Nexus

Title: Nexus – A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
Author: Yuval Noah Harari
Publisher: Fern Press, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9781911717096
Pages: 492

‘Sapiens’ was a best seller by Yuval Noah Harari that showcased some very pertinent ideas on the evolution of human societies from an anthropological perspective. The take-home message from the book was that the immense success of human societies was not caused by the exceptional intelligence of individuals, but due to the cooperative effort by a multitude of individuals. For a group of people to cooperate as part of an organisation, some methods are essential to bring them together and that title examined them in good detail. This book is an extension of the idea which evaluates the information networks which bind humans together. Mankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem then is a network problem. Humanity possesses many powers which they can’t effectively control. The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of machines or AI, but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that ended up with flooding the world with blood instead of love and joy. With this stark reminder delivered beforehand, the book inspects information networks from the stone age to artificial intelligence (AI). The goal of the book is to provide a more accurate historical perspective on the AI revolution, because AI is the first ever technology that is capable of making decisions and generating ideas by itself. My earlier reviews of Sapiens and Homo Deus (also by Harari) can be accessed by clicking on the book titles.

Harari delves deep into the definition of information to get the discussion going. The naïve view among people is that information is an attempt to create reality. He argues that reality may not be the basis of people associating together. There’s something called inter-subjective reality which is true only for the people believing in the same story or myth. In this light, information actually creates realities by tying together disparate things, like people or empires, into a network or nexus. In short, the role of information is to connect people together to create order in a network rather than representing truth or reality. As we look at the history of information over the ages, we see a constant rise in connectivity without a concomitant rise in truthfulness or wisdom. To reinforce the point, Harari presents an example on the nature of reality taken from an episode in the creation of Israel which runs counter to the truth perceived by a Palestinian. Considering his Jewish background and Palestinian backers usually having a short fuse, this attempt is rather bold.

The author focusses his attention to provide an interesting and informative view of the information technologies that made human societies stick together. The ‘story’ is the first information technology mankind developed to connect people. It was assumed wrongly that people connect to the person (hero or heroine) of the story, but in fact they connect to the story told about that person. For uniting people, fiction offered many advantages over truth because it could be made really simple and understood by everybody while the latter was often complicated. Plato, in his Republic, imagined that the constitution of his utopian state would be based on ‘noble lie’. While stories circulated in societies, it was realized that poems and myths could be easily remembered by people but other factors were also needed to run a society such as tax records or payable amounts that required a unique non-organic information technology to function. This led to the origin of the written document. Retrieval of the document at the right time was a problem that was solved by the creation of bureaucracy. This led to the development of more powerful information networks. The written book became part of the network in first millennium BCE. After eons in which gods spoke to men via shamans, priests, prophets, oracles and other human messengers, god began to speak through the information technology of the infallible book. Inevitably, the holy book spawned numerous interpretations which eventually turned out to be far more consequential than the book itself. Problems of interpretation tilted the balance of power between the holy book and the institution called church in favour of the latter. Here, the term church is used in a universal sense and not restricted to the Christian variety. The power to interpret the sacred teachings made these institutions omnipotent. The Catholic church interpreted Jesus’ gentle words in a way that allowed it to become the richest landowner in Europe, to launch violent crusades and to establish murderous inquisitions (p.89).

When we come to the modern age, we see mass communication technologies that helped democracy become technically feasible. Newspapers and printing caused consolidation of public opinion that is a precondition of democracy. Hence the new information technology of the late modern era gave rise to both large scale democracy and large scale totalitarianism. We generally tend to be unaware of the potency of the latter. Stalinism (which is the author’s euphemism for communism; for some unknown reason he does not want to call a spade a spade) came close to world domination after World War II and it would be naïve to think that its disregard for truth doomed it to failure or that its ultimate collapse guarantees that such a system can never again rise. The advent of the computer age was again a game changer. The main split in twenty-first century politics might not be between democracies and totalitarian regimes; instead the participants might be human beings and non-human agents such as AI. For thousands of years, prophets, poets and politicians used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now computers are learning how to do it. As computers amass power, new information networks will emerge, but for at least some time, most of the old information chains will remain. Harari suggests ‘alien intelligence’ as the expansion of AI. The book looks at the ways in which an authoritarian system can bend the social media to serve its need of subservience of the people to it such as China’s social credit system. Apart from money, there was traditionally a non-monetary system that was variously known as honour, reputation or status. The new social credit system ascribes to award precise values even for social gestures such as smiles or visiting parents! For example, you might get ten points for picking up litter from the street or lose fifteen points for disturbing neighbours with loud music. This may wipe off privacy and turn life into a ‘never-ending job interview’. This will also pave the way for a totalitarian control system.

The latter half of the narrative is a laboriously long and uninspiring sermon on the likely pitfalls of AI technology when it spreads to the entire world and begins to handle all aspects of human life. The possibility of such systems taking over the world and turning humanity into its slaves is not seriously considered. Instead, the very real chance of AI acquiring the prejudices of human societies such as racism or misogyny is dissected threadbare. In view of this threat, the author recommends to build human institutions that will be able to check not just familiar human weaknesses but also radically alien errors. The scope of AI systems is also evaluated in the book. Some of mankind’s intellectual tasks can easily be automated such as playing chess or providing medical diagnosis, but manual tasks such as dishwashing or nursing are not so easily amenable to AI. People who want a job in 2050 should perhaps invest in their motor and social skills, as much as in their intellect. Data colonialism is a threat Harari flags prominently. American AI systems engage in mass surveillance of Pakistan’s mobile phone network and then uses a machine-learned algorithm to identify suspected terrorists (p.236). This would lead to the pioneer nations or corporations in AI to the ability to control data using their advantages to achieve domination over other nations or corporates. Mastery of AI and data give these empires the power to control people’s lives beyond their national borders. Raw data will be harvested throughout the world and will flow to the imperial hub. There the cutting edge technology will be developed, producing unbeatable algorithms. These will then be exported back to data colonies but neither the profits nor the power is distributed back. Overall coverage of the topic leads readers to the impression that the author is unduly pessimistic.

As noted above, the long lecture on democracy and dictatorship is rudimentary and plain to the point of being redundant. Democratic societies need not be lectured to on the requirement of democracy while totalitarian societies will not be allowed to listen to the author’s tiresome tongue-lashing. The author appreciates the present Indian government under Narendra Modi for its clean up mission. He casts his glance on the Clean India Mission (Swachh Bharat) and the $10 billion spent to build 100 million latrines and remarks that ‘sewage isn’t the stuff of epic poems, but it’s a test of a well-functioning state’ (p.56). The book exhibits scathing and sometimes out-of-place criticism of Vladimir Putin with comments such as ‘Anticipating present-day strongmen like Putin, Augustus [Caesar] didn’t crown himself king, and pretended that Rome was still a republic’ (p.140). While loquacious on Russia, Harari is uncannily tight-lipped on China or its pathetic credentials on democracy and human rights, seeming reluctant to utter anything that would antagonize the Chinese Communist party. Left liberalism seeps through every page, paragraph and word in the book that makes it so drab, unlike Harari’s earlier works. He laments about government censors cutting out free speech, but wants social media platforms to employ more censors – human or AI-based – to block out rightist speech which he conveniently classifies as hate speech. It’s a peculiarity of this genre of scholars to demand total freedom to say anything for themselves while wishing to drown out any opinion dissenting with them. It’s a liberal principle that gender preferences be left to the individual to handle. There is no need for homosexuals to shout their sexual preferences from the rooftops. Being a gay himself, the author has no right to force the readers to irrelevantly go through the problems they face in modern societies and to ‘wonder’ at how he met ‘his husband’ in an LGBTQ social media platform in 2002. Being non-compliant to society’s norms don’t make you entitled to utter something which is best left unsaid. The latter half of the book on AI is mere gaslighting of the readers under the guise of examining potential problems of the new technology.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

Dutch Heritage in Fort Cochin, Cannanore and Quilon

Title: Dutch Heritage in Fort Cochin, Cannanore and Quilon
Author: Bauke van Der Pol
Publisher: Darpan, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9788119355303
Pages: 138

In the colonial race for India, the British and the Dutch joined the fray at around the same time, but the latter opted out of the race two centuries later, influenced by historical movements in Europe and a splash of red in the account books. The Dutch were not able to penetrate into the interior and remained stuck in coastal streaks where they fought the British and local princes with their backs always to the sea. The Dutch had a mission to perform in Kerala in the final reckoning. They drove out the Portuguese who alienated the locals with their characteristic religious intolerance. Kochi (Cochin), Kannur (Cannanore) and Kollam (Quilon) were the three places where the Dutch had a solid presence and this book investigates their legacy at these places. Even though the place names have been indigenised a few decades back, the book still uses the colonial names throughout in the text. Bauke van Der Pol is an anthropologist and an Indo-Dutch historian. He has written about and travelled throughout India and lectured on the historical relations between the two countries. He first visited India in 1974 at the age of 22 and has interacted with backward communities in India. He has written many books on the Dutch presence and their influence in India.

