The Anarchy

Title: The Anarchy – The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of an Empire

Author: William Dalrymple

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9781526618504

Pages: 522

 

The eighteenth century was a critical period of transition in Indian history. The Mughal Empire began disintegrating immediately after the death of Aurangzeb. Or in other words, it can also be said that the pace of disintegration accelerated after fate removed Aurangzeb from the throne. A combination of weak and incompetent princes, dissension in the provinces, power struggles among princes and external threats destabilized the House of Timur day by day. It lost the reins completely after Nadir Shah’s invasion in 1739. Shah looted the entire wealth of the Mughals and carried away the treasure to Persia. The financially wrecked empire than had to deal with the English East India Company (EIC) which was growing from strength to strength in Bengal. The Hindus were also making resurgence in the form of Marathas and Jats. The Mughal emperor was literally at the protection of the Maratha confederacy. This book covers the period of five decades from 1756 – on the brink of Plassey – to 1803 when the British defeated the Marathas and took over as the Mughal emperor’s protectors. The contention between the British, French, Mughals and their vassals like the Bengal Nawab, Nizam of Hyderabad and Tipu Sultan and also the Marathas created a condition of anarchy in the subcontinent. William Dalrymple makes an excellent survey of the country in that period in this book. This is the latest volume from him. The book attempts to answer how a business corporation based in London managed to replace the mighty Mughal Empire as masters of India.

 

Dalrymple presents a prescient review of the operations of EIC and how the U-turn in the flow of money between India and England occurred after the company started poking its nose in regional battles with Mughal vassals. By the 1750s, the items handled by the company were tea, saltpeter, silk and cotton cloth. It had to exchange silver coins to purchase goods in India. £6 million (£630 million in current values) had been sent out in the first half of eighteenth century, but very little silver bullion was dispatched after Plassey. Bengal was the sink into which foreign bullion disappeared before 1757. But after this crucial year, Bengal became a treasure trove from which vast amounts of wealth were drained without any prospect of return. A large portion of the money ended up in the hands of company officials illegally. A good proportion of the loot of Bengal went directly into Clive’s pockets. The entire contents of the Bengal treasury were loaded into a hundred boats and transferred to company’s strongholds. India was being robbed in plain daylight. This required a strong military force to keep peace and order among the contenders. By the time EIC captured Delhi, the company had trained up a private security force of 200,000 sepoys which was double the size of the regular British army. It marshalled more fire power than any nation-state in Asia.

 

Dalrymple then makes a unique observation that the conquest of India was not the end-result of an imperialist masterplan but rather the unexpected side-effects of manipulations in regional politics for power. Readers get stunned at this straight formulation of a new theory, but the author makes a convincing argument of the case. Siraj ud-Daula, whom the English defeated at Plassey, was a cruel despot who rough-treated his own nobles and Jagat Seth, the most powerful banking house of Bengal. Mir Jaffar, Siraj’s paymaster, turned against him with the help of Jagat Seth and encouragement from EIC. This was something quite new in Indian history. This was an instance of a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade. This was not part of any imperial strategy. In fact, the EIC men were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks. Seeing opportunities for personal enrichment as well as political and economic gain for their country, they dived headlong into the conspiracies. The Battle of Plassey was fought with only 800 Europeans and 2200 South Indian sepoys. After the Queen’s oversight was mandated by regulations, the company had to wage many battles which eventually bankrupted them.

 

The Battle of Plassey was a turning point in Indian history as the beginning of the end of Mughal colonialism and rise of British colonialism. This was the moment when the traders associated with a for-profit trading company engaged in administration of the land. Clive had intended only to establish British trade on a favourable footing and to ensure the accession of a friendlier Nawab than Siraj ud-Daula. But what they had in fact done was permanently to undermine the authority of Nawabs, bringing chaos to the most peaceful and profitable parts of the country. The Nawabs hoisted by the company soon turned against them and engaged in battle at Buxar. The nominal Mughal emperor Shah Alam also participated in the battle with his troops. The Mughals were convincingly defeated and they forfeited to the company the right to collect taxes (diwani) in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The emperor signed off economic management of the three richest provinces to EIC, taking Rs. 2.6 million in his pocket annually. The only condition he set to the company was to ‘govern the provinces agreeably to the rules of Mohammed and the law of the empire’. This concession enabled the company to soar high to conquer the entire land.

 

The book then takes a detour to examine the rising opposition in England to the company’s way of operations in India. Immediately after the company received the diwani, Bengal went through a gruesome famine lasting several years. Millions perished, but the company made an increase in tax collection. By 1771, word was spreading about company’s inhumanity in Bengal. The number of dead and dying was simply too vast to hide. The immense wealth flaunted by returned company officials – called nabobs – also caused resentment. Strident demands arose for the Crown to take over Bengal as a government colony so ending the asset-stripping of the province by a for-profit company. In 1772, several banks in England and the continent went bankrupt and the EIC came on the brink of loan default. Having a sizeable income of Britain channeled in through the remittances of the company, it was simply too big to be allowed to go down under. In return for a loan of £1.4 million as a bailout package, the company agreed for parliamentary control through the Regulating Act of 1773. Henceforth, parliament took upon itself the right to appoint the company’s governor general in India and to oversee its operations. The 1773 Act did little to muzzle the worst excesses but it created a precedent. It marked the beginning of a steady process of state interference that would ultimately end in outright nationalization in 1858.

