A few months ago, in the middle of the Sonal Shah controversy, I wrote a blog post criticizing Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk as a somewhat inadequate historical account of the Indian-American community. The example I focused on was the “Yankee Hindutva” chapter, which I thought was unbalanced and prone to cast aspersions rather than actually illuminate the topic at hand. But other chapters in Prashad’s book have similar problems: Prashad’s book is more a critique of the “desi” community in the U.S. than it is an introduction to it: we are too bourgeois (the “model minority” myth), too racist (i.e., against African-Americans), and too religious.

We now have a more comprehensive introductory book on the history of the South Asian American community, Vinay Lal’s The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (see an earlier post on Vinay Lal by Abhi here). Lal’s book covers some of the same topics as Prashad’s Karma but is much more heavily factual and closely researched -– it’s a work of history rather than a political polemic –- and it’s rich with useful and well-sourced statistics. If I were to ask students to read something about the history of South Asians in the U.S., say, in conjunction with a segment of a course relating to Indian immigrant fiction, I would probably assign this book.

In lieu of a comprehensive review, below are a few highlights and interesting tidbits from The Other Indians that I picked up on: Elihu Yale, early Immigration/Legal issues, Religion, and the old terminology question.

Maybe it’s because I live in L.A. and everyone here is working on the latest greatest movie/script/t.v. pilot but I have a great idea for a docu-travel-reality show.

Picture this: As South Asians have slowly immigrated over and made their mark on America, they have also brought along their iconographic image of Mahatma Gandhi. The bronzed image of a walking and robed Gandhi, stick in hand, has been popping up all across the U.S. recently with a statue in almost every major city. Each statue erected has a unique associated story, for the most part an active first generation Indian American community rallying for a statue in their adopted hometown.

1. Riverside, CA: I started thinking about this when I literally stumbled across a Gandhi statue in front of City Hall in downtown Riverside, CA. The statue is surrounded by quotes, and plaques with Desi names surrounding it. I learned later, the local Muslim community was in uproar about the statue getting put up. A compromise was eventually reach.

Among the concessions the city was willing to make were naming a street beside the local mosque after a Muslim leader, and considering a sister-city relationship with a Pakistani city. Currently, the city has a sister relationship with Hyderabad, India.[rediff]

2. San Francisco, CA: On the Embarcadero, the statue is located right behind the Ferry Building by the trash dumpsters.

The statue was given to the city in 1988 by the Gandhi Memorial International Foundation, “a controversial non-profit organization run by Yogesh K. Gandhi,” who Gandhi family members claim was a “scam artist” and the White House called “clearly disreputable” when he asked to visit. Then in the 1990’s Yogesh then was the subject of an investigation, and the US Dept of Justice charged him with tax evasion, mail and wire fraud and perjury. The Foundation continued for a few years but then ran into more legal troubles as they found out Yogesh still had his hands in things.[yelp]

3. NYC, NY: At the southwest corner of Union Square, the statue was added in 1986, to mark Union Square’s history of social activism.

When Anne Dodge wrote her thesis at MIT about preservation planning along Route 66 — the 2,500-mile corridor that runs through eight states from Chicago to Los Angeles — she found out that more than 30 percent of the independent motel owners along Route 66 were Indian Americans.

Her documentary project 66 Motels will combine interviews and photos of historic motels and their owners. Browsing through the photos reveals shots of vintage neon signs and some retrofabulous interiors as well as portraits of the owners at their motels. She writes that interviews will be up by this summer. Some interviews are already online.

One part of her project involves the practice of labeling motels with the “American Owned” sign. A Time Magazine piece that refers to desi motel owners along Route 66 as “curators of a nice slice of Americana” who lovingly refurbished and decorated the historic motels also covers the practice of using “American Owned” signs.

Launching today in Los Angeles at the opening night of the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles: The Kahani Movement. A brain child of Dr. Sanjay Gupta (CNN) and Suneel Gupta (Mozilla), the new site “is a social network that aims to capture untold stories from first-generation Indians in the U.S. and provide those stories with a platform to be heard.” But what does that exactly mean? (Hat tip, Chick Pea)

the kahani trailer from Suneel Gupta on Vimeo.

I’m borderline obsessed with the ideas of documenting the history of South Asian Americans, and am completely fascinated with how this project is merging documentary with social networking with user generated content. There is so much potential.

The Kahani Movement…ties the concept of StoryCorps to the technology of Web 2.0 by inspiring Indian Americans to tell stories of their early days in the U.S. from the comfort of their own kitchen tables and then share this content on a newly developed social network.

The project takes a Hollywood 2.0 approach to sharing these stories by motivating young Indian Americans to pick up a camera, interview their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and then post that footage to Kahani’s web platform. The eventual audience for this content is a generation of people who may never have the benefit of a real conversation with their immigrant ancestors. [sajaforum]

I’ve been working on documenting my maternal grandparents’ story, and this is a space where I knew I would have been able to share it…that is if it weren’t an “Indian” space, but a South Asian one. My only critique of the site, which I think is substantial considering how integrated the South Asian American migration and historical experience is.

Last year everyone was talking about Sarah Palin’s eyeglasses. This year I predict Gandhi-type glasses will be the hot trend among the urban elite. After days of protest by the Indian government and it’s private citizens, Gandhi’s glasses and a few additional personal effects went on the auction block in NYC. In the end, after drama throughout the day, an Indian citizen got the goods:

No wonder he wanted new glasses. Those are pretty fugly.

After intense protests from India’s government and the Indian press, Mohandas K. Gandhi’s eyeglasses and some of his other belongings were sold on Thursday afternoon for $1.8 million at an auction in Manhattan, after last-minute attempts to halt the sale.

The buyer was identified as Vijay Mallya, an Indian liquor and airline executive who owns the company that makes Kingfisher beer. A representative for Mr. Mallya, Tony Bedi, did the bidding and later announced that the belongings would be returned to India for public display, but it was not clear whether they would be turned over to the government, as some officials have demanded.

Indian officials had maintained that the auction — scheduled to be completed on Thursday afternoon in Manhattan — was illegal, but also that they were continuing to negotiate with the owner, James Otis, over a possible resolution. Ultimately, the government and Mr. Otis were not successful in halting the auction. [Link]

At one point in negotiations with the Indian government, Otis asked for the following:

James Otis said he was ready to halt the sale and donate Gandhi’s personal items, including his trademark round eyeglasses, in exchange for India’s commitment to a substantial rise in its funding for poverty. [Link]

Ummm, yeah. Good starting negotiation position. Next time I negotiate with anyone I will start by asking for world peace.

Earlier this month, the “25 Random Things About Me”-meme was so omnipresent on Facebook, even major papers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune discussed it. What, you haven’t heard of it? Wow. No wonder newspapers are going out of business! Well, here’s some background info from the grey lady, then:

…the latest digital fad — a chain-letter-cum-literary exercise called “25 Random Things About Me” — is threatening to consume what little remaining free time and privacy we have.

Here’s how it works: friends send you an e-mail message (or, on Facebook, “tag” you in a note posted to their profile) with 25 heartfelt observations about themselves — like “I named my son after a man I’ve never met” or “I once paid good money to see Whitesnake in concert” — along with instructions for you to follow suit. You are then expected to gin up your own clever list and foist it upon 25 people, including the friend who asked for it in the first place. [NYT]

The 25 things can be habits, goals, quirky facts— whatever. Everyone on Facebook seemed to be doing it, so much so that a backlash started. People used their status messages to denounce the meme and warn others from including them. Groups like “Stop Tagging Me in 25 Random Things Posts You Tards” were formed. But the lists weren’t really THAT bad. No one was forcing anyone to read them. Often, if you did, you’d end up learning fascinating things about the people whom you allegedly “know”.

That’s the thing about “25 Random Things About Me”: Once you stop being annoyed you realize that, at its best, it’s one of the more compelling — and, yes, even oddly inspiring — wastes of time to hit the Web in years. And let’s cut to the chase. Should we really be complaining about the inanity of this new trend? We’re a nation entertained by lolcats. [salon]

Word. Besides, it’s not like this is anything new:

“It’s a brainstorming exercise,” said Anne Trubek, an associate professor at Oberlin College who said she used to give nearly identical assignments 15 years ago to beginning writing students. “It’s used to get people to think about ideas without the pressure of developing a thesis or an argument.” [NYT]

Someone on my GChat list had an intriguing link included in their status message. I saw “inauguration”, and since that historic event is still very much on my mind, I clicked it. I was led to the Boston Globe’s website, to a feature called “The Big Picture: News Stories in Photographs”.

Yesterday was a historic day. On January 20th, 2009, Barack H. Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America - the first African-American ever to hold the office of U.S. Commander-in-Chief. The event was witnessed by well over one million attendees in chilly Washington D.C., and by many millions more through coverage on television and the Internet. Collected here are photographs of the event, the participants, and some of the witnesses around the world. (48 photos total)

Picture number 38 caught my attention, setting my browndar off before I could even read the caption underneath it (which I’ve quoted, well, underneath it):

Pakistani Christian children hold portraits of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama during a prayers ceremony for global peace in Islamabad, Pakistan on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009. (AP Photo) [Globe]

At first glance, I didn’t notice the word “Christian”. I just saw “Pakistani children”. I thought I’d just post the picture plus a quick blurb about where I found it, and isn’t it sweet, etc. But for obvious reasons, I started surfing around, and a rambling post was born.

The benediction at Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration was given today by Rev. Joseph Lowery:

Joseph Echols Lowery (born October 6, 1921) is a minister in the United Methodist Church and leader in the American civil rights movement.

Lowery was pastor of the Warren Street United Methodist Church, in Mobile, Alabama from 1952 until 1961. His career in the civil rights movement began in the early 1950s in Mobile, Alabama. After Rosa Parks’ arrest in 1955, Lowery helped lead the Montgomery bus boycott. He headed the Alabama Civic Affairs Association, an organization devoted to the desegregation of buses and public places. In 1957, with Martin Luther King, Jr. Lowery founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and subsequently led the organization as its president from 1977 to 1997. [Link]

Without a doubt the most striking paragraph of the benediction (the full text of which can be found here) was the following:

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around … when yellow will be mellow … when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. [Link]

Martin Luther King, Jr. visited India in 1959, an event which is described in detail at the King Encyclopedia (a site that has been linked to before at Sepia Mutiny). King, as is well known, modeled his approach to civil rights in the United States on Gandhi’s successful mass non-violence/civil disobedience campaign for Indian independence.

On NPR last week, there was a story about how All India Radio has recently discovered in its archives the recorded version of the address given by Dr. King at the end of his visit to India.

Through a little bit of digging on Google, I found the actual recording posted on the internet, at the website of the Indian Consulate of Chicago.

For me the highlight of the address is the closing, which I’ll take the liberty of including here:

Many years ago, when Abraham Lincoln was shot – and incidentally, he was shot for the same reason that Mahatma Gandhi was shot for; namely, for committing the crime of wanting to heal the wounds of a divided nation. And when he was shot, Secretary Stanton stood by the dead body of the great leader and said these words: “now, he belongs to the ages.” And in a real sense, we can say the same thing about Mahatma Gandhi, and even in stronger terms: “now, he belongs to the ages.”

And if this age is to survive, it must follow the way of love and non-violence that he so nobly illustrated in his life. Mahatma Gandhi may well be God’s appeal to this generation, a generation drifting again to its doom. And this eternal appeal is in the form of a warning: they that live by the sword shall perish by the sword.

We must come to see in the world today that what he taught, and his method throughout, reveals to us that there is an alternative to violence, and that if we fail to follow this we will perish in our individual and in our collective lives. For in a day when Sputniks and explorers dash through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war.

Today we no longer have a choice between violence and non-violence; it is either non-violence, or non-existence. (link)

Perhaps the meanings of King and Gandhi’s respective messages have changed as times have changed. India is no longer a country with a colonial chip on its shoulder, and minorities in the U.S. have a shining example of success in President Barack Obama (among many other signs of progress). It is probably a bit too easy and nostalgic to simply savor those past struggles without continually seeking to apply them to our messy current situations; with too much familiarity and Big Talk, these two icons of struggle risk becoming bloated relics. (For example, by the 1970s, Gandhianism in India had become an easy symbol, devoid of substance — one thinks of the overweight Congress politicians in homespun, happily siphoning off crores of Rupees for Swiss bank accounts.)

Also, it may be that rigorous non-violence cannot mean the same thing for us today as it did for African Americans who demanded a seat at the American table, or Indians who demanded sovereignty (a seat at the table of nations). Perhaps King and Gandhi’s shared dream of a total, worldwide movement away from a social order based on violence (active or potential) is one we’ll have to put away for the foreseeable future, as simply not in keeping with human nature. Satyagraha is a brilliant strategy for mobilizing the Indian masses to defeat the most powerful, thoroughly armed Empire the world has ever known, without bloodshed. But in my view it is neither effective nor appropriate as a response to Jihadists on the streets of Mumbai, or Maoist rebels in eastern India, to name just two examples. (I am not a pacifist myself for this reason.)

And yet, is it not still chastening to hear these words, even in these times? (Listen to the speech.) As I say, some of the diacritics may have changed, but I think King’s warning still stands: “they that live by the sword shall perish by the sword.” Gaza. Sri Lanka. Iraq. India-Pakistan. Isn’t that still the truth we need to hear?

I should create a category called, “NOW you tell me…?”, for situations like this. I just woke up 30 minutes ago, checked my email and what did I see?

Make it a priority this weekend to see the highly acclaimed exhibition, “Garden and Cosmos.” The exhibition named the “great Asian show of the year,” by Souren Melikian of the International Herald Tribune closes this Sunday, January 4 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

Closes this Sunday?! Well, happy birthday to me!

This groundbreaking exhibition of newly discovered Indian paintings from the royal court collection of Marwar-Jodhpur (in the modern state of Rajasthan) has three sections devoted to the garden and cosmos leitmotifs, with an introductory gallery about the kingdom of Marwar-Jodhpur and the origins of its court painting traditions in the 17th century. Produced for the private enjoyment of the Marwar- Jodhpur maharajas, virtually none of the 60 works on view in “Garden and Cosmos” have ever been published or seen by scholars since their creation centuries ago. Strikingly innovative in their large scale, subject matter, and styles, they reveal both the conceptual sophistication of the royal atelier and the kingdom’s engagement with the changing political landscapes of early modern India.

Commentary by the Maharaja of Jodhpur, who lent many of the paintings, and Debra Diamond, the curator who organized the exhibition, is included on an audio guide available at the Garden and Cosmos entrance. [si]

There’s a link to some of that audio guide, here. I’m going to finish blogging about this later; I’d rather put up a blurb now (so that those of you who are awake and in DC have a shot at making this) vs. blog about it later today when I’ll have more time…and a whole day to see these gorgeous works will be gone. The Sackler gallery is open from 10:00am to 5:30pm, daily. Remember, admission is FREE.

If my phone works in the exhibit, I’ll try and tweet about what’s going on via SM’s twitter account. More soon!

Read my Q&A with Padma Viswanathan here.

No, it’s not a book of recipes and she’s not the sister of the much-maligned Kaavya. “The Toss of a Lemon” (Harcourt, Sept. 2008) is Arkansas-based and Canada-born writer’s first novel. And what a beautifully-wrought, political, social, and at times heart-wrenching work it is—ten years in the making.

The Toss of a Lemon begins in 1896 in the caste-organized village of Cholapatti in Tamil Nadu and carries us to 1958 where the strictures of caste have broken apart amidst the new economic and political framework of post-colonial India, specifically South India.

In the opening scene, ten year old Sivakami (a character based on Viswanathan’s great-great grandmother)and her parents are on a pilgrimage to “her mother’s place” and decide to pay a visit to a young healer and astrologer Hanumarathnam. While making Sivakami’s astrological chart, the healer announces that their stars happen to be in alignment – “He blinks rapidly, the lamplight making him look younger than his twenty-one years. He takes a breath and looks at Sivakami’s father. ‘I have never looked at, nor ever proposed to any girl before now. Please … consider me.’” There’s only one small glitch. Hanumarathnam’s horoscope predicts that he will die in the ninth year of marriage—unless his first-born son’s horoscope matches his.

Sivakami’s parents are optimists and the two are subsequently married “like everyone else, at an auspicious time on an auspicious day in an auspicious month.”

At the heart of The Toss of a Lemon is a horoscope. It dictates the destiny of Sivakami, who is widowed at age 19, the mother of one girl and one boy and the inheritor of her husband’s family home and properties. It also dictates the destinies of Sivakami’s children: Thangam, a quiet beauty whose skin gives off gold vibuthi, or dust, with healing properties—a result of her father’s alchemist experiments—and Vairum, a math genius with “irises nearly black yet strangely brilliant, diamond sharp” and a skin condition (vitiligo) which makes him an anomaly in the Brahmin quarter early on in his life.

There’s a memorable description of Sivakami early in this book: she “carries herself with an attractive stiffness: her shoulders straight and always aligned. She looks capable of bearing great burdens, not as though born to a yoke but perhaps as though born with a yoke within her.” Indeed, though strict Brahmannical traditions call for Sivakami to shave her head, wear white, and to not contaminate herself with human touch between dawn and dusk, she is also a rebel who chooses to raise her children in her husband’s ancestral home (instead of returning to her natal village and living with her brothers). Helping her in this herculean task is Machumi, a non-Brahmin villager and closeted gay man, who manages Hanumaranthnam’s land properties and business.

Read a review of Arkansas-based, Canada-born Padma Viswanathan’s debut novel “The Toss of a Lemon” here.

Q. When and how did you first start collecting these stories?
A. I interviewed my grandmother over the course of a year or so, in the mid-nineties. She would talk for a few hours, either in English or in Tamil (with my mother translating, to ensure I got the nuances), and then I would transcribe the tape. She told me a story that fascinated and bewildered me: of her grandmother, who was married as a child and widowed at eighteen with two small children. It then took me over ten years of writing to imagine myself into this world and to transform the story I had been given into a novel of my own making. The book that resulted has many emotional and narrative ties to the story my grandma told, but also departs from it in numerous significant ways.

Q. How did you research the historical and social context of this book?
A. I went to India after interviewing my grandmother. I had been many times before, but now saw the old places in a new way, populated by the ghosts of these stories she had told me. I interviewed other relatives and did a lot of reading on the particular social and political upheavals that were happening in this corner of India at that time, in contrast to the larger narrative of Independence. Six years later, with much of a draft written, I made a return trip, visiting some incredible resource centers in south India, where I did more detailed research on themes and characters that had emerged in the writing. This involved a lot of reading, as well as interviews with scholars and historians. I also revisited the places where the novel takes place, to refresh my sense memories and ask more specific questions of my relatives. Although the world I have described exists now only in a fragmentary and vestigial way, I actually saw it crumble in my lifetime. So some of the research was reconstruction of my own memories.

