Desai, former prime minister of India, when he was an ordinary minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet. The author claims that Desai was a paid agent of CIA (p.179). The inexplicable point is that even with such a highly placed source, the US could not deduce that India was planning a military incursion in East Pakistan. In another place, Cloughley calls him ‘a traitor’ outright (p.183). The foreword of the book is written by Gen. Abdul Waheed, former army chief of Pakistan. The author has good personal rapport with three successive army chiefs who invited him to attend military exercises and permitted him to freely engage with the top brass. However, the book does not bear witness to the author’s celebrated exposure with the army in bringing out any hitherto unknown fact.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translator: Gregory Rabassa
Publisher: Penguin, 1996 (First published 1967)
ISBN: 9780140157512
Pages: 422

When Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, I was ten years old. Studying in primary school, we children preparing for quiz competitions at school were obliged to remember his name for the coming tests and exams on general knowledge. Though he was given the honour for his ‘novels and short stories’, it was painted by media such that his masterpiece, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ alone had won the award. The title had a soothing feel to it. Every time you uttered it, something moved imperceptibly inside and you never got tired saying it aloud. Of course, even though the novel was praised very much, not many people had actually read it. At least, I could not find one who had gone through it at that time. That’s why around ten years later, when I was attending college and joined a public library to improve my English skills, I took the book off a dusty shelf for the first time. I read it with as eagerness as when you do push ups and found the going tough. My language skills were only developing and I could not enjoy the rich tapestry of vivid imagination that Marquez had spread before me. Naturally, I began forgetting the plot right from the moment the book was put down. Every time I heard its title mentioned by somebody else, I would momentarily feel a light bulk glow inside in the sense that I have read it once which will immediately be followed by guilty darkness that I don’t remember anything from it. Another three decades later, it now felt that the book may be given another try. That’s why a copy was newly bought and read. This is not exactly a review, but a summary of my own adventure of an act resembling climbing the sheer rock of Marquez’ creative genius.

The book tells the saga of the Buendia family in seven generations which founded the town of Macondo in Colombia (the names are certainly fictional). Jose Arcadio Buendia, the patriarch who established the settlement wanted proximity to the sea and instead had to contend with solitude in the middle of nowhere among a wide swamp. The settlers’ ties to the town were tenacious at first as ‘a person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground’. Buendias’ mansion becomes an icon of Macondo and the patriarch’s son Colonel Aureliano Buendia makes the family’s name a household one in the nation by joining a civil war fighting on the liberal side. Overwhelmed by odds against, he lays down arms and the fall of the family starts at that point. The males of the family adopt only two names – Jose Arcadio and Aureliano. All those who chose the former name exhibit traits of physical strength and rational mind while the Aurelianos were impulsive in nature but with a profound inkling to acquire esoteric knowledge. An Aureliano of the sixth generation finally succeeds in decoding the predictions about the dynasty’s end precisely at the moment at which it was coming true. It is amusing that Marquez alludes the coded prediction to be in Sanskrit. How he stumbled upon India is unknown, but it is suggestive that he had named his daughter ‘Indira’, rather than Amaranta or Ursula, the common names of female Buendias.

As the title implies, solitude is the overarching theme of the book. The town of Macondo founded by the Buendia clan was solitary for most of its existence which was broken by the appearance of railroad that brought in a ruthless American banana company. But the tide turned and the town fell back to desolation as everybody abandoned it. The banana company left on the face of stiff local resistance and the government which shot dead thousands of striking workers of the company lost interest when the town was depopulated. Most of the characters also exhibit the curse of solitude. Dead men come back to haunt their killers as ghosts not out of malice or revenge, but because they could not endure loneliness in the other world. Don’t ask how it’s possible – that’s magical realism for you. Melquiades the gypsy returned from death because he could not bear the solitude. Prudencio Aguilar, whom the first Buendia killed, returns to him because ‘after many years of death, the yearning for the living was so intense, the need for company so pressing, so terrifying the nearness of that other death which exists within death, made him love his worst enemy’. The novelist comments about a senile character that ‘the secret of a good old age is simply an honourable pact with solitude’. The loneliness of some characters is so intense that he is said to have ‘locked himself up inside himself’.