 

The plundering mindset of both the Mughals and the British is evident in their sharing of spoils from Bengal treasury while the province was reeling under the worst famine and famished people were dying in hundreds on the wayside. Stretching the comparison a bit longer, it can be concluded that the Mughals and EIC feasted on the carcass of Bengal. While EIC increased its remittances to London during the famine, Emperor Shah Alam anxiously demanded the company to pay him the tribute from Bengal as he was in extreme demand of money. But don’t be misled by the urgency of the request! This was not to pay for any famine relief, but only to satisfy the demands of his court musicians and dancing girls. The author also portrays the extreme helplessness of the emperor. His forces had earlier defeated Rohilla chief Zabita Khan and sacked his Pathargarh fort. Shah Alam took his son Ghulam Qadir to Delhi and used him as a catamite. After a few years, Ghulam Qadir attacked Delhi while the Maratha protection force was engaged in an internal conflict among them. Qadir extracted his revenge from the royal family by raping the royal princesses, forcing the princes to perform dances in women’s costume and finally gouging Shah Alam’s eyes out with his own hands. The Marathas under Mahadji Scindia chased Qadir and retaliated by severing his head before inflicting all the punishments he gave to Shah Alam, who was the nominal overlord of the Marathas.

 

As is usual among left-liberal writers, Dalrymple strives hard to portray Tipu Sultan as a benevolent and impartial ruler who treated all religions equal. The attempt is quite clumsy and unconvincing though. He accuses the British to have consistently portrayed Tipu as a savage and fanatical barbarian, but he was in truth a connoisseur and intellectual with a library containing 2000 books (p.321). Tipu was also in the habit of sending offerings to Sringeri Mutt. Will these mitigate his atrocious conduct described by the author on the same page? Tipu Sultan had a cruel bend of mind and was in the habit of cutting off arms, legs, ears and noses of prisoners before hanging them. He routinely circumcised captive enemy combatants and brutally converted them to Islam. He destroyed temples and churches of those he conquered. Another of his favourite pastime went like this: he tied naked Hindu and Christian prisoners to the legs of elephants and made the animals to run in opposite directions till the bodies of the victims are torn to pieces. The modern ISIS has also replicated this kind of punishment, probably stimulated by the deeds of their ‘illustrious’ predecessor. The only difference is that they used SUVs rather than elephants. One has to change with the times, isn’t it?

 

The East India Company sucked the life blood of India for a century before it was dismantled after the 1857 war of independence. But if you look at it from a modern management expert’s viewpoint, it was the ultimate model of commercial efficiency. After a century of incorporation, it still had only 35 permanent employees in its head office. The firm managed military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of south Asia while operating from a modest office building in London. But what played out in the end was the supreme act of corporate violence in history. Dalrymple plays up the usual liberal trope of the enlightened Mughals in treating their subjects without consideration of the religion they belong to. We see a conscious selection of passages which favour the narrative of ‘magnanimous Mughals’. Not content with stopping there, he goes a step further and includes passages depicting the barbarity of Marathas. We read about Shah Alam’s poems praising Hindu gods on the one hand and the Marathas destroying temples in Bengal on the other. A notable feature of the book is the special care it devotes to estimate the present money value of the amounts mentioned in historical records. Seeing these figures Indians would surely get heartburn at the vast amount of wealth plundered out of India by the British, Persians, Afghans and Mughals. Quite expectedly, Dalrymple’s style of writing is a delight to readers.

 

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

 

Return of a King

Title: Return of a King – The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-1842

Author: William Dalrymple

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2013 (First)

ISBN: 978-1-4088-1830-5

Pages: 502

Ever since I read The Last Mughal, Dalrymple has been one of my favourite authors. As the years passed, all of his other works came to me until I saw the announcement of his new volume, Return of a King somewhere around the beginning of the year. Eager anticipation ensued, finally reaching the crescendo of joy when I got hold of a copy in the library a week back. With this book, let me proudly say that I have read and reviewed ALL of Dalrymple’s titles! Alas, along with the joy comes the saddening realization that I will not be encountering one of his works for at least two years to come, as that much time is what he normally takes in researching and publishing a new work. When a new title appears at the end of a grueling wait, I am certain that the anticipation would not have been in vain.

