The two factors that prevent India from having an honest discussion about caste

 Opinion

The suicide of a Dalit student in Hyderabad is another reminder that political correctness gags and free speech suffocates any real conversations on the problem.

Devdutt Pattanaik  · Jan 21, 2016 · 11:30 am

In the beginning there was nature: a world of predators and prey, of pecking orders, of packs and herds and hives, but no oppressor or oppressed. To survive in this world, you had to be strong or smart. Opinion did not matter here, only survival. It was a world without intellectuals.

Then came human culture, born out of human intellect. We domesticated fire, water, plants and animals, and even humans, with rules and rituals. We gave ourselves meaning and agenda through stories.

According to one story, with culture came contract. But there was a breach of contract resulting in oppression, with some communities cornering wealth, power and knowledge and using it to dominate the rest.

There is hope that one day the contract will be restored, that there will be a fair redistribution of wealth, power and knowledge that will satisfy all. That day is yet to come. Maybe a revolution will accelerate the process. The revolution may be inspired either by a messiah, a messenger of god, or by a rational scientific leader.

This story influences Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and even communism.
There is another story. It influences Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, and even capitalism. In this story, there is no oppression in the world – only hierarchy. Hierarchies of wealth, power and knowledge result from the animal instinct to compete and dominate, which humans have been unable to shake off.

While awareness of animal nature with intent to outgrow it prevents exploitation, blindsighting it creates tension. Any attempt to overturn the prevailing hierarchy will only create chaos and end up creating just another hierarchy. Hierarchies are inescapable and eternal. Those who cannot handle the hierarchy need to step out, either physically like an indifferent monk, or psychologically, like a detached yet engaged householder.

Understanding the problem
Caste, as an idea, emerges from the second story. But people are explaining it and seeking solutions for it, from the first story. There is a vast epistemological gap as pointed out by Bernard Cohn in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge and SN Balagangadhara in Heathen in his Blindness. It is like trying to understand and solve the problems of football using the rules of cricket. However, we rarely acknowledge this gap. We don’t want to, or we can’t. And there are two reasons for this: free speech and political correctness.

Free speech was designed to help critics of a system speak out freely, to get unheard voices to be heard. But it ended up enabling the majority to drown the voices of the minority. Political correctness was designed to protect the oppressed from violent language. But it has ended up gagging the powerful, building silent resentment and even turning many moderates into extremists.

Today, no member of the privileged castes can speak about caste. If a person tries to understand or explain it, he/she is accused of justifying it, or of being defensive, and apologetic. If a person condemns caste, he/she is accused of appropriating the movement for his/her career growth.

Likewise, if a member of the unprivileged castes says anything good about Hinduism, or engages with it positively, he/she could end up being seen as a traitor. And if he/she says anything bad about Hinduism, he/she will end up being admired by a few radical academicians, but also hounded by Hindutva radicals as "anti-national".

People on every side are being storm-tossed. So while politicians get their votes, academicians get their doctorates, and media get their debates, caste remains the least understood problem of India, trapped in epistemological limbo. When a disease is wrongly diagnosed, the prescription can never be right.

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Source: scrollin

Why BR Ambedkar's three warnings in his last speech to the Constituent Assembly resonate even today

 Republic Day

On November 25, 1949, he spoke of the need to give up the grammar of anarchy, to avoid hero-worship, and to work towards a social – not just a political – democracy.

BR Ambedkar  · Today · 02:30 pm

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Excerpts from the speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949

On 26th January 1950, India will be an independent country. What would happen to her independence? Will she maintain her independence or will she lose it again? This is the first thought that comes to my mind. It is not that India was never an independent country. The point is that she once lost the independence she had. Will she lose it a second time? It is this thought which makes me most anxious for the future.

What perturbs me greatly is the fact that not only India has once before lost her independence, but she lost it by the infidelity and treachery of some of her own people.

In the invasion of Sindh by Mahommed-Bin-Kasim, the military commanders of King Dahar accepted bribes from the agents of Mahommed-Bin-Kasim and refused to fight on the side of their King. It was Jaichand who invited Mahommed Gohri to invade India and fight against Prithvi Raj and promised him the help of himself and the Solanki Kings. When Shivaji was fighting for the liberation of Hindus, the other Maratha noblemen and the Rajput Kings were fighting the battle on the side of Moghul Emperors. When the British were trying to destroy the Sikh Rulers, Gulab Singh, their principal commander sat silent and did not help to save the Sikh Kingdom. In 1857, when a large part of India had declared a war of independence against the British, the Sikhs stood and watched the event as silent spectators.

Will history repeat itself? It is this thought which fills me with anxiety. This anxiety is deepened by the realisation of the fact that in addition to our old enemies in the form of castes and creeds we are going to have many political parties with diverse and opposing political creeds. Will Indians place the country above their creed or will they place creed above country? I do not know. But this much is certain that if the parties place creed above country, our independence will be put in jeopardy a second time and probably be lost for ever. This eventuality we must all resolutely guard against. We must be determined to defend our independence with the last drop of our blood.

On the 26th of January 1950, India would be a democratic country in the sense that India from that day would have a government of the people, by the people and for the people. The same thought comes to my mind. What would happen to her democratic Constitution? Will she be able to maintain it or will she lose it again? This is the second thought that comes to my mind and makes me as anxious as the first.

Democratic system

It is not that India did not know what is Democracy. There was a time when India was studded with republics, and even where there were monarchies, they were either elected or limited. They were never absolute. It is not that India did not know Parliaments or parliamentary procedure.

A study of the Buddhist Bhikshu Sanghas discloses that not only there were Parliaments – for the Sanghas were nothing but Parliaments – but the Sanghas knew and observed all the rules of parliamentary procedure known to modern times. They had rules regarding seating arrangements, rules regarding Motions, Resolutions, Quorum, Whip, Counting of Votes, Voting by Ballot, Censure Motion, Regularisation, Res Judicata, etc. Although these rules of parliamentary procedure were applied by the Buddha to the meetings of the Sanghas, he must have borrowed them from the rules of the Political Assemblies functioning in the country in his time.

This democratic system India lost. Will she lose it a second time? I do not know. But it is quite possible in a country like India – where democracy from its long disuse must be regarded as something quite new – there is danger of democracy giving place to dictatorship. It is quite possible for this new born democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact. If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility becoming actuality is much greater.

Three warnings

If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what must we do?

The first thing in my judgement we must do is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives. It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution. It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.

The second thing we must do is to observe the caution which John Stuart Mill has given to all who are interested in the maintenance of democracy, namely, not “to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with power which enable him to subvert their institutions”. There is nothing wrong in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness. As has been well said by the Irish Patriot Daniel O’Connel, no man can be grateful at the cost of his honour, no woman can be grateful at the cost of her chastity and no nation can be grateful at the cost of its liberty. This caution is far more necessary in the case of India than in the case of any other country. For in India, Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.

The third thing we must do is not to be content with mere political democracy. We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.

Social democracy

What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognises liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life. These principles of liberty, equality and fraternity are not to be treated as separate items in a trinity. They form a union of trinity in the sense that to divorce one from the other is to defeat the very purpose of democracy.

Liberty cannot be divorced from equality, equality cannot be divorced from liberty. Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity. Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them.