The book is suffused with magical realism that is mesmerizing if you stand back a little from the flow of narrative and pause for a moment to reflect on it. However, just for this extra work, some readers may find it unpalatable. The book has to be slowly masticated and not at all meant for swallowing in one gulp. Then you feel the pleasantly suffocating richness of Marquez’ expressions. Some characters in the novel are alone with only their memories as companions and the memories are said to have ‘materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms’. The novel also mirrors the revolutionary spirit of Latin America to a good degree that glorifies fratricidal warfare as quite normal or even something to be desired. One of the Buendias tries to kill an old friend who was captured in war, saying ‘Remember, old friend, I am not shooting you. It’s the revolution that’s shooting you’. Apart from socialism, dictatorship also flourishes in Macondo where human life is sometimes not worth anything. The autocratic commands are said to be so effective that ‘his orders were being carried out even before they were given, even before he thought of them, and they always went much beyond what he would have dared have them do’.

Fatalism and incest are the two other recurring themes which mark the narrative with significance. In fact, the second is related to the first as if to prove that a prophecy had come true. We see incestual relations developing in at least two generations of the Buendia family. The founding parents – Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran – were first cousins and Ursula feared giving birth to a monster child with pig’s tail as was believed to be the fate of offspring arising out of such tabooed unions. In the sixth generation, the match was more on the forbidden scale than the first and the couple was horrified by the birth of a boy with a pig’s tail. The unfortunate child is then carried away by ants which had colonized the mansion in its every nook and cranny. This leads to another prophecy coming true which had earlier predicted the chaining of the insane patriarch to a chestnut tree in the middle of the front garden. Unfortunately for the family, the coded material was decrypted from Sanskrit only at the last moment of existence of the last member. This novel is considered to be the epitome of Spanish creativity and is a geographical indicator of South America in the sense that the physical environment also assumes the nature of a protagonist such as a rain that lashes continuously for many years, warm gusts of wind, ants and termites eating into the innards of furniture or even people, yellow butterflies that signify the vital force of another human being and many similar devices.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

War and Gold

Title: War and Gold – A Five-Hundred Year History of Empires, Adventures and Debt
Author: Kwasi Kwarteng
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2014 (First)
ISBN: 9781408848166
Pages: 424

The trade and commerce of ancient and medieval societies were based on exchange of precious material such as cowrie shells, beads of rarely occurring minerals, shaped stones, silver and gold. Taken alone, gold is just another metal but with lesser practical use than iron. Its value was assigned by a consensus of the society which handled it that it was precious. So were cowrie shells a few centuries before. If that is the case, why not use paper with special markings and engravings as a store of value that is impossible to replicate without costly equipment? The idea is surprisingly new, probably developed only when the state’s law-enforcing arms became longer that effectively put a stop to counterfeiting on a large scale. Trade expanded enormously with the growth of credit and global economy thrived. This book is an excellent attempt to tell a narrative story about the history of money from the time of the Spanish conquistadors and their discovery of the New World – in short, the origin of the Western world as we know it today. It summarizes some of the monetary developments which have shaped government in the last 500 years. Kwasi Kwarteng is a British politician of Ghanaian parentage and holds a PhD in history. He served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer for a month when Liz Truss was the prime minister.

The discovery of vast stores of gold in the New World during the sixteenth century invigorated European economy and polity. Spain was the only kingdom ordained by the Pope to conquer the New World. It is ironic that such immense wealth did not make Spain a great nation even though gold and silver flowed like water into its coffers. Spain used it to fund their military conquests. They heavily borrowed from private bankers and were in great debt. Increase in the availability of bullion led to general price rise and merchant classes flourished by the end of that century. The constant need to pay for wars was the principal engine of modern finance. This in turn indirectly controlled the destinies of nations. The Seven Years’ War (1756-63) greatly indebted Britain. To raise money they resorted to taxation of the American colonies which was resented, fiercely resisted and finally led to the birth of the United States after a war of independence. Paper money came into general use after the two revolutions in US and France. Administrations printed money for their use at will that caused its loss of value. This was later linked to gold. The institution which issued the paper currency kept a portion of its value in the form of gold and released the bullion in exchange of paper currency at a constant pre-specified rate. This mechanism was known as the gold standard and remained in vogue till 1971 when the US opted out of the gold standard.