Return of a King is an anecdote of Britain’s first Afghan War (1839-42) in an attempt to tame the wild and mountainous country and to re-establish Shah Shuja, the monarch who lived in exile in British India. Based on unsubstantiated conclusions taken from doubtful intelligence gathered from the field, Britain invaded the country to preempt the Russians from getting a hold with the ruler Dost Mohammad who was really an anglophile at heart. The Army of the Indus, as the British forces were called, managed to overrun the country after a long march through difficult mountain passes under the constant harassment from tribal snipers. Shah Shuja, who was weak and enjoying no support at home, was made the king again. The highhandedness and rush for political and economic reforms initiated by the invaders soon alienated them from the Afghan nobility which had had a strict code of honour. Shuja was soon lampooned as the stooge of infidels and the whole country rose against them. The weak British envoy and military commander in Kabul couldn’t offer a fitting response to the uprising in time and they suffered heavy casualties in the city, with the envoy and his deputy being brutally murdered by the insurgents. A ceasefire was soon agreed and the British were allowed to retreat back to their base in Peshawar at the height of winter in 1842. The retreating troops were followed by harsh nature and the determined Afghan soldiers bent on obliterating the invading force. In a matter of weeks, the entire army was wiped out by cold, diseases, hunger and the bullets and knives of the insurgents. Only one man limped back to the British base at Jalalabad to tell the story. Shuja himself was assassinated soon after though the losses were avenged to some extent by the Army of Retribution led by the British in 1842 which devastated most of the country they passed through and killing thousands. Dalrymple beautifully describes the epic fight and the circumstances which led to it.

Afghanistan always remained at the frontier of powerful neighbours and was never under a dominant central authority until it was established by Ahmed Shah Abdali who was in the service of Nadir Shah, but fled Persia soon after the Shah’s assassination, stealing the Koh-i-Noor, the world’s largest diamond. He established the Durrani dynasty which lasted only two generations. The Sadozai clan, of which the rulers belonged, came to blows against the Barakzai clan, who were the ministers. Shah Zaman, grand son of Abdali was captured and blinded in 1800 in factional struggle against his half-brother. Three years later, Shah Shuja ul-Mulk, the brother of the deposed king managed to stage a victorious battle to ascend the throne in Kabul. Shuja was reported to be a gentleman with refined tastes, but with a predilection to cut off the ears, noses and genitals of his trusted servants for even minor infractions. Shuja’s reign lasted only till 1809 when he was deposed by Barakzais at the Battle of Nimla. Shuja ran for his life and obtained asylum at Ludhiana, even though he had to part with the Koh-i-Noor to Raja Ranjit Singh in the meanwhile. He planned and organized several abortive military strikes against the Kabul regime under his rival, the Barakzai Dost Mohammad.

Meanwhile, another story was being enacted in Europe. Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall pointed to the importance of Afghanistan to Britain. The French emperor wanted to prise India away from England, thus weakening it. To this end, he made alliances with Persia and Russia. But his fall put paid to French ambitions until Britain found another threat looming on its northern horizon in the 1830s – Russia. St. Petersburg opened negotiations with Persia and Dost Mohammad Khan. If the Russians could ensure their military presence in Afghanistan, they could invade India when they wished. But England was in alliance with the enemies of Dost Mohammad, namely Shah Shuja and Ranjit Singh, so it had to overrule the entreaties of its most capable agent, Alexander Burnes who was dispatched to Kabul and was clamouring for an arrangement with the Barakzai ruler as against the weak Sadozai king-in-exile living in Punjab. Diplomatic hassles prevented Burnes from exerting a direct influence on Lord Auckland, the Governor General. The Persian army began skirmishing around Herat around this time with Russian support and the country was expected to fall to them and the Barakzais.

The two pronged attack on Kabul was marked more by hardships the army encountered along the way rather than due to any resistance. Kandahar fell without firing a single shot and Ghazni fell like a plum after a brief fight. When the wind seemed to be on British favour, the treacherous chieftains rebelled against their master, Dost Mohammad who had to flee to Bukhara where he was imprisoned. Shah Shuja ascended the throne, but Macnaghten, the governor general’s secretary and envoy to Kabul, was the real power. This charade could not be continued further as the people saw how weak their sovereign was. Dost Mohammad escaped meanwhile from Bukhara and surrendered to the British who promptly parcelled him to exile in Ludhiana where Shuja lived earlier. The large number of British troops in the capital was creating more havoc in the social milieu as many noble Kabuli women turned to the flesh trade for easy money. Matters came to a head when Alexander Burnes seduced the mistress of an Afghan noble who was insulted and maltreated when he tried to retrieve her.

In November 1841, the British found to their dismay, the extent of the hatred they had amassed in people’s minds when the whole country erupted against them with cries of jihad (holy war). Poor planning in setting up cantonment, indecision regarding the timely deployment of troops to quell violence and general complacency ensured totality of British rout. Burnes and Macnaghten were killed, decapitated and the mutilated remains strewn over the streets. British men, women and Indian sepoys were captured and enslaved with many women ending up in local harems. At the turn of the new year, in January 1842, the British were finally allowed to withdraw from Kabul with whatever they had after paying a huge ransom to their assaulter. Little did they suspect that they were walking into a trap set by Akbar Khan who informed nearby tribal chiefs about the party’s arrival. The cold and snow of the winter of 1842 was especially harsh that compounded the miseries of the soldiers and their camp followers who had no woolens, not much food, arms and ammunition. The Afghan assailants treated them for weapon practice and mowed them down to a single man. An estimated 12,000 people perished in the mountain passes. The British mounted an Army of Retribution to avenge their miserable failure. This army more than extracted vengeance on the city of Kabul and wherever they went. The violence was nauseating, but suffice to say that whatever the Afghans gave to the British, they were paid back with compound interest. The English however found it prudent to leave the country to its fate and recalled Dost Mohammad to hand over reins to him.