Van Der Pol begins with a survey of how the Dutch ended up in India. The company known as VoC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie – United East India Company) was one of the first multinationals in the world and was a contemporary of the British East India Company, set up for the same purpose. Dutch history in India covers about 150 years of activity and is often mistaken for the Portuguese or the British. Being a coastal region with a rich history of trade in spices, Kerala was a major theatre of operations for the Dutch. Cochin, Cannanore and Quilon were the best kept Dutch forts in India. The Dutch conquered the Portuguese possessions in Kerala in 1663 and held sway for nearly a century. Their defeat at the hands of Marthanda Varma at Kolachel in 1741 inaugurated the beginning of the end. They were finally replaced by the British in 1795. The first agreement the VoC had struck in India was in 1604 with the Zamorin of Calicut vowing to fight their common enemy – the Portuguese. There began a colonial enterprise that was uprooted in 1795 when following Napoleon’s occupation of the Netherlands, the British took over their possessions in India. In 1825, the Treaty of London was signed and the last VoC stronghold of Chinsurah in Bengal was handed over to the British. The downfall of VoC was caused by defective bookkeeping in the Netherlands, mismanagement and corruption in Asia, growing costs of overseas administration and the Fourth English War of 1780-84. Many parts of the book are based on the letters sent home by the missionary Canter Visscher between 1717 and 1724.

Fort Cochin was the head of Dutch operations in India. The town has a variegated history. The Portuguese owned Fort Cochin from 1498 to 1663, the Dutch till 1795 and the British thereafter till India’s independence in 1947. The author remarks that what is remaining of the Dutch heritage can still be reasonably found because a lot of drawings, maps and paintings of Fort Cochin are still available in Dutch museums and archives. A striking thing to note in this context is the early colonialists’ eager initiative to re-plant the city of Amsterdam in Kerala as many street names in Fort Cochin are also found in the parent Dutch city. However, the architectural style did not seem to differ that much between the Dutch and the Portuguese. Even though he arrived almost half a century after the latter was driven out of Fort Cochin, Canter Visscher observes in 1720 that it was not always clear which houses were Portuguese or Dutch. Van Der Pol walks around Fort Cochin, visits still extant houses of the era, describes its architectural details and marvels at the still-preserved sale deeds of these properties. In addition to the old town, the author visits heritage places nearby, such as the forts at Cranganore (Kodungallur) and Chettuva. The author also comments appreciably on the slightly more tolerant form of the religion followed by the Dutch. He says that unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch chaplains did not actively convert people into Protestantism. The Catholics were forced to remove their religious idols and altarpieces to churches outside Fort Cochin after the Dutch conquest in 1663.

The book casts a glance at the innards of the society back when Dutch power was in the ascendant who rather uncharacteristically encouraged the Jewish community in Cochin to flourish by trade. It makes an analysis of the Jewish settlement and some of the persons in that community who were connected to the Dutch as confidants and middlemen in trade with locals. It was only after the arrival of the Dutch in 1663 that they developed contacts with foreign Jewish communities which ended their isolation. The author still finds some remnants of anti-Semitism and racial intolerance among the Dutch settlers. In a sale deed of 1772 of a prime real estate inside the fort, it was mentioned that the plot shall not be sold to Jews, Moors (Muslims) or heathen (Hindus), in which case the company has to approve the transaction (p.47). The population of Fort Cochin was around 2,000 by the end of the Dutch era, of which 20 per cent were slaves. Some form of discrimination based on skin colour was also rampant among the Jews as well who were split into two distinct groups such as the black and Pardesi (foreign – white) Jews. Exemplifying the marriage of two senior individuals named Gumliel Salem and Reema which had to be solemnized in a Mumbai synagogue, the author brings to light the blatant refusal of the local Pardesi synagogue to carry out the rituals because Gumliel was black. When the couple eventually returned to the Pardesi synagogue, all the women in the ladies’ gallery walked out in protest!

The author follows the same itinerary at Cannanore and Quilon as at Fort Cochin though on a reduced scale because of the scantiness of architectural evidence. He provides an interesting aside from the temple at Mavelikkara that exhibits the close association the Dutch had established with the Travancore royal family in the eighteenth century. After the battle at Kolachel, Marthanda Varma entered into a treaty with the Dutch at Mavelikkara. There is a tiered lamp in the temple at the foot of which the replicas of four VoC soldiers cast in bronze stand guard at each corner of the lamp. The soldiers in characteristic Dutch hats stand with the head humbly downwards and in their hands a gun rests on the ground with the barrel upwards, symbolizing peace. The lamp is thought to have been donated by the Dutch. Unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch had a hand in promoting knowledge about Kerala’s flora to a wide audience in Europe by commissioning a botanical compendium named Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, under the pioneering effort of Henrik van Reede, the governor. This book offers tribute to him and the native experts who took part in the endeavour. However, among the VoC personnel, van Reede was known as a maverick. His rivals complained to Dutch higher authorities that he ‘writes elaborate letters about the local plants and trees but did not know how to make Malabar profitable’. As an anthropologist, the author has close connections to the depressed classes of Kerala. He visited Cheruvathur in 1983 to live among the Pulaya caste to see how their social conditions were improved over the years and was quite impressed at the steady progress the community has made.

The book is published in hard cover format with fine, thick pages so as to feel like a collector’s item. The photographs are in colour and the paper is partially glossy making it a coffee-table book. The author notes that the roles of Indians and the Dutch have been reversed over the centuries because now the Indians are visiting the Netherlands to look for trade items. Readers can make an amusing observation regarding the racial profile of Kerala through two unrelated photographs in the book. On page 71, there is a photograph of a group of Jews who left for Israel in 1955. On page 108, a group photo of the community with whom the author stayed for some time and who belong to the Pulaya caste which was traditionally considered very backward. The curious part is that you really can’t tell the two images apart without a closer look on the attire which signify that all castes and religions in Kerala comprise of people belong to one and the same racial stock. It is worthwhile for architectural lovers to explore Fort Cochin with this book in hand as the trek would impart a lot of insight into the closely woven fabric of Indo-Dutch ties.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back

Title: A Cabinet Secretary Looks Back – From Poona to the Prime Minister’s Office
Author: B. G. Deshmukh
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2004 (First)
ISBN: 9788172234744
Pages: 392

Bhalchandra Gopal Deshmukh was a 1951-batch IAS officer from Maharashtra who had served in his home state and Gujarat in the junior cadres and got promoted as Chief Secretary of Maharashtra. In the meantime, he was intermittently deputed to central government where he took up various assignments. He was posted as Cabinet Secretary in 1986 and appointed as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister in 1989. He served three prime ministers in his career – Rajiv Gandhi and those who followed him, such as V P Singh and Chandrashekhar – until he retired from service in 1990. Deshmukh has written several books on his tenure in the government and this book is one of them. The parts which attract the readers’ attention is from his assuming the post of Cabinet Secretary. The period 1986-90 was noted for tremendous political upheavals in India and abroad, such as the Bofors scandal, Ram Janmabhumi issue, insurrection in Sri Lanka, heightened militancy in Punjab and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The book presents a closer picture on some of these issues but unfortunately, it does not further clarify any of them.

Deshmukh declares at the outset that it is not his intention or objective to expose any sensational facts or to expose skeletons in the cupboard. If you get discouraged at this and decide not to read any further, you’ll not be much mistaken. The narrative is so lacklustre and neutered. His only aim is to motivate the young generation to join the civil service because the experience is ‘fascinating and self-satisfying’. The author seems to be a status-quo man with not much innovative ideas to transform or improve. He openly confesses that ‘it is impossible to remove corruption but people are happy if it is controlled and reduced’ (p.135). However, the book uncovers the pettiness of a few personalities, the most notable being V K Krishna Menon, who was the defence minister in Nehru’s cabinet. Our author was due for promotion as deputy secretary and his name was sent to the defence ministry of which Menon was the head. At that time, he was pissed with the finance minister C D Deshmukh who had raked up the jeep corruption scandal against Menon. He stoutly refused to accept the author declaring ‘I don’t want a Deshmukh in my ministry’ (p.52), referring to his namesake who was Menon’s bete noire. There are glimpses of the miserable license raj in the book which was introduced by Nehru and Indira and was stifling India’s industrial growth. We read about a chief minister finalizing the list of who should get cars. Remember that all of them had paid the full price out of their pockets but could not get delivery of the vehicle because the government was determining the number of vehicles to be produced in a given month. There were restrictions on private industrialists to set up plants with their own money. Government sometimes refused to grant licenses, according to the claims of their competitors on the plea that they’d lose market share if the new plant came through! Altogether, the system was planned to work in a way as to maximise corruption. 