The period between Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and the First World War in 1914 may rightly be called an era of financial prudence and discipline in which governments tried very hard to keep balanced budgets with deficit in a year counterbalanced by surplus in the following years. A currency fully convertible into gold, a central bank which controlled the note issue based on that gold and an extensive and highly developed market for credit were features of the Late Victorian Age. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the complacency of the ruling group towards the ambitions of the ruled saw some real downward pressure. As democratic elements further strengthened, greater public spending was demanded from government. This pushed them to deficit to cover which they started borrowing money on a larger scale. World War I upset all political calculations and national budgets in Europe. The war was fought on borrowed money. More cash were printed and the currency was briefly unpegged from the gold standard. As the currency was delinked from gold, inflation soared again. The thinking changed and the practice of having balanced budgets gave way to deficit financing. The wartime restrictions undermined Britain’s position as the financial and industrial capital of the world. The USA stepped into British shoes. Britain’s national debt multiplied 12.5 times from 1914 to 1921. War thus inevitably put an end to the balanced rectitude of Victorian public finance.

 The five decades between the end of World War I in 1918 and the fall of Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971 saw the climax of the gold standard and its inevitable demise. The Great Depression broke out in 1929 when the US Dollar was still linked to gold. Rapidly expanding export to post-War Europe accumulated a large quantity of gold in the US. Interest rates plummeted. When interest rate goes low, investors search for innovative schemes to derive more yield on their invested money. The low interests generated a credit boom coupled with visual prosperity of the American people through instalment purchases. When the credit bubble burst, the economy went into depression in 1929. After four years of low activity, the US devalued its currency by 59 per cent resetting the gold value to $35 an ounce from $20.67 set in 1792. The irony is that the 1929 depression occurred when the US was still enjoying a surplus in foreign trade while the 2008 recession happened under a trade deficit. The two world wars and the Depression transformed the ideas of a sound currency and balanced budgets into a consensus of debt and unprecedented levels of government spending often named as the Keynesian system after the writings of John Maynard Keynes. The Bretton Woods Agreement did not straightaway go back to the gold standard. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar under a somewhat static exchange rate. The dollar itself was then linked to gold. The US then bankrolled Europe and Japan for post-War reconstruction.

The book neatly summarizes the post-World War II commerce and the compulsions which made the US abandon the gold standard in 1971, perhaps for ever. The enviable position of Britain was irredeemably lost at the end of the War in 1945. Britain lay devastated and prostrate. A third of its overseas investments were liquidated and export trade ceased to function. Dollar gained ascendancy over the pound sterling and Britain became the leading debtor country in the world. Instead of then adopting pragmatic free-trade policies, Britain democratically brought in socialism that undermined the growth of the economy. At the same time, Americans imposed a well-managed form of capitalism on Germany which had surrendered. The same system with some minor modifications was also implemented in Japan. Under the canopy of American military support, Japan did not have to incur the ruinous defence expenditure of the pre-War years. Its US-made economic framework kept the Japanese Yen at an artificially low exchange rate against the dollar which boosted exports to the US and brought prosperity to the economy. When Europe and Japan recovered, American balance of trade shifted in their favour and the US became a net importer. Trade deficit made American gold to flow out of the country into the hands of foreign exporters – Germany and Japan. The US was incurring huge expenditure in the Vietnam War too. The pressure on gold mounted to such a high extreme that the US exited from the gold standard in 1971 and the Bretton Woods system collapsed.

