The Shape of Rome

The Shape of Rome from Ex Urbe 

Aug 15th, 13

 

The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park.  Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from classicists that this single act proves the nobility of the human species.

The road in question, running along the Forum.

This curious range of reactions seems the perfect moment for me to discuss something I have intended to talk about for some time: the shape of the City of Rome itself.  We all know the long, rich history of the Roman people, and the city’s importance as the center of an empire, and thereafter as the center of the memory of that empire, whose echo, long after its end, still so defines Western concepts of power, authority and peace.  What I intend to discuss instead is the geographic city, and how its shape and layers grew gradually and constantly, shaped by famous events, but also by the centuries you won’t hear much about in a traditional history of the city.  The different parts of Rome’s past left their fingerprints on the city’s shape in far more direct ways than one tends to realize, even from visiting and walking through the city.  Rome’s past shows not only in her monuments and ruins, but in the very layout of the streets themselves.  Going age by age, I will attempt to show how the city’s history and structure are one and the same, and how this real ancient city shows her past in a far more organic and structural way than what we tend invent when we concoct fictitious ancient capitals to populate fantasy worlds or imagined futures.  (As a bonus to anyone who’s been to Rome, this will also tell you why it’s a particularly physically grueling city to visit, compared to, say, Florence or Paris.)



Sigmund Freud had a phobia of Rome.  You can see it in his letters, and the many times he uses Rome as a simile or metaphor for psychological issues, both broadly and his own.  He fretted for decades before finally making the visit.  Part of it was a cultural inferiority complex.  Europe’s never-fading memory of the greatness of the Roman empire was intentionally magnified in the Renaissance by Italian humanists who set out to convince the world that Roman culture was the best culture, and that the only way to achieve true greatness was to slavishly imitate the noble Romans.  Italians did this as a power play to try to overcome the political weakness of Italy, but as a result, in the 19th and 18th centuries, many intellectuals in many nations were brought up in a mindset of constantly measuring their own nations only by how far they fell short of the imagined perfection of Rome.  Freud was one of many young intellectuals in Germany, Poland, and other parts of Europe who were terribly intimidated by the Idea of Rome, and the sense that their own nations could never approach its greatness.

Rome’s layers: ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, modern, all jumbled together in an insoluble stack of meaning and contradictions.  And that road.

But Freud had a second fear: a fear of Rome’s layers.  In formal treatises, he compared the psyche to an ancient city, with many layers of architecture built one on top of another, each replacing the last, but with the old structures still present underneath.  In private writings he phrased this more personally, that he was terrified of ever visiting Rome because he was terrified of the idea of all the layers and layers and layers of destroyed structures hidden under the surface, at the same time present and absent, visible and invisible.  He was, in a very deep way, absolutely right.  Rome is a mass of layers, the physical form of different time periods still present in the walls and streets, and when you study them enough to know what you are really looking at, they reach back so staggeringly far, through so many lifetimes, that if you let yourself think seriously about them it is easy to be overwhelmed by the enormity of it all.

I will begin by discussing a single building as an example, and then the broader structure of the city.

The Basilica of San Clemente:

San Clemente is a modestly-sized church a couple blocks East of the Colosseum, one of many hundreds of churches in Rome, and, in my mind, the most Roman.  It was built in honor of Pope Clement I (d. 99 AD), an important early medieval cleric who traveled East and returned, making him one of the most important linking figures between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox worlds.  One enters the church from a plain, hot street populated by closed doors plus an antique shop and a mediocre pizzeria.  Outside the door is a beggar disguised as someone who works for the Church trying to extort money from tourists by convincing them that they have to pay him to enter.  Within, a lovely, lofty church with marble columns, frescoed chapels, a beautiful stone floor, stunning gold mosaics in the nave, and a gilded wood ceiling.  It is populated by milling tourists, and perhaps a couple of the Irish Dominicans who are now its custodians.   It is reasonably impressive, but when we pause and look more closely, we realize the decoration is not as simple as it seems. Nothing matches, for a simple reason: No two pieces of this church are from the same time.