Q. It’s not easy to take one’s family history and put it out there, whether it’s in fiction or non-fiction form. What did you turn to for inspiration and motivation during your writing process?
A.The story exerted a strong hold on me for the ten years it took me to write this book. In the early stages, I consulted the interview transcripts frequently, looking for stories that intrigued me and writing them into chapters. As the novel began to take shape, though, I looked less and less to our family history: the book I was writing had its own logic and momentum, and that became paramount. When I had a full draft, I asked my mother to read it for me as a fact-checker, and we had wonderful discussions about it, but I was pretty clear with my family that this was, ultimately, an artistic product of which I was the author and that I would take full responsibility—including blame!—for its contents. Still, I was very relieved, when various family members—including my grandma—finally read it, that they gave it their stamp of approval, saying that in spite or because of all the liberties I had taken, I had created an authentic portrait of that time and place.

Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin made history last night, as she addressed the RNC. In her speech, she (of the lifetime NRA membership) aimed barbed verbal ammunition at Barack Obama, though many reports indicated that she would not do so; so much for reciprocating his class-drenched gesture of reminding the press corps that he, too, was the child of a teen mother, and that they should back the muck off of Bristol Palin. I know, I get it— it’s the convention. It’s a pep rally, time to rile up the fans.

Palin displayed exquisite contempt while commenting on Obama’s past work as a “Community Organizer”; and yes, that’s exactly how she pronounced it, as if the words were too strangely shaped for her mouth, as if they should be chaperoned by quotes.

But, community Organizers do extraordinary things. If you don’t believe me, look here, at one of the most revered “Community Organizers”, ever:

From last night’s performance:

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.

And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves.

I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities. I might add that in small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening.

A few days ago, I opened up the Chicago Tribune to see this nice story about games of cricket taking place in the Chicago suburbs, which is not a rare occurrence in most South Asian communities. Yet, as I did some research, I found that cricket has an interesting history in the United States that extends far back before the South Asian diaspora. After all the United States was a British colony as well. A disclaimer here: I am proud to say I have a reasonable knowledge of cricket and am a devoted Cricinfo reader, but I can’t say I know cricket as well as, say, the NBA, and thus, I’m sure many of you will know more about cricket in America than I do - please do contribute your knowledge on the subject. Cricket in the United States extends back as far as the 18th century. This great Smithsonian article speaks of some of the earliest recorded history of cricket in the states:

In a diary he kept between 1709 and 1712, William Byrd, owner of the Virginia plantation Westover, noted, “I rose at 6 o’clock and read a chapter in Hebrew. About 10 o’clock Dr. Blair, and Major and Captain Harrison came to see us. After I had given them a glass of sack we played cricket. I ate boiled beef for my dinner. Then we played at shooting with arrows…and went to cricket again till dark.”

Evidently, spending large portions of the day playing and following cricket is a practice as old as the British Empire itself. Not only that, but the Smithsonian has uncovered some Revolutionary Hero interest in cricket:

The rules of the game on this side of the Atlantic were formalized in 1754, when Benjamin Franklin brought back from England a copy of the 1744 Laws, cricket’s official rule book. There is anecdotal evidence that George Washington’s troops played what they called “wickets” at Valley Forge in the summer of 1778. After the Revolution, a 1786 advertisement for cricket equipment appeared in the New York Independent Journal, and newspaper reports of that time frequently mention “young gentlemen” and “men of fashion” taking up the sport. Indeed, the game came up in the debate over what to call the new nation’s head of state: John Adams noted disapprovingly—and futilely—that “there are presidents of fire companies and cricket clubs.”

Disregarding John Adams’ chronic moodiness, cricket continued to have a strong presence in the U.S. throughout the 19th century. The first ever international cricket match was held in the U.S., a match between the U.S. and Canada in 1844, in Bloomingdale, New York. The considerable national interest in this game was evident, as 20,000 spectators attended and the equivalent of 1.5 million 2007 dollars were wagered on the match. The United States set a telling precedent in the match, however, losing by 23 runs. As the 19th century neared its end, baseball began to take precedence, and with that, the primacy of cricket in America’s sporting interests neared its end. One place, however, where cricket was still going strong was in the city of Philadelphia. The Philadelphian Cricket Team carried the mantle as the last remaining bastion of professional cricketing in the U.S., and frequently toured England and Australia, playing against some of the best cricketers in the world. A sign of the declining influence of the sport in America was that the American team consisted of “gentleman” players that had sources of wealth that allowed them to play cricket at no salary. The team had on it the best American cricket player in our national history, Bart King. King was quite the guy:

King was a skilled batsman, but proved his worth as a bowler. During his career, he set numerous records in North America and led the first-class bowling averages in England in 1908. He successfully competed against the best cricketers from England and Australia. King was the dominant bowler on his team when it toured England in 1897, 1903, and 1908. He dismissed batsmen with his unique delivery, which he called the “angler,” and helped develop the art of swing bowling in the sport. Many of the great bowlers of today still use the strategies and techniques that he developed. Sir Pelham Warner described Bart King as one of the finest bowlers of all time, and Donald Bradman called him “America’s greatest cricketing son.”

Bart King and his generation of extraordinary American cricketers could not live forever, though, and baseball only continued to gain in popularity throughout the country. As the 1910’s came to a close, the Philadelphian cricket team played its last game. Cricket in the U.S. became increasingly harder to sustain when the Imperial Cricket Conference was created, excluding non-British Empire members.

We’ve talked about it here before: In 1972, Idi Amin gave all 80,000 Asian Indians living in the Uganda 90 days to pack up and leave. As the BBC reported on August 7, 1972, “Asians, who are the backbone of the Ugandan economy, have been living in the country for more than a century. But resentment against them has been building up within Uganda’s black majority. General Amin has called the Asians “bloodsuckers” and accused them of milking the economy of its wealth.”

A new young adult novel Child of Dandelions by Canadian author Shenaaz Nanji sheds much needed light on the upheaval of Asian Indians in Uganda. It’s worth checking out, even if you don’t have a young adult in your household, or don’t normally pick up books for younger readers.

The protagonist of Child of Dandelions is fifteen year old Sabine, a girl whose comfortable life is torn asunder on August 6, 1972, the day that Idi Amin issues his expulsion order for all Indians in Uganda. Shaken by the protests she walks into while window shopping in Little India, Sabine turns to her parents for protection.

Sabine’s mother is afraid and eager to leave Uganda, but her father, a wealthy Ismaeli businessman and landowner, is determined to ignore Dada Amin’s orders:

“Nonsense!” Papa laughed his conch-shell laugh, and her little brother echoed it. … “We are even more Ugandan than the ethnic Africans. Not only were we born here, but we chose to be Ugandan citizens when other Indians remained British…

Sabine agrees with her father. She is different after all. Her best friend Zena is African. They’ve grown up together like “twin beans of one coffee flower” and Zena is just like her sister, even if others (like her Indian friends) don’t see it that way.

Narmin …Nasrin … Sabine’s hands clenched at the names of her classmates. They were prissy prunes. She’d had a big fight with them after they called Zena goli. Mixing her African and Indian friends was like mixing oil with water.

As the 90 day countdown continues, Sabine’s optimism is drowned out by the growing chants of “Muhindi, nenda nyumbani! Indian, go home.” Amidst reports of violent attacks against Indian families, the mysterious disappearance of her favorite uncle, and strained relations between her and Zena (whose uncle is a general and crony of Idi Amin), she is forced to reexamine her understandings of race and class.

The novel is what Nanji calls Faction, a mix of facts and fiction.

The following post was inspired by the news last week that the government of Maharashtra is planning to build a huge statue of Shivaji off the coast of Bombay (that’s right, I said Bombay), on the scale of the American statue of liberty. The statue will be built off-shore, on an artificial island constructed especially for the purpose.

I’m not actually opposed to the idea of the statue — as far as I’m concerned, it’s all part of the great, entertaining tamasha of modern Bombay — though obviously I think there could be some other figures from Indian culture and history who might also be worth considering (how about a 300 foot bust of a glowering Amitabh Bachchan, for instance?). But reading the news did make me curious to know some things about the historical Shivaji that go beyond the hagiographical myths and legends one sees on Wikipedia, so I went to the library and looked at a book I had been meaning to look at for a couple of years, James Laine’s Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (Oxford, 2003).

• • +

In 2004, James Laine became a target of the Hindu right after the publication of his book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, but as is often the case the people burning down libraries, and destroying priceless works of India’s cultural heritage, clearly did not read the book. If one actually reads Laine’s work, one finds that Laine is quite careful not to frontally challenge the myth of Chatrapati Shivaji, the 17th century Maratha warrior. Indeed, there is much there that actually supports the pride that many Maharasthrians feel about Shivaji.

The conclusions Laine comes to after surveying the evidence on Shivaji were surprising to me. Though I obviously came to the book looking for objectivity as an antidote to the bloated mythology loudly propagated by the Shiv Sena, I presumed that “objectivity” and “secularism” would be more or less synonymous. The reality may be somewhat more complex in Shivaji’s case. Though he’s clearly not quite what his partisans believe he was, Shivaji’s story remains inspiring and heroic even after some scholarly scrutiny. And though he was more secular than many Hindu chauvinists will admit, Shivaji certainly did pointedly assert his identity as a Hindu and promote symbolic elements of Hindu religion and culture against the increasingly intolerant imposition of Islam during the Mughal empire under Aurangzeb and the final years of the Bijapur Sultanate (see Adil Shah).

I’m in the midst of biz trip hell and one book I’m plowing through is Thomas Sowell’s Conquests & Cultures. The book is part of a trilogy where Sowell brings his considerable scholarship to the relationship between culture and socio-economic outcomes across a wide span of history & the globe. This is a mighty controversial topic, to say the least, and one which Sowell engages with aplomb.

Clearly, one factor which has shaped the fate of groups over time is, of course, Conquest. And Sowell isn’t afraid to discuss how this dynamic played out for both Worse *and* for Better.

Now, we need to be very clear that by pointing out the Better, Sowell is emphatically NOT making a case for future Conquests of Cultures. Nor is he delving into whether Conquests are / were Morally Good. And, for that matter neither am I (just to forestall some of the comments a post like this generates - let’s try to keep the discussion Type C rather than descend into Type M. One can credit how the K-T extinction helped give rise to Humanity, for example, without calling it Good or “wishing” for another one; same with the British Empire).

What he is noting, however, is that just as many of the leaps and bounds of progress in tech can be traced to conflict & competition (WWII and the Space Race, to pick a few quickie examples), cultures are similarly fluid and subject to evolution. Proof of this & a tremendous source of historical experiments to this effect is Conquest [pg ix]-

The underlying theme of all these books is that racial, ethnic, and national groups have their own respective cultures without which their economic and social histories cannot be understood. Modest as this claim may seem, it collides head-on with the more widely accepted visions in which the fates of minority groups are determined by “society” around them, which society is therefore both causally and morally responsible for the misfortunes peculiar to the less fortunate of these groups — though apparently not responsible for the good fortune of more successful minority groups. This trilogy also collides head-on with prevailing doctrines about “celebrating” and preserving cultral differences. Cultures are not museum-pieces. They are the working machinery of everday life. Unlike objects of aesthetic contemplation, working machinery is judged by how well it works, compared to the alternatives.

In other words —> Culture is a moving target & is responsible for much of our socio-economic fate(s). One source of Punctuated Equilibrium in Culture’s evolution is/was Conquest. Let’s learn how it got us to where we are today & use those lessons + our volition to further evolve moving forward…

Representatives from 14 African nations were in New Delhi for the first-ever India-Africa summit, which just ended today. (The India-Africa Summit follows closely on the heels of the China-Africa summit of November 2006.)

Attendees signed off on the Delhi Declaration and the Africa-India Framework for Cooperation, pledging cooperation in the areas of energy, terrorism, climate change and UN Reforms. An informal and equally important outcome: India is looking to play a far more prominent role in Africa’s economic development than China in coming years.

My uncle Gobind is a retired World Bank developmental economist who has served as economic adviser to the government of Ghana. I asked him to share his thoughts on this historic summit.

“While India is less prominent than China in Africa today, both in trade and investments and aid,” he said, “it is more respected than China because of its image, its democracy, its presence in education, industry— especially pharmaceuticals and railways, and IT. There is growing interest in Africa in India, but it is not yet a hot issue, except for mining companies and the new private oil companies like Reliance. India is currently big in Sudan, DRC, Nigeria, Zambia and S. Africa. But it’s increasing its presence everywhere.”

The Emerging Economy report, released yesterday, underlined the role of Indian corporations in driving new technology usage in Africa. From the Earth Times [full story link]:

Chinese corporations have made significant investments in Africa over the past decade. For example, China’s Civil Engineering Construction Corporation is building the $8.3 billion railroad linking Lagos and Kano. However, the Report also points out that Indian entrepreneurs have long enjoyed trading relations in Africa, particularly along the continent’s east coast, running from Kenya down to the tip of South Africa. In the early part of the 20th century Indian engineering and consumer brands were considered as reliable as those coming from Europe. Bilateral trade between India and Africa increased from less than US$ 1 billion in 1991 to over US$ 9 billion in 2005. Today, the Government of India is aiming to achieve a trade turnover of US$ 500 billion by 2010.

My grandfather might be one of those Indian entrepreneurs referred to above. In the 1930s, Dada came to West Africa as apprentice to an Indian trading company. He ended up placing his roots down in Ghana where he opened a chain of movie theatres and imported movies from India and China for a rural audience.

China continues to deploy troops in an effort to quell any protests in/over the “disputed region” of Tibet as the Summer Olympics, China’s coming out party, inches ever closer:

Chinese troops and police have tightened their hold on Tibetan areas in the westernmost region of the country as they work to keep anti-government protests from spreading.

Journalists and activist groups have reported large numbers of troops in provinces along Tibet’s eastern border…

Peaceful protests against Chinese rule in Tibet began last week and gradually turned violent.

China says at least 16 people were killed in riots in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa Friday. But the Tibetan government-in-exile says at least 99 people have been killed in the unrest. [Link]

Last week the nation of Nepal bent over for China by caving to a request to shut down all points on Mt. Everest higher than base camp between now and the middle of May. The beginning of May is thought to be a prime time for a summit attempt, groups having spent the few weeks before that steadily climbing and acclimating. Only a Chinese team, carrying the Olympic torch, will be allowed to proceed, without worry that they will be met by Tibetan protestors at or near the top. All those that may have spent years planning for their ascent attempt get screwed. This isn’t as trivial as it sounds since tourism related to Everest brings a large chunk of money and prestige to the impoverished nation. On the brightside, it looks like Nepal might have begun to come to its economic senses in the past few days. They are no longer “sure” about acceding to China’s original request:

“How could they do something so devastating to the economy and to a Nepalese icon?” said Peter Athans, a 50-year-old American mountaineer who has reached the summit of Everest seven times. “A country superior in size and power is grinding under foot Nepal’s small but very important tourist industry.”

An expedition leader who has a group of 14 clients arriving next week said: “We just want to climb. But suddenly we have this other priority. We don’t need the Chinese intimidating us.” The Nepalese Ministry of Tourism backed away from its ban yesterday, with a spokesman insisting that the season’s 25 Everest expeditions would proceed as planned. “You can go any time to Everest,” he said. [Link]

Via 3QD, I came across an article in the Washington Post about a 10 year research project, based in Delhi but funded by the Ford Foundation, to interview thousands of survivors of the 1947 Partition.

The story begins with a powerful anecdote:

Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his family offered their necks to the sword for the sake of honor.

At the time, sectarian riots were raging over the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the men of Singh’s family decided it was better to kill the women than have them fall into the hands of Muslim mobs.

“None of the women protested, nobody wept,” Singh, 78, recalled as he stroked his long, flowing white beard, his voice slipping into a whisper. “All I could hear was the sound of prayer and the swing of the sword going down on their necks. My story can fill a book.” (link)

These ‘honor killings’, where women were killed by male members of their families to prevent their being raped by communal mobs, were not at all unusual. I do not know if they happened in other communities, but in the Sikh community in particular it is thought that thousands of women died this way. (I do not think anybody knows exactly how many it was.)

Thus far, the project has interviewed about 1300 people, including Bir Bahadur Singh. The project (“Reconstructing Lives: Memories of Partition”) does not appear to have a web presence, and I’m not sure whether there are any plans to digitize the tapes from the interviews, or publish raw transcripts. Hopefully, that will be in the cards at some point.

Readers, if you have grandparents (or great-grandparents?) who went through this, and who have stories they want to tell, I would urge you to interview and record what they went through while they’re still around. (Projects like the one I’m describing are only interviewing people still in India — I’m sure there are more than a few who have ended up settled abroad.)

If you’ve actually done such an interview, have you published the text of it anywhere? (If you’re interested in doing this, drop me a line.)

Why all this is important:

In honor of Women’s History Month, I thought I’d feature South Asian women poets on Poetry Fridays for the remainder of March. Today’s selection is “Shilling Love,” by Kenyan-Indian-American spoken word artist Shailja Patel. Her work “Migritude” premiered last fall in the San Francisco Bay area to packed audiences—it uses her collection of saris, passed down by her mother (another take on Mama’s Saris!), to unfold hidden histories of women’s lives “in the bootprint of Empire, from India to East Africa.”

“Shilling Love” is the first poem from “Migritude” that I came across a couple of years ago, and it has stayed with me since.

Shilling Love
By Shailja Patel

They never said / they loved us

Those words were not / in any language / spoken by my parents I love you honey was the dribbled caramel / of Hollywood movies / Dallas / Dynasty / where hot water gushed / at the touch of gleaming taps / electricity surged / 24 hours a day / through skyscrapers banquets obscene as the Pentagon / were mere backdrops / where emotions had no consequences words / cost nothing meant nothing would never / have to be redeemed

My parents / didn’t speak / that / language

1975 / 15 Kenyan shillings to the British pound / my mother speaks battle

Storms the bastions of Nairobi’s / most exclusive prep schools / shoots our cowering / six-year old bodies like cannonballs / into the all-white classrooms / scales the ramparts of class distinction / around Loreto Convent / where the president / sends his daughter / the foreign diplomats send / their daughters / because my mother’s daughters / will / have world-class educations

She falls / regroups / falls and re-groups / in endless assaults on visa officials / who sneer behind their bulletproof windows / at US and British consulates / my mother the general / arms her daughters / to take on every citadel

1977 / 20 Kenyan shillings to the British pound / my father speaks / stoic endurance / he began at 16 the brutal apprenticeship / of a man who takes care of his own / relinquished dreams of / fighter pilot rally driver for the daily crucifixion / of wringing profit from business / my father the foot soldier, bound to an honour / deeper than any currency / you must / finish what you start you must / march until you drop you must / give your life for those / you bring into the world

For those who are aware of it, this past week (specifically January 14th and 15th) was generally a time for celebration—Thai Pongal Usually, in my own family, this just means pongal rice, a “Happy Thai Pongal, darling!” from various overseas relatives and thus it remains one of those ever-dwindling, absolutely pure links to my childhood. Or so I thought. Another part of the festivities in India, aside from thanking Bhumi Devi for the year’s bounty, involves the snatching of treats and trinkets from the body of a bewildered bull by people one could only describe as foolhardy.

Could it have happened to India?