Kwarteng makes a lucid analysis and unprejudiced commentary on the world economy that entered ‘the modern period’ with the demise of Bretton Woods, in which currencies unpegged to any gold value freely floated in exchange rates to other currencies, like any other commodity. The tight control of money supply by central banks known as monetarism came into being as the prominent philosophy by the end-1970s. It sought to control inflation and regulate government spending to the lower scales. Paper currencies not backed by any commodity standard facilitated unprecedented credit expansion. The soaring gold price from $40 an ounce in 1971 to $2700 today shows the extent to which investors were losing faith in the American currency. Paper money allowed governments to print ever greater quantities of cash and still shielded the most developed countries from the consequences of their excessive spending. Poorer countries would not be that lucky in this situation. Almost the entire book is dedicated to America and Europe and the small amount of space given over to Asian powers like China and Japan makes for interesting reading. The rise of China followed the path of mercantilism. This is a system which sought to boost exports in order to gain gold. A large population and low wages helped them achieve their objectives. The Chinese yuan was kept low in value which was stable during the Southeast Asian crisis in late-1990s even though the pressure on yuan was considerable as the other currencies were falling. The Chinese leaders, who are unaccountable to anything like a democratic electorate, planned for the long term and refused to be swayed by short-term considerations (p.292). The book was written in 2014 and contains no mention of India at all or its potential as a rising major economy at a level matching a part of China’s growth numbers.

Books on macro finance and economy has a nasty habit of being very lucid at first, dry after a point and would make the reader gasping for breath in the end. This book is delightfully different from this generic dictum. All parts of the book maintain clarity of thought and fruitfully engage the attention of the readers. It is amazing that Kwarteng packs five centuries of financial history into a solid tome that reviews each crisis faced by nations and the lessons learned from that episode are used to rewrite the future story. Even though a politician himself, Kwarteng has been very diligent in avoiding contentious postulates. The intricate ways in which the global political landscape emerged from a series of episodes such as the Vietnam War, oil embargo of 1973, the Reagan-Thatcher years, rise of China, the Southeast Asian crisis of the end-1990s and the 2008 recession are all catalogued in this book in an effective manner.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Banaras – City of Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 5 Star

The Case That Shook India

Title: The Case That Shook India – The Verdict that Led to the Emergency
Author: Prashant Bhushan
Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2017 (First published 1978)
ISBN: 9780670090051
Pages: 314

India awoke to freedom at midnight while the world was sleeping on the fifteenth of August, 1947, as extolled poetically by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. 28 years later, on a hot summer day in June, it tumbled and fell headlong into a dictatorship instigated by his daughter and grandson. The dark night that began on June 26, 1975 would run till March 20, 1977, when the ruling party and its authoritarian prime minister were voted out of office by an indignant populace. Indira Gandhi’s era marked the pinnacle of military glory for India in the spectacular victory over Pakistan in the 1971 war. In fact, a triumph of this scale was not witnessed within a thousand years. But that was the only saving grace of her disastrous stint as prime minister of India. Having no regard for political ideals or personal integrity, her rule pushed Indian polity to the lowest depths of corruption, nepotism, separatism and sycophancy. Her populist policies devastated Indian economy in the name of socialism and put the country at least two decades behind among the world’s financial powers. In 1991, Narasimha Rao reset all that she had initiated in the 1970s and steered India back into the path of progress. Indira’s declaration of Emergency in 1975 was caused by many factors, the most serious among them Opposition protests that were growing in vehemence and stridency each passing day over price rise, loss of employment and grinding poverty. However, the proximate cause of the nation’s tipping over to dictatorship in 1975 was a court case in the Allahabad High Court in which a judge invalidated her election to parliament in 1971 which took away her claim to continue in office. This book is a detailed narrative of the case right from its filing in 1971 and till it was quashed on appeal in the Supreme Court in 1975. This is authored by Prashant Bhushan who is the son of Shanti Bhushan who was the lawyer of Indira’s opponent who argued the case against her. The junior Bhushan relies on the notes he had prepared in court while the advocates were arguing the various aspects of the case and his own father’s legal notes. This book was first published in 1978 immediately after lifting the Emergency and reprinted in 2017. You can find reviews of several books on Emergency in this blog, but this book is totally different from others as it has solely focussed on the legal aspect. Prashant Bhushan is a public interest lawyer in the Supreme Court of India most known for cases such as 2G and coal scam during the Manmohan Singh era. He is a vocal critic of Narendra Modi and the NDA government.