The basic structure of the church, the actual edifice, is from the twelfth century.  But nothing else.

Look at the columns first: beautiful colored marble columns with delightful translucent swirls of stone.  But they don’t match: they’re different colors, even different heights, and have non-matching capitals and different size bases to try to make them fit.  These columns weren’t made for this building, they are looted columns, carried off from Roman buildings all around the city and repurposed for this Church.  These columns, therefore, were cut about 1,000 years before the construction of this church.



The floor too is Roman mosaic tile, inlaid with pieces of porphyry and serpentine, materials unachievable after the empire’s fall.  If they are here, they were carried here after the 12th-century Church was built and re-used.



What else?  There is the stunning mosaic.  It looks like nothing else we’ve seen in Rome, and with good reason.  It looks Russian or byzantine, a totally different style.  Foreign artists must have come in to create this, not in a Roman style of decoration at all but one more Eastern.  Our Eastern Church devotees of Saint Clement have been here.

We turn around next, and spot a lovely side chapel with frescoes of a saint’s life, in a familiar Renaissance style.  We might have seen this on the walls of Florence, produced in the late 1400s or earlier 1500s, and can immediately start playing Spot the Saint.



But next we make the mistake of looking up, and realize that this massive hanging gilded wood ceiling is entirely wrong, with overflowing ribbons and a dominant central painting of a much more flowy, ornamented, emotional, voluptuous Baroque style than everything else.  The artist who painted those modest Spot the Saint frescoes would never drown a scene in little cherubs and clouds like this, nor would that ceiling ever have been near these Roman columns.



The upper walls too have Baroque decoration. Even an untrained eye is aware something is wrong.  The practiced eye can tell instantly that the ceiling must be late sixteenth century at the very earliest and is more likely seventeenth or eighteenth, three hundred years newer than the Spot the Saint frescoes, which were two hundred years after the mosaics, which are two hundred years after the church was built using stolen Roman materials that were already 1,000 years old.  Freud, exploring the church with us, has vertigo.

Next we look down.



What’s this?  What are these arches in the wall next to the floor?  Why would there be arches there?  It makes no sense.  Even in a building that used secondary supporting arches in the brickwork there would be a reason for it, a window above, a junction, and they would end at floor level.  Our architecture-sense is tingling.

So we go down stairs…



Welcome to the 4th century Roman basilica which the 12th century upper church was built on top of.  Here we see characteristic dense, flat Roman bricks, and late classical curved-corner ceiling structures laying out what used to be an early Christian church.  This church was 800 years old when it was buried to build the larger one above it.  The walls are studded with shards of Roman sculpture, uncovered during the excavations, bits of broken tombs, halves of portrait faces and the middle of an Apollo, and a slab with a Roman pagan funerary inscription on one side which was re-used and has an early Christian inscription on the other side, in much cruder lettering.



And here too there are frescoes.  Legend has that Saint Clement’s remains were carried from the East back to Rome in 869 AD, and this lower church is the place they would have been carried to, as we see now in a fresco depicting the scene, painted  probably shortly thereafter.



Other 9th century frescoes (300 years older than the church above) show the lives of other now-obscure figures who were important in the 800s.  One features a portrait of an early pope (Leo IV), the only known image of this largely-forgotten figure.  Another features Christ freeing Adam from Limbo, and to their left a man in a very Eastern-looking hat, another relic of the importance of this church as a center for Rome’s contact with the east.



Another wonderful fresco, of the life of a popular hermit, features a story in which a pagan demands that his servants carry the saint out of his house, but he goes mad and believes a column is the saint, and flogs and curses his slaves as he forces them to carry the column.  In this fresco we find inscriptions in Latin, but also a phrase coming out of the man’s mouth (a very crude one cursing his slaves as bastards and sons of prostitutes) which is the oldest known inscription in a language identifiable as, not Latin, but Italian.  The Italian language has come to exist between the construction of this church and the construction of the one above.  (The inscription is at the bottom in the white area above the column, hard to make out.)



You can see it better in this reconstruction:



One more fresco is worth visiting: the Madonna of the funny-looking hat.