The book neatly depicts the characters of tribal leaders of Afghanistan who are thoroughly independent in outlook so that the central leadership had to resort to monetary and other placatory tactics to enlist their support. Though very brave in battlefield, they are prepared to stoop to any depth of moral degeneration if it suited their purpose for the time being. All of them were treacherous – though the author paints them in a more chivalrous attire – as evidenced by tales of murder of their own mates in garden parties who were invited for the very purpose of eliminating them. Dalrymple has used many Afghan sources which have not seen the light of day in English in the research for this book that ensures a balanced view of the debate. As is characteristic of the author, he lives history through his characters who possess enough bone and marrow to bewitch the reader’s attention. His analysis is sharp, narration so mesmerising and selection of subjects so appealing and delightful. However, the description of the besieged British army in Kabul seemed to be so lengthy and full of details of military strategy as to be a bit disconcerting. The author’s insightful comparisons to the NATO occupation of modern Afghanistan is very striking and military strategists must pay some heed to them.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

In Xanadu

 Title: In Xanadu – A Quest

Author: William Dalrymple

Publisher: Penguin, 2004 (First published 1990)

ISBN: 978-0-143-03107-9

Pages: 302

Dalrymple is always welcome for an Indian reader. Most of his books are on Indian topics or very much related to its ethos in a subtle way. In fact, he enjoys a rather high level of tolerance from desi readers as against many western authors when they go on a critical assessment of the experiences they had had in this country. Dalrymple do present many of his experiences in a not too flattering light, but the recounting will be in such a caressing way that not even overly sensitive people get offended by it, as they can clearly see the love and affection the author possesses towards this ancient nation. However, the present book is the very first one from the author’s able hands and depicts his journey across the breadth of Asia, retracing the footsteps of the 13^th century Venetian merchant, Marco Polo from Syria on the west to Xanadu (Shang-tu) in the east of China. The journey covers 19000 km mostly across deserts and arid zones of Central Asia amidst a string of neighbouring countries hostile to each other or actually at war. Polo had undertaken the trip obliging a request from Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, who established Mongol rule over most of Asia. Kublai Khan requested religious philosophers from the Pope and in a bid to proselytize the emperor, Polo obtained a sample of oil from the lamps glowing in the Church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem so as to present it as a relic. Even this little detail was noted and copied by the author before beginning his own version of the epic travel.

Polo began the trip in 1271 with the oil sample and Dalrymple illuminatingly point out the profane activities and inter-church rivalries between various congregations which are allowed to offer services at the Holy Sepulchre. He notes with amusement at the irreverence of the young prefect entrusted with topping up of oil in the ever-glowing lamps from which he managed to obtain a small quantity. He declares that there is nothing magical in the oil, that it is ordinary sunflower oil and passes some lasciviously oblique comments about the author’s lady companion, even while inside one of the holiest shrines of Christianity. This is also one of the factors which led the author to claim that for 2000 years, Jerusalem has brought out the least attractive qualities in every race that has lived there. The holy city has had more atrocities committed in it than any other town in the world (p.18). These remarks apply equally well to any holy city of any religion.

Polo traveled from Jerusalem to Syria on his onward journey, but that is unthinkable in today’s Middle East. If Israeli visa is stamped on the passport, Syria and Iran will not let you through. So the author and his friend went back to Cyprus and boarded a ferry to Syria. He describes with a high sense of humour his travels along pot-holed roads of Turkey and marvels at the civilizational progress it had obtained in the middle ages. The Shifaiye Medresse was built in 1217 as a medical school and there was nothing remotely comparable in Europe at this time, even the outstanding Italian medical school at Salerno. European architecture, or many facets of it, like the pointed arch which is a key feature of Gothic style is derived from Islamic architecture.

Traveling in 1986, while the Iran – Iraq war was raging and amidst a xenophobic Persian mindset nourished by the revolutionary mullahs, journey through Iran proved irksome to the author. Professing strict adherence to medieval dogmas and codes of practice, both him and his girlfriend found Iran to be rigid, playing mullah’s speeches in public transport systems and irksome for women. It is however, to be noted that the people were as friendly as any other and helpful, though the author finds them to be possessing a tinge of effeminacy (p.162). Polo’s route turned to Afghanistan from there, but it was inaccessible to Western tourists because of the Soviet occupation of the country and the vast minefields they had set up on the border regions. Instead, they traveled through Pakistan towards north to catch up with the ancient caravan route.

The traveling party was put to great trouble by the intricate rules of Chinese bureaucracy. Most of the route through which they traveled was strictly off limits for foreigners in 1986. Local police harassed them and arrested them on more than one occasion. Dalrymple humorously narrates how they managed to hoodwink the not-so-alert policemen and continued their travel by hitch hiking, too afraid to use public transport. Such foolhardy acts of defiance was bound to end up in long prison sentences in undemocratic countries like China, but the author and his readers were fortunate enough to survive to tell and hear the story. China seems to be justified in taking such precautions as the route coincided with one of China’s nuclear testing sites and the author claims to have observed people suffering from harmful effects of radiation. The veracity of the claim could not be proved however. The team experienced their greatest despair when they were again arrested near Shang-tu (Xanadu, in Coleridge’s poem) – their final destination. Having come 19000 kilometers, only to be arrested and deported just 8 km from the ruins of Kublai Khan’s medieval palace was heartbreaking. The police took pity on them and transported them to the ruins in their own vehicle, but didn’t allow to photograph the place. Dalrymple managed to pour the oil he’d collected from Jerusalem over the ground where the Great Khan’s throne was supposed to stand.