To say that the case against Indira Gandhi was sensational would be an understatement. The entire nation looked eagerly upon Allahabad as every legal point or loophole was assiduously dissected by both sides. It was the only hope of an Opposition that was suffering from a lack of leadership – or, the excess of it, depending on which way you look at it. The people’s verdict was crystal clear. Indira won by bagging 60 per cent of the popular vote in Rae Bareli constituency in 1971 trumping over the combined Opposition’s candidate Raj Narain. Shanti Bhushan was the senior counsel for Raj Narain who was confused on how to go forward in the case at first. The first draft of allegations claimed that magic ink was used in printing of ballots on special paper. This erased the mark stamped by voters while the pre-printed voting mark for Indira would become legible after a few days. This claim was so outlandish and ridiculous that it was dropped by the petitioner immediately and instead they focussed on corrupt electoral practices of Indira by exploiting her position as the prime minister of the country. The case trial lasted for four years in which four judges heard the arguments, the last being Jag Mohan Lal Sinha who pronounced the judgement in 1975. Oral evidence was recorded between August 1974 and January 1975. Indira Gandhi herself appeared in High Court for two days and bungled under cross-examination. Justice Sinha held Indira guilty and set aside her election as void and disqualified her from holding office for six years. However, he stayed the execution for twenty days for filing appeal in the Supreme Court. Justice V R Krishna Iyer of the Supreme Court formally stayed the High Court order but restrained Indira from voting in parliamentary proceedings. She declared an internal Emergency in retaliation and suspended the Constitution. She convened the parliament after jailing many opposition members and passed an amendment of all provisions of electoral laws on which she was disqualified with retrospective effect from 1971. This would have forced the Supreme Court to have no alternative than to validate her election. Not content with this, she introduced and passed the 39th Constitution amendment in just three days which forbade challenging the election of the prime minister in a court of law. So, by the time the Supreme Court convened to consider her appeal, she had changed all laws and even the Constitution itself to force the court’s hand. Bhushan explains the arguments and logic heard in both the courts.

Even though Indira Gandhi undoubtedly misused her power to quash the legal proceedings against her, the Allahabad High Court’s order also seems to be not furthering the course of justice. By setting aside a candidate’s thumping electoral victory over a minor technical issue, the High Court, in my opinion, acted irresponsibly and committed an equal misuse of power. Yashpal Kapoor, who was an officer-on-special duty in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, was the electoral agent of Indira Gandhi. He resigned from his government post on Jan 13, 1971 whose resignation was accepted on Jan 25 with retrospective effect from Jan 14. He was not paid after Jan 13, nor did he attend office thereafter. However, the court refused to accept the retrospective part of the order and decided that Kapoor was still in official service till Jan 25. This made all political work done by Kapoor between Jan 14 and 25 a corrupt practice. The electoral laws applied from the date a person ‘held himself out’ as a prospective candidate. One would have expected this to come into force after the elections were officially notified on Jan 27. Justice Sinha made a strange observation here too. Court decided that the election became in prospect right from Dec 27, 1970 when the previous Lok Sabha was dissolved! Two days after the dissolution, on Dec 29, Indira Gandhi had replied to a question in a press conference that she doesn’t intend to change her constituency. Court presumed this to be her holding out as a candidate even though she was nominated by the party only four weeks later. Both these decisions made her electoral work a malpractice and corruption under law. Why did the court act in this obscure way to invalidate a clear selection made by the people? Reading between the lines, a motive is faintly visible to discerning readers. What follows is my own assessment and it is only an informed guess. This hostility might be a strike back by the judiciary for superseding three senior judges in favour of Justice Ajit Nath Ray for promotion as the Chief Justice of India in 1973. Justice K S Hegde was one of the overlooked judges. He had made an interim judgement in favour Raj Narain on a minor issue related to the same case that had gone to Supreme Court for consideration in March 1972. Ray’s appointment evoked strong resentment in the legal community and it is probable that some of the decisions against Indira Gandhi was coloured by this sentiment. In a total departure from precedent, Justice Bhagwati held in another election case involving a politician named A N Chawla that any expenditure by anybody in favour of a candidate as coming under his expenses. This clarification was made in Oct 1974 while Raj Narain’s case was pending in the High Court. Justice Sinha took cognizance of this judgment and added some more expenditure to Indira Gandhi’s account even though she still barely managed to be within the limits. All these point to the sad conclusion that the court too had exceeded its limits on legal propriety in this case.