I saw The Kite Runner last weekend and man did it rock. Beyond a great story, y’all should go be swept away by the shocking similarities between disco-era Afghanistan and India - I gaurantee you’ll recognize an uncle or 2 from your old home movies

In the movie, a pivotal plot point is the end to the Good Times marked by Soviet tanks rolling into Kabul to aid local communist forces… due to the interest in the “India in WWII” series, I thought I’d post on yet another aspect of the conflict that many folks probably aren’t aware of - this time, the Desi-Soviet angle.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact gets a fair amount of coverage as a milestone for WWII in Europe. Before the Soviets fought with the allies, they were secretly helping the Nazis and this pact solidified the Nazi-Soviet alliance. It outlined how the two butchers would divvy up Central and Eastern Europe whilst the British, under Chamberlain, sought appeasement; Wikipedia summarizes it thusly -

In addition to stipulations of non-aggression, the treaty included a secret protocol dividing the independent countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania into spheres of Nazi and Soviet influence, anticipating “territorial and political rearrangements” of these countries’ territories.

All were subsequently invaded, occupied, or forced to cede territory by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or both.

Based on the (initial) success of this pact, the Soviets & Nazis formed other pacts to divvy up the world…

A good percentage of those who paid attention in High School History class probably remember something called the Yalta conference.

Shaping the World to Come

There, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s of a plan which eventually outlined the shape of the post WWII world - particularly a divided Germany and other large chunks of Europe. Yalta, in many respects, resulted in a parcelling up of European territory between WWII victors not unlike the earlier parcelling up of America, Africa and Asia by colonial powers.

Consequently, and perhaps news to many, “arbitrary” borders dividing ethnic groups aren’t just an African / Asian thing. There are a surprising number of European “ethnics” who span “nations” - Finnish-Swedes, Alsation Germans, Baltic Russians, German Poles, Bosnian Serbs, the entire country of Belgium, etc. — many of which trace their predicament to Yalta and various other treaties, wars, forced migrations, and the like.

While Yalta was clearly significant on many levels, the earlier & lesser known Atlantic Conference should be interesting to mutineers because of the key role it played in Indian history… It was there that FDR made Indian Independence a pre-requisite to American involvement in WWII…

For many folks, the most widely recognized pop culture image of Desi soldiers in WWII was Naveen Andrews’ portrayal of Kip, the Sikh soldier, in the film version of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Kip was a combat engineer / bomb removal expert for the British army in Italy and his love affair with Hana, the gorgeous nurse played by Juliet Binoche, formed one of the central plot lines of the movie.

Oh bury me at Cassino
My duty to England is done
And when you get back to Blighty
And you are drinking your whisky and rum
Remember the old Indian soldier
When the war he fought has been won!

-Indian 8th Infantry Division
War Song from the WWII Italian Campaign

When I saw the flick, I recall many a female audience member shuddering at Kip’s “hair scene” - much to my progressively follicle-challenged chagrin…

Still, Ondaatje’s use of Kip in such a significant role is laudable not just because Kip is a strong, attractive & clearly desi male in a leading romantic role but also because it implicitly frames the presence of folks like him as relatively commonplace. I recently stumbled across a fascinating, slick, Indian-produced documentary that goes into much more detail on the “real Kips” who participated in the Allied offensive in Italy. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, it appears the entire documentary is online and available for your viewing pleasure after the fold.

Naveen Makes It Look Easy

The facts, sights, and sounds of the video are an impressive testament to an often overlooked chapter in history. Desi losses in the multi-day assault on the Gustav line, for example, numbered over 1000 - a figure comparable to US losses on D-Day. An Italian countryside scene shows a field of Hindi-inscribed tombstones that hits you in the gut. The UK’s highest military honor, the Victoria Cross, was awarded to its youngest WWII recipient during these battles - 19 yr old Kamal Ram. As is common in these sorts of documentaries, snapshots of soldier’s daily lives provide poignant color - such as the Sikhs making Naan on makeshift ovens. Local Italians, some of whom were barely teenagers at the time, discuss their impressions of these “handsome” soldiers from afar who’ve come to fight for their liberation and attend modern day memorial services to commemorate their sacrifice.

[Part of an ongoing series on Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi. Last week’s entry can be found here. Next week, we will look at Chapter 10, “The Conquest of Nature,” on India’s approach to development and the modernization of agriculture.]

Guha’s Chapter 9, “Redrawing the Map,” is about the early phase in the movement to establish language-based states, with particular emphasis on the south (the creation of Andhra Pradesh out of what was formerly the state of Madras), the status of Bombay vis a vis Maharashtra, and the delineation of Punjab.

As Guha points out, though reorganizing states according to language was part of the Congress plank from the 1930s, after Independence/Partition, both Nehru and Sardar Patel were strongly opposed to rushing into any reorganization of states, especially if there was a danger that such reorganizations could lead to the destabilization of the union. The logic behind this hesitation was understandable and quite sound: if the idea of “India” could be broken along the lines of religion, why not also language?

[Part of an ongoing series on Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi. Last week’s entry can be found here. Next week we will look at Chapter 9, “Redrawing the Boundaries,” on the Language Movements of the 1950s]

With 20-20 hindsight, many people criticize Nehru today for pursuing a foreign policy oriented to “nonalignment” — that is, independence from both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Here is one of Nehru’s most famous statements articulating that policy, from a speech given at Columbia University:

“The main objectives of that policy are: the pursuit of peace, not through alignment with any major power or group of powers but through an independent approach to each controversial or disputed issue, the liberation of subject peoples, the maintenance of freedom, both national and individual, the elimination of racial discrimination and the elimination of want, disease and ignorance, which afflict the greater part of the world’s population.”

The idealism in that statement is admirable, and still worth thinking about, even if the world order has changed dramatically since Nehru first uttered these words. The idea of taking an “independent approach to each controversial or disputed issue” is one I personally strive for as a writer, and could serve as a helpful corrective to many partisan ideologues — on both the left and the right — who tend to only see the world through one particular ideological filter or the other.

Ideals aside, Nehru’s government did make some serious mistakes in foreign policy in the first few years. One of the significant failures Guha mentions in this chapter involved an inconsistency in the response to two international crises: 1) Anglo-French military action in response to Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 (the Suez Crisis), and 2) the Soviet invasion of Hungary following an anti-Communist uprising, also in 1956 (the Hungarian Revolution). India publicly condemned the first act of aggression by western powers, but not the second, which today seems like a clear indication that India was leaning towards the Soviets more than it let on.

Guha suggests there were some internal differences between Nehru and the famous leftist Krishna Menon, who represented India at the U.N., over the Hungary question. Nehru publicly defended Menon’s abstention at the U.N. on the resolution condemning the Soviet invasion of Hungary, but privately he was deeply upset about the invasion. Part of the problem here might have been Nehru’s lack of clarity over the correct course to take, but certainly Krishna Menon’s independent streak must have been a factor as well.

A similar kind of diplomatic confusion was present in India’s relationship with China starting in 1950. Here, the Indian ambassador to China, K.N. Panikkar (who is also very well-known as a historian), seems to have fatally misread Mao Zedong and the personality of Chinese communism:

[Part of an ongoing series on Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi. Last week’s entry can be found here. Next week we will skip a chapter, and go directly to Chapter 8, “Home and the World,” which explains how India evolved its “non-aligned” status.]

I’ve actually written a longish post on the idea of “secularism” in the Indian constitution in the past, but of course there’s more to say. The entire proceedings (more than 1000 pages of text!) of the Constituent Assembly have been posted online by the Indian Parliament here. Guha’s account comes out of reading through those proceedings, and is also deeply influenced by Granville Austin’s classic book, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, which is still as I understand it the definitive book on the subject.

As many readers may be aware, the Indian Constitution was worked out over the course of three years (1946-1949), by a Constituent Assembly that contained 300 members, including representation by religious minorities, members of marginal groups (i.e., Adivasis), as well as a small but vocal group of women.

Three of the profound disagreements that the members of the Assembly had to resolve included: 1) the proper role of Gandhian philosophy in defining the new nation, 2) the question of “reservations” for Dalits and Tribals (Scheduled Castes and Tribes), and 3) the status of Indian languages, and the idea of an “official” language.

(Part four in an ongoing series dedicated to Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi. Last week’s post can be found here. Next week we will look at chapter six, on the Constituent Assembly and the writing of India’s constitution. )

There are lots of interesting bits in Guha’s fifth chapter, on the resettlement of refugees scattered across India after Partition. The part I will focus on in particular is the status of women who were abducted, forcibly married, and then forcibly returned to their families. But to begin with, here are some general facts on the displaced people who ended up in India:

• Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of refugees in Punjab were temporarily housed in camps. The largest of these was at Kurukshetra, where there were some 300,000 refugees. Over time, a major land redistribution effort was initiated, so that farmers who had been displaced from land in Pakistan were granted land in India. More than 500,000 claims were processed through this effort. (According to Guha, the effort worked, by and large; withing a few years, many displaced Punjabis from farming villages were back at work on new lands.)
• Nearly 500,000 refugees ended up in Delhi, fundamentally changing the character of the city. Some settled in outer districts like Faridabad, while others were given land immediately to the south and west of New Delhi. Many of Delhi’s new residents thrived in trade, and came to hold a “commanding influence” over the economic life of the city.
• About 500,000 refugees also ended up in Bombay, including a large number of Sindhis. Here resettlement did not go as well, and Guha states that 1 million people were sleeping in the streets (even in the early 1950s).
• 400,000 refugees came into West Bengal during and immediately after the Partition, but another 1.7 million Hindus left East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) following communal riots there in 1949-50. At least 200,000 ended up in desperate straits in “squatter colonies” in Calcutta, where the refugees effectively overwhelmed the city. Conditions here were much worse than they were in Delhi or in the resettlement camps in the Punjab. The government may have been slow to respond because it presumed that many of the refugees would be returning — and that communal feelings in Bengal were not quite as bad as they were in Punjab. (A mistaken presumption, Guha suggests.)

Those are some of the general facts Guha gives us. What stands out to me is how effective the new Indian government was, on the whole, in responding to the mass influx of people. There were failures — and again, Guha singles out West Bengal as the worst — but if you think about the numbers involved, it’s astonishing that the process was as orderly as it was. Hundreds of thousands of displaced families were allotted land through a rationalized, transparent process oriented to ensuring their survival. And food relief and temporary shelter was provided to thousands more (not without international help).

However, one area where the state really did fail — astoundingly — is with women who had been abducted, converted, and forcibly married in the Partition. Guha’s account here is quite thin, so I’m supplementing what he says with material from Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s book, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition.

Mutineers, we have our first brown Governor. :) Join me, as I bold my favorite parts of the NYT article which declares this history-making outcome.

Bobby Jindal, a conservative Republican congressman from the New Orleans suburbs and the son of immigrants from India, was elected Louisiana’s governor Saturday, inheriting a state that was suffering well before Hurricane Katrina left lingering scars two years ago.

Mr. Jindal, 36, defeated three main challengers in an open primary, becoming this state’s first nonwhite governor since a Reconstruction-era figure briefly held the office 130 years ago.

With more than 90 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Jindal received 53 percent, above the 50 percent-plus-one threshold needed to avoid a runoff in November. He will be the nation’s first Indian-American governor when he takes office in January.

Have I popped champagne? Yes, I have. No, I don’t believe in teaching Intelligent Design, I certainly am not an advocate of getting rid of a woman’s right to choose and I still support hate crime legislation.

I can guzzle bubbly despite all that, because there’s something else stirring within me— recognition that someone who looks like me did something so significant, combined with an uncomplicated thrill over the fact that Bobby made history.

There are so many valid reactions to Jindal; I know about them because thanks to Amardeep’s post, we have hosted a lively discussion regarding his background, his policy positions and the greater implications of his politicking, for “the community”. Amardeep’s thoughts resonated with many of us who are conflicted about Louisiana’s new Governor. The good news is, there are no wrong reactions.

Each of us is allowed to feel how we do, so while some of you gnash your teeth, I’m happy for him and by extension, us. Better than that, the next time some little kid decides that they want to be in government when they grow up, their immigrant parents now have a visual, a template, a precedent to latch on to, much the same way my English minor was suddenly acceptable once Jhumpa won.

There is much to do, much which is owed to the great state of Louisiana and her people; this is just the beginning of that story and I idealistically hope that it has a happy ending. What Jindal can do (and really, whether he can do it) remains to be seen. But I don’t think it’s disrespectful or inappropriate to raise a glass to him tonight and wish him a sincere congratulations.

Doing so doesn’t mean we buy in to his positions lock stock, neither does it mean he’s like, the greatest thing EVAR. It just means that we are happy for someone who accomplished something extraordinary. Congratulating Bobby is something I humbly think we should do, because ideally we should each choose generosity of spirit over bitterness and rancor. Choosing the former and congratulating a winner doesn’t lessen us or diminish our passionate convictions, it just demonstrates our tolerance, equanimity and good faith that we will allow a person’s actions to speak before we do, negatively and presumptously.

(Part 3 in an ongoing series dedicated to Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi; see last week’s post here. This week’s post is dedicated to Chapter 4, “A Valley Bloody and Beautiful”; next week we will look at Chapter 5, “Refugees and the Republic,” which looks at the problem of integrating millions of refugees into the new Indian republic.)

Guha’s first chapter (of three) dealing with Kashmir, I must admit, left me with more questions than answers, but it may be that the subject of Kashmir — even restricted to two years at a time — is simply too complex to deal with in a thirty page overview chapter. Guha’s goal is to provide a balanced account of what happened in 1947-8 with the Accession of Kashmir to the Indian union (October 26, 1947), and the war between India and Pakistan that followed (which is actually well-summarized at Wikipedia). Guha goes with the line that the Pathans who marched on Srinagar in the autumn of 1947 were surely armed by Pakistan, and were not exactly a “liberation” army (they were only too happy to loot Kashmiri Muslims as well as Hindus and Sikhs in the towns they entered). He also stresses the close ties between Sheikh Abdullah and Nehru, and derides Hari Singh as just another useless Maharaja. He also acknowledges that the role of the UN in 1948 was not particularly helpful, and that effectively the whole issue was going to be punted (1965), and then punted yet again (1999).

We could go back and forth on Kashmir forever. The two major, historically grounded positions in the debate, I think, are the following:

• (1) The Maharajah of Kashmir, Hari Singh, legally joined the Indian union in 1947, and therefore the territory belongs to the Indian union, irrespective of whether Hari Singh’s action represented the desires of the majority of Kashmiris. A popularly elected Constituent Assembly, led by Sheikh Abdullah, did unanimously ratify the Accession in 1951.
• (1a) At this point, we should just formalize the Line of Control (LOC), and end the whole thing.
• (2) The people of Kashmir have the right to self-determination. When it signed the ceasefire in 1948, India promised to offer Kashmiris a plebiscite, where they could decide whether to join India or Pakistan, or remain independent. This it has never done. Moreover,
• (2a) Sheikh Abdullah always asked for more autonomy for Kashmir, and was eventually imprisoned for it (correction: he was imprisoned when he started to demand independence). Even if a plebiscite is not granted, the demand for autonomy should be taken seriously.

(Is that a fair characterization of the two major positions, and the ancillary points that follow from them?)

My goal here — and I hope you’ll go along with me — is not to reaffirm my own position, but rather to find out something I didn’t know before, and explore new ways of thinking about a very old subject. From Guha’s account, the figure I’ve become most interested in is Sheikh Abdullah, a secular Muslim who saw himself as the natural leader of all Kashmiris. He sided with India in the conflict with Pakistan, but was later imprisoned by the Indian government for continuing to demand autonomy for the region. His complexities are perhaps emblematic of the extraordinarily complex political problem that is Kashmir.

Part 2 in an ongoing series. Last week we talked about Chapter 2 of Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi. This week’s topic is Chapter 3, which deals with the accession of the Princely States. Next week is Chapter 4, on the turmoil surrounding Kashmir in 1947-8

When they think about 1947, most people naturally think about the tragedy of Partition, which left millions of people dead and displaced. Partition resulted in the creation of two states, but what is left out of this story is an alternative history where instead of two new nations, independence might have seen the formation of three, or five, or five hundred independent nations.

For there were more than five hundred Princely States in existence in 1947. Each of these had its own ruler and court, and many had the trappings of fully independent states (such as railroads, currency, and stamps). All the same, they had to pay significant taxes to the British crown, and none were allowed to maintain their own armies. The Princely States were also, one might add, the most backward in India when it came to the situation of ordinary people. While British India had begun to build schools and universities, and develop the foundations of democratic governance (i.e., property owners could vote), the various Maharajahs were perfectly comfortable keeping their subjects in total, feudal subjection.

Very quickly, between the fall of 1946 and the summer of 1947, the vast majority of Princely States signed “Instruments of Accession,” whereby they agreed to hand over their sovereignty to India. The chief architects of this development were Vallabhbhai Patel and his agent, V.P. Menon. While Patel and Mountbatten did much of the formal negotiation from Delhi, it was Menon who went to hundreds of different Maharajahs all over India, and worked out agreements. According to Guha, because of his indefatigability and his remarkable competence, Menon is one of the unsung heroes of this story.

After Kashmir (which we’ll talk about next week), the state that gave the most difficulty in agreeing to Accession was Hyderabad, which was governed by a Muslim Nizam, but with a Hindu majority.

I’ve had Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi on my shelf for a couple of months, waiting to be seriously cracked. Why not read it together? It’s not a book club that I’m suggesting, or at least, not exactly — since anyone who proposed an 850 page historical tome as a book club selection would have to be out of his mind.

What I propose is this: we’ll look at a chapter or so a week, and go in sequence. In each case, I’ll try and present some of the main ideas in each chapter in a blog post, so readers can participate in the discussion even if they haven’t read that chapter of the book. The idea is to do a survey of post-independence Indian history with emphasis on the conflicts that have occurred in various states. Guha tends to be much more pro-Nehru than is fashionable these days (since liberalization, many people blame Nehru for keeping India behind; I think this is mistaken). He is also scrupulous in looking at “marginal” communities such as the tribals, who are often left out of major histories. From the chapters I’ve read, Guha seems to be quite fair in his approach, and his style of writing is accessible without being ‘dumbed down’ in the least.

If all goes well, and there’s interest in this approach, next week’s topic will be chapter 3, “Apples in the Basket,” where Guha looks at how the Princely States were incorporated into the union — sort of a neglected topic. For now, however, I wanted to look at a controversy that has come up around one of the earlier chapters (Chapter 2), where Guha talks about the events leading up to Partition.

Since today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day (y)aarr, I wanted to blog about Kanhoji Angre, an African-Indian who became the most powerful “pirate” of his era in the world:

Yaarrrrrr

Kanhoji … Angira[’s] …operations off the west coast of India developed into what was probably the most successful piracy endeavor of the 17th or 18th century. [Link]

He was the first pirate who dared to extort money from Indian and British shipping. In 1712 he seized the armed yacht of the East India Company’s governor and held it for a sizeable ransom. Several years later he repelled the British … using specially built gunships. His success drew pirates from India and Europe and by the 1720’s his captains commanded hundreds of well-armed vessels. By 1722 his repeated humiliations of the Company led to their cessation of attempts to destroy Kanhoji. [Link]

While Kanhoji is considered a pirate by the western world, he’s a national hero in India. The Indian Navy named a major naval base after him, and a memorial was due to be erected in his honor in Alibag. In the Indian narrative, he is “the great Admiral of Marathas,” Shivaji’s naval commander:

British historians have described Kanhoji Angre as a pirate, ignoring that he was appointed by the Maratha king. [Link]

Thirty-five years ago, today, the first wave of South Asians who were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin landed in the UK.