We must begin by acknowledging the fact that there is complete absence of two things in Indian Society. One of these is equality. On the social plane, we have in India a society based on the principle of graded inequality which we have a society in which there are some who have immense wealth as against many who live in abject poverty.

On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which is Assembly has to laboriously built up.

The second thing we are wanting in is recognition of the principle of fraternity. What does fraternity mean? Fraternity means a sense of common brotherhood of all Indians – of Indians being one people. It is the principle which gives unity and solidarity to social life. It is a difficult thing to achieve. How difficult it is, can be realised from the story related by James Bryce in his volume on American Commonwealth about the United States of America.

The story is – I propose to recount it in the words of Bryce himself:

    “Some years ago the American Protestant Episcopal Church was occupied at its triennial Convention in revising its liturgy. It was thought desirable to introduce among the short sentence prayers a prayer for the whole people, and an eminent New England divine proposed the words `O Lord, bless our nation’. Accepted one afternoon, on the spur of the moment, the sentence was brought up next day for reconsideration, when so many objections were raised by the laity to the word nation’ as importing too definite a recognition of national unity, that it was dropped, and instead there were adopted the words `O Lord, bless these United States.”

There was so little solidarity in the USA at the time when this incident occurred that the people of America did not think that they were a nation. If the people of the United States could not feel that they were a nation, how difficult it is for Indians to think that they are a nation?

A great delusion

I remember the days when politically minded Indians, resented the expression “the people of India”. They preferred the expression “the Indian nation.” I am of opinion that in believing that we are a nation, we are cherishing a great delusion. How can people divided into several thousands of castes be a nation? The sooner we realise that we are not as yet a nation in the social and psychological sense of the world, the better for us. For then only we shall realise the necessity of becoming a nation and seriously think of ways and means of realising the goal. The realisation of this goal is going to be very difficult – far more difficult than it has been in the United States. The United States has no caste problem. In India there are castes. The castes are anti-national. In the first place because they bring about separation in social life. They are anti-national also because they generate jealousy and antipathy between caste and caste. But we must overcome all these difficulties if we wish to become a nation in reality. For fraternity can be a fact only when there is a nation. Without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint.

These are my reflections about the tasks that lie ahead of us. They may not be very pleasant to some. But there can be no gainsaying that political power in this country has too long been the monopoly of a few and the many are only beasts of burden, but also beasts of prey. This monopoly has not merely deprived them of their chance of betterment, it has sapped them of what may be called the significance of life. These down-trodden classes are tired of being governed. They are impatient to govern themselves. This urge for self-realisation in the down-trodden classes must no be allowed to devolve into a class struggle or class war. It would lead to a division of the House. That would indeed be a day of disaster. For, as has been well said by Abraham Lincoln, a House divided against itself cannot stand very long. Therefore the sooner room is made for the realisation of their aspiration, the better for the few, the better for the country, the better for the maintenance for its independence and the better for the continuance of its democratic structure. This can only be done by the establishment of equality and fraternity in all spheres of life. That is why I have laid so much stresses on them.

I do not wish to weary the House any further. Independence is no doubt a matter of joy. But let us not forget that this independence has thrown on us great responsibilities. By independence, we have lost the excuse of blaming the British for anything going wrong. If hereafter things go wrong, we will have nobody to blame except ourselves. There is great danger of things going wrong. Times are fast changing. People including our own are being moved by new ideologies. They are getting tired of Government by the people. They are prepared to have Governments for the people and are indifferent whether it is Government of the people and by the people. If we wish to preserve the Constitution in which we have sought to enshrine the principle of Government of the people, for the people and by the people, let us resolve not to be tardy in the recognition of the evils that lie across our path and which induce people to prefer Government for the people to Government by the people, nor to be weak in our initiative to remove them. That is the only way to serve the country. I know of no better.

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Source: scrollin

Why the attempt to deny Dalit status to Rohith Vemula is a shocking ignorance of the law

Opinion

Or a deliberate misrepresentation. Apart from being extremely undignified, it is indicative of the high stakes involved.

Anup Surendranath  · Today · 07:30 pm

The political pressure arising out of Rohith Vemula’s suicide is evident from the wide range of unsavoury responses we have seen over the last few days. Amongst the worst of those responses has been the attempt to deny Rohith Vemula his Scheduled Caste status after his death.

One of the arguments being put forth to not treat Rohith Vemula’s suicide as a Dalit issue is that he cannot be considered a Dalit in the first place.

Apart from being extremely undignified, it is a response that demonstrates a shocking ignorance of the law.

The argument is that since his father belonged to the Vaddera caste (Other Backward Classes or OBC in Andhra Pradesh) and his mother to the Mala caste (Scheduled Caste or SC in Andhra Pradesh), Rohith Vemula takes on the caste of his father and not his mother.

That argument reflects an extremely problematic position in Hindu personal law that has long been abandoned by the constitutional jurisprudence developed by the Supreme Court in the context of determining social disadvantage.

Judicial discourse

The judicial discourse on determining caste status arising out of inter-caste marriages is now well-settled but has followed two trajectories in the past. However, for the purposes of establishing social disadvantage, neither of those two trajectories endorsed the position in Hindu personal law that a child born out of an inter-caste marriage assumed the caste of the father.

These questions have come to the Supreme Court in circumstances where an individual’s membership in a beneficiary group has been under challenge under a variety of circumstances relating to reservations in representative bodies, education and public employment.

In adjudicating these disputed claims about caste status arising out of inter-caste marriages, the Supreme Court early on in cases like Chatturbhuj Jasani (1954) and Jahan Ara Jaipal Singh (1972) adopted an approach that focused on the assimilation of the concerned person within the beneficiary group and her acceptance by other members of the beneficiary group.

It will be noted that even within this approach the Supreme Court refused to adhere to the rule that the person assumes the caste of her father.

The Supreme Court started doubting the above approach in Valsamma Paul (1996) while still upholding the position that the father/ husband’s caste in an inter-caste marriage could not automatically determine caste status of the child/ wife.

The disagreement with the approach developed in Jasani and Jahan Ara was over the role attributed to assimilation within the beneficiary group and the acceptance of the concerned person within that group. In Valsamma Paul, the Supreme Court took the view that the relevant consideration would be the life experience of the individual.

However, the decision in Valsamma Paul was by a two-judge bench whereas the decisions in Jasani and Jahan Ara were by three-judge benches. The approach that considered the life experience of the individual as the determinative factor received the approval for a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court in Sobha Devi (2005). In a decision from January 2012, the Supreme Court settled the position in favour of the approach in Valsamma Paul.

The Supreme Court in Rameshbhai Naika (2012) was confronted with a judgment from the Gujarat High Court that upheld the decision of a local authority to cancel the appellant’s Scheduled Tribe’s certificate on the ground that the appellant had to necessarily inherit his father’s forward caste status and not his mother’s Scheduled Tribe status.

The Supreme Court held that a mechanical application of the position in Hindu personal law that a child born out of an inter-caste marriage inherits the caste of the father is constitutionally invalid as far as determining beneficiaries of reservations is concerned. In the context of inter-caste marriages, the court took the view that it must be the individual experience that must be established to determine the membership in a beneficiary group.

Missing the point

Similarly in Rohith Vemula’s case the argument that he was not a Dalit based on his father’s OBC status misses the entire point of the constitutional jurisprudence that the court has attempted to develop.