The book provides a stark reminder of how large was Indira’s ego that brooked no obstacles and wanted total obeisance from all arms of the state, including judiciary. The 39th constitutional amendment was passed only for validating her election and forbidding anybody from questioning it in future. That both houses of parliament and half of the state legislatures ratified this piece of legislation in just three days shows the obsequiousness of her party whose leaders danced to her tune. The latter half of the book is dedicated to the appeal proceedings and the petition challenging the constitutional validity of the 39th amendment in the Supreme Court. Those who are not familiar with the scene of action in court would find it curious and a bit amusing to note the clarifying questions asked by presiding judges to the pleading counsels which sometimes appear to be naïve and childish. One judge asks, “if a company spends money on a candidate, is it an offence under penal code”? “Yes”, replies the petitioner’s advocate. The judge then asks to the astonishment of readers as to “how can the company be jailed or hanged”? The counsel then informs him that the person responsible for the acts of the company can be punished (p.231).

The book includes a foreword by M. Hidayatullah, former Chief Justice of India and former Vice President of the nation, who was a legal luminary. The only thing that is added to the previous edition is a preface to the 2017 edition which is penned by Prashant Bhushan. As can be expected, he assails the Modi government on long-standing issues and suggests unrealistic and unworkable proposals to reform even the fundamentals of elections in such a way that no party would ever gain an absolute majority in the parliament which would push the nation into confusion and policy paralysis. Of course, the judiciary and the lawyers would have a dream time deciding even minor issues as all disputes would have to be eventually settled in courts. His suggestion to adopt the proportional representation system of Switzerland is laughable, considering the size and nature of the two societies. This is all the more comic when one remembers that women were allowed to vote in Switzerland only in 1971. Many discussions inside court which are presented in the book involves the landmark Kesavananda Bharati judgement of 1973 in which the Supreme Court constrained the Parliament's power to amend the Constitution only to those provisions which are not part of the basic structure of the Constitution. At first glance, this may seem normal and even a healthy check on the House’s unbridled power. But the sting in the tail is that it is only the judiciary which can pronounce whether an amendment violates the basic structure or not. This plain usurpation of democratic powers by a few unelected judges who are accountable to none still continues. Parliament needs two-thirds majority to amend the Constitution, but a division bench requires only a simple majority to pronounce it ultra vires. Of course, Bhushan supports judiciary’s enhanced powers, but the danger is clearly visible. Two decades later, judges took upon themselves the power to appoint those who would succeed them. The collegium system is so opaque that it is not even amenable to judicial review. Still, the Supreme Court thinks that it does not violate the basic structure! The book is quite readable even though many legal points are minutely described. An epilogue on what had happened to the new laws and amendments introduced by Indira Gandhi after the Janata Party came to power could also have been included.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Buddhist Landscape of Varanasi

Title: The Buddhist Landscape of Varanasi
Author: Vidula Jayaswal
Publisher: Aryan Books International, 2015 (First)
ISBN: 9788173055416
Pages: 220