When archaeologists opened up the under layer, they found a Madonna, probably 8th century, which then decayed before their eyes (horror!) due to exposure to the air.  Underneath they found another Madonna (delight!) wearing this extremely strange hat.  They looked more closely: the Christ child in her lap is not original, but was painted on after the Madonna.  This is not a Madonna at all, it is a portrait, and that hat belongs to none other than the Byzantine Empress Theodora.  Someone painted a portrait of the empress here (who used to be a prostitute, I might add), then someone else redid her as a Madonna, then, a century or two later, someone else painted over that Madonna with another Madonna, now lost, who presumably had a more reasonable hat.

Wandering a bit we find more modern additions, post-excavation.  One of the most beloved 20th century heads of the Vatican Library has been buried here, just below the now-restored old altar of the lower church.  And the tombs of St. Cyril and Methodius are here, creators of the Glagolitic alphabet (ancestor of the Cyrillic), surrounded by plaques and donations and tokens of thanksgiving from many Slavic countries who use that alphabet.  Below is a modern mosaic, thanking them for their work:



And nearby there are stairs down…   Freud needs to stop and breathe into a paper bag.

There are stairs down because this is not the bottom layer, not yet.  The 4th century church was built on top of something else.  We descend another floor and find ourselves in older, pre-Christian Roman brickwork.  We find high vaults, frescoed with simple colorful decoration, as was popular in villas and public buildings.  Hallways and rooms extend off, a large, complex building.  Very complex.  Experts on Roman building layout can tell us this was once a fine Roman villa of the first century AD.  In that period it had sprawling rooms, a courtyard, storerooms… but its foundations aren’t quite the right shape.  If we look at the walls, the layout, it seems that before the villa there was an industrial building, the Mint of the Roman Republic (you heard me, Republic!  Before the Empire!), but it was destroyed by a fire (the Great Fire of 64 AD) and then rebuilt as a Roman villa.  Before it was a church… before it was another church.



Except… there are tunnels.  There are narrow, meandering tunnels twining out from the walls of this villa, leading in strange, unpredictable directions, and far too tight to be proper Roman architecture.  This villa was on a slope, and some of these rooms are dug into the rocky slope so they would have been underground even when it was a residence.  Romans didn’t do that.




















 






























Houston, we have a labyrinth, a genuine, intentional underground labyrinth, and with a bit more digging we find out why.  This was a Mithraeum, a secret cult site of the Mithraic mystery cult, which worshipped the resurrection god Mithras.  Here initiates dwelled in dormitories for their years of apprenticeship, waiting their turn to enter the clandestine curved vault, sprawl on its stone couches, and participate in the cult orgy in which they take hallucinogens, play mind-bending music, and ritually sacrifice a bull and drink its blood in order to achieve resurrection.



We wander still farther, daring the labyrinth, much of which has not yet been excavated, and come upon another room in which we hear the bubbling of a spring.  A natural spring, miraculously bubbling up from nowhere in the depths of Rome.  Very probably a sacred spring.



While Freud sits down to put his head between his legs for a while (on a 1st century AD built-in bench, I should add) we can finally piece this muddle of contradictory and mismatched objects together into a probable chronology:




