Saga of Kalpathy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Invisible History of the Human Race

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Tipu Sultan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

A History of the Pakistan Army

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

One Hundred Years of Solitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

War and Gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Banaras – City of Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 5 Star