When dealing with inter-caste marriages, the Supreme Court has adopted the sensible constitutional position that a mechanical application of Hindu personal law cannot determine social disadvantage. It is futile and incorrect to argue that Rohith Vemula’s caste status is determined by his father’s caste.

The attempt to misrepresent the constitutional position on this issue is indicative of the stakes involved.

As a society we collectively failed in protecting his dignity in life and the least we can now do is to zealously guard his dignity in death.

Anup Surendranath’s doctoral work at the University of Oxford was on reservation policies in India and he currently teaches constitutional law at National Law University, Delhi. The legal issue in this article was discussed in an earlier blog post on ‘Law and Other Things’ in January 2012.

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Source: scrollin

Rohith Vemula's suicide: A missing conversation

Ankur Bhardwaj | New Delhi Jan 22, 2016 12:40 PM IST

Social fronts and students organisation members take part in a candle march protest over the death of Rohit Vemula in Nagpur of Maharashtra. Photo: PTI

Rohith Vemula’s suicide has sent our politics into convulsion and has once again brought to fore the deep social fault-lines that criss-cross our society. Often masked, these divisions have always existed deep under. Through constitutionally mandated means -- aided by political participation -- the Indian Republic has sought to paper over the rumbling of these tectonic plates. Whether it has succeeded or failed depends on how you look at it.

The government’s response has been to brush aside the casteist underpinnings of this issue. HRD minister, Smriti Irani, was at pains to deflect attention by suggesting that it was not a Dalits versus non-Dalits issue. A report in the Indian Express today highlights, how her deputies in the ministry -- one of whom is a Dalit -- have gone silent on the matter. This has only highlighted how important conversations around Dalit issues are ignored in attempts to tide over a crisis.

The old debates of merit versus reservations, upper caste versus lower caste, privilege versus social justice have once again surfaced. What is at the heart of such breakdowns in our society, especially in our schools, colleges and universities? Why is our youth taking such pitched positions on these matters?

What causes these conflagrations in educational institutes and among the youth now?

At the heart of it, these disputes among our youth in our educational institutions represent a questioning of the status-quo. It represents how Dalit or Tribal youth question the status-quo they have inherited in the form of a rigid, discriminatory social order. It represents a pushing of existing boundaries by every new generation. It represents an assertion of their equality and a consciousness of their rights.

This in itself represents a success of the republic that in 1950 decided to enshrine equality in the constitution in its attempt to fix centuries of oppression. To remove social stigma, to ensure equitable growth, to ensure the new Republic’s sustenance and to reform the society, reservations for Scheduled Castes and Tribes were introduced. This important feature continues till this day as Indian society has not reformed at the pace at which it was expected to, as Rohith Vemula’s suicide clearly demonstrates.

On the other hand, we have a questioning of the status-quo by those from privileged castes. It represents a curious mix of casteism and entitlement but it also represents a questioning of the social order that has been bequeathed to them by the republic’s founders. It partly represents a lack of awareness and therefore understanding of the reasons this order was created in 1950. This questioning of the status-quo should also be welcomed.

This mutual resistance coupled with entrenched power equations that are clearly tilted against the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes leads to social flare-ups.
The fuse that leads to these flare-ups is made up of multiple layers, each different from the other and each requiring careful parsing

The challenge here is to understand that broad-brushing all questioning as assertion of caste superiority or entitlement is useless and lazy while the broad-brushing of assertion of rights by Dalits as usurpation of merit is disingenuous and lacks comprehension of dalit or tribal victimisation.

What do these conflagrations lead to?

Pitched battles with no common ground for frank, free and civil conversations is now the norm when it comes to public discourse and battles over reservations in jobs and educational institutions are no different.

On one hand we have a side which is rightly asserting its right to equality and claiming its rightful place in the society and on the other we have a side whose new generations wallow in victimhood and deprivation, unaware of the roots of the debate.

A distinct lack of awareness of how sections of a society we live in have been deprived of opportunity and life (often a bullheaded and vicious lack of acknowledgement of such deprivation) is then met by an equally obstinate lack of acknowledgement of this grouse.

To acknowledge the existence of this grouse itself becomes a reason for another pitched battle. Hectoring activism speaks to strong victimhood and no honest conversation is held that can help one side even acknowledge the other’s point of view.

How to reduce the scope of these flare-ups?

The solution to these flare-ups is then found in the age old Indian method of letting the issue die, biding time till the next one arrives on the scene.

Rohith Vemula’s case is not an exception, it is rather the norm but despite so many battles being fought, solutions or even discussions are hard to come by. Why is it so hard for the so-called upper castes to understand the legitimacy of the social justice mechanism?

A 20 year old born in 1995 in a privileged caste or class or gender who has neither been exposed to the Constituent Assembly debates, nor the discourse centred around Mandal commission and whose idea of merit is the percentage of marks scored in an exam, will find it hard to comprehend the concept of social justice.

In his political consciousness, reservations are electoral sops often extricated through collective agitation, sometimes even by the undeserving. Reservations then become a cart in which everyone tries to get  a stake but nobody wants to question.

With no window into dalit history either at school or college and no portrayal of dalit struggles in popular culture, this exposure to the realities of caste oppression is completely absent.

For political or social activists, it would be useful to understand that reservations or the existing mechanisms of social justice are not holy cows to not be questioned. The status-quo, as created over decades since 1950, will be questioned; by every generation and more strongly than before. This questioning needs to be countered through conversations and often accommodation rather than through hectoring and self-righteousness.

While the republic has a responsibility to ensure social reforms and equality, it also has a need to ensure generations don’t get alienated by feeling ignored and uncared for, however improbable the cause. For this young republic’s sake, it is important that we don’t ignore these conversations and don’t create any more holy cows.

In his death, Rohith Vemula has given us an opportunity to start this important conversation and take it to schools, colleges and universities. Let us have this debate in right earnest and let the two sides talk to each other, rather than talk down or past each other.

Twitter: @bhayankur

Source: businessstandard

Is this dead tiger our new Confederate flag?

By Sandy Garossino in Opinion | January 19th 2016

 Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, with his wife in Bengal, 1903

The Bengal Lounge is a genteel cousin of the Confederate Flag

A tempest is brewing at High Tea on Canada's southwestern tip, at the edge of the wide Pacific Ocean (next stop, Japan). A Vancouver real estate czar wants to close a bar and there’s a ferocious hullabaloo about it, with petitions and the whole nine yards.

All of this is happening in Victoria, B.C, the provincial capital named for the empire’s 19th century regent. The smallish city has two primary functions: to be the seat of government and attract tourists as a kind of "Ye Olde Victorian Theme Parke.” Which works like a charm. Gently nestled in the calm protected harbour lies the jewel in the city's crown; the storied Empress Hotel, built in 1908 and named for the monarch’s title as Empress of India.

And inside the Empress Hotel sits the Bengal Lounge, a mock-Churchillian mens-clubby watering hole romanticizing a mythical British Raj that never was. It's a version that Queen Victoria herself would probably have trouble with. Even the legendary Bengal tiger skin mounted above the crackling hearth is a counterfeit. That Thailand tiger didn't spend a minute of its abruptly foreshortened life under the Raj.