Having served in the highest echelons of Indian bureaucracy including the home department, the hollowness and obvious duplicity in his assessment of the communal situation in some trouble spots in North India are to be attributed to political correctness rather than naivety. He believes economic parameters to be the cause of communal unrest in Moradabad and Aligarh. He says that Muslim workers did not earn fair wages while Hindu financiers and traders reaped the real profits. See the deceitful comparison? He does not say whether Hindu workers earned fair wages or Muslim financiers reaped profits. All this sophistry is to avoid pointing out the real cause of communal clashes – fanaticism. Further, he opines that Muslim youth were not properly educated and faced unemployment which led them to antisocial activities that ultimately turned into communal trouble (p.106). He does not stop to think for a moment whether it was one of the causes that drove Muslims into a sordid orgy of violence in 1985 following the Supreme Court’s verdict forcing a little-known man named Mohammed Ahmed Khan to pay alimony to his divorced ex-wife Shah Bano Begum. That’s why readers reach the conclusion that duplicity and selective amnesia are prerequisites to secularism of the Indian variety. Quite naturally, Deshmukh justifies the 1975-77 Emergency with the remark that ‘if some progress had to be made, gentle force is required to enforce discipline among staff and make citizens accept their responsibility’ (p.84). He has a very low opinion of the military top brass, especially General Sundarji who is accused of canvassing for the post of field marshal for himself. Exposing an unrealistic and fanciful mindset, the author advocates for a cut in defence spending through effective foreign policy which can develop friendship with our enemies that would substitute for the shortage of funds to buy arms (p.167). This is a strange comment from a Cabinet Secretary and it is fortunate that the government was sane enough to consign this idea to the dustbin. There is a section in the book that exposes the blatant intervention the executive made on the prerogative of the Election Commission of India. Rajiv Gandhi decided in October 1989 that national elections should be held on 22nd, 24th and 26th of the following month. The author himself conveyed this information to Peri Shastri, the election commissioner, who was very agitated at first at this shameless appropriation of the Commission’s authority, but later fell in line (p.213).

The author had a close official relationship with Rajiv Gandhi and he closely watched how Indira Gandhi functioned as the prime minister. As a result, this book provides some shocking revelations about the administrative tenures of the mother-son duo. Indira handled her state chief ministers like puppets. Vasant Rao Naik in Maharashtra was asked to step down after she promoted his rivals in the party to create trouble. The reason for this disgraceful act was that he was getting popular with good agricultural reforms. Naik resigned in February 1975. Under Indira’s tenure, corruption became more rampant and refined. The system of the party claiming a good cut in all major contracts, especially with foreign supplies, was well established (p.174). This was claimed to be proved in the HDW submarine case where the German company paid 10 per cent commission to Indian agents in buying submarines for the Indian navy. The author was informed that Indira was very annoyed with the agent as he did not pass on the promised amount from the commission to the Congress party and she refused to meet him on her next visit to the UK (p.203). This leads him to lament that ‘as cabinet secretary, I was aware of the widespread corruption in the central bureaucracy, but I could not do much in the atmosphere then prevailing when political corruption was overwhelming’ (p.153). Rajiv Gandhi had far more integrity in this regard, but he faltered in other areas. Rajiv’s inexperience and immaturity in administration and political matters created acute problems. He reshuffled the council of ministers 22 times in a space of 39 months and there was a virtual merry-go-round in some of the ministries. He was more inclined towards suave advisors and officials who came from public schools, could speak and write good English and had a gloss both in appearance and presentation. He was impressed with short-term results and impatient when an officer tried to explain a long-term strategy that was bound to be slower. There was another face of Rajiv than the gentle and calm one he wished to project. He had little respect for some opposition chief ministers such as NTR, Karunanidhi and Devilal and used to fight with them in NDC meetings. He did not show necessary respect and consideration in parliamentary proceedings. He was unwilling to attend parliamentary sessions unless absolutely necessary (p.175).

In the final section of the book, Deshmukh reminisces about his time with V. P. Singh and Chandrashekhar as the principal secretary to the prime minister. Regarding Singh, he observes that he implemented Mandal Commission recommendations to split Hindu votes and crush the BJP whose support he loathed to accept and with whom he did not share a public platform in the election campaign. This same frame of mind regarding assuming power at any cost afflicted Chandrashekhar too. His overarching ambition to become the prime minister made him cast away his scruples and morality and take the help of Rajiv Gandhi whom he heartily disliked, if not detested. As a private person, he was a gem of a man, but his ambition turned him into a typical Indian politician. The author also handled the Kashmir issue and bemoans the pathetic situation created by Article 370 of the Indian Constitution – which conferred special rights to Jammu and Kashmir – without identifying the root cause which was the article itself that was finally scrapped in 2019. He notes that refugees from Pakistan who arrived in Kashmir during Partition could not be granted citizenship due to the special status of the state and displays impotent rage at the government’s helplessness!

The author led a clean career without any adverse reflection or irregularity. In fact, he boasts about this in a contented way that the only conviction he faced was for a traffic violation of sounding the horn in an area where it was banned. The book contains an account of what the author knows about the Bofors scam and concludes that neither Rajiv Gandhi nor any member of his family received any portion of the kickbacks. There are no private or personal anecdotes in the book. His marital status would have remained an enigma had a photo of the author and his wife with the chief minister’s family been not included. There are separate chapters on Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab. Reading the dull passages, readers feel that the author never took up any challenging job, always bowing to senior bureaucrats or politicians and feeling contented for even minor accomplishments. His career remained shuttling between the central and state administrations in New Delhi and Mumbai respectively. The book is designed with a bit too much bureaucratic perspective. Transfers and postings of secretaries after a change in administration are given undue prominence.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Secret of Secrets

Title: The Secret of Secrets
Author: Dan Brown
Publisher: Bantam, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9781787634558
Pages: 675

After a gap of eight years, here we have another great book from Dan Brown and the wait was worth it. Robert Langdon, the legendary American symbologist, is the protagonist who wades through one tangle after the other in this book whose storyline is set in Prague, the capital of Czechia. Langdon’s companion, Katherine Solomon, is a noetic scientist and the book she intends to publish on the secrets of human consciousness falls foul of the CIA who actually uses some of her ideas described in the book. The agency’s clever moves to thwart the pair and to destroy all copies of the manuscript in digital format leads eventually to the destruction of the largest mind-control experimental facility secretly built underground Prague. Apart from the thrilling and mysterious storyline, the book identifies the human mind as the world’s next battlefield. The future of technology lies in developing a perfect human-to-machine interface, without typing or dictating, but directly from the brain by thinking. Along with the lead cast, readers enjoy a virtual tour through Prague’s cityscape, geographical indicators, famous museums, cathedrals and hotels and a glance at the extraconstitutional influence the US ambassador wields in the country. The book introduces the philosophical concept of non-local consciousness which claims that there is no such thing as an individual’s consciousness and human brain does only to tune into the global consciousness which pervades the whole world as if a radio gets in sync with a particular station which then appears to others as the person’s mind or character. Believe me, Brown is subtle as well as intriguing in this thriller.

The book introduces the science of noetics which is the science of the intellect or pure thought, focusing on reason, mind and the origins of logic. One word of caution is prudent here: whenever you see the word science in this book, take it only with a pinch of salt. However, Brown colours the narrative with a touch of the paranormal and presents it as an addendum to parapsychology or out-of-the-body experience. This minor hitch definitely does not hinder the pleasure of reading it and the first thrill comes on page 32 itself. The idea of artificial neurons is developed in the book which is thought to control consciousness and would permanently alter the course of human history. Brown’s insight is sharp and transcends domains in its application and is evident in generalizations such as ‘the social media is the biggest intelligence gathering boon since the catholic church invented confession’. We know that the world is aging fast, and the percentage of old people is shooting up in developed economies which the others would surely follow once they trudge along the road of development and growth. Brown’s characters are youthful only in their spirit and in fact are aged well over fifty, including Langdon the hero and Katherine Solomon, his lover, who is in fact four years older than him. However, the narrative is very effective in displaying only the vigour of their demeanour which leaves the readers unsuspecting of their real age since their actions are so youthful in and out of bed, while Brown has included more scenes of the former variety in this book than was his wont!

This book’s focus is on human consciousness which is claimed to be non-local in the sense that humans can receive or reflect only a sliver of an external consciousness. This can be exploited to serve our needs and to enhance our capabilities such as visualizing a remote area without actually going there in person. In this scenario, it affords the ultimate spy camera if a suitable technology is developed to nudge a person to undergo an out-of-body experience and help it record the visual experience on to a storage medium to play back later without human intervention. I personally don’t believe or think it would ever be possible, but there is no denying that Brown has made very persuasive arguments in its favour. If you are spiritually oriented, it is very probable that you would become a fan. Study of human brain is said to be divided into two opposing philosophies – materialistic and noetic. Materialists believe that all phenomena, including consciousness, can be explained solely in terms of physical matter and its interactions. Noeticists think that consciousness is not created by brain processes but rather a fundamental aspect of the universe, like space, time and energy and was not even located inside the body. The heroine of the story, Katherine, is a noted noeticist and it is she who thinks up the exotic technologies to communicate electrically with the brain which is clandestinely appropriated by the CIA. Going a step further, she claims that human thoughts create reality and that this idea existed at the core of most major spiritual teachings. This is part of a conscious effort to bring in all religions into the narrative, however flimsy the occasion is. An instance that can be cited is that of employing the Vel spear of the south Indian god Murugan as part of the letter A in a monogram in the story. The book claims in the preface itself that all artwork, artefacts, symbols and documents in the novel are real and that all experiments, technologies and scientific results are true to life and that all organisations in the novel exist.