At the time Amin gained power, Uganda’s Indian community, numbering approximately 80,000 in total, was comprised of Hindis, Muslims, and Ismalis(sic). [link]

Here’s why they left:

President Amin has denounced the Ugandan Asians as “bloodsuckers”, and warned that any remaining in the country after 8 November risk being imprisoned in military camps. [BBC]

Bloodsuckers, eh? Takes one to know them, or imagine them, I guess. Consider this horrific story:

A 75-year old retired chartered accountant Natubhai Shah, who is living in Ahmedabad, recalled Amin’s reign of terror in an interview with ‘The Times of India’, “Here I was, on an official tour with Idi Amin’s entourage, trying to cross the Nile River when a military van stopped me from going ahead.

One of the army men discreetly handed me a pair of binoculars. It was a chilling sight. Amin was standing beside the river, cutting flesh off an Asian man and feeding it to crocodiles in the river.” [HT]

Also, what exactly were Uganda’s desis threatened with? The BBC article states “imprisonment”, but a case study I found, which focuses on one woman’s personal account of this nightmare, suggests something far more heinous.

Dr. Sunita Sundaram, an ethnically Asian Ismali(sic), was a medical student in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, when Amin announced that all Asians must leave the country within three months time or be killed. [Harvard]

Even as Ugandans followed Amin’s outrageous directions and fled, they were terrorized:

Kassem Osman - who arrived with his wife, two brothers and their families - said they had been robbed by the soldiers.

“On the way to the airport the coach was stopped by troops seven time and we were all held at gun point,” he said. [BBC]

If it is Monday, then it is time to segue back in to Sepia timepassing gently. After all, you’ve had quite the weekend, I’m sure. Exercise your commenting skillz by playing the caption game! Don’t you know that working out without a proper warm-up isn’t wise? ;)

Many thanks to Paul, who guaranteed we’d be able to play today by sending in this tip (“a great candidate for a caption contest”); if any of you spot similarly interesting, “Brown” photographs, pass them along! This picture accompanied an article, some of which is available after the jump.

So, just what is going on here? I’m sure that a few of you already know (and may have witnessed the spectacle yourselves!), but if you don’t recognize the hotstepping, here’s the relatively-somber caption the L.A. Times gave this image:

A Pakistani guard, left, and an Indian counterpart march during a nightly border-closing ceremony. It’s an elaborate, almost comical, show of martial bravado and chest-puffing that has gone on for nearly 60 years. [LAT]

Not sure how to play? Peep these previous editions of captioning fun: Ondhu, Eradu, Mooru, Naal’ku, Aydhu, Aaru, EyLu…

Six years ago, after the attacks, a Humvee rolled up to my apartment building, which was seven blocks from the White House; we were not allowed to leave, for our own safety.

Six years ago, we entered an age of terror which we are also not allowed to leave, ostensibly for our own safety.

Six years ago, 3,000 innocents boarded a plane or went to work, as if it were any ordinary day; they never returned home.

At 8:46 a.m., the moment the first plane struck the North Tower, a bell was sounded, as it has for six years now, and the gathered masses bowed their heads. [NYT]

Let this be a space for remembrance, for respect and for grieving, if you need. Everyone who reads this blog lost something six years ago, even if they didn’t “directly” lose someone in New York, D.C. or Pennsylvania; this space is for your thoughts, on this appositely grim day.

Take an extra long bath, put on your prettiest mundum neriyathum, look forward to some Kaikottakali and smile brightly— Mahabali is coming home, and we don’t want him to know we are forlorn without him.

What’s that you say? You have no idea what I’m talking about? Fret not, almost no one ever does. The tale of Onam and Kerala’s most beloved King is available for your edification, below.

The story goes that the beautiful state of Kerala was once ruled by an Asura (demon) king, Mahabali. The King was greatly respected in his kingdom and was considered to be wise, judicious and extremely generous. It is said that Kerala witnessed its golden era in the reign of King Mahabali. Everybody was happy in the kingdom, there was no discrimination on the basis of caste or class. Rich and poor were equally treated. There was neither crime, nor corruption. People did not even lock their doors, as there were no thieves in that kingdom. There was no poverty, sorrow or disease in the reign of King Mahabali and everybody was happy and content.

It may be noted Mahabali was the son of Veerochana and grandson of Prahlad, the devout son of demon King Hiranyakashyap. Mahabali had a son called Bana, who became a legendary king in his own right and became popular as Banraj in central Assam. Mahabali belonged to the Asura (demon) dynasty but was an ardent worshiper of Lord Vishnu. His bravery and strength of character earned him the title of “Mahabali Chakravathy” or Mahabali - the King of Kings.

Looking at the growing popularity and fame of King Mahabali, Gods became extremely concerned and jealous. They felt threatened about their own supremacy and began to think of a strategy to get rid of the dilemma.

The trailer’s been out for a few weeks but I figured that perhaps a few Mutineer’s haven’t had a chance to check it out quite yet. So, true to my culture beat of late, I now present the trailer for Harold & Kumar part deux -

My take?

India and Pakistan are now 60 years old, as is the bloody partition that created them. My father’s family was caught up in what became arguably the largest mass migration in history: 14.5 million people were moved, roughly the same number in each direction, and somewhere between 500,000 and one million of them died in the process.

Because independence was declared prior to the actual Partition, it was up to the new governments of India and Pakistan to keep public order. No large population movements were contemplated; the plan called for safeguards for minorities on both sides of the new state line. It was an impossible task, at which both states failed. There was a complete breakdown of law and order [Link]

The management of partition was badly botched; if you think Brownie did a heck of a job, Mounty makes him look like a paragon of engagement and sensitivity. Mountbatten insisted that the partition line be drawn in only six weeks! Think of how slowly the US government moves today, and that will give you a sense of how ridiculous and uncaring that deadline was. The line was drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe; this is what his private secretary, Christopher Beaumont, had to say about the process:

“The viceroy, Mountbatten, must take the blame - though not the sole blame - for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished,” he writes. “The handover of power was done too quickly…”

… it was “irresponsible” of Lord Mountbatten to insist that Beaumont complete the boundary within a six-week deadline - despite his protests. [Link]

Mountbatten was a pretty boy from a royal family whose track record during WWII led him to be “known in the British Admiralty as the Master of Disaster.” [Link] His track record in India seems similar - he was charming and glib, but unconcerned about the feasibility of plans or the lives which would be lost.

As Viceroy of India, he advanced the date of independence by nine months (no reason was ever given), making the problems associated with partition worse. Critics argue that he foresaw bloodshed and didn’t want it to happen on British watch; he was willing to make things worse as a form of CYA rather than take responsibility for the situation.

So here’s another piece of ammo for your “everything came from India” uncle -

Newton’s Infinite Series: We heard it in Malayalam first

NEW DELHI: A group of Malayali scholars had predated a ground-breaking Newton ‘discovery’ by over 250 years, according a research paper published on Monday.

The team of researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Exeter reveal that the ‘Kerala School’ identified the ‘infinite series’- one of the basic components of calculus - in about 1350.

And thus, by discovering one of the building blocks of calculus first, Mallu’s used the knowledge to, uh, well, uh, I’m not quite sure…. The researchers were quick to note that this discovery shouldn’t be used to reduce Newton’s stature but instead, add some brown names to the pantheon of genius -

[Dr George Gheverghese Joseph, one of the researcher and Honorary Reader, School of Education at The University of Manchester said,] “The brilliance of Newton’s work at the end of the seventeenth century stands undiminished - especially when it came to the algorithms of calculus.

“But other names from the Kerala School, notably Madhava, Valloppillil, and Nilakantha, should stand shoulder to shoulder with him as they discovered the other great component of calculus- infinite series.

However, Dr. Joseph does note that perhaps, just perhaps, Newton wasn’t inspired by the proverbial apple at all -

…there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Indians passed on their discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited India during the fifteenth century.

That knowledge, they argue, may have eventually been passed on to Newton himself.

Let the attribution games begin! (Hat tip - Venkat & Sindhya)

“Put up a post, please. Now, if possible.”

“Like…a test post?”

“Yes. A post. Any post.”

“Um…okay.”

I leaned back, then giggled. I was in a silly mood. A few moments later…

i’m brown irish, actually.

there once was a group of brown nerds
who spent all their time toying with words
they all loved to blog
(some from a city with fog)
b/c let’s face it, a social life’s for the birds.

(mc sharaabi, out)

“Ta-da!”, I trilled, to my late German Shepherd, Rani.

A few moments later, a terse reply appeared: “thanks.” Don’t ask me how, but I knew that his trebuchet-lettered, monosyllabic response had been punctuated by one mighty eye-roll, instead of just a period.

And that’s how it all began, on July 30, 2004

::

It was dizzying, the start of this thing, this “project”, this labor of love, loathe, learning and light.

Political ads were everywhere, constantly reminding us that we were cynical spectators at the race to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; so were news stories, about outsourcing, racism (clumsily cloaked as wit), and profiling. Three years ago, we were outraged over the very same things. Normally, this would depress me, but I can’t despair, not now, not over this. This is extraordinary. The issues may be the same, but everything else is different, because we are different. We are here.

::

July, 2004.

I wrote a post on my original blog, HERstory.

Manish wrote a post on his original blog, vij.com.

Abhi emailed us, plus two more.

“Guys, I can’t believe so many of my friends are still undecided about whom to vote for…yet when I show them your story on Mamta, Anna, or yours on Michigan’s GOP, Manish…then they’re suddenly more decisive. You know what we need to do? We need to centralize this, all of this information…because the conventions are coming and what is at stake is so important…we need to reach more people.”

There were murmurs of agreement and empathy.

“Guys, I think we should create a group blog for this stuff. Think about it— all of our readerships overlap a little bit…the same people who might read Anna, sometimes read Manish or me….it’s great that we’re raising awareness about these desi news stories that get no attention otherwise, but we should focus our efforts, so people aren’t going to different places. This is the first year they’ll allow bloggers at the convention! We need to do this. Now.”

And we did.

For approximately six hours, furious rounds of emails passed, a few instant messenger chats popped and one phone call was made…then, we paused. The most difficult decision we had faced yet stymied us, putting a consummate, thudding halt to our spectacular telesis.

Uh, what would we name this goo-covered thing, which was “crowning” and about to force its debut any minute now?

Desirati?

Indian Ink?

Blogwalla?

Tamarind.

Amar Akbar Anthony?

Dishoom Dishoom?

XDesi?

BrownAmerica?

Desispiracy?

PanDesi?

Desinfect?

Desified?

Shotgun Rishta!

Desintegrate?

Blogging While Brown.

We each had submitted close to a dozen names; we ranked and re-ranked, and then calculated which idea had what percentage of support. It was exhausting. It reminded me of sorority rush, when prospective pledges ranked the houses they liked and we did the same on the other end, hoping that without too much delay or effort, everything would get sorted and everyone would be happy.

Uh, no.

After blazing through vision, expectations, concepts and possibilities, unanimously agreeing, almost immediately, on all of it (No meetings? GREAT. No deadlines or assigned stories? Awesome! No expectations or rules, beyond the barest minimum of guidelines, which all seemed to pop out of our heads identically and simultaneously? FANtastic. Some of us have never [and still never!] met? Who cares?)…we were stuck.

“What about Sepia Mutiny?”, I blurted out.

Silence.

The Greatest Living American?

Greg Easterbrook writes about Norman Borlaug who played a tremendous, and often vastly underappreciated role in India’s modern development -

The greatest living American is Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and joins Jimmy Carter as the two living American-born laureates around whose necks this distinction as been placed.

How did Borlaug win his Nobel back in 1970?

Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India’s food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes.

As a temporary American expat to India, Borlaug’s impact on India’s development was possibly greater than Deming’s on Japan…

I never understood why the British referred to their home country as “old Blighty.” These days the term is mainly used with self-depricating irony, but during its heyday it was said in earnest, to refer to a homeland dearly missed:

Vilayated not blighted

The term was more common in the later days of the British Raj… It is … commonly used as a term of endearment by the expatriate British community, or those on holiday to refer to home… During World War I, “Dear Old Blighty” was a common sentimental reference, suggesting a longing for home by soldiers in the trenches. [Link]

What confused me about the term was that it implied that the motherland was a blight, which is an odd thing for homesick soldiers to admit. While I may have thought of the Raj as blighted, I didn’t think that the soldiers fighting for it did so, and I definitely didn’t think the term was sanctioned by the British authorities.

The confusion was soon cleared up by Wikipedia which tells me that the word “Blighty” has little to do with blight, it’s a false cognate. Instead, it is a desi loan word. Yes, All things come from India uncle strikes again - even the British term from home comes from the Hindustani word (borrowed from Arabic) for foreign:

Blighty is a British English slang term for Britain, deriving from the Hindustani word vilayati, meaning “foreign”, related to the Arabic word wilayat, meaning a kingdom or province.

According to World Wide Words, Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C Burnell explained in their Anglo-Indian dictionary, Hobson-Jobson, published in 1886, that the word came to be used, in British India, for several things the British had brought into the country, such as the tomato (bilayati baingan) and soda water, which was commonly called bilayati pani, or “foreign water”. [Link]

That’s right - instead of longing for a blighted homeland, these soldiers were longing for a foreign one. It’s as if they started to refer to themselves as “goray log,” appropriating an Indocentric term for other to refer to themselves. With so little discrimination, they’re just lucky they didn’t end up calling Mother England “Bhenjotistan”.

Via Tipster BNB, a searing one-hour documentary, exposing the 19th-century British practice of Indentured Labour, through which more than 1 million Indian workers were transported all over the world — only to be told there was no provision to return. They were effectively only slightly better off than the African slave laborers they were brought in to replace. The latter had been emancipated in 1833, when the British government decided to end slavery and the slave trade throughout the Empire.

The documentary is brought to you by… who else? The BBC! (“The BBC: Bringing You… Post-colonial Guilt in Excruciating Historical Detail”)

Some of the speakers include Brij Lal, an Indo-Fijian who now teaches in Australia, and David Dabydeen, an Indo-Guyanan novelist who now teaches in Warwick, UK. I’ve watched about 25 minutes of it so far, and it seems to be pretty well designed — some historical overview, but not too much. Most of the focus is on the descendents of Indian indentured laborers, who are now trying to work out the implications of their history.

Incidentally, it looks like this video can be downloaded for free to your PC — in case you’re going to be sitting in a train or an airport for an hour sometime this weekend, and wanted a little “light” entertainment. (You will also need to download Google’s Video Player application.)

From our News tab, via Shivam Vij.

…by which I mean ignorance and racism; I have nothing against ancient warriors who had little to do with the lush paradise in which my parents were born. I’ve largely refrained from the “Scythian”-drama on SM, which has now pindered out to the point where it’s almost an inside joke: “But is she SCYTHIAN??”, etcetera ad nauseum.

Behold, the stunning nescience below, which inspired this unexpected post:

Well not all Punjabis are Scythians, but some are. I don’t look like the small, dark and gumpy looking people there. I’m totally a 6’4” tall, 220 lbs. White Scythian, not just in complection, but in those jagged Iranic/Germanic Scythian features. U.S. Born, and a U.S. Marine too. Not some unkempt, short darkie, goofy looking son of a bitch like most of those Indian fuckers are. Don’t forget about the Pashtunic, Scythian, White Hun, Magog descendents who decided to stay on the Indian side during 1947. And changed their names to Singh. I got nothing in common with most Singhs, I’m all-American here. My blood’s totally of White Hun/Scythian and Greek lineage. I should change my name back to our original Scythic/Hun and Greek surnames, before my ancestors made the hair brained idea to stay on the Indian side. When they should have fought hard to preserve their Princely States, which do not belong to India or Pakistan. I got nothing in common with Desis in appearance and culture. They’re as bad as the Muslims! The problem is, is that most here are NOT Scythians, so they won’t understand, but it’s foolish to claim that all are Scythic, or none are Scythic. However some are. Also a lot of pure Scythians left India in 1947 and the time after that to come to America. Since their high civilization of their Princely States were robbed and dissolved by the Desis. No worries, though, we’re florishing well here. Just I’m against the current immigration of all these undesirables who don’t belong in America. The immigration rules of the 1950’s, 1960’s were excellent in America. But not anymore, today. With the way things are going, America’s gonna be another 3rd World cesspool if they don’t close the doors to immigration. But it’s all Commie New World Order and the Bibilical End Times now. So go figure. [for shame]

Hmmm. I wonder if he realizes that most of our darkie desi parents came here during that “excellent” era for immigration, i.e. 1965.

Look.

I’m all for being proud of one’s roots and heritage. I’m certainly not ashamed of my undesirable, small, dark and gumpy (??) past. I’m also proud of the fact that like this commenter, my sister is active duty Air Force; I’m a total cheerleader for our troops, but that doesn’t mean I’ll overlook the egregious. You see, there’s being proud and then there’s being pejorative. One can be the former without resorting to the latter. Shocking concept, I know.

If you are someone Gujjar, Sindhi, Kashmiri or whatever and you have some logical right to claim Scythian ancestry, then bully for you. I was always taught that Scythians were blood-drinking, pot-headed, parent-devouring cannibals who didn’t even have a written language, but whatever floats your quasi-supremacist boat. ;) I keed, I keed.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you Scythians are unique and special. Just like everyone else. You’re no better or worse. Just like everyone else. So why this fixation on differentiating yourself from us when you quite probably have some of our small, darkie genes too, even if they haven’t expressed themselves in your tall, broad-shouldered, Aryan phenotype? What is up with the proto-racism?

And if you are excessively proud of your purported background, why come to a site populated by inferior darkies to crow about it? People who own Ferraris are fine with obeying the speed limit/staying out of the extreme left lane, I’ve seen it myself. It’s the poser in the uber-modded __ who has something to prove— and behaves deplorably.

Since I commenced this post because of a comment, let me end with one, too. This was Chachaji’s response to CinnamonRani, over on the Skin Color Matters thread:

I think discrimination based on skin color(or for that matter discrimination based on any visible markers of difference) is an innately human behavior. It takes a lot of conscious effort to see beyond the visible marker at an individual level. This requires training, sensitization, consciousness raising, and it has to happen all the time, in every generation. Although one makes distinctions precisely because one is human, it is also because one is human that one can become aware that one is doing so, and learn not to base significant decisions on these markers. People who claim they are not racists are often being not so much dishonest as ignorant of their own psychological processes. [link]

Better yet, have a cup of Possibly Scythian-descended Camille:

…Honestly, when people say this, I wonder if folks recognize that this is just another way of playing into ideas of white supremacy and a “white on top” racial hierarchy? PARTICULARLY when they start throwing in color (e.g. “Oh I’m much more like (fair-skinned) Aryans than (dark) south Indians.” It’s racist and stupid, through and through…[link].