While the name sounds grand, the Bengal Lounge isn't "olde" at all, but was introduced during a 1960’s update to its previous incarnation as the Coronet Room, long after Indian independence.

Yet peel back local nostalgia, and the Bengal Lounge isn't just an innocent throwback to a bygone age, but a genteel cousin of the Confederate flag, the Washington Redskins and the Whitesboro town seal. Except it’s not even our past.

British Columbians in the 1960's, who lived about as far away from India as it's possible to get, might be forgiven for spicing up their local scene with some exotic flavour. But time marches on, and to anyone familiar with British India, the name 'Bengal' in that context is virtually synonymous with ghastly war atrocity and plunder so obscene that it hastened the end of the Raj itself.

"If food is so scarce, why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”

"If food is so scarce, why hasn't Gandhi died yet?" countered Winston Churchill to the desperate pleas of India’s Viceroy as the catastrophic 1943-44 Bengal Famine unfolded. Killing over 3 million, the famine was induced by Churchill's diversion and stockpiling of Indian grains to wartime England and Europe.

The prime minister knew full well why the "nauseating... half-naked fakir" Gandhi hadn't died, because he'd had him locked up for two years.

Millions of others weren’t so lucky. The Bengal Famine was no accidental mismanagement, but an indefensible choice. Knowing that untold numbers were starving in Bengal, Churchill continued to insist that India export rice to Europe for the war effort, and even blocked efforts by the international community to send aid.

Leopold Avery, his secretary of state for India wrote of the disaster, "Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country."

In Churchill’s Secret War, which documents the famine, journalist Madhusree Mukerjee describes Bengal's agony:

    “Parents dumped their starving children into rivers and wells. Many took their lives by throwing themselves in front of trains. People were too weak even to cremate their loved ones.”

    “No one had the strength to perform rites… Dogs and jackals feasted on piles of dead bodies in Bengal’s villages… Mothers had turned into murderers, village belles into whores, fathers into traffickers of daughters,”

Churchill steeled himself to withstand the suffering of Indians by despising them at a distance: “I hate Indians,” he said. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” As for Bengalis, he said, "The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.”

 Child victim of the Bengal famine.

Despite his contempt, Churchill wasn’t too proud to send for some 2.6 million Indian soldiers to defend the Empire, just as over a million had served in World War I. Almost 150,000 were killed in both conflicts. Forgotten by history, some 10,000 Indian lads lie beneath the poppies in Flanders Fields. More than Canadians.

British Indian Army soldiers in World War 2

The sight of well-fed British troops in India during the Bengal Famine was too much for Jawaharlal Nehru, the man destined to become the nation's first prime minister. The Bengal Famine, he said, was “the final judgment on British rule in India.”

Three years later, the English would be gone.
Indian Muslim was Queen Victoria's closest confidante

As for Queen Victoria, in whose honour the Bengal Room purportedly stands, she never set foot in the country, but instead brought it to England. While Winston Churchill was still in short pants, Victoria loved India as passionately as she defied the British racism and caste system he came to represent. Victoria spoke and wrote Hindi and Urdu. As the writer Shrabani Basu documents in her meticulously researched book, Victoria and Abdul, the queen was tutored daily by her private secretary and closest confidante, an Indian Muslim named Abdul Karim.

Victoria built him a cottage at Balmoral that you can rent today. She showered him with medals and honours, introduced curries and Indian customs to the court, and filled her residences with Indian and Muslim servants and soldiers. Indian and Middle-Eastern themed theatricals were regularly performed by members of the household staff, outfitted in full traditional garb.

 Victoria with her Indian honour guard left, and private secretary Abdul Karim, right.

Naturally, all this drove the court and royal family nuts. Seething with resentment, they figured the queen was off her rocker, manipulated by a scheming foreign low-life. For her part, Victoria wasn’t having any of it. She’d taken enough of their chin-wagging over her love for the working class Scottish servant John Brown, whose ring she wore to her grave. She wasn’t going to take it over Karim.

The household might have tolerated Abdul Karim's presence had he been a prince or maharajah rather than what he was: a low-born clerk from Agra.

In the end, Karim's class was his greatest offence against decency. Hours after Victoria's funeral, the new King Edward VII ordered his home raided and all her letters and photographs burnt in a bonfire. Karim was summarily dismissed, and he and his family were expelled from England for the remainder of their lives.

Yet in her private life Victoria exuded an egalitarian sensibility that's the antithesis of the disastrous Churchillian values embodied by the Bengal Lounge. If the former Empress of India were alive today, she would probably ask the good people of Victoria to let the place sail into the history books like the Raj itself.

On a summer’s evening, the Empress Hotel is a glorious place to watch the sun set.

Source: nationalobserver

The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

Was the famous author killed from a beating? From carbon monoxide poisoning? From alcohol withdrawal? Here are the top nine theories

 Like his life's work, Edgar Allan Poe's death remains shrouded in mystery. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

By Natasha Geiling

smithsonian.com

October 7, 2014

It was raining in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, but that didn't stop Joseph W. Walker, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, from heading out to Gunner's Hall, a public house bustling with activity. It was Election Day, and Gunner's Hall served as a pop-up polling location for the 4th Ward polls. When Walker arrived at Gunner's Hall, he found a man, delirious and dressed in shabby second-hand clothes, lying in the gutter. The man was semi-conscious, and unable to move, but as Walker approached the him, he discovered something unexpected: the man was Edgar Allan Poe. Worried about the health of the addled poet, Walker stopped and asked Poe if he had any acquaintances in Baltimore that might be able to help him. Poe gave Walker the name of Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor with some medical training. Immediately, Walker penned Snodgrass a letter asking for help.

Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849
Dear Sir,

There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

Yours, in haste,
JOS. W. WALKER
To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass.

On September 27—almost a week earlier—Poe had left Richmond, Virginia bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Mrs. St. Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time. When Walker found Poe in delirious disarray outside of the polling place, it was the first anyone had heard or seen of the poet since his departure from Richmond. Poe never made it to Philadelphia to attend to his editing business. Nor did he ever make it back to New York, where he had been living, to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding. Poe was never to leave Baltimore, where he launched his career in the early 19th- century, again—and in the four days between Walker finding Poe outside the public house and Poe's death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets. Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium, gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death, according to his attending physician Dr. John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out for "Reynolds"—a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery.

Poe's death—shrouded in mystery—seems ripped directly from the pages of one of his own works. He had spent years crafting a careful image of a man inspired by adventure and fascinated with enigmas—a poet, a detective, an author, a world traveler who fought in the Greek War of Independence and was held prisoner in Russia. But though his death certificate listed the cause of death as phrenitis, or swelling of the brain, the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have led many to speculate about the true cause of Poe's demise. "Maybe it’s fitting that since he invented the detective story," says Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, "he left us with a real-life mystery."

1. Beating

In 1867, one of the first theories to deviate from either phrenitis or alcohol was published by biographer E. Oakes Smith in her article "Autobiographic Notes: Edgar Allan Poe." "At the instigation of a woman, " Smith writes, "who considered herself injured by him, he was cruelly beaten, blow upon blow, by a ruffian who knew of no better mode of avenging supposed injuries. It is well known that a brain fever followed. . . ." Other accounts also mention "ruffians" who had beaten Poe senseless before his death. As Eugene Didier wrote in his 1872 article, "The Grave of Poe," that while in Baltimore, Poe ran into some friends from West Point, who prevailed upon him to join them for drinks. Poe, unable to handle liquor, became madly drunk after a single glass of champagne, after which he left his friends to wander the streets. In his drunken state, he "was robbed and beaten by ruffians, and left insensible in the street all night."