Varanasi is not just the holy city of Hindus. Buddhism also locates some of its holiest spots in or near the city. It was at Sarnath – a few kilometres outside the city – that Buddha preached his first sermon upon attaining Enlightenment at Gaya. Varanasi was a prominent city in Buddha’s time as well regarding the presence of learned scholars on religion, rich merchants to support the congregation and political power to patronize the new movement. That may be why the Tathagata chose to trek the 250 km path from Gaya to a place called Rishipattana which was famous, quite literally, as the abode of sages. Sarnath is nearby this town and the Buddha thus embarked on his noble work of ‘turning the wheel of Dharma’. Jataka stories contain the quintessence of Buddhist thought and a large many of them are narrated to have taken place at Varanasi, which was the capital of the Kashi kingdom. Prof. Vidula Jayaswal taught archaeology at the Banaras Hindu University for nearly four decades and has considerable field experience at her back. She is the author of eighteen books and research monographs. This book is a snapshot of her work which identified the hamlet of Aktha near Sarnath as the ancient town of Rishipattana. The sacred architecture of Sarnath as well as the ancient remains of Varanasi which provides the backdrop of Jataka stories is covered in this nice book. It is basically a monograph that emerged from a number of short articles which the author presented in national and international seminars on Buddhist art, archaeology and culture. It is aimed at reaching a larger section of society interested in Buddhism and Buddhist sites.

In the early part of the book, the nature of state formation in the Ganga plain is described. This took place around the seventh century BCE in two distinct clusters – janapadas which were monarchical and ganas that were republican. Kashi was ruled by a king. Then she explains why Varanasi was significant for Buddhism to a great extent and to Jainism also to a lesser extent. Both Buddha and Mahavira came to Varanasi. Apart from the former’s First Sermon at a deer park called Mrugadaya at that time and later known as Sarnath, Varanasi was also the centre of origin and development of religious thought, intricacies of skilled handicrafts, performing arts, trade and commerce. The city was the foremost urban conglomeration right from Late Vedic period. Sarnath flourished between the time of Ashoka (third century BCE) when he built stupas and religious buildings there to Kumaradevi (one of the queens of Gahadvala king Govindchandra, twelfth century CE) when the last of the structures were built there. This book covers the entire time span of these fifteen centuries.

The ancient geography of Sarnath is examined in the book. The land contained many forest patches and a deer park named Mrugadaya might have come up. There was a settlement of sages named Rishipattana nearby, mentioned in Buddhist texts such as Mahavastu written in Sanskrit. The rationale for this place in becoming a resort for rishis was that it was situated at the junction of major trade routes passing through Kashi janapada. Even now, major highways pass near the town and their prototypes might have served the population in the second millennium BCE. The visit and stay of rishis and learned masters helped the town to gain the reputation of being a centre of wisdom. That may be why Buddha chose to preach his First Sermon there. The author has personally led excavations in the fields from 1994 and came out with the conclusion that Aktha is the modern face of the ancient Rishipattana. However, she has attempted to squeeze scientific test data into the straightjacket of established historical theories. Carbon 14 tests on the earliest remains at Aktha showed habitation from 1800-1450 BCE. This is in conflict with the much controversial Aryan Invasion theory which proposes that people should have settled in Varanasi a good five centuries later. Still, the author makes a compromise to settle the site’s ancestry in the Later Vedic period (1400-1000 BCE). This is in stark contrast to Carbon 14 data in a vain bid to salvage the Aryan Invasion theory. Considering that the research was funded by American/British agencies such as the Ford Foundation, this is expected. But the undisguised truth is that the middle Ganga plain was inhabited much before the dates which are postulated by this colonial-era theory.

A rather unique feature of Sarnath is that we have eye-witness accounts of how that place looked like in the remote past. This is from the descriptions of Fa Hien in fourth century CE and Xuanzang in the seventh century CE. Both these scholars had come from China with the intention of collecting the greatest number of documents related to Buddhism and to hold extensive discussions with its teachers. Sarnath being one of the cardinal places of Buddhism, both the Chinese travellers paid a visit to the place. Xuanzang says that the Ashokan column was standing at a majestic height of seventy feet which ‘glittered in the light’. Archaeologists have discovered the remains of the mentioned buildings and structures. On the other hand, the destruction and pilferage that happened in British times should force the colonial administrators to hang their heads in shame. Jagat Singh, the dewan of the local zamindar Raja Cheta Sign, scavenged the Sarnath stupas in 1794 for material to build a market nearby. He pulled down the Dharmarajika stupa and the vacant circular pit is now called the Jagat Singh stupa! In 1835, a British army engineer named Alexander Cunningham recovered a circular sandstone box from a stupa which contained pearls, silver, gold and three pieces of human arm bones. He also threw 48 statues and many other sculpted stones into the Varana river to erect a bridge over it (p.61). In the medieval period, vandalism of these sacred structures was carried out even by kings. Akbar built an octagonal tower on top of the Chaukhandi stupa in 1588 to commemorate an earlier visit of his father Humayun to the place. The fortunate part is that even though a Mughal, he didn’t bring it down.