What do you think? Be respectful, please. I’d love to have a discussion where we hash this out, for once and all, but that won’t happen if this thread gets shut down. Scythe away at each other accordingly. ;)

As usual, biz has me on the road accumulating airmiles… and the usual upside is some unbroken reading time — most recently with Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound. The book is well written and covers a wide span of Indian history and issues both from Das’s direct (and apparently quite privileged) experience as well as his clearly thorough research. Emotionally laced with optimism for the future and regret for the past, this nonfiction book struck a chord in a way I imagine some find in escapist lit. Call it Bridget Jones for the econ-minded. Amartya Sen’s comments on the book are particularly interesting.

Das tackles the age old, highly politicized question of “Why was India rich, why is it poor, and when will it be rich again?” In the dozens of cases Das presents, one particularly unique example is a famous battle of antiquity and the first large scale military interaction between Desi’s and the West - the Battle of Hydaspes River in 327 BC.

The battle pitted Alexander the Great’s Macedonians against Porus (the Hellenic version of “Rama Puru”), leader of the Kingdom of Paurava in what is now the Pakistani section of ancient Punjab. Beyond the general intrigue and war narrative - feints, maneuver, logistics, and so on - Das finds a nugget of explanatory wisdom to his question - Teamwork.

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do - Samuel HuntingtonDepending on your proclivities, Hydaspes may have marked the beginning of Western colonialism in India and thus the beginnings of all that ailed its 20th century history. In Samuel Huntington’s famous aphorism — “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do” — Alexander was perhaps the capstone ancient example. Thus, the Battle of Hydaspes River may have set the imperial template for hundreds more, longer lasting incursions over later millenia.

I’m sure the science-fiction geeks amongst y’all know about the lost continents of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu. These are the “missing continents” that were submerged in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans respectively.

[The story of Atlantis has its origin in the Platonic dialogues, while Lemuria was hypothesized in the late 1800s as an explanation for why there were Lemurs in both Madagascar and India but not in Africa or the Middle East. Both are now beloved of mystics and kooks. Nobody really cares about Mu, although it is sometimes confused with Lemuria.]

However, I’ll bet you’ve never heard of the Tamil analogue, the lost continent of Kumari Kandam! Proponents say Kumari Kandam is Lemuria, different names for the same continent that once covered most of the Indian ocean:

Sri Lanka together with India, Indonesia and Malaysia were a part of this continent. Many islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans are remnants of this continent that in ancient time covered the whole area of today’s ocean. [Link]

The lost continent of Kumari Kandam

It turns out that everything does not actually come from India, it comes from Kumari Kandam. And by everything, I do mean everything.

“Homo Dravida” first evolved in Kumari Kandam; it is the cradle of civilization; the birthplace of all languages in general and of the Tamil language in particular. This is where the first and second great ages (Sangams?) of the Tamils happened, not in India, but in the true Dravidian homeland, further south.

It’s kind of a famous line now, uttered by former Virginia Senator George Allen to a young political staffer named S.R. Sidarth. Many of us think it was probably responsible for bringing down the former Senator and shifting the Senate to the Democrats in the 2006 elections. It turns out that Allen’s statement would have been MUCH more appropriate if he had uttered it just under 400 years ago. On today, the 400-year-anniversary of the founding of Jamestown and the birth of what would one day become America, Francis Assisi and his fellow reporters at Indolink bring us this news culled from historical research of the last several years:

The best evidence suggests that the people from India arrived in colonial America in one of two ways. They were taken aboard as lascars or helpers aboard the trading ships of the British East India Company from Indian ports, and, on reaching England, succumbed to the promises of agents who were taking indentured workers to the New World. Or else they were taken as servants by the British “Nabobs” who amassed their fortunes in India and subsequently returned home to England and thence to the newly established colony in America - where they took their servants with them as a sign of their status.

A 2003 study prepared by Martha W. McCartney, a project historian for the National Park Service’s Jamestown Archaeological Assessment reveals that Captain George Menefie, who was assigned 1200 acres of land in Jamestown in 1624 used “Tony, an East Indian,” as a headright. This is further confirmed in a 2006 report from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation which identifies Menefie as a wealthy English merchant who arrived in Virginia in 1622, and obtained legal right to the land by paying passage for 24 immigrants, including an East Indian.

At the heart of the early migration to colonial America was the headright system designed to encourage immigration. Every Englishman who “imported” a laborer or servant to the colony received a fifty-acre land grant.

What the evidence from Jamestown/Williamsburg suggests is that the first East Indians were brought to Virginia within less than a generation of the arrival of European settlers in Virginia - and within a decade after the Mayflower landed in Plymouth. [Link]

Of course, as we know from history, Jamestown began to flounder and descended into chaos until they started profiting from growing John Rolfe’s tobacco, harvested by the first slaves in North America. After the first batch of African slaves, East Indians soon followed:

Social historian Thomas Brown, a faculty member at Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas has corroborated this in a 2004 research paper. Brown explains that many East Indians were imported to the American colonies by way of England, arriving already Christianized and fluent in English. Others arrived as slaves who had been captured and sold. “It is impossible to confidently estimate the size of the South Asian population in the Western Shore counties, but “East Indians” outnumber “Indians” in the extant colonial records after 1710 or so,” acknowledges Brown.

Furthermore, he claims: ‘In 18th century Chesapeake, South Asians stood out from sub-Saharan slaves both in culture and appearance. Since South Asians were a minority among the slave population, the community’s perception of their distinctiveness persisted for a longer period of time.’ And most surprisingly, Brown adds: ‘there was a significant contingent of “East Indian” slaves in the colonial Chesapeake.’ [Link]

If we had a tradition of open threads here, I would just open one here today and ask all of y’all to share your thoughts on the Sepoy Mutiny, a.k.a. Rebellion, a.k.a. First War of Independence, a.k.a. perhaps some other name, depending on your viewpoint and the importance you assign to nomenclature in history. I know shamefully little about this fundamental event in the history of the Indian Subcontinent, and even less about the debates that it has spurred among historians, except that I know that these have been complicated and sometimes heated.

But today marks the official sesquicentennial commemoration of the start of the Mutiny/Rebellion/War, and by way of launching the conversation, I present three different takes that are in the news today. First we have Mani Shankar Aiyar, India’s Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports, who gave the official start to a youth march from Meerut to Delhi a couple of days ago. His remarks to a RediffNews correspondent emphasized the secular nature of the uprising; he observed that India today can learn from the uprising the importance of pluralism, secularism and religious understanding:

The significance of 1857 for today’s youth is that it makes you realise that we all are one people in spite of our diversity.

The freedom-fighters who revolted against the British in 1857 were mostly Hindus in Meerut. After disobeying their British superiors they went straight to the Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar, and made him their king.

They had no ill-feeling for the Mughal king though he was a Muslim. This is the kind of secular bonding these soldiers had in them.

Our young generation must remember that united we stand, and though we are a diverse people we have to maintain our unity. That is what the message of 1857 was to all Indians. …

This is another message that Bahadur Shah Zafar and the freedom-fighters of 1857 wanted to pass on to the future generations. No matter what your religion and region be, respect all religion and maintain harmony. …

We have to remember the fact that India has the second largest Muslim population in the world. We have more Muslims than in Pakistan and Bangladesh but we Indians live together peacefully and I am proud to say all Muslims are my brothers.

When you next encounter everything-comes-from-India Auntie or Uncle, you can turn their fixation to your advantage.

Beti: Auntieji, you know, there is another area where India was ahead of the rest of the world.
Auntie: Yes, beti?
Beti: And it was mentioned in the Vedas, ages before any western source mentioned it.
Auntie: Yes yes, that is how it always is. What area of scientific advancement are you talking?
Beti: Auntieji, I am referring to kissing. Snogging. Mouth Mashing. Tonsil Field Hockeying. Two desis each kissing the apple sequentially in a Bollywood movie, except there is no apple and there was no Bollywood.
Auntie: Hai Ram! Chi!
Beti: But it’s in the Vedas, Auntieji! The very first written references to kissing. It was written about, in Sanskrit, long before it was written anywhere else! How can it be a bad thing then?

Unsurprisingly, this news isn’t something that is coming out of a BJP research center, it’s coming from Texas A&M University anthropologist Vaughn Bryant who says:

The earliest written record of humans’ kissing appears in Vedic Sanskrit texts — in India — from around 1500 B.C., where certain passages refer to lovers “setting mouth to mouth,” [Link]

“References to kissing did not appear until 1500 BC when historians found four major texts in Vedic Sanskrit literature of India that suggested an early form of kissing. There are references to the custom of rubbing and pressing noses together. This practice, it is recorded, was a sign of affection, especially between lovers. This is not kissing as we know it today, but we believe it may have been its earliest beginning. About 500 to 1,000 years later, the epic Mahabharata, contained references suggesting that affection between people was expressed by lip kissing. Later, the Kama Sutra, a classic text on erotica, contained many examples of erotic kissing and kissing techniques.” [Link]

Sadly, this pattern of looking to attribute motivation to the characteristics of a particular ethnic / religious group goes waaaaay back [Thanks Saheli]. While today’s attack in Virginia is the worst ever school shooting incident in US history, it is not the worst ever school killing. That bloody honor belongs to an incident almost 80 years ago, involving a suicide bomber and victims in elementary school:

The Bath School disaster was a series of bombings in Bath Township, Michigan, USA, on May 18, 1927, which killed 45 people and injured 58. Most of the victims were children in second to sixth grades attending the Bath Consolidated School. The bombings constituted the deadliest act of mass murder in a school in U.S. history. [Link]

The killer planned his attack very carefully for at least a year. Hundreds of pounds of explosive denoted but luckily enough an additional 500 pounds of explosive did not, thus limiting the damage. The terrorist filled his vehicle full of shrapnel and then detonated it, with himself inside, killing the school superintendent and some of the rescuers who had started to gather.

The killer was a school board member who blamed his financial problems on taxes levied to pay for the new school. The KKK spun this in a religious direction, saying that Catholics were opposed to paying for secular schools since it was against their religious beliefs. They provided multiple quotes from Catholic authorities strongly opposing “Protestant or godless schools” as evidence that Catholics thought that public schools were a tool of Satan (I give only two):

These forty-five lives were sacrificed to satisfy the lust of a shrewd mind, poisoned by intolerant, religious dogma. It is a self-evident fact that the Roman Catholic church, from the moment of birth, assumes the self-appointed duty of shaping and developing the mind of the Catholic born child… as the following quotations will show:

“We don’t want to be taxed for Protestant or godless schools. Let the Public School system go to where it came from - the Devil.” - Freeman’s Journal. (Catholic).

“The children of the Public Schools turn out … well versed in the schemes of deviltry… Catholics stand before the country as the enemies of the Public Schools” [Link]

Sound like a familiar tactic? They also produced quotes arguing that according to Catholic doctrine, the children at school were heretics and gave a quote from a priest in New York where he said:

“Heretics should be put to death and that if the Catholic church was strong enough, the Catholic people would hinder even by death, the spread of such error among the people.” [Link]

You see how the game is played? Nobody would believe it about white Catholics today, but they would believe it about brown Muslims. Same game, different players, and people just keep falling for it again and again.

I know that many SM readers like to partake in one particular cross-border skirmish we seem to have a lot here. You know the one of which I speak, right? It’s the herbivores vs. the carnivores (although technically we are all omnivores). Well, to throw a little fuel on to that fire I submit to you this book review over at Slate.com.. The book is titled “Bloodless Revolution” and is meant to be a sort of “history of European vegetarianism.” I haven’t read the book but the review was quite insightful. First the background on the book:

Here’s the story as he tells it in The Bloodless Revolution: In the 17th century, a fundamental question about the relationship between ourselves and the other creatures of the earth broke out into passionate debate, a debate that swooped over and around and through the culture, rattling long-held European assumptions about the very nature of life. There was no single word adequate to capture the ideas that were bursting forth, until the term vegetarian emerged in the middle of the 19th century. And with that, the battle was over—not because meat-eating came to an end but because European culture made a home for this challenge to dietary norms, giving it a local habitation and a name. Whether or not this constituted a victory for animal-lovers is hard to say. As Stuart points out early on, when the concept of vegetarianism became domesticated, it turned into “a distinct movement that could easily be pigeon-holed, and ignored.” But people did start thinking differently about animals, human responsibilities, and the rights of living creatures, albeit rarely to the extreme sought by such groups as PETA. Stuart sums it up well: Nowadays, he says, “negotiating compassion with the desire to eat is customary…” [Link]

The critic contends, however, that vegetarianism from a European perspective isn’t so much something they accept as a way of life but is rather a philosophy to be practiced off an on:

If vegetarianism has settled comfortably into Western culture by now, it’s because the term vegetarian has become so vast and shapeless that it describes just about everybody who isn’t on the Atkins diet. To be sure, there are vegetarians who avoid all animal food. But most are willing to eat eggs, and many eat fish. Chicken is fine with some because hey, it isn’t beef. Hamburgers? Absolutely not—or maybe just once in a while. And turkey because it’s Thanksgiving, ham because it’s Easter, pepperoni because it’s pizza—what on earth is a vegetarian, anyway? No wonder Stuart never tries to define the term. A huge, wonderfully entertaining cast of dietary rebels parades through his chapters, but all we really know about the eating habits of these pagans, scientists, doctors, scholars, theologians, writers, philosophers, and crackpots is that most of them ate meat. [Link]

“The worst nonfiction book about terrorism published by a major house since 9/11” is what Warren Bass, senior books editor at the Washington Post (and, the byline notes, a former staff member of the 9/11 Commission), calls the latest from desi Talking Android nonpareil Dinesh D’Souza. The book is called THE ENEMY AT HOME: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, a title that begs little further explication. Indeed, Bass points out at the end of a sharp review that’s less blustering and more cutting than that of Alan Wolfe in the New York Times, the whole exercise of D’Souza’s book seems so plainly intended to cause a kerfuffle in the blogosphere that I feel tawdry even bringing it up here, despite the Desi Angle (TM). As Bass notes:

Either D’Souza is blaming liberals for 9/11 because he truly believes that they’re culpable, or he’s blaming liberals for 9/11 because he’s cynically calculating that an incendiary polemic will sell books. I just don’t know which is scarier. One has to wonder why his publisher, agent, editors and publicists went along for the ride, and it’s hard not to conclude that they thought the thing would cause a cable-news and blogosphere sensation that would spike sales — a ruckus triggered not despite the book’s silliness but because of it. This sort of scam has worked before (think of Christopher Hitchens’s gleeful broadside against Mother Teresa or the calculated slurs of Ann Coulter), but rarely has the gap between the seriousness of the issues and the quality of the book yawned as wide. This time, let’s just not bother with the flap; this dim, dishonorable book isn’t worth it.

And perhaps, indeed, it isn’t. Still, as the rituals of the publishing biz dictate, Brother D’Souza has been getting his publicity on since the book’s release last week. Yesterday he had an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle that begins with a piece of logical reasoning that might have done Descartes proud:

The Pelosi Democrats sometimes appear to be just as eager as Osama bin Laden for President Bush to lose his war on terror. Why do I say this? Because if the Pelosi Democrats were seeking Bush’s success, then their rhetoric and actions now and over the past three years are pretty much incomprehensible. By contrast, if you presume that they want Bush’s war on terror to fail, then their words and behavior make perfect sense.

If you are looking for an alternative take on Kenya’s Indian community, speak to Zahid Rajan, editor of Awaaz, a magazine focusing on historical, political, and cultural issues in the South Asian community in East Africa. The local Indian community traces its roots to the late nineteenth century laborers imported by the British to build the Uganda Railway and grow sugarcane and to the generations of traders who settled along the Indian Ocean coast in Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, and other port towns. The Indian community quickly prospered and became managers instead of laborers (the current issue of Awaaz has a great article on the cultural dynamics that promoted their rapid success). In short order, Indians built businesses, hired black Kenyans to do the work, and banked their considerable profits.

Today, the community in Kenya is perceived, not without justification, as wealthy and aloof. Rajan is critical of what he sees as the community’s lack of engagement with Kenya’s many challenges. ““The South Asian diaspora in Kenya is completely nonpolitical,”” he says. ““It stays behind its security fences in [the Nairobi suburb of] Parklands.””

Historically, Indians were engaged at all levels, leading labor unions, participating in the struggle against British colonialism, and building schools and hospitals, but that civic drive was sapped somewhere along the way.

Rajan attributes the Indian withdrawal from politics to three factors: the “Kenyanization” programs of the late 1960s that redistributed land, awarded contracts and licenses and reserved government jobs for black Africans; Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972; and a failed coup attempt against Kenya’s president, Daniel arap Moi, in 1982. Fighting during that conflict resulted in significant destruction in downtown Nairobi, where many Indians ran businesses.

“”I know Indians who have never been back to the city center,”” he says.

I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment [December 1964] when twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award in behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice.

I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeing to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. …

After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time — the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.

Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.

— Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, December 10, 1964

Though I’ve always been proud of the Sikh tradition in military service — particularly in the First and Second World Wars — the fact that the British Raj designated certain ethno-religious groups as martial races makes me uneasy. And recently I’ve been reading a book on the Gurkha regiments, (Byron Farwell’s The Gurkhas), and after reading a number of chapters I’m ready to throw out the designation entirely.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Gurkhas (or Gorkhas) come from a region of Nepal west of Kathmandu, and have been actively recruited by the British for service as mercenaries since 1815. It so happened that the British discovered the Gurkhas’ military aptitude after defeating them in a series of particularly tough battles — just as they did with the Sikhs, the Marathas, and indeed, the Zulus (all of whom would be designated “martial races”; see the full list here). Often, troops from one recently conquered region would be instrumental in defeating the next group (the Gurkhas were deployed in the Anglo-Sikh Wars, for instance).

As a side-note, though most Gurkha regiments joined the Indian army at independence, the British did retain a small number of Gurkhas for the British Army after 1947 — and they still actively recruit them today (on a fully voluntary basis, of course). Gurkhas were deployed in the Falklands’ War, in Kosovo, and are now in Afghanistan. Retired Gurkhas are also probably going to be deployed to monitor the fragile peace agreement between the Maoists and the new government of Nepal. Joining the Gurkha regiments in the British Army is considered desirable, but it’s a tough gig to get: one of the physical tests in order to be accepted involves running uphill for 40 minutes with a 70 pound bag of stones strapped to your back!

The author of the book on the Gurkhas is mainly a military historian, not an anthropologist, so it’s probably too much to expect to ask him to deconstruct the idea of “martial races.” But it’s extremely frustrating that in episode after episode Farwell seems to reiterate a few straightforward stereotypes as explaining the Gurkhas’ effectiveness in battle on behalf of the British: they are simple peasants, they are hardened by life in a mountainous region, and they have a strong sense of cultural identity. The same could be said of many other ethnic groups, most of whom were not designated “martial races.” So why the Gurkhas?

It seems hard to escape the conclusion that “martial race” is a convenient term created by the British to continue military recruiting patterns favorable to the progress of imperial expansionism.

Via Desipundit, I caught a link to a post by Qalandar on a recent article in the Calcutta Telegraph by Mukul Kesavan.