2. Cooping

Others believe that Poe fell victim to a practice known as cooping, a method of voter fraud practiced by gangs in the 19th century where an unsuspecting victim would be kidnapped, disguised and forced to vote for a specific candidate multiple times under multiple disguised identities. Voter fraud was extremely common in Baltimore around the mid 1800s, and the polling site where Walker found the disheveled Poe was a known place that coopers brought their victims. The fact that Poe was found delirious on election day, then, is no coincidence.

Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe's strange demeanor before his death. Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward; had Poe been forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain his semi-conscious, ragged state. 

Around the late 1870s, Poe's biographer J.H. Ingram received several letters that blamed Poe's death on a cooping scheme. A letter from William Hand Browne, a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins, explains that "the general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, (his death happening just at election-time; an election for sheriff took place on Oct. 4th), 'cooped,' stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die."

3. Alcohol

"A lot of the ideas that have come up over the years have centered around the fact that Poe couldn’t handle alcohol," says Semtner. "It has been documented that after a glass of wine he was staggering drunk. His sister had the same problem; it seems to be something hereditary."

Months before his death, Poe became a vocal member of the temperance movement, eschewing alcohol, which he'd struggled with all his life. Biographer Susan Archer Talley Weiss recalls, in her biography "The Last Days of Edgar A. Poe," an event, toward the end of Poe's time in Richmond, that might be relevant to theorists that prefer a "death by drinking" demise for Poe. Poe had fallen ill in Richmond, and after making a somewhat miraculous recovery, was told by his attending physician that "another such attack would prove fatal." According to Weiss, Poe replied that "if people would not tempt him, he would not fall," suggesting that the first illness was brought on by a bout of drinking.

Those around Poe during his finals days seem convinced that the author did, indeed, fall into that temptation, drinking himself to death. As his close friend J. P. Kennedy wrote on October 10, 1949: "On Tuesday last Edgar A. Poe died in town here at the hospital from the effects of a debauch. . . . He fell in with some companion here who seduced him to the bottle, which it was said he had renounced some time ago. The consequence was fever, delirium, and madness, and in a few days a termination of his sad career in the hospital. Poor Poe! . . . A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched."

Though the theory that Poe's drinking lead to his death fails to explain his five-day disappearance, or his second-hand clothes on October 3, it was nonetheless a popular theory propagated by Snodgrass after Poe's death. Snodgrass, a member of the temperance movement, gave lectures across the country, blaming Poe's death on binge drinking. Modern science, however, has thrown a wrench into Snodgrasses talking points: samples of Poe's hair from after his death show low levels of lead, explains Semtner, which is an indication that Poe remained faithful to his vow of sobriety up until his demise.

4. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

In 1999, public health researcher Albert Donnay argued that Poe's death was a result of carbon monoxide poisoning from coal gas that was used for indoor lighting during the 19th century. Donnay took clippings of Poe's hair and tested them for certain heavy metals that would be able to reveal the presence of coal gas. The test was inconclusive, leading biographers and historians to largely discredit Donnay's theory.

5. Heavy Metal Poisoning

While Donnay's test didn't reveal levels of heavy metal consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning, the tests did reveal elevated levels of mercury in Poe's system months before his death. According to Semtner, Poe's mercury levels were most likely elevated as a result of a cholera epidemic he'd been exposed to in July of 1849, while in Philadelphia. Poe's doctor prescribed calomel, or mercury chloride. Mercury poisoning, Semtner says, could help explain some of Poe's hallucinations and delirium before his death. However, the levels of mercury found in Poe's hair, even at their highest, are still 30 times below the level consistent with mercury poisoning.

6. Rabies

In 1996, Dr. R. Michael Benitez was participating in a clinical pathologic conference where doctors are given patients, along with a list of symptoms, and instructed to diagnose and compare with other doctors as well as the written record. The symptoms of the anonymous patient E.P., "a writer from Richmond" were clear: E.P. had succumbed to rabies. According to E.P.'s supervising physician, Dr. J.J. Moran, E.P. had been admitted to a hospital due to "lethargy and confusion." Once admitted, E.P.'s condition began a rapid downward spiral: shortly, the patient was exhibiting delirium, visual hallucinations, wide variations in pulse rate and rapid, shallow breathing. Within four days—the median length of survival after the onset of serious rabies symptoms—E.P. was dead.

E.P., Benitez soon found out, wasn't just any author from Richmond. It was Poe whose death the Maryland cardiologist had diagnosed as a clear case of rabies, a fairly common virus in the 19th century. Running counter to any prevailing theories at the time, Benitez's diagnosis ran in the September 1996 issue of the Maryland Medical Journal. As Benitez pointed out in his article, without DNA evidence, it's impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that Poe succumbed to the rabies virus. There are a few kinks in the theory, including no evidence of hydrophobia (those afflicted with rabies develop a fear of water, Poe was reported to have been drinking water at the hospital until his death) nor any evidence of an animal bite (though some with rabies don't remember being bitten by an animal). Still, at the time of the article's publication, Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House Museum in Baltimore, agreed with Benitez's diagnosis. "This is the first time since Poe died that a medical person looked at Poe's death without any preconceived notions," Jerome told the Chicago Tribune in October of 1996. "If he knew it was Edgar Allan Poe, he'd think, 'Oh yeah, drugs, alcohol,' and that would influence his decision. Dr. Benitez had no agenda."

7. Brain Tumor

One of the most recent theories about Poe's death suggests that the author succumbed to a brain tumor, which influenced his behavior before his death. When Poe died, he was buried, rather unceremoniously, in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore graveyard. Twenty-six years later, a statue was erected, honoring Poe, near the graveyard's entrance. Poe's coffin was dug up, and his remains exhumed, in order to be moved to the new place of honor. But more than two decades of buried decay had not been kind to Poe's coffin—or the corpse within it—and the apparatus fell apart as workers tried to move it from one part of the graveyard to another. Little remained of Poe's body, but one worker did remark on a strange feature of Poe's skull: a mass rolling around inside. Newspapers of the day claimed that the clump was Poe's brain, shriveled yet intact after almost three decades in the ground.

We know, today, that the mass could not be Poe's brain, which is one of the first parts of the body to rot after death. But Matthew Pearl, an American author who wrote a novel about Poe's death, was nonetheless intrigued by this clump. He contacted a forensic pathologist, who told him that while the clump couldn't be a brain, it could be a brain tumor, which can calcify after death into hard masses. 

According to Semtner, Pearl isn't the only person to believe Poe suffered from a brain tumor: a New York physician once told Poe that he had a lesion on his brain that caused his adverse reactions to alcohol. 