The author gives a little too much attention to finer details of architecture whenever he is near a dilapidated structure, whether it is a disused mosque, damaged Medresse or a caravanserai. He is quite adept on the nuances of architecture and delights in presenting the similarities and contrasts between various schools of architecture, which is not so close to the hearts of readers.

Dalrymple is so adroit in delightful depictions of travel experiences, and his narration of travel in China in 1986, the year in which he actually traveled there, is quite revealing by comparison with today’s realities. Beijing was still a city of bicycles when they reached there and its transformation to a bustling metropolis is mind boggling. Perhaps if the author would care to retrace the entire journey and note the changes alone, that itself would prove to be another classic in travel writing. The book contain a set of monochrome plates of sights on the way and is graced with a good glossary.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Age of Kali

Title: The Age of Kali – Indian Travels and Encounters

Author: William Dalrymple

Publisher: Flamingo, 1999 (First published 1998)

ISBN: 978-0-00-654775-4

Pages: 371

This book, published in 1998 was Dalrymple’s fourth and third in his series on Indian themes. He is a renowned author, requiring no formal introduction to the subcontinental readers. He is staying in Delhi and has become a distinguished presence in Indian literary circles. This is his sixth book to be reviewed in this blog. The earlier ones are, The Last Mughal, White Mughals, Nine Lives, City of Djinns and From the Holy Mountain. With his easy prose verging on the graceful contours of finely crafted verse, each book is a cherishable experience for the reader. Now there are only two Dalrymple books which have not been presented here, In Xanadu and his latest, Return of a King, which are eagerly awaited.

The Age of Kali (not to be pronounced Kaali) is the story of the writer’s travels across the Indian subcontinent. The title implies Kali yug, which is the fourth and last era of Indian time reckoning, in which virtue and the good beats a retreat, paving the way for evil and vice. The traditional society blames every misfortune that has fallen on them to be because of Kali yug and resigns calmly to fate. In the book which is partitioned into six parts, namely The North, In Rajasthan, The New India, The South, On the Indian Ocean and Pakistan, the author travels extensively and records his experiences at each place. Comparisons are inevitable in such a setting and he notes the rising prosperity of the South and the West as compared to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which are slowly sinking into a morass of violence bordering on lawlessness and corruption. He also brings into focus the enormity in scale of the annexation of Hyderabad and Goa to India which are euphemistically called ‘police actions’ in official history books. Recording the experiences of eye-witnesses, we get to know that they were full fledged military operations involving the army and air force, and also the navy in Goa.

While being a pleasure to read, on many occasions the author falls in the trap of eulogizing over the lost grandeur of aristocrats fallen from grace as the country gained independence from colonial or local imperialist powers. Traces of this trait was discernible in the author’s earlier book, City of Djinns which based Delhi as its theme in which he blindly followed the riches-to-rags nobility of the old Mughal system. During his travels in Lucknow, narrated in the chapter Kingdom of Avadh, we see a little known feudalist Suleiman gloating over the things he lost in the feudalist period like poetic symposia, architecture (which naturally changed with the times) and even prostitutes who could recite Persian verses. Not a small portion of his grief is over the fact that those dear artifacts of his past no longer exist anywhere. This feeling of nostalgia over the loss of the past is seen to transcend religious barriers. When he visited the Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia in Gwalior, her own attendants who were Hindus commiserated over the lost kingdom of the Maharajah with its extravagantly gilded processions, tiger hunts and the absence of corruption. We have only their word to attest to the last named item! But even they couldn’t deny the wastefulness of lavishly constructed Jai Vilas Palace nearby in a vain bid to impress the Prince of Wales who paid a visit to the place in the latter half of 19^th century. The palace was constructed at a huge expenditure on the impoverished exchequer.

What is quite unexpected and revealing is Dalrymple’s visit to Deorala, Rajasthan where in 1987 a young widow named Roop Kanwar chose to die by burning herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. With about 500 villagers as spectators, the flames consumed her, who was sitting on the pyre with her dead husband’s head on her lap. Makeshift temples were quickly erected for her as she had turned into a goddess, Sati mata, with her valorous deed. Protests soon broke out at many places. Journalists and women activists exposed the incident and claimed that she was forced to die by her relatives who were accused of having drugged her. Police arrested 66 of the villagers and used third-degree measures to elicit a confession from them. The case went on for 10 years until the trial court acquitted all of them for want of evidence with severe criticism reserved for the police for the way they investigated the case. Dalrymple visited the village, interviewed them and later corroborated the story with senior civil servants at the state capital. The facts which come out is indeed shocking. Roop had really chosen to die of her own free will, with no apparent coercion. The modern part of India, the anglicized urban elite couldn’t stomach the idea that connubial fidelity would drive a young woman to court death. Such secular incredulity marks the remove the elite is from the rural heartland.