The city of Prague is as much a character in the story as is Langdon or Solomon. A city with a classical past is the normal fare of Brown novels and it is seen that Prague eminently suits the plot. It’s the city of a thousand spires and also a city of drama and fantasy. Revellers regularly walked the streets masquerading as storied characters from her rich history. An important character in the novel named Golem used this peculiarity of the city to go about the streets in full disguise. The book offers a fine tour of the landmarks of the city through the narrative and it would be extremely good if readers check the places up on Google along the way. Knowing fully well the predilection of our Indian taxi drivers to mislead their passengers to squeeze out something extra, it was somewhat heartening to read that Czech taxi drivers are no different and would take a roundabout route to extract a hefty fare from their unsuspecting passengers. Another notable point is the hegemony US diplomats exercise in Prague. The US ambassador is seen directly ordering Czech law enforcement officials and forcibly releasing American suspects from their custody. The embassy has control of the surveillance system in the city and its officials can track the route taken by any person.

It’s a little unfortunate that this book promotes the pseudoscientific concept of global consciousness to imagine startling inventions that are mindboggling. It is suggested that there is no such thing as an individual’s consciousness residing in his or her brain. Even a person’s memory data sits outside the brain and is accessed from there each time, much like cloud computing. Global consciousness hovers in the universe and individual brains tune in to a particular source or channel and access data, like a radio receiver tuning in to a station. It is the development of some filters in the brain that prevents one from tuning in to another person’s channel. By this logic, extra sensory perception (ESP) is a brain tuning in to information that it normally filters out. Precognition is also explained away with a similar contraption. Brown then uses the common charlatan trick of hanging on to quantum physics to reason out implausible phenomena whereas quantum theory throws a disclaimer up front that its conclusions are valid and applicable only in the micro-realm and do not affect the macro objects. Concealing such caveats, Brown freely translates experiments in quantum mechanics into the spiritual realm. There is also an unabashed argument on authority in claims such as ‘some very smart minds believed future events did indeed affect past events’ (p.337). The author fails to realize that it is not the smartness of the mind, but of the idea that carries weight in science. The book further suggests that consciousness exists in the quantum field. An unpardonable license taken by the author is that he clubs Newton, Einstein and Galileo with religious prophets regarding attaining enlightenment and observes that ‘these brilliant minds had scientific epiphanies and spiritual revelations that can be explained in scientific terms’. When we die, our consciousness returns to the universal one and a life begins after death. He then makes a bold yet more or less irresponsible finding that hallucinogens such as LSD open up a wider spectrum of reality and help to see more of it. This reminds us of the need of Sherlock Holmes’ children’s versions to remove those portions in which the famous detective uses drugs.

The book is structured in the same mould as his earlier best sellers like Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons, with a slew of code breaking, secret messages, hurried chases across the city filled with artistic and architecturally notable buildings. What is impressive is his uncanny ability to demand the undiluted attention of the reader and the total immersion it guarantees. The significance of the title becomes evident in the epilogue along with the message he tries to convey. I just noted down the concepts, ideas and even gadgets he mentions in the book and of which I was not aware beforehand and it runs from secure virtual workspaces, laser microphone, UV resin, near-field communication, superconducting magnetic energy storage to body jet showers! With this brilliant line of sophistication, it is quite odd to find him mentioning ‘fluorescent lights flickering on’, especially since the fluorescent lighting has long since yielded their place to LED lighting which does not flicker and attains full brightness instantaneously.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Living Ramayanas

Title: Living Ramayanas – Exploring the Plurality of the Epic in Wayanad and the World
Author: Azeez Tharuvana
Translator: Obed Ebenezer S
Publisher: Eka, 2021 (First published in Malayalam: 2014)
ISBN: 9789390679737
Pages: 252

Ramayana is one of the original sources that make up the soul of India. Irrespective of the caste, creed, ethnicity or language of the people, this epic is known to every Indian worth the name. What is astonishing is its wide circulation even among societies which stay aloof from the mainstream such as Adivasis. Quite naturally, when an idea seeps down to every nook and cranny of the country, especially when the means and quality of communication were sparse and unreliable, a lot of subtle changes occur in the narrative as it changes hands across speakers spanning generations. Before the advent of writing or with illiterate people, the transfer of ideas happens only through the storage medium of human memory which is fallible. Besides, story tellers with a flair for the job embellish it to rivet the attention of the listeners. As a consequence, numerous variations of the Ramayana core tale occurred over the millennia. Ramayana continually adapted itself to the nature of the times, the people and the culture in which it has been produced. This work is translated from the Malayalam text ‘Wayanadan Ramayanam’. It examines the different versions circulating among tribal communities of Wayanad, in other states of India and also among overseas countries. This work is a partial record of the author’s research conducted under the guidance of Dr. A. Nujum. Azeez Tharuvana is a native of Wayanad and served as assistant director of the Institute for Tribal Studies and Research. He is currently professor and head of the department of Malayalam at Farook College, Kozhikode.

Among the tribal communities of Wayanad, there exist unique beliefs relating to the Ramayana story. Even within the same tribe, there are many different versions of the same legend. The tribal people use these versions of the Ramayana to justify their ritual beliefs, to trace their ancestry and to glorify their lineage. The book introduces three variations in common use in Wayanad and condenses the stories. There are similarities between them. The Adiya Ramayana, popular among the Adiya community, places the characters in Wayanad and the story unfolds there. Lanka is also in Wayanad. Ordinary human emotions and actions are attributed to the divine characters. In one of these, a dispute breaks out between Ram and Sita when the former discovers stones and sand in the gruel prepared by the latter! The native narratives link various locations like Sitakulam, Ashramkolly, Sasimala, Ponkuzhy, Thirunelli etc. in Wayanad to particular episodes in their version of the epic. Sitayanam and Wayanad Chetty Ramayana are also examined, where the latter is not much different from the standard version. In various regions of Wayanad, Lava and Kusa (Ram’s children) are called by different names such as Lavakuchan, Muriken, Atharvalar and so on. Many legends exist that link geological features such as streams, waterfalls, natural springs and rocks with the characters of Ramayana. There is a tributary of Kabani named Kannuneerpuzha (stream of tears) which is believed to have been formed by Sita’s tears at her abandonment by Ram.

Even though the author constantly endeavours to portray Dalits and Adivasis as separate from the Hindu fold, the nature of their beliefs and rituals scatter his arguments to the winds. Eventually, he helplessly concedes that savarna gods were incorporated by the Adivasis into their songs, but still raises a feeble caveat that these were modern. On the ground, the influence of Ramayana is genuine and rock-solid. The folk interpretation of mythological tales in Wayanad are inseparably linked to its landscape. This is similar to the relationship Indian epics have with Mount Kailash and the Himalayas and with the forest and forest-dwellers. Each tribal community appears to be a part of the Hindu caste hierarchy and aspires to rise higher by using legends, exactly like other castes do. Each community believes themselves to be noble. The genesis myth of Kurichyas claims that the Brahmins and Kurichyas are the noblest of Brahma’s creations. They are the only two pure castes on earth (p.61). Kurichyas believe themselves to be Ram’s soldiers. The Adivasis further believe that the traditional healing methods they use were taught to them by Shiva himself. And, Azeez treats them as non-Hindus! The book notes that Kerala was a stronghold of Buddhism in the ancient times and Wayanad was especially raised under the umbrella of Jainism. If these assumptions were true, we should have seen the Ramayana stories in Wayanad interspersed with Jain themes or at least influenced by them as seen in other parts of India. However, Azeez fails to mention any specific sway in the Wayanad folk tales that can be attributed to Buddhism or Jainism.

The book is very informative and provides many original snippets of knowledge regarding how Ramayana is so closely woven into the social fabric of Wayanad tribals. In spite of this, a wicked agenda is clearly discernible in the narrative. The author treats Dalits and Adivasis separate from Hindus and lets out comments like ‘the Hindus and Adivasis here both believe that this is the place where Sita devi disappeared into the earth’ (p.45). There are several references like this inserted casually into the text which try to drive a wedge right through the heart of Hindu society. In another instance, the book observes that several insertions have been added to the text of the Valmiki Ramayana to buttress and reinforce the concept of caste or Brahmin supremacy. Even though couched differently, the objective is the same. This is no wonder if you look back to the pre-partition days in India when the Muslim League was using the same technique using the same words. According to the author, the Adivasis seem to be oppressed and exploited only by the upper caste Hindus whereas all religious communities, including the Muslims and Christians in Wayanad do so. The foreword provided by K N Panikkar praises the author for ‘conducting the study by closely interacting with the tribal-Dalit-religious communities’. See the Left-Islamist cabal of historians harping on the same disruptive tune again and again? The author’s project guide for the research was Dr. A Nujum of the Aligarh Muslim University. He concludes that ‘when a dominant society gains the tendency to swallow up other smaller civilizations and sub-cultures, they resist by producing a thousand oral traditions’. The author is employed as a teaching faculty of the Farook College which is managed by the Islamic Rouzathul Uloom Association. Being so, Azeez should have shown a bit of decency and courtesy in denigrating the religious sensibilities of Hindus with statements like ‘Ramayana is not a historical text. It is a myth’.