8. Flu

A far less sinister theory suggests that Poe merely succumbed to the flu—which might have turned into deadly pneumonia—on this deathbed. As Semtner explains, in the days leading up to Poe's departure from Richmond, the author visited a physician, complaining of illness. "His last night in town, he was very sick, and his [soon-to-be] wife noted that he had a weak pulse, a fever, and she didn’t think he should take the journey to Philadelphia," says Semtner. "He visited a doctor, and the doctor also told him not to travel, that he was too sick." According to newspaper reports from the time, it was raining in Baltimore when Poe was there—which Semtner thinks could explain why Poe was found in clothes not his own. "The cold and the rain exasperated the flu he already had," says Semtner, "and maybe that eventually lead to pneumonia. The high fever might account for his hallucinations and his confusion."

9. Murder

In his 2000 book Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, author John Evangelist Walsh presents yet another theory about Poe's death: that Poe was murdered by the brothers of his wealthy fiancée, Elmira Shelton. Using evidence from newspapers, letters and memoirs, Walsh argues that Poe actually made it to Philadelphia, where he was ambushed by Shelton's three brothers, who warned Poe against marrying their sister. Frightened by the experience, Poe disguised himself in new clothes (accounting for, in Walsh's mind, his second-hand clothing) and hid in Philadelphia for nearly a week, before heading back to Richmond to marry Shelton. Shelton's brothers intercepted Poe in Baltimore, Walsh postulates, beat him, and forced him to drink whiskey, which they knew would send Poe into a deathly sickness. Walsh's theory has gained little traction among Poe historians—or book reviewers; Edwin J. Barton, in a review for the journal American Literature, called Walsh's story "only plausible, not wholly persuasive." "Midnight Dreary is interesting and entertaining," he concluded, "but its value to literary scholars is limited and oblique."

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For Semtner, however, none of the theories fully explain Poe's curious end. "I've never been completely convinced of any one theory, and I believe Poe's cause of death resulted from a combination of factors," he says. "His attending physician is our best source of evidence. If he recorded on the mortality schedule that Poe died of phrenitis, Poe was most likely suffering from encephalitis or meningitis, either of which might explain his symptoms." 

Source: smithsoniamag

This tragic documentary series tells the stories of Dalit students who were driven to suicide

CASTE DISCRIMINATION

University of Hyderabad scholar Rohit Vemula's death has once against brought up the issue of casteism in institutions of higher learning.

Scroll Staff  · Yesterday · 02:45 pm  · India



The suicide of 26-year-old Rohith Vemula, one of five Dalit students expelled from their hostel at the University of Hyderabad two weeks ago, has put the focus back on the way Indian academic institutions treat students from backward castes.

Vemula and the others had been suspended by the university after a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad accused the five students of having assaulted him. The five claimed this was a false allegation and had been staging a sleep-in protest outside their hostel since the expulsion.

Even though the 26-year-old said that no one was responsible for his suicide, his final note did make reference to the way he was feeling. "I am not hurt at this moment. I am not sad. I am just empty. Unconcerned about myself. That’s pathetic. And that’s why I am doing this," Vemula wrote in his suicide note.

Those are words that would be familiar to Dalit students across the country, who often have to deal with severe bullying and ostracism in many Indian institutions. The video above, from a three-part documentary series called The Death of Merit, documents the suicide of a 20-year-old Dalit student at IIT Roorkee in 2011.

Manish Kumar Guddolian jumped to his death from the fifth floor of his hostel. While the police put the death down to depression, his family members spoke to the filmmaker about the many months of bullying he faced in college from a group of students who tried to put him down by calling him names like "chamar" and circulating a video of his photos to be laughed at.

The college administration's response when the matter was taken to them was to suggest he should focus on his studies and perhaps he should be moved out of the hostel. His parents and relatives tell their part of the story in the film.



Another case covered by the series was the suicide of a 22-year-old medical student Dr Jaspreet Singh who was routinely failed in exams by one professor. The aspiring surgeon was a bright student, who scored well all through school and in college, barring one subject. On 27 January 2008, he hung himself to death on the fifth floor of his college's library.

Following his suicide, when his papers were examined by an external body at the behest of the National Scheduled Caste Commission, he passed. College authorities tried to put his suicide down to depression despite Singh explicitly mentioning professor NK Goel in his suicide note. The professor though went scot-free and continues to work at the Government Medical College in Chandigarh.



Reservations are another source of harassment for young Dalit students. Balmukund Bharti, a final year MBBS student at AIIMS committed suicide on March 3, 2010. His parents allege that the professors told him that people like him who come on the back of reservations can never become doctors.



We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: scrollin

'I loved Science, Stars, Nature': Suicide by suspended Dalit student sparks nationwide protests

Dalit issues

'I feel a growing gap between my soul and my body,' wrote scholar at University of Hyderabad before he hanged himself.

Scroll Staff  · Yesterday · 08:01 am

Students in Delhi and other parts of the country are planning to hold events on Monday to protest the suicide on Sunday night of Rohit Vemula, one of five Dalit scholars who had been expelled by the University of Hyderabad last year for an altercation with a rival student group.

Vemula, a PhD scholar, hanged himself in a hostel room, university authorities confirmed to the Times of India.

“No one is responsible for my this act of killing myself,” Vemula wrote in a suicide note released by the university authorities. “No one has instigated me, whether by their acts or by their words to this act. This is my decision and I am the only one responsible for this. Do not trouble my friends and enemies on this after I am gone. “

The young scholar and member of other student groups had been on a hunger strike since earlier on Sunday to demand a revocation of their suspension in August. The university authorities had barred them from entering the administrative building, hostels, libraries, mess and other common areas. For the past two weeks, Vemula and the four other suspended students had been sleeping in the open to protest the decision.

According to a statement issued by the Joint Action Committee for Social Justice at University of Hyderabad, the five Dalit students had been suspended after a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad falsely accused them of having assaulted him in August.

Student associations in Hyderabad, Delhi and other parts of the country have announced that they will boycott classes and hold memorial events to protest the circumstances that led Vemula to kill himself

Here is the text of Vemula’s note:

    “Good morning,

    I would not be around when you read this letter. Don’t get angry on me. I know some of you truly cared for me, loved me and treated me very well. I have no complaints on anyone. It was always with myself I had problems. I feel a growing gap between my soul and my body. And I have become a monster. I always wanted to be a writer. A writer of science, like Carl Sagan. At last, this is the only letter I am getting to write.

    I loved Science, Stars, Nature, but then I loved people without knowing that people have long since divorced from nature. Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs colored. Our originality valid through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt.

    The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust. In very field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.

    I am writing this kind of letter for the first time. My first time of a final letter. Forgive me if I fail to make sense.

    May be I was wrong, all the while, in understanding world. In understanding love, pain, life, death. There was no urgency. But I always was rushing. Desperate to start a life. All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.

    I am not hurt at this moment. I am not sad. I am just empty. Unconcerned about myself. That’s pathetic. And that’s why I am doing this.

    People may dub me as a coward. And selfish, or stupid once I am gone. I am not bothered about what I am called. I don’t believe in after-death stories, ghosts, or spirits. If there is anything at all I believe, I believe that I can travel to the stars. And know about the other worlds.

    If you, who is reading this letter can do anything for me, I have to get 7 months of my fellowship, one lakh and seventy five thousand rupees. Please see to it that my family is paid that. I have to give some 40 thousand to Ramji. He never asked them back. But please pay that to him from that.

    Let my funeral be silent and smooth. Behave like I just appeared and gone. Do not shed tears for me. Know that I am happy dead than being alive.