For those who don’t know, Mukul Kesavan is a pretty accomplished writer — the author of Looking Through Glass, and an interesting little monograph that came out a few years ago, called Secular Common-Sense.

His latest column is about the lingering consequences of the experience of Partition on the thinking of the Indian government regarding its borders. Kesavan is pointing to a kind of paradox in the constitution of the Indian state — it was founded on a principle of pluralism across religious, linguistic, ethnic, and caste differences. But once it was defined as such and those borders were consecrated, if you will, in blood during the Partition, the possibility of allowing one or another territory to secede on the basis of ethnic or religious difference became an impossibility. If you do that, the whole justification for holding the rest of the country together could potentially collapse.

Qalandar raises some questions about the rhetorical stance taken by Kesavan in his piece, and Mukul Kesavan himself actually shows up in the comments to clarify some things. In fact, it’s in the comments to the post that he gives what might be the clearest account of his position:

Pakistan claims Kashmir because as a Muslim state carved out of British India it thinks it has a right to Kashmir as a Muslim majority province. Israel, as a Jewish state, wants to annex large settler blocs of Jews on the West Bank to Israel and in return would be happy to give away bits of Israel that have concentrations of Arabs. Other nations dispute or defend territory on the ground of language. Indian nationalism refused the temptation of a single collective identity; as a result, the republic it created had no way of discriminating between borders that were negotiable and those that were written in stone. Not only were its borders were colonial and therefore arbitrary, being an ideologically pluralist state it couldn’t claim or trade away disputed borderlands going by the nature of the populations settled there. So it decided that every inch of its border was sacred and what it had, it held. (link)

It’s an interesting thesis — one could argue that it might not hold in the case of India’s claims to the Kashmir valley (too much strategic and symbolic value to ever think of letting go). But the northeastern provinces, where secessionism abounds, seem more marginal. And just to reiterate in case anyone misses it: Kesavan isn’t saying that India should just let go of any territory (indeed, he comes out pretty clearly as saying it shouldn’t). Rather, Kesavan is trying to explain why India has held on — and will continue to hold on — so tenaciously.

There’s more to it, but I think I’ll leave it to readers to explore some of the other interesting points made in this discussion, by Qalandar, Mukul Kesavan, and Nitin Pai.

It should be no surprise to most here that I’m a strident fan of Milton Friedman and that his passing was quite a bit more than a garden variety celeb obit for me. While I’m a geek of rather high proportions, there are quite a few of us for whom the loss left an almost personal hollowness.

“The current danger is that India will stretch into centuries what took other countries only decades” - Milton Friedman, 1963Because he called San Francisco home, I actually had the honor of seeing Uncle Milt speak in person about 2 years ago at a benefit gala for a thinktank I’m a contributor to.

And earlier this spring, I had another opportunity to see Milton & Rose Friedman in person at the unveiling of a PBS documentary on his life and times. At the time, I implored several friends to join me with the argument that “at 94, homey ain’t gonna be around too much longer - see him while you can.” Unfortunately, a bout of flu kept Friedman from joining us that evening (Rose did, however make it) and alas, my words were sadly prophetic.

Interestingly, at that event, Gary Becker was on tap for Milton & Rose’s intro. In nearly any other context, Becker’s own Nobel Prize would have garnered him a headline act. But given Friedman’s ginormous stature, Becker’s intro speech was instead somewhat rudely met with idle chatter from the back of the banquet hall. You’d think scoring a Nobel prize would earn a little more respect - apparently not so when you’re between an audience and the Friedman’s.

‘Tis the curse of the passage of a generation that we take for granted previous, hard fought accomplishments - both material and intellectual. In its extreme, we just assume that he world we see around us had to be rather than recgonize the role of volition, creativity, and intellectual accomplishment which enabled it to be.

In Friedman, India, and recent economic history, we see all this wrapped up in a neat tidy little package. So much that seems obvious now was contrarian then. And so many of the arguments we use to excuse and ignore the outcome of disastrous policy was plainly predicted and evident decades ago.

Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen has a (p)review of Gregory Clark’s “A Farewall to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World” in today’s NYT.

It takes 3 men to replace one good woman?

Unfortunately, the book isn’t available quite yet but, interestingly, the full manuscript is available on the web (not anymore!)

Clark follows in the footsteps of recent mass market developmental econ books such as Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs and Steel and William Easterly’s The Elusive Quest for Growth. All three attempt to tease apart resources, institutions, culture, money, colonialism, and the like in trying to answer the age old question of why some nations are rich and others are poor.

Clark comes down firmly in favor of culture while using the somewhat oblique, econ-centric term “Quality of Labor”. The example Cowen chooses to excerpt in his NYT review comes from India -

…A simple example from Professor Clark shows the importance of labor in economic development. As early as the 19th century, textile factories in the West and in India had essentially the same machinery, and it was not hard to transport the final product. Yet the difference in cultures could be seen on the factory floor. Although Indian labor costs were many times lower, Indian labor was far less efficient at many basic tasks.

For instance, when it came to “doffing” (periodically removing spindles of yarn from machines), American workers were often six or more times as productive as their Indian counterparts, according to measures from the early to mid-20th century. Importing Western managers did not in general narrow these gaps. As a result, India failed to attract comparable capital investment.

Contrary to the “race to the bottom” thesis, Clark argues that the real driver of globalization is interconnectedness amongst others who’ve mastered the strange calculus of economic growth rather than simple exploitation of the poorest -

Professor Clark’s argument implies that the current outsourcing trend is a small blip in a larger historical pattern of diverging productivity and living standards across nations. Wealthy countries face the most serious competitive challenges from other wealthy regions, or from nations on the cusp of development, and not from places with the lowest wages. Shortages of quality labor, for instance, are already holding back India in international competition.

Fifty years ago, on October 14, 1956 — and a mere two months before his death — Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the scholar and political leader who was principally responsible for the drafting of India’s Constitution, converted to Buddhism in a public ceremony in Nagpur. Somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 of his Dalit followers — the accounts vary — embraced Buddhism in the immediate wake of his conversion. For Dr. Ambedkar, nothing in his long, distinguished career could convince him that the socio-cultural dynamics of Hinduism would ever offer Dalits a way out of “untouchability,” disenfranchisement, poverty and social stigma.

Each year on October 14, conversion ceremonies take place at which Dalits embrace Buddhism or Christianity. This year they have extra poignance, not only because it is the 50th anniversary of Ambedkar’s act, but also because several states ruled by the BJP have recently adopted or strengthened laws limiting conversion. On top of all this, a principal follower of Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram, who founded the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) which is the main political vehicle for the Dalit movement now, passed away earlier this month.

From accounts in the press so far, there were major conversion ceremonies today in Nagpur and also in Gulbarga in Karnataka:

Hundreds of Dalits on Saturday embraced Buddhism and Christianity at a mass conversion programme in Nagpur, in which copies of Gujarat government’s anti-conversion bill were also put to fire.

The mass conversion, organised by the All India Conference of SC/ST Organisations and the All India Christian Council on the occasion of World Religious Freedom Day, was attended by Dalits from Orissa, Karnataka and Gujarat states, organisers said.

The conversion of Dalits to Buddhism was performed by priests, while a group of Christian pastors from the Council led by President Dr Joseph D’Souza baptised the Dalits. [Link]

GULBARGA (Karnataka): More than 3,000 Dalits on Saturday embraced Buddhism at an impressive ceremony here on Saturday, synchronising with the golden jubilee of Dr B R Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism.

Marking the change of faith, the Dalits were administered the oath by Bante Bodhi Dhama, a Buddhist monk from Japan.

Preceding the ceremony, “Buddha Dharma Deeksha Pratigne”, a huge procession led by more than 500 monks, was taken out through the city streets. [Link]

There are some very interesting present-day political angles here, not least the controversy over the anti-conversion laws, and the fact that the leader of the BSP, Mayawati, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, has said she will not convert to Buddhism yet. She said this at today’s Nagpur rally, while announcing that Kanshi Ram’s funeral rites were performed in the Buddhist tradition, even though he had not converted; and while expressing her hope that Buddhism would spread further among Dalits. The mixed message clearly reflects the political complexity of the Dalit leadership’s position.

In the larger historical frame, perusing the day’s news and doing a little background research reminds me how shamefully little I know about Dr. Ambedkar’s story, let alone more obscure yet significant figures like Kanshi Ram. I hope that comments and debate on this post will help me, and surely others, remedy this lacuna.

I like to keep track of the various industries where desis are making an impact, especially in New York City. When I was growing up, almost all the news stands were owned by Bangladeshis. Later, Punjabis became a major presence in taxi cabs in the city and gas stations in the suburbs. But the one I missed along the way had to do with Sri Lankans and porn stores [hat tip Manish].

In 1999, Tunku Varadarajan wrote an article for the NYT about Gujarati motel owners that contained the following throwaway line:

Sri Lankans, in case you didn’t know this, run most porn-video stores… [Link]

I did some digging, and the best estimates I could find show only a 10% ownership of the video smut business (I’m not entirely sure that these figures describe the same period as Varadarajan’s article, and they may be low since they came from within the Sri Lankan community). Still, no matter what the numbers, it’s a fascinating history.

The story starts, as all good New York City stories start, with the Mafia. La Cosa Nostra had dominated New York’s red light businesses for a number of decades but finally found their dominance undone by new technology:

Video’s emergence in the ’80s changed the Mafia’s porn role. No longer could the mob dominate distribution by simply running adult theaters and peep shows. Gotti and Basciano allowed businessmen without ties to the Mafia to move into retail stores. Immigrant entrepreneurs, particularly from Israel and Sri Lanka, multiplied X-rated video shops in New York neighborhoods from Greenwhich Village to Queens.

“The days of Mob influence are gone,” claimed a Sri Lankan businessman. “There’s no money in the business for them. Tapes used to be $100 each. Now they’re selling for $3:99.” [Link]

Confusingly, the same source also tells an alternate story, one where Sri Lankans entered the business earlier, working with the Mafia at first:

Sri Lankans worked for the Mafia through the 1980s and moved into ownership when the Mafia left. [Link]

This generates a great image in my mind, almost Benneton-like in its pluralism, of Sicilian and Sri Lankan mobsters working side by side to bring smut to the city that never sleeps. If this is true, a lot of hollywood dialogue needs to be rewritten and desi actors will start to complain that they only get roles as doctors, terrorists or gangsters. Sri Lankan script doctors will have to be hired to write lines like this:

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli wattalapam .”

We at Sepia Mutiny would like to extend a very snarky hearty welcome to the newest Sepia Macaca: Puran Singh. That’s right - Deep is a daddy! [Mothers everywhere want to know what the rest of us are waiting for]

Puran Singh (“Master P,” as my brother is already calling him) was born yesterday at 8pm. He’s 8 pounds, 2 ounces (3.7 Kg), and both he and his mother are doing well. We have lots of family around helping us out and giving support (thanks, everyone), and the hospital experience has been pretty good, though the final stage of labor was difficult (I guess it always is).

The name means “fulfillment,” “completion,” or “perfection.” No one in our family has been named “Puran,” but there are a couple of famous people who have had this name: including Bhagat Puran Singh and also a famous Punjabi poet. In the Sikh tradition, the first letter of a baby’s name is usually chosen by opening the Guru Granth Sahib at random, and taking a “Vakh.” The first letter of the page opened is supposed to be the first letter of the baby’s name. In our case, we got “P,” and I immediately thought of “Puran…” [Link]

P is for Perfection

There’s a powerful scene in “Bamboozled,” Spike Lee’s most difficult and underappreciated movie, in which the street-actor characters played by Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson, having been recruited into a scheme that involves staging a deliberately outrageous, racist pilot for a TV show, find themselves in the dressing room applying blackface. The camera lingers as the cork burns and the grease paint is prepared, and pulls back to show us the characters as they see themselves in the mirror, watching their natural brown hues turn to a shiny, oily black.

Blackface was both insult and injury. Used by white actors, it offered literal cover for the most offensive caricature; used by black actors, it represented a negation of oneself that was demanded to earn a living as a performer, and worse, the prerequisite of dehumanization in order to represent those portrayed as one’s own community, one’s own self. More than any law or repressive policy, it sent the message that black people were simply not human.

Over the weekend, I was shown a tube of grease paint of a make used back in the blackface heyday. A small, banal object, yet one invested with so much and so troubling a meaning. Well it turns out that just a couple of days earlier, the British daily The Independent ran this front-page image in honor of its “Africa issue” with half of the day’s revenues to help fight AIDS on the continent. The depiction is of Kate Moss, the decidedly non-black British fashion model and alleged onetime cocaine/heroin fiend, not only blackened but Blackened — bigger lips, thicker brows, fleshier cheeks. “NOT A FASHION STATEMENT,” the headline blares, while an inset on the sidebar promises a poster of the image inside.

Here’s a British term: BOLLOCKS! That’s also the view of Sunny from Asians in Media and Pickled Politics, our sister-from-another-mother site from across the pond, who puts it succinctly:

Could they not find a black model to represent Africa?

A particularly typical example of liberal guilt “we-feel-sorry-for-you” racism. You see they would have liked to to put a black model on the front but she just would not have sold as many copies. So they used a druggie.

It would have been better for the Indy to not even bother.

In a class I’m teaching this fall, we’re looking at Pandita Ramabai’s book on America, which has been recently translated by Meera Kosambi as Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter (2003). The original book was written in Marathi in 1889, and published as United Stateschi Lokasthiti ani Pravasavritta, which translates to The Peoples of the United States. It’s an intriguing book — part of the small group of “Easterner goes West” books published in the 19th century, coexisting uneasily alongside dozens of conventional, Orientalist travel narratives that describe the mystic, masalafied “East.” What Ramabai has to say about America is interesting partly for the oblique criticisms of colonialism and racism one finds at various points, and partly because of her staunch, unapologetic feminism.

Meera Kosambi has a thorough introduction to the book and to Pandita Ramabai, which is the source of most of the information in the post below. First off, the basic biography: Pandita Ramabai was born to a Brahmin family in Maharashtra in 1859. In a personal memoir she writes that her father (known as Dongre) went out on a limb and taught her Sanskrit, and also taught her to read and recite from the Puranas — considered completely off-limits to women at the time. But both of her parents died in in 1874 [approximately] because of famine, and Ramabai and her brother wandered around India until they ended up in Calcutta in 1878. They impressed the local Sanskrit experts (Calcutta, being more progressive, didn’t shun a female Sanskrit scholar), who granted Ramabai the name “Pandita,” in honor of her learning. Unfortunately, her brother died soon afterwards, and Ramabai married one of his friends, a lawyer from the Shudra caste named Bipin Behari (also known as Das Medhavi). The couple was ostracized for the cross-caste marriage, and tragically, Medhavi died just a couple of years later (in 1880), leaving Ramabai to raise their daughter Manorama, completely on her own.

We’ve had a few posts in the past on the growing influence of the Indian American Lobby (see 1,2,3), particularly with regards to the U.S./India nuclear deal. However, a new book set for release stateside next month takes us old school. Long before Indian Americans were lobbying for a nuclear deal with India they were lobbying for the basics, such as civil rights here and freedom for India. Indolink.com has a very informative review:

“Sikhs, Swamis, Students, and Spies: the India lobby in the United States, 1900-1946” is the title of a new book, authored by veteran South Asian scholar Dr Harold Gould, of the University of Virginia, and scheduled for release later this month by Sage Publications.

The subtitle suggests that it deals with the pioneers who confronted racism and opened America to South Asians, reflecting, as Joan Jensen informs us in her earlier classic study ‘Passage from India,’ “The story of how Indian immigrant pioneers settled in a hostile land and struggled to enjoy rights equal to those of Euro-Americans.”

That’s certainly a part of the historical confrontation between desis and non-desis in North America. It should be remembered that this was a time when the process of becoming an American citizen was one from which Indians were excluded through an increasingly complex maze of laws and regulations. Indeed, Indians were the only class of people whose citizenship was revoked because they did not neatly fit into the then commonly accepted racial categories of Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro.

This was also a time when the chief of the bureau of naturalization notified all United States attorneys to oppose actively the granting of naturalization to “Hindoos or East Indians” and to instruct clerks of courts in their districts to refuse to accept declarations of intention or to file petitions for naturalization. Attorneys were also asked to file motions for orders to cancel declarations of intention already filed by Indians.

That’s why, in 1907, when Bengali student Taraknath Das was refused an application for citizenship in San Francisco, he wrote to the attorney general: “May I ask you if the Hindus who belong to the Caucasian stock of the Human race have no legal right to become citizens of the United States, under what special law the Japanese who belong to a different stock are allowed to declare their intention to become citizens of the United States.” [Link]

By that last paragraph I can see that solidarity with other Asian Americans definitely wasn’t in vogue at the time. According to review, the book takes a very close look at the efforts made throughout North America to drum up support against the British occupation in India:

Most of the India associations had high aims and objectives. For instance, the Hindustanee association of United States, founded in Chicago in 1913, stated its aims as follows: “To further the educational interests of the Indian students, to gather or disseminate all kinds of educational information, to seek help and cooperation from people at home and in the country.” As I.M.Muthanna observes in his book ‘People of India in North America,’ “Though outwardly it posed as a cultural organization, the real aim of this association was to preach sedition against the British.”

The ‘Hindu’ Associations organized in the U.S. had the following objectives: ‘Receipt of vernacular papers from India in order to keep Hindus fully informed of the events in their country, importation of youths from India to America for their education and for preparing them for developing their nationalist outlook, and to hold weekly meetings and discus politics.’

Apart from the Ghadar weekly, some of the pamphlets that were widely circulated include New Echo, Gadar di Goonj, Gadar di Karak, Gadhar Sandesh etc. The editor Ram Chandra wrote: “The ghadar conveys the message of rebellion to the nation once a week. It is brave, outspoken, unbridled, soft-footed, and given to the use of strong language. It is a lightning, a storm and a flame of fire ..we are the harbinger of freedom…” [Link]

Here’s the problem in a nutshell. If you’re a CEO of an iconic brand, do you modernize the branding of your product if it is associated with a country’s racist history? If so, how do you do this without either losing brand recognition or whitewashing the past?

The original label

In 1885, Camp Coffee started producing a liquid coffee and chickory concentrate. They marketed the product by associating it with the coffee that kept Imperial soldiers fueled in the mornings:

To ensure Victorian consumers got the message that they were drinking the same treacly caffeine concentrate designed to fortify soldiers subduing the colonies, the kilted Gordon Highlander was shown being brought his drink by a Sikh manservant. [Link]

Of course, times change. The sun went down on the British empire, dusky Britons moved in and took over the cornershops. They weren’t quite as fond of this label as Victorian customers were.

So, in the 1980s, a compromise was reached:

In the 1980s, the label was moved to the back and later the Sikh bearer’s tray was removed but he remained standing. [Link]

This new label was a bit bizarre. It had the Sikh servant with his fist up, like he was about to punch the Scottish officer in his face.

The newest label

For some reason, after taking away his tray, they didn’t think to have him relax his hands at all. [picture after the fold, or click on the link].