Dalrymple has correctly identified the source of much rural strife in India as due to caste enmity. In Rajasthan, he describes how hordes of upper caste Rajputs descended on makeshift medical facilities intended to serve the lower castes and smashed them to smithereens, apparently to protest against the Central government’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission’s recommendations which suggested reservation of 27% of government jobs to backward communities. Rajasthan, however displays the diametrically opposite side of the situation in UP and Bihar, where the backward castes have gained much political power, but even there, the private armies of landlords ride roughshod over them. The author’s assertion that the decision to grant reservation has resulted in an awareness of caste at all levels is, however superfluous. Caste awareness for an Indian is like the proverbial sixth sense. This is something which comes by birth and had existed here for millennia.

Needless to say, the writer knows the rhythm of India and is well versed with the vitality that animates the national psyche in its forward thrust through the well-trodden path of spirituality. The mental subservience to spiritual objects like tombs and godmen flourish in the subcontinent. However, he seems to have a soft spot towards the Islamic side of the Indian cultural stream. Whenever he speaks about the other current, the Hindu stream, it is the backwardness and unsophistication that is unconsciously stressed. Dalrymple may be called the historian of the Indian Muslim aristocracy.

Though the author recognises the touchiness of many Indians towards criticism from abroad, it feels that the criticism is really harsher than warranted by the situation. He describes the clash between two student political unions in Lucknow and declares it to have been fought with assault rifles, which is stretching the imagination a lot. Has he confused Lucknow with Peshawar, which also he has visited? Anyway, he claims that the book is a work of love and “its subject is an area of the world I revere like no other, and in which I have chosen to spend most of my time since I was free to make that choice. I was completely overwhelmed: India thrilled, surprised, daunted and excited me” (p.xv). I think we can accept his arguments at face value.

A major source of disinterest seen in the work is the chapter on Reunion Island, which is distracting in a book centred on Indian themes and people. Stories on Pakistan and Sri Lanka illustrate the cultural continuity of the subcontinent across political and religious divides. No such affinity exists with Reunion which is a small French island colony in the Indian Ocean and it sticks out like a sore thumb. Also, clubbing Goa along with chapters on Sri Lanka and Reunion smacks of a feeling that it is not culturally homogeneous with the rest of India.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

From the Holy Mountain

Title: From the Holy Mountain – A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium

Author: William Dalrymple

Publisher: Flamingo, 1998 (First published 1997)

ISBN: 978-0-00-654774-7

Pages: 463

Ever the incessant travel writer and story teller familiar to us as one who stays here in India, taking in its eccentricities, beliefs and mannerisms, William Dalrymple needs no introduction. With his chaste diction in which he radically differs from Justin Marozzi, another equally great writer and the superb narrative escalate him to one of the great writers of the genre. He is one of my favourite authors, with his titles The Last Mughal, White Mughals, Nine Lives and City of Djinns reviewed earlier in this blog. Once you start reading one of his works, you just can’t put him down until it is finished – as simple as that! In this book, Dalrymple travels around the Mediterranean littoral, retracing the foot steps of an ancient monk through Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt over a period of five months in 1994. The itinerary is comparable to Justin Marozzi’s, as detailed in his book The Man Who Invented History, (reviewed earlier) journeying on the route taken by Herodotus, the father of history to Greece, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt. With these two books side by side, you get a good glimpse of how life goes on in the present Middle East.

Traveling on the path of ancient travel writers is an exhilarating experience as you get the lucky chance to tread the paths, stay in the same cities and take in all scenes that came along the way, exactly like your forebear did in his less technically advanced modes of travel. The author follows John Moschos, an ancient Christian monk in Galilee who wrote The Spiritual Meadow, cataloging his travel and religious experiences gathered during his travel with a fellow monk Sophronius, who later went on to become the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The conditions which obtained in the Middle East in 578 CE when he began his travel which ended in early 7^th century was radically different from that which exist today. The region was overwhelmingly Christian, bickering among themselves for minute ecclesiastical details along the lines of Greek Orthodox,  Syrian Orthodox, Monophysite, Nestorian, Armenian and a lot of minor fringe groups. The kings and commoners were oblivious to the dark clouds forming over the Arabian desert in the form of Islam. Hardly a century later, the Christian kingdoms were swept off the face of the earth in the torrent that was to unleash from the followers of the Prophet. The Byzantine emperor clung on to a titular throne until 1453 when the city of Constantinople itself fell to the Ottoman Muslims.

In stark contrast to the conditions prevailed when Moschos made his journey in late 6^th century, when Christianity dominated the region, the author finds it overwhelmingly Muslim and the number of Christians dwindling year by year by means of emigration, deportation and alienation by the Muslim regimes. This is nowhere more apparent than Turkey where Christians and their religious institutions are systematically erased off the landscape. The Turks might have some justification for dispelling the Greek Christians, citing a narrow interpretation of nationalism. Turkey and Greece continue to foster enmity going back to several centuries. In response to Turkish actions, Greeks had razed mosques in Athens and other places. But no such excuse hold water for the Turks’ ghastly treatment of its Armenian Christian minority. Dalrymple saw with his own eyes the conversion of an ancient Armenian church to a mosque – in the year 1994! And you thought Turkey was aspiring to join the European Union! Though vying for a place in the European community, archeological values don’t find merit in Turkish eyes if it is on the wrong side of the religious divide. Even now, the oppression Syrian Christians feel is immense. The author himself was stopped and harassed by Turkish police many times, the army even arresting him. On one occasion, we see the security personnel behaving like hooligans at a monastery, just because they provided accommodation to the author.