    'From shadows to the stars.'

    Uma anna, sorry for using your room for this thing.

    To ASA [Ambedkar Students Association] family, sorry for disappointing all of you. You loved me very much. I wish all the very best for the future.

    For one last time,

    Jai Bheem

    I forgot to write the formalities. No one is responsible for my this act of killing myself.

    No one has instigated me, whether by their acts or by their words to this act.

    This is my decision and I am the only one responsible for this.

    Do not trouble my friends and enemies on this after I am gone."

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: scrollin

Other read:  Hyderabad: Suspended Dalit student hangs himself  Indian Express

David Bowie has been secretly cremated without a funeral or any family and friends present

The iconic singer told his loved ones he wanted to “go without any fuss” and not have a funeral service or public memorial

 AKM-GSI-XPOSURE
Family man: David Bowie with wife Iman and daughter Lexi

Music legend David Bowie has been secretly cremated without any of his family or friends present.

The iconic singer told his loved ones he wanted to “go without any fuss” and not have a funeral service or public memorial.

A source in New York told the Mirror: “There is no public or private service or a public memorial. There is nothing.”

Since the singer's death on Sunday music lovers have been speculating about what plans the legendary showman had for his funeral.

But unbeknown to his millions of fans around the world, his body was quietly cremated shortly after he died.

*******************

Sir Elton John praised Bowie for dealing with his cancer battle with dignity.

He said: “What I loved about him towards the end was his incredible privacy during what must have been 10 years of incredible bad luck with illnesses, heart attacks, cancer, whatever.

"He kept it private in an age we’re living in with Twitter when everyone knows everything about everything - he kept it to himself.

"He made two albums without anybody knowing he was making them. He had treatment for his illnesses without anyone knowing or anyone saying anything.

"And that is the mystique of the man, because we know David Bowie the figure, the singer, the outrageous performer, but actually, we don’t know anything about him - and that’s the way it should be in music and should be in any art form whatsoever.”

Meanwhile, one of Bowie’s closest aides told how it was almost as if the singer knew he was going to die two days after his birthday.

********************

“He certainly planned for Blackstar to be released when it did – his birthday.

“It’s too coincidental. On the song The Girl Loves Me he asks ‘where the f*** did Monday go?’

“I’ve got no evidence but I think he did.

"It was like Mozart writing his requiem or the famous Dennis Potter who kept writing scripts on his deathbed.”

Read full article: mirror

Was the Ramayana actually set in and around today’s Afghanistan?

LITERATURE AND MYTH

An examination of a book by physicist Rajesh Kochhar debunks the notion that the events of the epic took place in modern-day India.

Dhiman Dasgupta  · Apr 26, 2015 · 08:45 am

 Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons


History is said to be the original discipline in the faculties today known as humanities. This is owing to the fact that every discipline in knowledge discourse has a history – even abstract disciplines like mathematics or astronomy – and every piece of history has a geophysical contextuality.

Ever since Herodotus (484 BC - 425 BC, Greek-occupied Turkey) started the discipline, he recorded events during the reign of four Persian kings and chronicled life and society in their times. These were times of conflict between Greece and Persia and had a geographical contextuality.

Herodotus also speaks of “India”, where he saw the Himalayan marmot bathing in gold dust. Much later, deconstructing his text led to the conclusion that the great father of historical praxis must have passed through the North West Frontier province and reached the base of Hindu Kush.

This posed a question, which Herodotus did not ask himself: if he had indeed travelled to “India”, which “India” was this? For that matter, if he was “Greek”, which “Greece” did he live in? Similarly. if Ram of the epic poem Ramayana was an “Indian”, where was this “India” situated?

The so-called Ram Setu

A ship that wishes to sail from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal has to pass through the Indian Ocean to the south of Sri Lanka. The voyage would have been 30 hours shorter if it could have travelled along the Gulf Of Mannar, which separates India and Sri Lanka, but this isn’t possible. For there are thousands of small submerged rocks beneath its surface, stretching like a bridge across 47 km between the two countries. As a result, the sea is between one and 30 metre deep here, which isn’t favourable for sailing.

The British government of colonised India as well the government of independent India had often planned to dredge the channel to make it suitable for sailing; but the plans have remained elusive for various reasons. At present, for instance, Hindutva followers believe that this is the bridge built by an army of monkeys, as described in the Ramayana, which Ram and Lakshaman crossed to conquer Sri Lanka.

Their demand is that, far from dredging, let the Archaeological Survey of India declare this bridge a national monument. Not that the colonisers were any less fundamentalist. In 1804 a certain British cartographer named the structure Adam’s Bridge – according to him this was the bridge described in the Bible which Adam crossed to scale a mountain peak, where he meditated for 1,000 years while standing on one leg.

Even before this, we have seen Marco Polo describe the structure as a bridge, as did Al-Biruni in the book he wrote in 1030 CE. In other words, it has long been held that this row of rocks beneath the surface of the water is a bridge.

Not exactly a bridge

According to geologists this structure is actually a limestone shoal, the outcome of natural processes. Between 300 and 30 million years ago, a portion of the Indian subcontinent is believed to have broken off because of continental drift to form the island of Sri Lanka. The debris that this fragment of land left behind at birth in the water as it drifted away led to the creation of this so-called bridge.

It may have jutted out of the water at some point in history, in which case it might have been used as a bridge. But there is considerable doubt whether the users belonged to the age of the Ramayana. This is because the inhabitants of Sri Lanka went directly from the Stone Age to the Iron Age; the use of copper was not very prevalent here. On the other hand, the Ramayana is a tale from an advanced Copper Age – an epic in verse from a period two or three thousand years before the Iron Age.

Where was Ramayana set?

Let us drop the preamble and get to the point now. If the Lanka mentioned in the Ramayana was not the Sri Lanka of today, where was it located? Where did Ram belong, for that matter? Wherever he may have lived, he was certainly not an inhabitant of what is the Ganges valley today, or of “Ramjanmabhoomi” Ayodhya. For, civilised man did not live in the forest-infested Ganges valley before the Iron Age, since there were no axes with which to clear the vegetation before iron was discovered. There were no swords either, which proves that the Ramayana, unlike the Mahabaharata, is not an epic of the Ganges valley. It makes no mention of swords – the bow and arrow are the primary weapons in it.

The primary objective of this essay is to point to the geographical location of the Ramayana. It is not the writer who has arrived at the answer, nor an Indologist like Max Mueller or even a historian or archaeologist. The person in question is Rajesh Kochhar, a physicist with an inclination for history, who has broken through the traditional techniques of history in his work The Vedic People – Their History and Geography.

How the Ramayana is different from the Mahabharata

The primary difficulty of discussing the ancient history of India lies in the necessity of first demolishing several well-established inaccuracies, such as the Aryan Invasion Theory, for instance. Spun by white men and broadcast by colonial historians, this old wives’ tale is still taught in schools and colleges, with half of any written work – measured in terms of paper, ink and effort - being expended on it. We shall not entertain it. We will only examine whatever can be determined through the social and geographical pointers available in the Ramayana.

There are two other fundamental differences between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – in the rivers and in the divine pantheon. In the Mahabharata the Ganga and the Yamuna are almost ubiquitous, but they’re completely missing from the Ramayana. In the Mahabharata we see the powerful presence of the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwar – but they’re absent from the Ramayana. We do not find these two rivers and these three gods together in the Rig Veda.