Once upon a time there was a natural spring bubbling up at this spot in what was then the grassy outskirts of early Rome.  It is reasonable to guess that a modest cult site might have sprung up around this spring, honoring its nymph or some such, as was quite common.  In time, the city expanded and this once-abandoned area became desirable for industrial use as the Republic gained an empire.  The Republic’s Mint was built here, making use of the convenient ice cold water, and likely continuing to honor its associated spirit.  Decades pass, a century, two, Rome expands still further, and chaos raises an Emperor.  After the Great Fire of 64 AD, it becomes convenient to move the Mint out of what is now a desirable central district of the expanding city, so the site is purchased by a wealthy Roman who builds his house here.  Decades pass and the builder, or his son, is converted to the exciting cult of this new god Mithras who promises his followers, not the gray mists of Hades, but resurrection and eternity. Since he is wealthy, he converts his home to the use of the cult, and digs tunnels and creates the underground Mithraeum.  For a generation or two this villa hosts the cult, but then Constantine comes to power and a new cult promising an even more inclusive form of salvation comes into vogue.  The villa, which is now three hundred years old, is buried, a convenient architectural choice since the ground level of the city has risen several times due to regular Tiber floods, so the old house was in a low spot.  A new church is built on top, and serves the Roman Christians of the local community for a few generations.  In 435 Rome is sacked by the Visigoths, but the conquerors are also Christian so the church stands and still serves the neighborhood, though its population is much smaller.  Now the main Emperor moves to the East, and in the 500s, when the church is about 200 years old, someone paints a portrait of the empress on the wall, then a generation later someone else decides a Madonna is more appropriate, and puts a baby in her lap.  Two or three more generations go by and Cyril and Methodius bring the bones of Clement from the East, and they are buried here, a great day for the neighborhood!  Commemorated with more frescoes.



Another century, two, we are well into the Middle Ages, and this old Roman building is old-fashioned and very low since the ground level has risen further.  The local community, and devotees of St. Clement, decide to build a new church.  They loot columns and flooring from other Roman sites, and bury the old church, producing the 12th century structure above, but using the walls of the older one as the foundation, so the arches still show in the walls.  The new church is very plain, but is soon decorated using mosaics provided by Eastern artists who come to visit Clement and Cyril.  After a few generations the Renaissance begins, and we call in a fashionable Florentine-style artist to fresco one chapel.  A few centuries later Pope Clement VIII comes to power and decides to spiff up San Clemente, initiating the internal redecoration which will end with the ornate baroque ceiling.



Oh, and somewhere in there someone slapped on a courtyard on the outside in a Neoclassical style, because it became vogue for buildings to look classical, so we may as well add a faux-classical facade onto this medieval building which we no longer remember has a real classical building hidden underneath.  Not long after the Baroque redecoration is begun, the nineteenth-century interest in archaeology notices those arches in the walls, and starts digging, re-exposing the lower layers.  Devotees of St. Cyril and lovers of history, like the head of the Vatican Library, begin to flock to San Clemente as an example of Rome’s long and layered history, and so it gains more layers in the 20th century as donations and burials are added to it.  Every century from the Republican Roman construction of the Mint to the 20th century tombs is physically present, actually physically represented by an artifact which is still part of this building which has been being built and rebuilt for over 2,000 years.  Not a single century passed in which this spot was not being used and transformed, and every transformation is still here.  And all that time, from the first sacred spring, to the Mithraism, to today’s Irish Dominicans, this spot has been sacred.

This is Freud’s metaphor for the psyche: structure after structure built in the same space, superimposing new functions over the old ones, never really losing anything.

This is Rome.

San Clemente is exceptional in that it has been largely excavated and is accessible, but every single building in Rome is like this, built on medieval foundations which are built on classical ones.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone into a random pizzeria and found a Renaissance fresco, or a medieval beam, or Roman marble.  I’ve gone into a cafe restroom and discovered the back wall was curved because this was built on the foundations of Pompey’s theater (where Caesar was assassinated).  I’ve gone into churches to discover their restrooms used to be part of different churches.  Friends have this experience too.  During my Fulbright year in Italy I had a colleague who was studying Roman altars, half of which you could only get at by ringing the bell of strangers’ apartments and saying: “Hello!  I’m an archaeologist, and according to this list there’s a Roman sacrificial altar here?” to which the standard response is, “Oh, yes, come on in, it’s in the basement next to the washing machine.”  I have another friend who thinks he’s found a lost chapel frescoed by a major Renaissance artist hidden in an elevator shaft.  Another friend once told me of a pizza place with a trap door down to not-yet-tallied catacombs.  I believe it.

As with San Clemente, so for Rome: layers on layers on layers:

If San Clemente’s narrative starts with a sacred spring and the Roman Mint, Rome’s narrative starts with scared people on a hill.