But Syria offered a picture diametrically opposite to the situation in Turkey. Christians enjoy equal rights and it fact occupy some of the very top posts in the military. Freedom of religion is guaranteed and at many places, both Muslims and Christians pray together. Dalrymple however sounds a warning this oasis in the desert of Islamic fanaticism may not outlast the reign of Asad family who holds Syria in a Soviet-style dictatorship of its Baath party. Himself belonging to a fringe Muslim sect, the Asads encouraged the minorities who are now fearing a backlash when the Islamic fundamentalists oust Asad. The battle is raging on now in Syria, at this writing. Astonishingly, when the author travels to Lebanon, the situation is completely turned on its head. We learn about the atrocities perpetrated by Christian extremists when they had absolute power in the 1970s and 80s. The gruesome violence and massacre executed in the name of religion don’t look different if the culprits are Muslims or Christians. The Maronite Christians had gone on the rampage when it remotely looked like they’d be able to claim the whole of Lebanon for themselves. They exhibited arrogantly superior attitude against their brethren of different faiths, speaking only in French and shunning Arabic, which is the lingua franca of the region. The rise of Hezbollah put paid to the hopes of Maronites.

A short visit to Israel clearly illustrate the moral lessons we saw earlier in Turkey and Lebanon – that the majority religion persecutes the minor ones. Jews, discriminated against everywhere settles the scores on the hapless Muslims and Christians still staying in the holy land. Dalrymple narrates merciless tales of forcible evictions and takeovers the regime regularly unleash on the minorities to make way for townships and kibbutz to house the settlers immigrating from various parts of the world. We may deduce from the scale of highhandedness and resistance to it that peace in Israel is still a long way away. In the last leg of the journey, we move on Egypt – Alexandria and Kharga oasis, to be precise. There too, the ethnic Coptic Christians are beginning to feel the heat of Islamic fundamentalism. Their plight was sinking more and more into despair when Dalrymple visited there in 1994 when Hosni Mubarak still presided over a secular administration. The rampant Islamicization was choking the life out of innocent Copts. Though a secular regime ruled over the land, religious affairs were still administered by the draconian Hamayonic laws which stipulated that Christians need permission from the President of the country himself, to build new churches or repair old ones. Technically, they have to seek permission even to patch up a dysfunctional lavatory in the monastery while mosques were mushrooming all over the country without any legal hassle to slow down the growth rate.

In the characteristic Dalrymple style, the author sketches a faithful and vibrant picture of how life is being lived out by the minorities in the Middle East. We can’t accuse him of siding with the Christians or looking only through the eyes of priests even though he was retracing the footsteps of a monk and accepting the hospitality of the same monasteries depicted in The Spiritual Meadow. Whether in Turkey, Lebanon, Israel or Egypt, the author’s sympathies lay with the oppressed. The narrative goads us to realize the dangerous and fatal prominence enjoyed by religion in shaping the outlook of whole societies. Whatever be the religion, the dominating one in a country persecutes the others and make life difficult for its practitioners. The minorities in India may also take a potent lesson from the harsh realities their coreligionists undergo in the Middle East and compare their paradise-like life in this country under a very liberal religious tolerance extended to them. The book also describes in a nutshell the origins of Christian iconography from Egyptian religions. The images we see portrayed, like St.George slaying the dragon, Christ child in the virgin’s bosom are too often adaptations of similar pictorial myths from ancient Egypt and nothing whatsoever to do with the tenets of Christianity.

The book contain a good number of monochrome and colour plates portraying the places of interest. It also graced by a comprehensive glossary and an index. The only thing we can arraign against the work is the sometimes uncanny interest shown by the author in eliciting an accusation from a victim against the oppressors. It is definitely the natural course for the truth to come out, but the interviewees are often terrified of the consequences when the material is published and they themselves are destined to face the music. Sometimes, the author is simply asked to leave them in peace in a rough way. Still, clinging on to the journalistic passion hidden beneath the layer of travel writing, Dalrymple follows up each lead turning up to its logical conclusion. Sometimes he travels to dangerous localities, just to obtain the testimony of a harassed person so that the world can see and judge for themselves the scale of tyranny heaped on the less fortunate ones.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

City of Djinns

Title: City of Djinns – A Year in Delhi

Author: William Dalrymple

Publisher:  Penguin, 2004 (First published 1993)

ISBN: 978-0-143-03106-2

Pages: 343

Dalrymple is an acknowledged Indophile whose other books have also been reviewed earlier in this blog, like The Last Mughal, The White Mughals and Nine Lives. He was born in Scotland and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Asiatic Society. Besides writing, Dalrymple has presented television documentaries on Indian topics. His wife, Olivia Fraser is herself an artist who has produced the remarkable illustrations adorning the pages of the book. The couple now divide their time between London and Delhi.