However, the rivers and gods that are to be found in the Rig Veda are also to be found in the Ramayana – the rivers Saraswati and Sarayu, and the original trinity of Agni, Varun and Pavan. From this it is easy to surmise that the Ramayana is a Rig Vedic epic. Which period was this? It would not be correct to estimate this using our current calendar: it would probably not be possible either. An approximation can be made from the sequence of events.

The somras clue

Vedic nomads travelled from the Eastern Europe to Bactria (present day Afghanistan). From here they went to Persia (today’s Iran). During their migration to Persia there was probably a battle for power amongst the gods, which led to the birth of the Avestan religion. As a result, Indra, the king of gods, became an inferior figure in the Avesta, while Yama, the god of death, turned into the finest of the gods. Worshipping Agni is a prominent practice within the Parsi community, but Hindus do not worship this ancient god. This indicates that the Rig Vedic age predated Persia. Kochhar has provided clues to whether this was the Afghan branch of the Vedic journey.

The first such clue that Kochhar alludes to is the Vedic drink somras. It was so important in ancient Vedic life that an entire mandala or chapter of the Rig Veda has been devoted to it. The importance of soma is evident in the Avestan Zend scripture – it is referred to as haoma in Persia. It is seen that the closer the Vedic nomads get to the Indian peninsula, the more they seek continuously new alternatives to the soma plant; that was how important somras was.

But the original soma plant was to be found only in what is modern day Afghanistan and Persia or Iran. In 1951 the German historian Karl Friedrich Geldner proved that the ephedra plant was what was described as soma in the Rig Veda. Ephedrin or somras is not alcohol – this intoxicant is an alkaloid. Kochhar’s investigations led to the discovery of four varieties of ephedra, found in Afghanistan, Iran, the northern Himalayas, and the Hindu Kush.

What we learn from summer solstice

There are 49 cosmic hymns in the Rig and the Yajur Vedas whose meanings have not been explained. But one particular hymn from Vedanga Jyotish informs us that the longest day of the year, or summer solstice, comprised 18 periods of daylight and 12 of night. Day and night are of equal length on the Equator; in the higher latitudes, summer days are longer than nights.

The latitude at which the proportion of daylight and darkness is 3:2 is 34 degrees North. It is worth noting that the cities to be found around this latitude today are Herat and Kabul in Afghanistan. In other words, the place and time of the composition of the Vedanga Jyotish is the same as that of Vedic Afghanistan and Iran. This second piece of evidence offered by Rajesh Kochhar further strengthens the perception of the location and time of the Rig Veda.

In search of the rivers

Kochhar has deconstructed the Rig Veda in search of the Saraswati and the Sarayu, the two rivers also mentioned in the Ramayana. Here too our current history has come in the way.

There is a tiny river named the Sarayu in Uttar Pradesh, which flows into the Ghaghara, which in turn merges with the Ganga. Many people consider the rainwater-fed Saraswati in the Aravallis, flowing along the Ghaggar (not to be confused with the Ghaghara) basin the mythical Saraswati. On viewing the scans of North-Western India made by the Russian Landsat satellite between 1972 and ’79, it is natural to assume that the Ghaggar was a wide river. It flows into the Rann of Kutch.

The scan reveals the basin of a dried up older river, which is up to 8 km broad in some places. It was this that led to the hasty conclusion of this basin’s belonging to the original Saraswati.

From Neil Roberts’s The Holocene it is clear that the basin of this river widened to the north of the Rann of Kutch because of the accelerated movement of a glacier during the previous Ice Age. But deconstructing the Rig Veda doesn’t suggest any of this. The Saraswati has been referred to as non-perennial towards the end of the Veda. The original stream of the Ghaggar enters India from present-day Pakistan, drying up in the Thar desert. Kochhar believes this is the non-perennial Saraswati.

However, the Saraswati of the Rig Veda is extremely powerful, grinding rocks with sheer force. Its roar subsumes all other sounds. And the Sarayu of the Rig Veda is immensely wide and deep, the mother river. None of these descriptions matches the actual rivers in present-day India with those names.

Hymn No. 5 | 53 | 9 of the Rig Veda says, “May the Rasa, Krumu, Anitabh, Kuva or Sindhu not be able to stop you; let the deep Sarayu not be an obstacle.” The order of the rivers clearly moves from east to west. So the Sarayu undoubtedly flows to the west of the Indus.

Kochhar believes it is the 650-km river known as the Hari-Rud in Afghanistan, whose source is in the Hindu Kush mountains. It flows past the city of Herat and then for 100 km along the Iran-Afghanistan border before disappearing in the Karakom desert of Central Asia.

In the Avesta we find the Saraswati as the Harahaiti – the similarity in sound is noticeable – which enters Iran along the combined basin of the river Arghandar on the Afghan-Iran border and the river Helmand. According to Kochhar, it is this Helmand that is the Vedic Saraswati river.

The source of the Helmand is in the Koh-i-Baba mountain range. Flowing for 1,300 miles through the heart of Afghanistan, the Vedic Saraswati joins the Vedic Drijadbati or Arghandar. The Avesta identifies this wide river as the Hetumanta (or, in varations, as Setumanta). In Iran the Saraswati is named the Harahaiti, which flows into the inland lake Hamun-e-Sabari in the Saistan area of northern Iran.

The conclusion

The political map of the ancient world, of the Copper Age, provides an extraordinary realisation. The kingdoms of the two main political powers – the Persians and the Greeks – all lie between and around the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. None of these is a coastal civilisation, however.

This raises a question. What did ancient man refer to as a sea? The Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Campian Sea are all saltwater lakes, and not seas in the way we understand them today. This make us wonder: perhaps the Lanka of the Ramayana was an island in the Hamun-e-Sabri.

The one thing that’s obvious: wherever it was that Ram and Lakshman went from Afghanistan, it could not have been to present-day Sri Lanka, for that would have meant crossing the Indian peninsula. And since Ravana, the lord of Lanka, was also partial to somras, it is unlikely that he went very far from the land of soma after abducting Sita.

Although it is not possible to prove archaeologically, there is considerable reason to assume that the lineage of Dasarath (and of Ram), the Ikshvakus, were from western Afghanistan. For the Puranas say that King Kubalasa slayed a demon on the shore of the Sabari. Vishwamitra received his second birth where the Saraswati met the sea. And Valmiki discovered Sita on the shore of the Sarayu. Which is why there is little room for doubt that today’s Hamun-e-Sabri is the sea mentioned in the Ramayana, one of the islands in which was the kingdom ruled by Ravana, lord of the rakshases.

The focus of attention for those studying the lost history of India is the contentious issue raised by Hindutva historians, who have repeatedly asserted that western historians have been unable to identify the roots of ancient India. We find these assertions in the writings of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, as well as in  those of certain lesser known right-wing historians. It is surprising how easily conclusions unsupported by the array of Vedic texts can be arrived at because of mindless adherence to a popular brand of politics.

The rock formation between India and Sri Lanka could well be preserved, but not as Ram Setu or Adam’s Bridge. Let it be protected as a geological feature. For no matter how far one looks, no relationship is evident between this Lanka and the Lanka of the Ramayana.

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Source: scrollin