Of course, this didn’t last either. Brown people being uppity like they are, they wanted yet more:

Recently, several Asian shopkeepers threatened to stop putting the liquid coffee and chicory concentrate on their shelves unless the label was changed. After such threats and pressure from race equality groups, the manufacturers have had the scene radically redrawn to show the two men sitting side by side. [Link]

So the label was finally changed to the anachronistic image of the officer and his batman sitting down for coffee together. While this might be a useful image for today’s multicultral UK, it’s absurd to imagine that it might have happened back in the day.

This was going to be a post about the dreaded E word (“exotic,” in case you’ve erased it from your memory) and its usage on me the other day, accompanied by excessive and unwelcome flirtation. However, recalling the incident renders me ill and sorely tempted to post the guy’s name and contact information here - bad move.

Instead, I’ll celebrate the language percolated down from my ancestors - Tamil, and its offerings to English - and linguistics in general. No, I don’t mean Tam-glish, with terms like shamachu-fy¹ or “An’one see my pie?”² but actual English words that originate in Tamil like catamaran and orange. Tamil Contributions To The English Language contains a list of terms derived from Tamil. The crux of this post is not glorifying Tamil, as the list seems to (“the great antiquity of the Tamil civilization”), but to celebrate the transmutation of language, all languages, when in contact with another. Our ancestors got around a lot more than the current understanding of history allows for and this is evident in language. While physical proof of such contact has been absent, destroyed or undiscovered, how we communicate via our vocal chords is the living evidence of cultural evolution.

For instance, the Italian word for key is chiavi, also the Tamil word for the same item (chaavi - Hindi, llave - Spanish, taste - German, tecla chave - Portuguese, clef - French, nøkkel - Norwegian, sleutel - Dutch). There is one of two possibilities for this coincidence - that the word was coined in one place and carried to another, or that the same word was invented separately in two different places to describe the same thing. Given that a significant majority of the world speaks Indo-European languages, I vote for the former theory.

Language is fascinating, as are dialect, accent and semantics. I feel honored to live in a part of the United States where so many collide. The ethnic geography of Brooklyn on the Bayou is so intricate that navigating it requires the knowledge of several Romance languages and a few African ones, too. In the end, you get used to the speak and the fact that we’re all in the same pot of gumbo no matter where we originated.

---

¹ Shamachu-fy: To cook. I’d love to go out, but have to shamachu-fy for relatives arriving tomorrow.
² An’one see my pie?: Has anyone seen my bag?

Though I’ve known about Dean Mahomet for a long time (and Ennis did a post on him last year), it wasn’t until recently that I actually read through the free online version of edition of The Travels of Dean Mahomet, for a class I’m teaching. For people who haven’t heard of him, Dean Mahomet is the first Indian writer to have published a book in English, The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794). Having moved first to Cork, Ireland, and then London and finally Brighton, Mahomet opened first the first Indian restaurant in England, The Hindoostanee Coffee House, and then started a profitable business doing “shampoo baths” at the shore resort town of Brighton. He married an Anglo-Irish woman, and was treated with respect by English and Anglo-Irish society around him.

The following is a bit of a dry academic/history type of post. I’m not so much interested in celebrating Dean Mahomet as a “hero” (I don’t think he necessarily is one), nor would it mean much to condemn him as some kind of race-traitor. Rather, the goal is simply to think about how we might understand his rather unique book, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, in historical context. What can be learned from it?

A bit of military history trivia for the history buffs…

This afternoon I got an email from someone doing research on a World War I fighter pilot named Indra Lal Roy.

Unsurprisingly, I knew nothing about the subject, but through a little digging I did come across a couple of pages in a book called Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History by Rozina Visram that has a couple of pages on Indra Lal Roy. It turns out the interesting thing isn’t that he fought in the war — in fact, there were thousands of Indians on the western front — but that he managed to get into the elite Royal Flying Corps (RFC). He was one of only four, and (at least on the internet) he is the only thing about which anything is concretely known:

Happy Indian Independence day, everyone!

In the comments of some recent posts at Sepia Mutiny, some readers have questioned why India needs “secularism,” and even just what secularism means in India. Similar questions were also raised in response to Abhi’s “jingoism in the blogsophere” post from a few weeks ago. Since I have researched the issue of secularism as part of my academic work, I thought it might be interesting to look at the Indian and American approaches to secularism in comparison as a thought-exercise. Instead of focusing on recent issues such as the train bombings in Mumbai last month, or almost-current events like the Gujarat riots of 2002, I wanted to back up a little and take a brief look at the texts of the respective Constitutions themselves. I think this comparative exercise might shed some insight on the value and importance of secularism in both countries.

A biography creates a record of a life, but it must also attempt to assemble many divergent strands and seemingly incoherent fragments of that life into a semblance of a story for a reader. It’s hard to do even half-comprehensively with any one life — it requires, for one thing, intimate access to the person him or herself, as well as a pretty good paper trail. Vikram Seth, in Two Lives, had such access to not one but two people, who were extraordinary individually but even more so as a couple. It’s the story of Shanti Behari Seth, the author’s great uncle, and Hennerle Caro (Henny), a German Jewish refugee from the Nazis. The two of them met during the early 1930s, when Shanti was in Germany to do a doctorate in dentistry, and he rented a room in the Caros’ house. In 1937 and 1939, respectively, they left Germany and settled in London.

When the war broke out, Shanti enlisted (on the British side, of course), and served as a dentist for the troops in the African campaign, and later in Italy (where he lost an arm at Monte Cassino). Henny, for her part, lost her nuclear family at Auschwitz: unlike them, she was able to get out in time. Henny and Shanti became a couple, and eventually married. When Vikram Seth went to England initially in 1969, he didn’t know much about his uncle or his foreign wife. But as he stayed with them and then continued to visit over the course of more than twenty years, he became quite close to them. They even helped him learn German, a skill which turned out to be indispensible for this project.

Time Magazine’s Asia edition has a cover article this week that details the life and travels of Marco Polo in the context of today’s emerging economies in China and India:

If history has taught us anything, it’s that Eastern and Western perceptions of one another are thoroughly unstable, an uneasy blend of fascination, fear and greed that lends itself to exaggeration. That all started with Polo (1254-1324), who left a detailed, and still controversial, account of his journeys and the years he spent in the service of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan. Polo’s Description of the World is the world’s first best-selling travelogue. He set off to the Orient from his native Venice with his father and uncle in 1271. For them it was a return journey; they had already been to what is now Beijing, where the Great Khan had given them a letter to the Pope, and asked them to return with learned men who could teach his people about Christianity. The route, as described by Marco Polo, took them through the Caucasus, Persia, Afghanistan, over the Pamirs and along the Silk Road to Cathay, as he called China. Hardship and danger were balanced by wonder, especially once he arrived at Kublai’s court, where he claimed to have become a court favorite who was sent off on diplomatic missions. He dictated his book, years later, long after his return to Italy, while in jail in Genoa in 1298. Some of the descriptions—from the miracle oil that cures skin trouble in the Caucasus to the giant griffin birds who pick up elephants and drop them into the Arabian Sea—earned him a reputation even in his day as a fairytale spinner rather than a credible witness. [Link]

Also in the issue is an article on western Big Pharma’s attempts to patent knowledge that Indians have been actively using for millenia:

It started with turmeric. An essential ingredient of most Indian curries, the spice was paid tribute by Marco Polo; he compared it favorably to saffron, and noted its importance in traditional medicines. Indeed, Indian doctors have long reached for the knobby yellow root to treat a variety of ailments from skin disease to stomachache and infection. So when two U.S.-based researchers were awarded a patent in 1995 on turmeric’s special wound-healing properties, a collective howl of outrage arose from the subcontinent. “Housewives have been using turmeric for centuries,” says V.K. Gupta, director of India’s National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources in New Delhi. “It’s outrageous that someone would try and patent it.” The patent was eventually revoked, after a decade-long battle in which the Indian government and private sector spent millions of dollars in legal and research fees to prove that turmeric’s qualities were well documented in ancient medical textbooks. Gupta scrolls through a list of some 5,000 applications currently pending approval by U.S. and European patent offices, jabbing a finger at the most egregious examples of what he considers to be outright theft. He estimates that at least half of those scientific “discoveries” are established remedies in India’s ancient plant-based medical system, called Ayurveda. To Gupta, each application is a jewel plundered from India’s vast trove of medicinal knowledge. “If this isn’t piracy, I don’t know what is,” he says. [Link]

The recent and still developing conflict between Israel and the Lebanese terrorist group Hizbollah has caused many analysts and pundits to point out the great disparity in arms between the two combatants:

The State Department’s 1993 report on international terrorism lists Hizbollah’s “strength” at several thousand. Hizbollah sources assert that the organization has about 5,000-10,000 fighters. Other sources report that Hizbollah’s militia consists of a core of about 300-400 fighters, which can be expanded to up to 3,000 within several hours if a battle with Israel develops. These reserves presumably are called in from Hizbollah strongholds in Lebanon, including the Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs. The number of members involved in combat activity in southern Lebanon is under 1,000. But it has many activists and moral supporters. After the Israeli withdrawal Hizballah reduced the number of full time fighters to about 500, though estimates range from 300 to 1,200. There are also several thousand reserves, but these lack training or experience. Hizbollah’s militia is a light force, equipped with small arms, such as automatic rifles, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and Katyusha rockets, which it occasionally has fired on towns in northern Israel. Hizbollah forces are shown on television conducting military parades in Beirut, which often include tanks and armored personnel carriers that may have been captured from the Lebanese army or purchased from Palestinian guerrillas or other sources. [Link]

versus:

The IDF [Israeli Defense Force] is considered to be one of the most high-tech armies in the world, possessing top-of-the-line weapons and computer systems, Some of it American-made or indigenously modified (such as the M4A1 assault rifle, F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon jets and Apache helicopter). Israel receives more than US$2 billion per year in military aid from the United States, and much of it requires that American equipment be purchased with it. In spite of this however, Israel also has developed its own independent weapons industry. Weapons such as the Merkava battle tank, Kfir jet series, and various small arms such as the Galil assault rifle and Uzi submachine gun have all proven to be very successful.

The IDF also has several large internal research and development departments, and it purchases many technologies produced by the Israeli security industries including IAI, IMI, Elbit, El-Op, Rafael, Soltam and dozens of smaller firms. Many of these developments have been battle-tested in Israel’s numerous military engagements, making the relationship mutually beneficial, the IDF getting tailor-made solutions and the industries a very high repute. [Link]

This post is filed under, “Another thing that Indians invented that you probably didn’t know about.” In this case however, the invention might be viewed by some as a rather dubious honor. The only weapon of any significance in Hizbollah’s arsenal is the Katyusha rocket. Can this single weapon threaten to defeat the IDF? No. But it was the Indians that invented the use of rocket artillery in battle, and the father of rocket artillery, Tipu Sultan (the Tiger of Mysore), was celebrated for his use of rocket artillery in defeating the superior British army in the 1792 Srirangapatna War.

…Tipu Sultan achieved a grand victory, whereby the whole British detachment lead by Colonel Baillie was destroyed and 3820 soldiers were taken prisoner (including Colonel Bailli). the contributory cause being that one of the British ammunition tambrils was set on fire by Mysorean rockets.

At the Battle of Seringapatam in 1792, Indian soldiers launched a huge barrage of rockets against British troops, followed by an assault of 36,000 men. Although the Indian rockets were primitive by modern standards, their sheer numbers, noise and brilliance were said to have been quite effective at disorienting British soldiers. During the night, the rockets were often seen as blue lights bursting in the air. Since Indian forces were able to launch these bursting rockets from in front of and behind British lines, they were a tremendous tool for throwing the British off guard. The bursting rockets were usually followed by a deadly shower of rockets aimed directly at the soldiers. Some of these rockets passed from the front of the British columns to the rear, inflicting injury and death as they passed.[Link]

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright has a new book titled “The Mighty and the Almighty : Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs.” Any book by a former Secretary of State is sure to contain interesting new insights but this one also contains a bombshell in the book’s introduction (via Pickled Politics). As he is often prone to do, former President Bill Clinton steals some of the show with this statement:

During my visit to India in 2000, some Hindu militants decided to vent their outrage by murdering thirty-eight Sikhs in cold blood. If I hadn’t made the trip, the victims would probably still be alive. If I hadn’t made the trip because I feared what religious extremists might do, I couldn’t have done my job as president of the United States. The nature of America is such that many people define themselves—or a part of themselves—in relation to it, for or against. This is part of the reality in which our leaders must operate. [Link]

The incident, in which ~40 Sikhs were killed has come to be known as the Chittisinghpura massacre. The Indian government blamed it on the Pakistan-based Lashkar e Taiyba terrorist group:

Suhail Malik of Sialkot, interviewed by a New York Times correspondent in an Indian prison, has said he had no regret that he participated in the massacre, which coincided with US President Bill Clinton’s visit to India.

Malik said he had opened fire because he had been ordered to do so by his commanders and that he knew nothing about the plot to kill the Sikhs until he stood in an orchard where the 35 people were killed.

“I used my weapons when commanded… We are told what to do and not why. Afterwards, we were told not to talk about it,” 18-year-old Malik said. [Link]

I know Priyamvada Gopal slightly from Cornell, and I’m always happy to read something she’s written. A recent editorial she published on neoconservative imperial historians in the Guardian provides lots of food for thought. I think she makes some important points about the current conservative fad for praising British imperialism, but I wanted to supply some quotes from Niall Ferguson’s book Empire that might challenge some of Gopal’s assertions. My own goal is to use this discussion as a learning opportunity, rather than a chance to throw around more polemical language; there’s been quite enough of that as it is.

(Incidentally, there are quite a number of intelligent comments in respone to Gopal’s essay at the Guardian site linked to above [check out especially the the comments by “Sikanderji”], as well as a lively discussion at Pickled Politics.)

William Dalrymple, a British travel writer and scholar of Indian history, sometimes gets himself into hot water with Indian critics. He was attacked by Farrukh Dhondy a couple of years ago for criticizing V.S. Naipaul’s pro-communalist comments, and then more recently by Pankaj Mishra for lamenting the state of non-fiction writing in and about India. But whatever you think of his role in these arguments, Dalrymple as a historian is the real deal: his book Delhi: City of Djinns is an amazing historical travel narrative, which blends Dalrymple’s experiences in modern Delhi with a great deal of careful research into Delhi’s formidable past.

The current issue of Outlook India has a nice essay by Dalrymple on the Indian Mutiny/Rebellion of 1857 (thanks, Indianoguy!). The essay is really in three parts: one is a fresh look at the fall of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the “last Mughal” — whose sons were all executed (murdered) by the British after the Rebellion. The second part is a discussion of “Mutiny papers” in the National Archives of India that Mahmoud Farooqi has been translating from Urdu. These documents show the Indian perspective on the events of 1857, where one finds, among other things, that the rebels were motivated by religious rage to a very great extent. Finally, there is a discussion of contemporary Delhi — in which preserving the emblems of this past is of very little interest to most people.

Someone posted a Learning Channel documentary called “The Lost Temples of India” on Google Video. (From News; thanks Rasudha!) Click “play” above or see the larger version at Google.

It exploits many of of the annoying clichés you would expect, including repeated references to elephants and a near obsession with the phallic symbolism of the Shivalingam.

“Lost Temples” also plays a bit of a geographic and historical trick on viewers, by starting and ending with the erotic temples at Khajuraho (which it insists are “lost,” “forgotten,” and “shrouded with secrecy”), and shots of the Taj Mahal. But in between it is actually mainly about the South: the temples built by Rajaraja Chola, the city/kingdom of Vijayanagar, and the Meenakshi Temple at Madurai. The attempt to link the Hindu temples of Southern India with Khajuraho is nonsensical, but I suppose the producers felt they had to sex it up a bit (elephants alone = too academic).

Despite its many flaws, it must be said that the cinematography in “The Lost Temples of India” is quite good — there are some beautiful shots of the temples in question. And there are actually a couple of facts in the documentary, though they’re carefully hidden (“shrouded”) by the steaming Orientalist cheesefest.

On July 29, 1911, the gentlemen to the right lifted their first IFA Shield as Mohun Bagan defeated the East Yorkshire Regiment by two goals to one. Founded in 1889, Calcutta’s Mohun Bagan are Asia’s oldest football team, and to this day a major force in Indian soccer, along with perennial in-town rivals East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting. Calcutta remains a hotbed of Indian football, with the most famous clubs and the most ardent and knowledgeable international football fans.

A memory: Midway through the US-hosted 1994 World Cup, I learned that my grandmother was ill and unlikely to survive. I flew to Calcutta from Boston, where I had attended two 1st-round matches and one 2nd-round (the Nigeria-Italy of tragic memory). For two weeks, my father and I held death watch in the family house. Our sole distraction was the World Cup matches that beamed in to the ill-tempered black-and-white television at ungodly hours of the night. In this nether state we saw the heroics of Romania’s Georghe Hagi, Sweden’s unlikely run, and Branco’s 30-meter free-kick that broke the Brazil-Netherlands tie. At 8 a.m. the armada of doctors would appear. They too had risen at 3 to watch the games. We’d analyze Colombia’s strange collapse or Brazil’s atypically dull style as they hovered over my grandmother, our own drama sadly easier to predict than, say, the fact that Brazil would beat Italy in the final on, of all things, a missed Roberto Baggio penalty.

Minutes away as I write this, Germany and Costa Rica will kick off this year’s tournament. In Calcutta, LCD and plasma television sales have doubled, says the Telegraph. The paper provides its readers with an invaluable feature on World Cup viewing tips which will be useful to sepia aficionados worldwide.

It covers dress:

The price may be a little steep at Rs 2,700, but Adidas is seeing team jerseys of Argentina, Germany, Spain and France fly off the shelves in city stores. Ditto for Nike jerseys of Brazil, Portugal and Holland, priced at Rs 2,495.

Posture:

The TV set should be at eye level, at a distance of at least five to six feet. Sit upright in straight-backed cushioned chair with head and lumbar support….

That Calcutta is becoming more conscious of the cramp and the cringe is clear from the queries reaching gyms about what to do during World Cup viewing.

“An erect posture should be maintained while sitting for such long hours because if the posture is faulty back trouble is inevitable. Reclining chairs are not advised,” says Divya Himatsingka of Gold’s Gym.

Exercise:

We are all at least somewhat familiar with the phenomenon of Indian migration to Africa, mostly in the form of persons of Gujarati origin working their way to East Africa, but little has been publicized about the opposite, about Africans migrating to India. I wasn’t even sure something like this existed until I read an advertisement for a lecture, “African Elites in India,” which is being given this Saturday, June 10 at 2 PM at the Smithsonian’s Meyer Auditorium by Kenneth Robbins and John McLeod, editors of the book African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat. The book focuses on the story of sub-Saharan Africans who migrated, beginning around the 15th century, to India and subsequently gained positions of power and status on the sub-Continent. Who knew hyphenated identities went so far back?

“Known as Habshis, the Arabic word for Abyssinian or Ethiopian,” the duo’s book tells the story of a “little-known group of elite sub-Saharan African-Indian merchants, soldiers, nobles, statesmen, and rulers who attained prominence in India in the fifteenth to twentieth centuries but also on the Africans who served at the courts of Indian monarchs as servants, slaves, eunuchs, or concubines.”