The book introduces multiple versions of the Ramayana in vogue in other countries such as China, Japan, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Whichever land had any interactions with India, possess a piece of Ramayana story as a relic of the relationship. It is interesting to learn that Muslim communities in these nations also have internalized this story. In Malaysia and Indonesia, Allah, Adam, Gabriel and others from Islamic lore and faith figures are seen in the Ramayana versions. They assume the positions of Brahma, Vishnu and other deities of the Hindu faith (p.157). The chapter titled ‘Muslims and the Ramayana’ tries to reconcile Islamic tenets with Hindu ones to suggest a syncretic product. In a veiled reference to the famous Gita couplet sambhavami yuge yuge, the author claims Muslims believe that ‘whenever righteousness is threatened and society suffers moral and spiritual decay, prophets make their appearance in different parts of the world’ (p.149). This appears to be a deliberate falsehood to gain acceptance among other communities. Finality of the prophecy of Muhammad is a fundamental and irrepudiable concept of Islam. This means that there will be no prophets after Muhammad even if righteousness or morality is compromised.

Azeez provides a good simile to the spread of Ramayana far and wide. As water flowing through different lands mingles with the colour of soils along the way, our legends and myths too, as they travel across lands and communities, mingle with their environs and sensibilities. True to the title, the book surveys Ramayanas in the major Indian languages as well as Persian and Urdu. Ramayanas composed by Muslim poets in Kerala’s mappilappattu style and Arabic are also introduced. A determined effort was made in the Mughal times under Akbar to translate Hindu holy texts to Persian. He employed Badauni to translate Ramayana who modified some parts of it with the result that it came to be called ‘Akbar Ramayana’. Azeez describes the project as a happy labour of love but hides the real purpose of Badauni who undertook the work and his personal motive behind it. Without going into the details, let me say that it is not at all music to the ears and reflects exactly what we would expect from a bigot even today. To know more about Badauni’s attitude, see my earlier review of Audrey Truschke’s book, ‘Culture of Encounters – Sanskrit at the Mughal Court’.

The included creation legends of various tribes indicate the presence of Muslims in their midst and appear to be quite modern (p.58). Anyhow, the trait of inclusivity which it witnesses is compatible with the Pan-Indian spirit of tolerance. Even then the author uses his argument to find holes and widen the fault lines in Indian society. The focus of the book centres on the unfinished agenda of the Left-Islamist nexus to project the Ramayana not as a religious text with an authentic version, but instead as numerous versions of secular folk literature that reflect the life of the communities in which these tellings are created. Azeez tries to harp on the differences and variations in the narrative and claims the reason to be the exploitation of these communities by upper castes. He fails to see – or more probably, pretends not to see – that these slightly different versions unite them all together with the main text since these modifications are the earnest effort of these communities to partake a share of the epic poem that binds the nation together on the cultural sphere. This is also an attestation that whether hill or dale, tribal or city-dweller, every part and person in India is tied one way or the other to the national psyche through the Ramayana legend. It’s somewhat amusing that the author still believes in the Aryan invasion theory which speculates that the Aryans invaded India and destroyed the Dravidian-built Indus Valley Culture. This notion is long discarded by eminent academics, particularly in the wake of genetic analyses. Moreover, he treats Dravidian as a human race, rather than a language group – another capital mistake on the part of a serious scholar. The book includes a big glossary. Apart from the chapters on Wayanad and its tribal groups, the other parts feel like a handbook where the information is simply copied from other texts without any value addition.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

A Walk up the Hill

Title: A Walk up the Hill – Living with People and Nature
Author: Madhav Gadgil
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9780670097043
Pages: 424

In Kerala, Madhav Gadgil’s fame is similar to the character of Mr. Frankland in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ – he is ‘either carried in triumph down the village street or burnt in effigy’. The report of the Western Ghats expert panel which he chaired recommended stringent rules on human habitation in the ecologically sensitive spots and as a consequence became a harbinger of bad times for the settler community in these zones who have been carrying on agriculture for a living for decades. Meanwhile, he is a hero of the environmental activists and the Left-leaning science awareness body called Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad (KSSP). Madhav Gadgil is a scientist well-versed in theory and quantitative methods and is an excellent field ecologist-cum-field anthropologist fascinated by the natural world and people and culture. I had initially thought that this book was an autobiography but this is only a memoir and that too, practically devoid of any kind of personal facts. In fact, this is a summary of the projects undertaken by the author – effectually a curriculum vitae. The book is graced with a foreword by M S Swaminathan.

The first few chapters of the book are biographical and tells about the author’s education in India and the US. On return, he joined the prestigious Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, as a faculty along with his wife. This association (with IISc, of course!) lasted for 33 years till his retirement. Gadgil was very keen in field work unlike most of our established scientists. He initiated his career as a field anthropologist-cum-ecologist working on the sacred groves of Ambi Valley in Pune district, his home town. His greatest contributions came while working as a faculty at IISc, which the author says remains to this day the only place conducive to the serious pursuit of science in a free atmosphere and in the company of many bright and committed scientists. Gadgil developed contacts with the tallest political leaders soon after. He was a member of the small group of people invited by Indira Gandhi to discuss the modalities in setting up a new department of environment in her cabinet. What made the author controversial was his association with conservation of ecology in the Western Ghats. He chaired an expert panel to examine the status of the Western Ghats and recommend appropriate conservation and governance mechanisms in 2010. Unlike the other projects of the author, this book is silent on the recommendations of this committee. But we know that the panel submitted its report containing severe restrictions on economic life in the sensitive areas. Jairam Ramesh, who was more militant than a street activist as far as environment was concerned, was the minister who constituted the panel. But he found himself too big for his boots and was shunted out of the ministry. When the final report was submitted, the climate ‘changed’ and the government refused to accept its findings. Then it constituted another high-level committee headed by Kasturirangan to re-examine its findings. The new committee watered down the recommendations and the author alleges methodological faults in its working.

The author is wary of forest departments of all states in India. He is pessimistic about the officials, their policies and functioning. The book claims that village communities in the pre-British times maintained village woodlots and grazing lands in good condition. Britain had the distinction of wiping out its own forests and wildlife and abolishing community-based management well before any other country in the world. After 1857, the need of forest management was felt and the British half-heartedly copied some European methods. The powers of the forest department to subjugate the common people of India were enhanced by the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. This act criminalized hunting, which surprisingly Gadgil opposes, claiming that hunting for meat was very much a part of human evolution. However, this act criminalized the livelihood of many hunter-gatherer tribes. The human-wildlife conflict in the form of wild animals raiding human habitats is precipitated by this act. At this point, the author notes with relish that Kerala’s forest officials are much more upright and spoke to their superiors somewhat as equals. This was recorded in 1975 and says that he instantly fell in love with God’s own country (p.82)!

This book consistently argues that we have been implementing a system of passing on the benefits of development to those already well off and costs of development to the weak and the poor. This forms the basis of the author’s quite openly visible tendency to oppose and create obstacles to every developmental project on environmental lines. He even objected to the EIA study of the Konkan Railway alignment in Goa. The reason cited for this resistance was that the project would ‘merely protect vested interests, damage the environment, hurt the poor and divide the society’ (p.172). Did it? After several decades of the Railway’s successful operations and the revolution in transportation it had brought to India’s western coast, we can conclude with certainty that the author’s observations were wide off the mark. For some other projects, the role of Gadgil was to act as part of an arbitration on the desirability of a project which he usually used to scuttle. He served in the advisory committee set up by Indira Gandhi to scrutinize the Silent Valley hydel project in Kerala. The committee promptly decided to shelve it. The book includes a chapter on the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad and its early leader M K Prasad, who were dead against the Silent Valley project. The author had a long and fruitful association with both. The author’s staunch objection is most vociferously directed against mining projects in the Deccan. However, his reasons for opposition to mining is laughable. He claims that mineral resources are non-renewable and cannot be replenished once they are exhausted. The value of these ores will only increase in future with mounting worldwide shortages of mineral resources and we lose nothing by not exploiting them in a great hurry (p.177).

Even though informative and providing guidance, it is to be suspected that the book might serve to radicalise young, impressionable minds on hard-line environmental activism. It addresses pollution in a big way and demands stringent rules. The logic is that if pollution is allowed to go unabated, the industry would make undue profits but remain inefficient in the global market. However, this legitimate concern turns very sensitive and intolerant even to minor offenses. Sound pollution from running trucks when they carry mined produce on the road and formation of waves in water bodies due to barge movements (p.309) are raised as big concerns the administration should address immediately. As an alternative, he suggests mining rights to be given to the local community with government’s financial support that should also be labour intensive. Can such ventures compete effectively in the market? As usual, economic viability is not a concern for the author. In the 1970s, the author and his wife Sulochana Phatak were among the very few Indian students at Harvard and MIT choosing to return to India. The reason he gives is a bit funny though: they did not want to further strengthen the white-supremacist American government by helping enhance its scientific abilities! There are some peculiar aspects of the author’s food habits which would surely amuse the readers. He was always willing to consume whatever his hosts ate. This was sometimes extended to strange preferences. Gadgil’s mother was raised on donkey’s milk as an infant because her six elder siblings had died within a week of birth. The author took inspiration from this and went to a donkey bazar near Pune and tasted fresh donkey’s milk. He claims that it was pretty good (p.344). On some other subjects, the book demands unnecessary secrecy in what should have been open knowledge. Government rules on People’s Biodiversity Register stipulate that the knowledge be made public. This is opposed on the flimsy pretence that ‘the communities may not wish to make public the knowledge of the medicinal use and properties of biological resources’ (p.230). His real concern is that pharma companies may utilize them.