In a fine example of archaeological detective work, Jayaswal pieces together the chronological sequence of construction of various structures in Sarnath which she categorizes into five time periods titled Maurya, Sunga, Kushan, Gupta and post-Gupta/early-medieval periods. There is a tendency among Left historians to claim that kings who favoured Brahminical practices did not contribute to build new Buddhist monuments. This fallacious notion arises from the anachronistic projection of the mores of a future era into the distant past. Since the distinctions between Hinduism and Buddhism are clear-cut now, they mistakenly assume that it was always so. This is wrong and the author writes about contributions made by Sunga kings who were thought to be anti-Buddhist. Some additions and constructions of railings had taken place at Sarnath in this era. It is also established that the stupa at Bharhut and the railings and gateways of Sanchi stupa were built in the Sunga period. This demolishes the myth of Sungas’ persecution of the Buddhists. The book also points out a hint to the development of Varanasi, which is outside the pail of Sarnath, as a place of brahminical worship. The growth of Shaivism during the reign of Vasudeva of the Kushan dynasty might have resulted in the decline of Sarnath and growth of Varanasi as a major centre of Shiva worship in the second century CE.

The author ingeniously attempts to link her research in archaeology to the very fundamental plane of Varanasi’s establishment as a major religious place. In this regard, she tethers her findings to places mentioned in some Jataka fables such as the fish that refused to move to the river when draught desiccated the muddy patch in which the fish ordinarily stayed. Readers get an impression that she has found that muddy patch! Even the presumption that tales involving mice and tortoises can be linked to archaeological discoveries is highly awkward. Jayaswal investigates into the origin and development of artisanal sculpture work at Varanasi. Demand for donation of icons from large beneficiaries like merchants created a flourishing of sculptural art in Sarnath in the Gupta period. Earlier, idols carved in Mathura were brought to Sarnath for installation. However, with the development of local industry supported by rich sandstone quarries at nearby Chunar, we see idols made locally. Lowering or almost closed eyes, divine smile and wet transparent drapery are some of the typical features of the Sarnath style. The book surprisingly does not bother much on the reasons why the Sarnath establishment collapsed in medieval period. In around thirteenth century CE, the flourishing Buddhist infrastructure here appears to have lost its glory (p.200). But what were the causes of it? The author makes a feeble guess that ‘whether the power of the Brahminical followers was the cause of the uprooting of the Buddhist establishment is difficult to ascertain’. This hypothesis is plainly ridiculous. There is evidence that even in the twelfth century CE, Brahminical followers contributed generously to it, such as the installation of the Kumaradevi stupa. Why should they rescind their patronage all of a sudden? Seeing her great reticence even to discuss the causes of Sarnath’s downfall, it is likely that Muslim invasions might have had a role in it. I am not suggesting it has, but the author’s squeamish efforts to slide this issue under the carpet make one suspicious. In an earlier chapter, she says that Akbar had made some modifications in the stupas without commenting on it.

The book incorporates several panoramic pictures of the archaeological work in Varanasi, Sarnath and their neighbourhoods. The level of competence of the people engaged in excavation and analysis are commendable in comparison to the haphazard British efforts in the colonial era. Even though being an established professional in the field, Jayaswal has been very careful to omit technical jargon as far as possible. Several photos and diagrams are included to complement the arguments in the text. The effort is a very fine example of the revival of Indian archaeology after independence. It is also a stark reminder that some of the real treasure underground may now have been lost forever as human habitation is overwhelming the sites before a detailed study could be carried out. The author’s effort to estimate the magnitude and capacity of the sculptural workshops in the Gupta period based on the present conditions of similar shops is somewhat bold and optimistic, yet is quite logical as the level of mechanization is still low.

The book is strongly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Unravelling the Silk Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star