It turns out the Africa-to-India phenomenon is not all that limited. In 1996, the Anthropological Survey of India reported sizeable communities of African ancestry in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, Gujarat, and the metropolises of Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai (link). For those of you who count yourself among the South Asian history geek-squad like I do, this lecture sounds fascinating. If you need more information, or to RSVP, you can call 202 633 0444. A book signing will follow the lecture.

Perhaps this answers why Anna, and so many other desis are often mistaken for Ethiopian. Incidentally, the Freer Gallery is also screening a few Sri Lankan films this month. The remaining two are Flying with One Wing (2002), which is showing tomorrow, and Guerilla Marketing (2005) which is screening on Sunday.

The past month or so has taught me that there are a lot of people out there that want to see this blog, and what it is all about, succeed. The emails we recently received offering technical support, as well as the offers of financial support we have gotten, have led me to conclude something similar to what one forward looking American politician once said. To paraphrase:

“We’ve earned capital in this blogosphere, blog capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.”

So with that I am announcing the creation of The Desi Dad Project.

For the past six months I have been mulling this idea over in my head. Photographs, even without any words or explanations, can convey a tremendous amount of information and history. Just look through these pictures of some of the first Indian Americans that came to the U.S in the early 20th century, most of them Sikh Punjabis. Recently, with the immigration debate in this country raging on, we have discussed the signifigance of the 1965 Immigration Act and how many of our fathers immigrated to the U.S. as a result of this act. Eventually this led to many of our births. :)

So this is what I am proposing, particularly in light of Father’s Day which is just two weeks away. I want you guys to upload a single picture of your dad. I want a photographic archive that captures the spirit of what it meant to be an immigrant in this country as part of the second wave. I want to capture that part of our collective history before it rots away in old albums in our basements, attics, and closets. This project won’t end with Father’s Day though but will keep accepting phtographs.

Here are the criteria you must meet before uploading a picture of your father into this new archive I am proposing:

• Your father immigrated to the United States between 1965 and 1985. If he arrived a couple of years before 1965 it is okay, but please do not upload pictures taken after 1985. I am looking for pictures that capture the experience of a SPECIFIC generation for the purposes of this project.
• Your father came from a country in South Asia (e.g. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, etc.) or from ANY other country so long as his ethnicity can be traced back to a South Asian country.
• The picture you upload has to have been snapped in America.
• I strongly prefer that your father should be the only person visible in the photograph (feel free to crop the original picture). Pictures of individuals tell a different story than pictures of families. If you don’t have ANY pictures of you father alone then maybe you have one with the two of you together.

I just wanted to make sure that everyone was aware that AIDS “turns” 25 this week. India now has the largest number of infected people and is still trending downhill:

Twenty-five years after the first AIDS cases were reported, there is no sign of a halt to the pandemic which is likely to spread to every corner of the globe, the head of the United Nations’ AIDS agency said.

Peter Piot was speaking as UNAIDS released a report which declared that the world’s response to the disease, that has infected about 65 million people and killed 25 million, has been nowhere near adequate. Five years after a special U.N. session pledged its commitment to halt the AIDS pandemic, only a few countries have met the targets laid down…

India has the largest number of people living with the virus. With 5.7 million infections, it has overtaken South Africa’s total of 5.5 million. But, the epidemic is still at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where 90% of the world’s HIV-infected children live. [Link]

The first reported case in India came nearly 5 years after the first reported case in the U.S.

The first case of HIV infection in India was diagnosed among commercial sex workers in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, in 1986. Soon after, a number of screening centres were established throughout the country. Initially the focus was on screening foreigners, especially foreign students. Gradually, the focus moved on to screening blood banks. By early 1987, efforts were made up to set up a national network of HIV screening centres in major urban areas. [Link]

The statistics are grim:

The UN Population Division projects that India’s adult HIV prevalence will peak at 1.9% in 2019. The UN estimates there were 2.7 million AIDS deaths in India between 1980 and 2000. During 2000-15, the UN has projected 12.3 million AIDS deaths and 49.5 million deaths during 2015-50.

A 2002 report by the CIA’s National Intelligence Council predicted 20 million to 25 million AIDS cases in India by 2010, more than any other country in the world. [Link]

So you guys tell me. We know what some of the problems are. What more can be done to stop this boulder from rolling?

I was browsing William Makepeace Thackeray’s wonderful and strange The Book of Snobs (1848), and I came across the following odd passage in the midst of a rant about a lady-friend’s poor table manners:

I have seen, I say, the Hereditary Princess of Potztausend-Donnerwetter (that serenely-beautiful woman) use her knife in lieu of a fork or spoon; I have seen her almost swallow it, by Jove! like Ramo Samee, the Indian juggler. And did I blench? Did my estimation for the Princess diminish? No, lovely Amalia!

But, my dear fellow, who precisely is “Ramo Samee, the Indian juggler”? It turns out he was a real person, who came to England around 1819, and lived there with his wife (identified only as “Mrs. Samee”) until his death in 1851. The juggling history website I looked at also speculates he may have gone to the U.S. and performed as “Sena Sama,” in 1817, though that’s only speculation. Ramo Samee is considered by some the first modern professional juggler in England, and he was far and away the most famous practitioner of the art in his era. He inspired royalty, journalists, and famous essayists like William Hazlitt. And yet, when Ramo Samee died he was so poor that his wife needed to advertise for financial assistance just to have him buried (cremation, I suspect, was probably not an option). Today he is, aside from the appreciation he gets on a handful of juggling history websites, completely forgotten.

Needless to say, I am pretty ambivalent about Ramo Samee (or “Ramaswamy,” probably the more accurate spelling), just as I am about Sabu, Dean Mahomed, and scores of other Indian artists and hustling “Gurus” who work “exotic” stereotypes for western applause. In the African-American tradition this type of performance is called minstrelsy, and it is seen as a shameful kind of pandering to other people’s stereotypes.

But Ramo Samee might be a slightly different case at least in the sense that the kind of sword-swallowing and juggling he did is in fact a real historical profession in India, which goes back hundreds of years. So while clearly part of Ramo Samee’s appeal was his exotic otherness, he was doing what he did best — what he had been raised to do. And observers like Hazlitt really did find him to be a performer of astonishing skill. So even if I can’t exactly celebrate Ramo Samee’s life as a triumph, he is nevertheless an interesting figure to learn about and consider.

I’ve always loved comic books—actually, any illustrated book. It seems insane that you wouldn’t. Why wouldn’t you want words and pictures to work together, in harmony? But many people don’t. They think the pictures are a shortcut, that the words cheapen the images.

“outrageous, unlawful and a breach of accepted moral standards.”- Sir Sydney Kentridge QC

A British court has just issued a decision that has significant implications for both the former inhabitants of Diego Garcia and for the U.S. military:

In a decision that could have ramifications for the huge US airbase on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, a British high court ruled earlier this month that attempts by the British government to keep the former residents of the Chagos islands from returning to the islands (which include Diego Garcia), even after they had won a court ruling in 2000 to do so, were “outrageous, unlawful and a breach of accepted moral standards.”

The British government expelled the Chagossians, the original inhabitants of the islands, some 40 years ago so the US could build the airbase at Diego Garcia, but a British court ruled in 2000 that the islanders had a right to return to their home. After the decision, then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said the British government would not appeal the ruling.

But under pressure from the US, London changed directions in 2004, using what was called “Royal Perogative” to overrule the original decision. Government lawyers had argued that in a territory like Diego Garcia, the Queen (and her ministers) have unlimited power and can use Royal Perogative powers in these territories, despite the fact that she lost the right to use such powers in Britain in the 17th century. [Link]

NPR’s Morning Edition also featured a story about this on Tuesday morning. Roughly 2000 people were forced to leave Diego Garcia at the hands of the British in the 1960s. Domestic animals were gassed and most inhabitants were relocated to slums in the nation of Mauritius. The expulsion by the British involved a deal that would lease the island to the U.S. who needed it as a strategic base during the Cold War (good place for long-range bombers to take off from). The trade? The U.S. gave the Brits the Polaris missile system. About 2000 U.S. military personnel now live there. Ironic when you consider the number of people forced to leave was almost exactly the same.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered is running a three part series this week that takes a look at the 1965 Immigration Act. As mentioned at various times on SM, this is the law which is responsible for many of our parents being allowed to legally enter the U.S., as well as the reason many of us are born citizens. The series by NPR is particularly relevant because one can draw comparisons between the immigration debate then and now. There are three to four million people standing in line waiting to get into America legally right now.

The FULL story is an audio story (and contains rich detail in the form of short interviews-12 min long). I am excerpting the abridged transcript below, although you are much better off listening to the whole story. First, one must remember the immigration laws before the 1965 Act:

“The law was just unbelievable in its clarity of racism,” says Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University. “It declared that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race. The Nordics were superior to the Alpines, who in turn were superior to the Mediterraneans, and all of them were superior to the Jews and the Asians.”

By the 1960s, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese and Italians were complaining that immigration quotas discriminated against them in favor of Western Europeans. The Democratic Party took up their cause, led by President John F. Kennedy. In a June 1963 speech to the American Committee on Italian Migration, Kennedy called the system of quotas in place back then “nearly intolerable…” [Link]

So Kennedy and the Democrats saw the political advantages to updating the racist laws in order to give an equal shot to everyone in the world, but Kennedy died before the ‘65 act was passed. When Lyndon Johnson signed it into law he went out of his way to state that he didn’t think anything would come of it. Neither Johnson, nor most of the government, thought that people would really line up to come to the United States:

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” Johnson said at the signing ceremony. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

Looking back, Johnson’s statement is remarkable because it proved so wrong. [Link]

No, not the kind Voldemort spreads in the sky in eerie green only to have it dissipate without a trace. We are discussing the kind that sticks ugly in people’s minds and in history. Can-do Canada’s past is no stranger to such impressions, no stranger to xenophobia. In the early part of the last century the Canadian government imposed a head tax on all Chinese immigrants that began at $50 in 1885 and increased to $500 by 1903. Out of the around 80, 000 Chinese in Canada who paid that tax, 15, 000 were working to build the Canadian Pacific Railway and around 4000 of them died during construction. The head tax kept families apart for decades, sometimes for good, and kept them in a state of economic depression while they made it possible for goods to travel across Canada’s enormous land mass.

In April, the Chinese Canadian National Council’s mission to gain a formal apology and remuneration for the estates of Chinese-Canadians who paid the tax came closer to status ‘accomplished’. At the end of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s throne speech there was mention of an agenda item concerning a formal apology for Chinese Canadians. This type of dialog has prompted hope among many in the Indo-Canadian community of a similar apology, with possibility of redress, with regard to the Komagata Maru incident:

The Conservative government should issue an apology and compensation to Indo-Canadians over the Komagata Maru incident if it is going to give both to Chinese-Canadians over the head tax paid by Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century, B.C. Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal said… “If the government is going to apologize to one group of Canadians, they should also have a similar line for other groups of Canadians who have suffered discrimination” [Link]

Harper is said to be “looking into the matter”.

The Komagata Maru was carrying passengers who were Sikh by a large majority but the “white, please” immigration policies of the Canadian government at the time saw only brown. Passengers were not allowed to disembark, were left on board for two months in miserable conditions and were ultimately forced to return to India where they were persecuted by the British as participants in the Independence Movement. All because the Canadian government was afraid of some hardworking brown folk. This episode is as much a part of our history as Indian-Canadians as it is a part of Sikh history. Early immigrants to Canada were largely Sikh but they came here as Indians and they were discriminated against as Indians.

The survivors of the Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking of 1986 have just filed a $10B reparations suit against the government of Libya because of information which came out in 2004 about Libya’s role:

… the lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, and it seeks $10 billion in compensatory damages, as well as unspecified punitive damages, from Libya, its long-time leader, Muammar Qadhafi, and the five convicted militants, all of whom were members of the notorious group Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO). [Link]

The Bombay-Karachi-Frankfurt-JFK flight was taken over in Karachi by a Middle Eastern terror group called Abu Nidal. Four men dressed as Pakistani security guards and bristling with arms got on board the Boeing 747. Twenty people were massacred on board:The hijackers had intended to crash the jumbo jet into Tel Aviv

Flight attendants were able to alert the cockpit crew using intercom, allowing the pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer to escape through a hatch in the cockpit, effectively grounding the aircraft…

… flight attendants surreptitiously declined to collect some of the United States passports and hid other United States passports from the hijackers… [Link]

Sometimes it’s better to be a citizen of a subcontinental country:

When [Jordanian terrorist Zayd Safarini] arrived at the seat of Rajesh Kumar, a 29-year-old California resident who had recently been naturalized as an American citizen, Safarini ordered Kumar to go to the front doorway of the aircraft and to kneel with his hands behind his head… Shortly thereafter he shot Kumar in the head and pushed him out the door onto the tarmac below… [Link]

Surviving passenger Jay Grantier, a resident of the state of Washington, said, “This was an attack on America. The terrorists murdered their first victim because he was an American, and when they ordered the cabin crew to collect all our passports, it was pretty obvious that they intended to kill more of us in the hours to come.” [Link]

A newly declassified Indian navy investigation says that the only Indian naval vessel ever sunk by an enemy submarine was inadequately protected, and the Indian navy initiated an immediate cover-up. The Pakistani sub Hangor torpedoed the INS Khukri during the 1971 India-Pakistan war. An accompanying Indian ship fled instead of returning fire. But many involved received awards for gallantry rather than court martials for dereliction of duty.

… a Pakistani submarine torpedoed and sank the Khukri on the night of December 9, 1971. It is the single biggest wartime casualty of independent India. There was never a court of inquiry to find out if anyone was responsible for the ship going down.

… in their last moments some 250 officers and sailors of the Khukri were abandoned by INS Kirpan, an accompanying naval ship that should have carried out an immediate counterattack250 sailors were abandoned by an accompanying naval ship . It also reveals that the navy’s claim that it hunted and sank the Pakistani submarine a few hours later to be false. The Hangor returned to Karachi harbour safely…

“The Khukri, in company with another A/S (anti-submarine) ship Kirpan, was torpedoed and sunk without even an engagement with the enemy. Eighteen officers and 176 sailors perished with the Khukri. Both the COs deserved to be punished, but the higher authorities gave them gallantry awards. INS Khukri and INS Kirpan violated every principle of A/S doctrine for hunter killer operations…” [Link]

If true, this revisionism may be linked to a military and civilian culture which gives greater weight to saving face than fixing problems.

… It also raises uncomfortable questions about numerous gallantry awards given out by the government to many involved in the incident. [Link]

It reminds me of the Pat Tillman friendly fire cover-up by the U.S. Army Rangers:

… the military’s top commanders were covering up the truth to protect their image… Although “soldiers on the scene said they were immediately sure Tillman was killed by a barrage of American bullets,” according to the Post, and “a new Army report on the death shows that top Army officials, including the theater commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, were told that Tillman’s death was fratricide days before the service,” Army officials decided not to inform Tillman’s family or the public until weeks after the memorial…

Via our newsline we see that Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature has a paper out which indicates that dentistry may be one of the world’s oldest professions. The paper, which has an Italian as the lead author, is titled Early Neolithic Tradition of Dentistry (paid subscription required). Now when we are old uncles/aunties we can brag to our children that South Asians invented denistry also.

Proving prehistoric man’s ingenuity and ability to withstand and inflict excruciating pain, researchers have found that dental drilling dates back 9,000 years.

Primitive dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday’s journal Nature reports. Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found in a Pakistan graveyard.

That means dentistry is at least 4,000 years older than first thought — and far older than the useful invention of anesthesia.

This was no mere tooth tinkering. The drilled teeth found in the graveyard were hard-to-reach molars. And in at least one instance, the ancient dentist managed to drill a hole in the inside back end of a tooth, boring out toward the front of the mouth. [Link]

My whole life I had looked down on people with multiple cavities because I had never had one. I usually snubbed these “enamelly challenged” because I saw them as being weak and unable to resist candy. I got my just desserts though. Last year I got my first (and I swear it will be my last) cavity. By the time the doctor was done she had pulled two of my innocent teeth just to get to the offending tooth which she then reconstructed with a crown. My wisdom teeth surgery was even worse (warning: NSDL). Apparently they were like upside down. I can’t even begin to imagine how people were able to withstand the pain in the Neolithic.

The site of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan lies along the principal route connecting Afghanistan to the Indus valley. After intermittent occupations by hunter-gatherers, Mehrgarh’s subsistence economy shifted to the cultivation of barley and wheat, cotton domestication and cattle breeding. Diachronic archaeological evidence records an increasingly rich cultural life, with technological sophistication based on diverse raw materials. Excavation of the Neolithic cemetery known as MR3 yielded more than 300 graves created over a 1,500-year time span…

Whatever the purpose, tooth drilling on individuals buried at MR3 continued for about 1,500 years, indicating that dental manipulation was a persistent custom. After 6,500 yr BP, the practice must have ceased, as there is no evidence of tooth drilling from the subsequent MR2 Chalcolithic cemetery, despite the continuation of poor dental health. [Link]

Teeth are the greatest find in any paleontological/archeological expedition. Measuring istope ratios can even tell you what the people ate. I keep two of my old teeth on my desk at home. This is just in case my body is lost during some adventure and someone wants to learn about my lifestyle when I was still alive.

Dave’s post about the British Raj reminded me about the seamy underside of the British East India Company, namely its business in drugs. Imperial trade in opium was central to the success of the British empire:

Indian opium helped the British rule the world

By the early part of the nineteenth century, British Indian opium had stanched the flow of New World silver into China, replacing silver as the commodity that could be exchanged for Chinese tea and other goods…Opium revenues in India not only kept the colonial administration afloat, but sent vast quantities of silver bullion back to Britain. The upshot was the global dominance of the British pound sterling until World War I… [the] data supports, without opium the British global empire is virtually unimaginable. [Link]

The British energetically encouraged poppy growing, on occasion coercing Indian peasant farmers into going over the crop. By the end of the 1830s the opium trade was already, and was to remain, “the world’s most valuable single commodity trade of the nineteenth century.”(4)… [Link]

The definition of a drug cartel is a group with a monopoly on the distribution of an illegal narcotic. The empire, in the form of the East India Company, fits the bill quite neatlyWithout opium the British global empire is virtually unimaginable:

In 1773, the Governor-General of Bengal was granted a monopoly on the sale of opium, and abolished the old opium syndicate at Patna. For the next 50 years, opium would be key to the British East India Company’s hold on India. Since importation of opium into China was illegal … the British East India Company would … sell opium at auction in Calcutta on the condition it was smuggled to China. In 1797, the company ended the role of local Bengal purchasing agents and instituted the direct sale of opium to the company by farmers.

In 1799, the Chinese Empire reaffirmed its ban on opium imports, and in 1810 the following decree was issued:
“Opium has a very violent effect… Opium is a poison… Its use is prohibited by law.” [Link]

Certainly, the British ended up doing many good things in India. Still, we should acknowledge that the roots of the British Raj lie in something as dirty and illicit as the Medellin cartel. That a bunch of dirty narcoterrorists could give birth to the world’s largest, and (relatively speaking) one of its more humane empires, is perplexing indeed.