The harsh wildlife protection act is causing animal numbers to go up considerably, leading to attacks on human habitats on the fringes of forests. The stringency of the act was conceptualized by urban nature conservationists who are alienated from the common villager and having an elite mindset. The author notes that even Salim Ali shared this prejudice. The system criminalizing activities in wildlife parks was set in place by Ali and some maharajas of erstwhile native states who were entrusted by Nehru to formulate rules on wildlife in the 1950s. Mainly because hunting is banned for almost half a century and animal numbers have greatly increased which lead to raids on farmland and conflict with people, Gadgil boldly suggests legalization of hunting on a limited scale as in Sweden where wildlife is deemed a renewable resource that should be managed through regulated systematic hunting while consuming the meat and utilizing other products of economic value such as hides or antlers. No country other than India bans hunting outside national parks or wildlife sanctuaries except for endangered species. Since the author is much interested in anthropology, we get to know some interesting facts as well. A study under the well-known Harvard leader of human population genetics Cavalli-Sforza found that there was a large overlap of genetic makeup of two groups from Uttara Kannada district in Karnataka, namely the Brahmin Haviks and Dalit Mukris (p.47). The study found that it is impossible to assign any particular individual with certainty to one or the other group. All talk of any one caste group in India being genetically different or superior to others is just nonsense.

Each chapter in the book begins with a short poem of four or five rhyming lines, related to the topic which is discussed in that chapter. Nothing is mentioned about their authorship, but it’s possible that Gadgil himself has penned these lines. The book is somewhat large with around 400 pages that focuses on technical aspects on ecological conservation that demands readers’ unwavering attention. It includes long explanations involving technical terms about the projects coordinated or assisted by the author while at IISc. This becomes a trying experience for ordinary readers after some time. In one such instance, the book lists out 21 problems specific to the Chilika lake in Odisha along with solutions proposed by the local people. Such elaborations are frequent and tiresome for the readers.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Autumn of the Matriarch

Title: Autumn of the Matriarch – Indira Gandhi’s Final Term in Office
Author: Diego Maiorano
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2015 (First)
ISBN: 9789351774709
Pages: 261

Just as Margaret Thatcher is called the ‘Iron Lady of UK’, Indira Gandhi more than deserve the epithet ‘the Iron Lady of India’. In fact, the five major policy changes she had initiated – termination of privy purses, bank nationalization, Bangladesh war, the Emergency and Operation Blue Star – ended up with far more consequences for India than what Thatcher had made in her tenure for her nation. Most books and articles on Indira Gandhi concentrate on the Emergency and how she stifled free speech and put democracy on ventilator for eighteen gruelling months. This book concentrates on the final five years in her office which she won by sweeping the polls in 1980 which, in a sense, was an indication that the populace had forgiven her for the excesses of the Emergency. The research for the book is part of a PhD scholarship of the University of Torino, Italy, granted to the author. Diego Maiorano is a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. He has written several articles on Indian politics and society. He was associated with very prestigious academic institutions where his main topic of interest was contemporary Indian history and politics.

It feels like Maiorano have no exposure to India other than academic or personal interactions with the prominent personalities who had a role to play during the period under discussion. This brings in a refreshingly neutral feel to the narrative while exhibiting a few glimpses here and there of the ‘white man’s disdain’ of India and its society. A primer on Indian politics after 1947 is condensed into a brief section which covers Indira Gandhi’s ascent to power. This was different from that of her father and first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. A combination of genuine popularity with the party’s remarkable ability to extract votes in exchange of patronage distribution ensured the Congress’ dominance over India’s political system in the first two decades after independence. However, after Indira became prime minister, corruption was institutionalized in the early-1970s. Industrialists factored in the cost of ‘donations’ to Congress party as any other cost involved in an investment. Indira was riddled with a sense of insecurity right from her childhood, which made her look at her rivals – whether in politics or party – with unease and hostility. She destroyed her own powerful party leaders who could eventually turn into enemies. State chief ministers were handpicked and nominated by her. With the suspension of internal party elections in 1972, she controlled the key positions in the party apparatus. Loyalty to the Gandhi family was an essential pre-requisite to guarantee a plum position in the party as well as the state.

The early-1970s was a restive period both in terms and national and global politics. The oil shock had set in motion a huge inflation. In Nehru era, higher education had received a disproportionate amount of resources as compared to primary and secondary education. This led to high enrolment of students in colleges. Employment for these became a problem and large scale student protests erupted everywhere. The quality of Indian democracy had steadily deteriorated since Indira came to power and the Emergency was only just another nail in the process. Indira destroyed her own party as an instrument for information gathering at the local level and was not aware of the resentment brewing in the countryside in 1977. She lost the election and was even jailed for misuse of power. However, the internal dissensions in the Janata party was unmanageable. Everyone wished to have a slice of power and had no compunction to backstab anyone who obstructed their way. Within two years, the Janata experiment failed and the party exploded into several fragments. Hence in the 1980 election, Indira and her party was the only alternative to chaos. She offered stability in the face of the disastrous economic and social situation brought on by the mismanagement of her adversaries. The electors bought her argument and she swept the polls. Her modus operandi remained the same as before. Most of her colleagues in the Cabinet were long on loyalty and short on original thinking and administrative ability.

Then comes the first half of the 1980s which is the area of focus of this book. The pyramidal system of corruption that had come into being in the early-1970s scaled newer heights. Many chief ministers were removed because their incompetence and corruption had become too much even by the prevailing permissive standards. The party high command continuously intervened in provincial affairs and direct involvement of central ministers in the administration of a state became quite common. They were haughty towards local leaders as exemplified in Andhra where Rajiv Gandhi’s chiding of state chief minister T. Anjaiah provoked N T Rama Rao to float a regional party to restore ‘Telugu pride’. Law and order situation severely deteriorated in the early-1980s. Punjab and Assam erupted into violence. The irony was that the rebel sponsored by Congress as a counterweight to Akali Dal in Punjab, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, turned a Frankenstein that ultimately led to the assassination of Indira herself. High-handed tactics employed in removing Farooq Abdullah in Kashmir might have had a role in fomenting militancy. The personalist conception of the Congress party became clear when following Sanjay Gandhi’s death, his brother Rajiv was inducted into politics. From that moment on, dynastic succession became the universally accepted rule, not only in Congress, but in most other parties too. A whiff of fresh air was also felt on the economic side. Indira took a radical departure from the past as she gave up efforts to bring about social changes through land reforms, progressive direct taxation, measures to restrict conspicuous consumption and control over monopoly. Seeds of liberalization were thus sown in this term.

Maiorano presents a closer picture of the socio-economic transformation Indira Gandhi was attempting to bring about. She tried desperately to woo the middle class. The party proclaimed her as a strong leader the country invariably needed. It also tried to substantiate the modernisation dream of the middle class and to stimulate its sense of national pride. Then she promoted the interests of the upper castes (p.121). The book alleges that the RSS actively supported Indira in her final years. Its workers campaigned for Congress and refused to support BJP (p.134). The author claims that her political message on the country’s unity was in many ways identical to that of the Hindu right-wing. The support of big businesses and kickbacks on foreign contracts ensured a huge availability of funds for the prime minister’s party (p.136). The author observes that the Punjab problem was completely avoidable and easily manageable if Indira had negotiated with those parties who did not share her own political objectives. To break Akali unity, Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi financed and promoted a hard-line preacher Bhindranwale who in fact campaigned for Congress in three constituencies in the 1980 elections. He was arrested for the murder of Lala Jagat Narayan but ignominiously released soon after, because the Delhi Gurdwara management committee threatened to withdraw support of the Congress in Delhi.

The book focusses on the somewhat irrevocable damage Indira Gandhi had inflicted on democratic institutions of India. The judiciary strenuously fought for its independence and eventually resisted to a large extent the attacks of the executive. Indira superseded the seniority of three judges and appointed A N Ray as the Chief Justice of India in 1973. All the three judges promptly resigned in protest. However, the parliament and the president surrendered without fighting. The author remarks humorously that the bureaucracy split into three groups – ‘the wives’ (those officers who are attached to only one party), ‘the nuns’ (officers who remain unattached to any party) and ‘the prostitutes’ (who attach themselves to whichever party is in power and switch when there is a change of government), the share of the last being quite high (p.167). Indira left behind three destructive legacies – she institutionalized corruption as a key feature of India’s polity; entry of criminals into politics which was started and legitimized by Sanjay Gandhi (p.211); and state institutions became a vehicle for pursuing personal and partisan ends coupled with the institutionalization of dynastic politics. The book concludes that Indira left behind a divided nation, though not in the physical sense of disintegration. India’s social fabric was badly cracked in the mid-1980s.