The book is in essence what the author saw and thought during his year-long stay in the Indian capital city in 1989-90. He borrows the concept of djinns (spirits said to have been created from fire) from Muslim folklore to make the theme of the book, a portrait of a city disjointed in time, a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic, a city of djinns (p.9). The author peels through the thin layers of history surrounding the core of the city, the recent ones first. Thus, the British presence is dealt with first, followed by the struggle of the last of the mughals in 1857, consolidation of the British during early 19^th century, last remnants of Mughal structure in the 18^th, Shah Jahan’s founding of the city during middle-17^th, Tughluk’s period during the sultanates, Prithvi Raj Chauhan, and into the mists of pre-history, like Indraprastha and Hastinapura of Mahabharata. Each section is amply made lucid by interactions with noted personalities from Delhi who has made it their speciality of study.

Delhi enters prehistory through the Mahabharata epic. The palace of the Pandavas, Indraprastha, was situated there. Though archeologists differ about the scale of magnificence of the Pandava structures, there is no denying, from excavated remains that a civilization which has produced fine pottery known as painted grey ware, has been flourishing along the coast of river Jamuna around 2800 years before. After a long hiatus, Delhi again comes into the picture with Prithvi Raj Chauhan who made the mistake of pardoning his Afghan enemy once in the war – Mohammed of Ghor! He came back with a larger force the next year, defeated and beheaded Chauhan in 1192, inaugurating six centuries of Islamic rule in the city. The middle ages saw flashes of splendour echoing along the streets of Delhi in the superb buildings made by emperor Shah Jahan. What we see in Old Delhi is the remains of fine structures built by that megalomaniac autocrat. 

Shah Jahan was ousted from the throne by his treacherous third son, Aurangzeb who declared war against the country and its culture. Lot of temples were destroyed or desecrated resulting in resentment throughout the empire. No wonder that the empire began to crumple no sooner Aurangzeb died in 1707. The 18^th century was an era of palace intrigue, treachery, and degenerate morals. The British came on the scene not much later, who gradually sunk their claws into the flesh of Islamic society and mercilessly tore down the social order when it effectively crushed the rebellion of 1857. Lutyens modelled a new city, New Delhi, which remains the seat of power of the Indian government.

The book is eminently readable, with its presentation of characters throughout the chapters in the form ordinary Delhiites, like the landlord, the taxi driver, the Persian-language professor and numerous such people. One thing which emerges from the treatise is the helping mentality of the common people. It is not to be confused with the normal mindset of the people, who will nevertheless be willing to extend a helping hand to a foreigner staying amidst them. Dalrymple also displays an aspect of Indian society – venality – which permeates all spheres of society, be it politics, religion, social relations and administration. Indians must take note of this disturbing fact, which keeps on churning to the top from the writings of foreign authors, right from the 15^th century Arab and Portuguese travelers. Dalrymple just confirms the notion in a gentle, apologetic way. The book is very humorous and is a delight to read. The section in which the author dissects through newspaper advertisements for arranged marriage is taking hilarity to new heights.

One downside which can be pointed out is that, as always, Dalrymple caters to British sensitivities about India. There is no arguing that the book appeals equally strong to the Indian reader, but a British one is more at ease while reading it. The native reader experiences a whole panoply of emotions like pride, curiosity, anticipation and even outright shame by going through the work, the foreign one feel a sense of déjà vu – it simply reaffirms what he had had already in his mind.

The book is strongly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Nine Lives

Title: Nine Lives – In Search of the Sacred in Modern India
Editor: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Bloomsbury 2009 (First)
ISBN: 978-1-4088-0061-4
Pages: 260

A disappointing work from Dalrymple, especially after ‘The Last Mughal’ and ‘The White Mughals’ which were splendidly researched works. This book is a collection of nine stories or essays detailing the lives of people who have dedicated themselves in the practise of their beliefs, often grotesque. The stories are about a Jain nun, a government servant who moonlights as a Theyyam dancer, a senior devadasi and a devotee of Yellamma, a singer of epics in Rajastan, a woman who resides in a sufi dargah in Pakistan, a Buddhist monk from Tibet who joined the Indian army to fight the Chinese invasion, an idol maker from Tamil Nadu, a woman ascetic from Tarapith near Kolkata where black magic is practiced and about a blind Baul singer from Bengal. Dalrymple claims that the seeds for these stories germinated in his mind during his incessant travels in India. A good understanding of Indian culture, religion, customs and people are clearly evident in the masterful representation of contemporary prose. He likes the syncretic nature of all things Indian and sadly notices the gradual creeping in of hardline elements bent upon destroying this age old fabric which clothes and unites India.

The stories are good catalogues of the sad lives of the protagonists. One can also discern the grinding poverty transcending the boundaries of states in India and becoming a common factor in almost all stories. The excessive faith of the people make them do impossible feats of self mortification so that the title may also be given as ‘Nine lives devastated by faith’. However, in some stories there are references to customs and practices which have long gone extinct and we wonder whether Dalrymple accepted parallel inputs rather than his first hand experience. Some references to Kerala in the chapter on Theyyam dancer force us to think likewise. Even excepting such hyperbolic remarks, the book is a page turner and a delight to read.

A good work and recommended.

Rating: 3 Star