The author’s unfamiliarity to India is almost tangible in the narrative as he relies solely on newspaper reports and personal interviews. This is accentuated by lack of comparison to modern Indian politics which he seems not to have followed in detail. At some points, the coverage is totally dependent on interviews with some of the prominent figures held a quarter century after the incident. It feels like the opinions they expressed are taken at face value. Indira’s attempts to subjugate India’s institutions for personal domination is a self-professed recurring theme in the book. Maiorano focusses only on politics and leaves out the economic aspects of her rule. This is a great drawback as her U-turn from the socialist path is not sufficiently elaborated. It is true that the author has provided some coverage on this topic and remarks that the government’s focus shifted from the rural poor to the urban middle class in the 1980s. Indira’s encounter with the judiciary is also only glimpsed at. This may be because the most dramatic period of the tussle happened before the Emergency. The lack of coverage on the personal aspects of the prime minister such as her itinerary in the final weeks and the repercussions in the country after Operation Blue Star are glaring. Written from a typical European perspective, the author trivializes the aftereffects of illegal immigration from Bangladesh into India’s northeast, specifically Assam. For the Assamese middle class, he says, what was at stake was control over the state institutions which in turn were the key to the allocation of most middle class jobs (p.114). The grave Assamese concerns over the takeover of their state by illegal Bangladeshi Muslims goes above the author’s head probably because he was not aware of the deeply religious nature of India’s partition and how the district of Sylhet was taken away from Assam to merge with Pakistan because the Muslims had by then become a numerical majority in the district as a result of unchecked immigration.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Father Tongue, Motherland

Title: Father Tongue, Motherland – The Birth of Language in South Asia
Author: Peggy Mohan
Publisher: Allen Lane, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9780670099740
Pages: 361

There is a famous truism called the ‘Law of the Instrument’ which says: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. Though unfortunate for the author, this book is a shining validation of the unedifying principle in that ‘law’. The author is a person of Indian origin residing in Trinidad and is an expert on the mixed or creole languages spoken in those islands. She very clearly understands how these languages originated and developed through the murky episodes of plantation slavery. However, she falls into the trap of believing that the same mechanism was repeated everywhere else in the world and churns out high-sounding theories on how the modern Indian languages came into being from a local substratum that mixed with Sanskrit of the elite newcomers. Essentially, she uses Trinidadian creole English as a compass to hold on to for the journey into language evolution in the Indian subcontinent. Needless to say, she tries miserably to clothe her outlandish concepts in the straitjacket of social dynamics among Trinidadian slave colonies. In the meanwhile, several prejudices of the author also tumble out of the closet. Peggy Mohan was born in Trinidad and studied linguistics at the University of the West Indies. She has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ashoka University and Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Mohan assumes without any rational justification that what happened in the Caribbean, associated with slave labour from Africa, occurred in India too. This posits an all-male migration of settlers arriving one fine morning from the land to the north without their womenfolk and going on to have children from local women creating a bilingual generation that knew both its mother tongue and Sanskrit. This produced a number of intermediate languages called prakrit which remained in vogue till the twelfth century when Muslim invaders occupied India. The author claims that the Muslim occupation did well for the underlying languages when it suppressed Sanskrit and its associated prakrit varieties. This led to the development of modern languages. Mohan tries to establish two points here – that the modern Indian languages are totally delinked with Sanskrit in the initial stages and that the Muslim sultans deserve the credit for the growth of modern languages in India. The basic presumption is that the north Indian languages have words drawn from local prakrits, but their grammar had a number of features that are derived from older languages of the area.

Theories of Dravidian origin of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) flourished in India till DNA analysis came in vogue which convincingly ruled out any sudden variations in genetic material in the entire subcontinent, including Pakistan. A Dravidian language called Brahui is still spoken in Baluchistan while a language called Burushaski is spoken in an isolated outcrop of Swat region. The author accepts that the speakers of these languages are not genetically different from their neighbours (p.113). But she again claims that it always made sense that the route used by the early Dravidians into the subcontinent should run from the Northwest to South India via the Indus valley (p.90). Again, this attests to her fallacious intuition that the Dravidians are a human race and IVC was their creation. Both these wrong concepts are long discarded by the academic community. Ignoring the glaring inconsistencies in her argument, she proceeds to test her creole model on India. All-male migrants arrive in a new land and marry local women. Their children and some elite local men pick up a close approximation of the migrants’ language with essentially no change in the grammar. Later on, other local people join the community and soon a version of the language develops with a number of grammatical features from the local languages. Grammar comes from local, but vocabulary is from the migrants. This is the significance of the book’s title, Father tongue, motherland. At this point, she presents another inconsistency in her theory that the IVC was Dravidian. A grammatical feature called ergativity is strongly seen in the Northwest where IVC once flourished. This is conspicuously absent in all Dravidian languages in the South and Magadhan languages to the East, including Sanskrit and all Aryan languages.

A major weakness in the book’s research is the highly subjective nature of the references and the casual way of obtaining information that does not stand up to the minimum rigour expected from a serious academic treatise. Some of the author’s observations are self-delusional and outright misleading. She discusses Brahui and Burushaski languages in the guise of an expert, but her only source of info regarding the latter is a Japanese ‘expert’ who himself did not have much grounding in that language. One of his replies was that he doesn’t ‘think’ that there were compound verbs in Burushaski. Such is the level of understanding among the sources! She further claims that a lady software developer from Bengaluru has deciphered the Indus Valley script which she claims to be notes concerned with currency and the sort of license documents that allowed them to practice their trade. It is not literature at all (p.100). She in fact likens it to a QR code. Another mistaken comment is that the old IVC did not have a sense of social hierarchy (p.143). The findings of archaeologists suggest a contrary picture in the presence of citadels in many Indus sites such as Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Dholavira. Apart from wishful thinking, isn’t it naïve on the part of a scholar to assume a civilization which existed several millennia ago that did not have social hierarchies? Another erroneous inference – either accidental or deliberate because of the author’s association with the Jamia Milia Islamia – is that the Islamic occupation of India was some sort of a blessing in developing the modern languages by destroying Sanskrit influence and Islam offered a path to equality to the country’s downtrodden masses. Both are maliciously crafted perfidies. Forced conversions were the norm during Islamic expansion in South India, but the author asserts that lower castes were attracted to Islam because of the equality it offered through the teachings of Sufis (p.47). She seems to have no sense of what was going on in India. This observation was made regarding the appearance of a mixed elite in Hyderabad in which the lower castes in fact did not find entry.

The author then attempts to make a guess on the basic features of a primitive language X which was spoken at IVC sites when the supposed Aryan invasion took place and which was the prototype that mixed with Sanskrit. She compiles thirteen features of the hypothetical language, compares these to Tamil and appears surprised to find that Tamil matches them. Again, this is just another vent to her overheated fantasy that IVC was Dravidian. Then she emits the offensive and unsubstantiated observation that ‘Punjabi, Tamil, Burushaski, Bhojpuri and Brahui, together with Language X look like one big extended family and Sanskrit the foreign guest who came to stay’ (p.150). Read that sentence again and note with consternation the lethal venom this Trinidadian scholar conceals in it. She goes on further to claim that Language X would sound like a hypothetical Punjabi song with Tamil words. Between the tenth and twelfth centuries CE, Prakrit languages were replaced and our modern languages are claimed to begin appearing in the documents. Never for a moment she considers the rather plausible alternative of the prakrits metamorphosing to the modern languages. Sultanates are said to be the reason for giving space to local languages in place of Sanskrit and related prakrits. However, this is just another hallucination as there were no sultanates that spread across the whole of India in the tenth to twelfth centuries. The author’s conclusions are often shocking because of their glaring disconnect from objective truth. One of her references clearly state that the Turks destroyed the Buddhist Pala kingdom in Bengal and the religion declined. But she demurs and asserts instead that Brahmanism assimilated the people and Brahmins imposed taxes in the kingdom at Malda (p.203). She then turns the screw a bit tighter and claims that the ‘Sufis arrived in Bengal well in advance of the new rulers (Muslim sultans) and encountered a restive population of Buddhists, unhappy with Brahmins and orthodox Hinduism and ready to turn to Muslims for protection’.

Peggy Mohan’s idea of India’s pre-history is childishly simple which can be summarized as follows - 65,000 years ago, people speaking Munda languages left Africa and settled in India. About 9,000 years ago, there was a migration of farmers from Zagros mountains in Iran and they interbred with Mundas, creating a hybrid race called Dravidians. Around 4,000 years ago, a large number of Austro-Asiatic men reached Gangetic plains and introduced a hybrid variety of rice that enhanced productivity of cultivation and population levels. Then came Vedic men with Sanskrit. The ridiculousness of this argument is on what happened next. After all these encounters, the Mundas promptly retreated into forests and became tribal!

What is remarkable throughout the narrative is the author’s inveterate hatred towards Sanskrit and Hinduism though she cleverly vails it in attacks against ‘Brahmanism’. The fundamental premise of the book that only males form migratory bands does not hold water and the entire logical edifice is built up on this shaky ground. Her example of gazelle herds in Masai Mara in support of this ridiculous proposition is made all the more comic by the fact that she found this idea about gazelles during one of her pleasure trips to that place, probably from a tour guide. Fact and truth are at a discount in the entire text and hearsay and opinion of dubious academics are assigned utmost credibility. An email from a correspondent is enough to convince the author to declare some preposterous idea as gospel truth. Her conjectures are marked by their weirdness and naivety. She once remarks that ‘perhaps Brahmin men had begun to secretly dislike the verb conjugations in early Sanskrit’ (p.81. This is the only reason she can think of regarding the disappearance of this feature in Sanskrit!

This book lacks sincere research and is a pure waste of time. Hence it is not recommended to any class of readers.

Rating: 1 Star

Lords of Earth and Sea

Title: Lords of Earth and Sea – A History of the Chola Empire
Author: Anirudh Kanisetti
Publisher: Juggernaut, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9789353455606
Pages: 343

The Chola dynasty is historically and emotionally very important to South Indians and Tamils respectively. It was the only Indian lineage that carried our culture towards the distant shores of southeast Asia and even China. Indian mainstream historians generally assume an unmindful attitude towards this South Indian dynasty and focus entirely on the Delhi sultanates and Mughals. Partly to rectify this bias and set the record straight, our new parliament building houses the spectre (chenkol) of the Cholas as a symbol and continuity of the authority and fountainhead of Indian culture. The book’s front cover shows a chenkol. This book lacks historical rigour, but is an attempt to fill the void. The story is generated from inputs of 30,000 inscriptions in the Chola land. Names of minor dignitaries who had dedicated grants and gifts to the temples are also woven into the story. The unfortunate part of the whole episode is that the author has made a lot of warps and wefts coloured by his ideology while weaving the parts into the general skeleton of Chola history. Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian specializing in ancient and early medieval India. It is not clear whether he has any academic background in history but has received grants for his work from prestigious institutions.

The book opens with a clarification that the Cholas who originated in the Kaveri floodplain is not genetically linked to Cholas of the Sangam era. The new kings were only slightly more powerful than the landed magnates who were their allies. They developed political power by matrimonial alliances with powerful families and other royal houses. The book tells about Kokkilan Adigal, a Chera princess married to Parantaka I. While describing her imaginary journeys across the vastness of the Tamil plains, the book resembles a movie script. These queens were very social, not quite unlike their modern counterparts and greatly contributed to temple worship as part of an effort to justify their rule to a peasant subject class. Sembiyan Mahadevi was a Chola queen who commissioned and popularized Shiva’s worship as Nataraja. This iconic figure of Shiva was first crafted around 970 CE. Sembiyan Mahadevi built as many as eight temples. She handpicked a team of sculptors from the Kaveri delta, binding all their families and villages to her. All her temples had a signature style, with Nataraja facing the south. Slowly, under the velvet glove of Shaivism, the Chola court extended its iron fist and controlled the floodplain. One of their initial defeats in 949 at Takkolam was soon gotten over with and the empire was crowned in all its glory by the end of the first millennium CE.

Kanisetti provides some interesting details which put the Cholas in a class of its own among medieval and pre-medieval kings. Succession to the throne appears to be smooth and orderly, without fratricide or patricide. The ascent of Prince Arulmoli (regnal title Rajendra Chola) shows a marked contrast to the bloodstained machinations of many dynasties, especially the Mughals. Again, Rajaraja was ordained as a co-ruler to his uncle Uttama Chola and he assumed sovereignty when the elder died of natural causes. Construction of the Brihadiswara Temple at Thanjavur gives an absorbing aside to the story. The architects needed to design a temple at least 40 times larger than the average Tamil shrine. It had to be done in a single stroke, without experimenting with buildings of intermediate sizes. Excepting the pyramids of Giza, it was the tallest structure on earth in the eleventh century. The interior of the superstructure can still be glimpsed today. It is an astounding and somewhat eerie sight, an empty, silent pyramid of granite ascending away into the darkness. Cholas heavily depended on the merchant guilds such as the ‘Five Hundred’ to project their power overseas. The Cholas had no navy, contrary to popular perceptions, but the merchant ships carried men and materiel to the places as needed. They also acted as spies and gathered information on numerous occasions. They tipped Rajaraja of the power vacuum in Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka which led to a Chola invasion and annexation. In return, the Cholas helped the guild by destroying their trade rivals. When Rajaraja stormed Kanthaloor in Kerala, he burnt the merchant ships moored there in an uncharacteristic departure from the rule of leaving commerce unmolested during war. This is thought to be a strategy to cause crushing losses to the Chola guild’s competitors. Further, the book notes that the Cholas established new centres through conquest, but they did not wipe out the older cultures and thrived from diversity. Rajendra made a plundering raid to Kedah in Malaysia in 1025, but he did not establish suzerainty over it. A network of Tamil merchants was established from mainland India deep into southeast Asia. Remains of brick temples were found there, containing Tamil-style stone idols of Buddha, Shiva linga and sculpture of Vishnu were cohabiting harmoniously (p.145). Read William Dalrymple’s excellent work ‘The Golden Road’ which presents a sweeping coverage of southeast Asia’s cultural links to the Tamil country (read my review here). Some fundamental changes were happening in the palace around this time. After Rajendra followed his father Rajaraja to the crown, purse-strings were tightened and the royal ladies ceased patronizing temples for half a century since the 1020s.

The most unfortunate thing about the book is that Kanisetti tries to sneak in his liberal ideology onto medieval treatises in claims such as the Chola empire was great only for the upper classes of the Kaveri floodplain; for the people on the frontier it meant that their homes were looted, fields burnt and women captured. Not only the Cholas, in any period in history including our own, the upper classes always have a great time. It provides no new information such as redundant statements like ‘it was the sun which rose in the day and the moon shone in the night during the Chola period’. The author plays up the atrocities during Cholas’ military campaigns as if to blame them. During Rajendra’s Ganga campaign, he attacked temples. The author then admits that a number of spectacular idols were carried back to Chola territory (p.19) and placed in minor shrines. He says that this was very much par for the course in medieval south Asia. Now, compare this to what Ghaznawi did to the Somnatha idol at around the same time. Readers also get a taste of the author’s socialist turn of mind while describing events occurred in the eleventh century. He complains that most of what the Paraiyar cultivators grew went to landowners. The unmentioned labour of the Paraiyars was the foundation of the medieval period’s urbanism and complex exchanges, but the people were shorter, wirier and more wrinkly with prolonged exposure (p.164). These are lofty, elegant ideas but applied here a bit anachronistically. This book also takes references in contemporary texts at face value ignoring the exaggeration of many orders of magnitude. He considers Sekkilar’s Shaivite work on the history of sixty-three gurus. They entered into a religious discourse with the Jains and when the latter lost, 8000 of them is said to have impaled themselves. Kanisetti then cheekily suggests that this was based on a historical event even though he has no references to support this claim. Another story in the same book is that of a devotee of Shiva named Kannappa plucking both his eyeballs and offering it to a linga. Was that too based on a real incident?

The book gives a prominent place to the changes that occurred in Tamil society along with Chola decline and how the caste system solidified thereafter. As the centralized monarchy weakened, power was gradually seized by those who controlled military labour and agrarian production at the source. Tax evasion from within by gifting land to temples and foreign invasions weakened the Cholas. Caste is often thought of as an ancient, immutable system imposed from the top by kings and Brahmins, but in south India, it was a medieval system shaped by medieval classes in response to an absence of royal authority, rather than a preponderance of it (p.255). The book explicitly narrates the Cholas’ war-time atrocities, but a marked difference of their modus operandi to Islamic invasions is clearly discernible. The Hoysalas ransacked Kaveri temples but did not destroy them. The Palli people under the Cholas ransomed the idols and re-consecrated them (p.200). This is how true economic interest on the part of invaders works. On the other hand, whenever we read of destruction of temples, a clear religious motive lies behind the act. The author presents the ways in which palace women were sexually exploited in needless detail. These are unquestioningly taken from the eulogies of fawning poets living on the largesse of their patrons.

The entire book employs a clever stratagem to paint the greatest Chola kings as villains or at least as those who do not deserve appreciation or respect. To bolster his point, he alleges them to have carried out the most outrageous crime imaginable in today’s Tamil Nadu – patronization of Brahmins! The book is written in dramatic prose with characters displaying emotions and capable of thinking like ordinary people. It is probable that the author might have desired to provide the seed for a movie script on Cholas out of this book in the future. Even though this book is historical fiction for the most part, he paints a picture designed to accentuate the fault lines in present-day society and deliberately plays up discrimination and violence which might have happened in the distant past. Instead of naming the princes directly, the uses their battle honorifics like ‘Madurai-destroyer’ or ‘Kerala-destroyer’ in a wily attempt to scratch long-healed scabs in order to reopen the wound. This would also make the people from these regions remain slightly peeved that would prevent them from identifying with the kings and queens in this book. Mass rape is accused in a Chola-Chalukya war. It might’ve occurred, but what is hypocritical is the total tactical silence of such liberal authors when the winning side is Mughal or Central Asian, as we have seen many times in the past. In such cases, they shut up like a clam on battlefield violence and tyranny on captured women. Examples of the author’s colourful language describing Cholas’ atrocities are: ‘hands reddened with blood and mud-stained sweat of thousands’; ‘loot and pillage of undefended villages’; ‘sawed off the nose of the daughter of an enemy general’; ‘The Chola imperial temples only served to distribute war loot to Kaveri gentry and warriors’; ‘Chola court was imagined as a cut-throat world in later centuries’.

Winston Churchill once pejoratively remarked that India was no more a single country than the equator – that is, India was only a geographic term. But Kanisetti goes one step further in the detestation of his homeland by removing all references to the Indian subcontinent and replacing it with South Asia. However, South India remains as such without any modification. Taking into account the disdain and apathy Kanisetti shows to all things Indian and his uncanny knack in always digging up the unpleasant, this man may rightly be called the ‘Wendy Doniger of India’.

The book lacks serious research and feels like fiction. Serious readers of history would do better by avoiding this book.

Rating: 2 Star