Welcome to the archaic period.  You are a settler.  Your goals are securing enough food to stay alive, and avoiding deadly threats.  The major threats are (A) lions, (B) wolves, (C) wild boar, (D) other humans, who travel in raiding parties, killing and taking.  You are looking for a safe, defensible spot to settle down.  You find one.  The Tiber river, which floods regularly producing a fertile tidal basin rich with crops and game, takes a bend and has a small island in it.  At that same spot there are several extremely steep, rocky hills, almost like mesas, with practically cliff-like faces.  In such a place you can live on top of the hill but hunt, farm, and gather on the fertile stretch below.  And you can even sail up and down the river, making trade and travel easy.  Perfect.



The very first settlement at Rome, in the archaic period, was a small settlement on the Capitoline hill, one of the smallest hills but closest to the river.  (Are you, perchance, from a country?  With a government that meets in a “capitol” building?  If so, your “capitol” is named after the Capitoline hill, because that’s how frikkin’ important this hill is!)  The valleys around are used mainly for farming, but also for burials, and the first tombs are very simple ones, just a hole with dirt, or sometimes a ceramic tile lid.  The buildings in this era are brick decorated with terra cotta.  Eventually the first major temple is built on the Capitoline hill, with a stone foundation but still terra cotta decoration, and is dedicated to Jupiter. Its foundations remain, and you can see them, in situ, in the Capitoline museum which will be built on the same spot a few millenia later.

A more developed form of the settlement. The Temple of Jupiter with
its red roof still stands on the Capitoline hill, while buildings have now
filled the valleys below.

This hill turns out to be a great place to live, and the population thrives.  In time the hill is too crowded.  People spread to the neighboring hills, and start building in the little valley in between.  As the population booms and spreads to cover all seven hills, the space between the first few becomes the desirable downtown, the most important commercial center, where the best shops and markets are.  This is the Forum, and here more temples and law courts and the Senate House are built.

South is up in this image. To the right is the Capitoline, still with the
Temple of Jupiter. In the center you see the deep valley which
becomes the Forum.

In time, defensive walls go up around the area around the hills, to make a greater chunk of land defensible.  In time, the walls are too constrained, so another set goes up around them.



As the population booms and Rome becomes a serious city, serious enough to start thinking about conquering her neighbors and maybe having a war with someone (Carthage anyone?), this area is now the super desirable downtown.  The commercial centers migrate outward to give way to monuments and temples, the Mint is built out on a grassy spot past where there is not yet a Colosseum, and the hills near the Forum become reserved for sacred spaces, state buildings, and the houses of the super rich.  On one, the Palatine hill, a certain Octavian of the Julii builds his house, and when Caesar is assassinated and the first and second triumvirates result in an Emperor, it becomes the imperial palace. (Does your capital contain a palace?  If so it’s named after the Palatine hill, because Augustus was so powerful that all rulers’ grand houses are forever named after his house).

I am now standing on the Capitoline Hill, with the Temple of Jupiter
behind me. I am looking down the Forum, and the Palatine hill, where
the Imperial Palace was, is the high tree-lined crest to the right.

Rome again spills over her walls and builds even farther out. The great fire of 64 AD destroys many districts, but she rebuilds quickly, and what was the Mint is replaced by a villa which soon becomes a Mithraeum.  Rome reaches its imperial heights, a sprawling city of a million souls, and the seven hills that were once defensive are now sparkling pillars of all-marble high-class real estate, and also very tiring to climb.

Here North is up. You can see the island to the left, and the Colosseum.
To the right of the island is a small semi-circular building, which is the
Theater of Marcellus. A bit to the right of that, sticking up above the rest,
you can still see the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill.

With Constantine, Christianity now becomes a centerpiece of Roman life, and of the city’s architecture.  Major Christian sites are built: St. Peter’s, St. John Lateran, St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, etc.  These sites become pilgrimage centers, and economic centers.  They are scattered in far corners all around Rome, but all the sites have something in common: they are in corners.  The major Christian centers of Rome are all on its periphery, not in the center.  There are two reasons for this.

First, and simplest, the center of Rome was, by this time, already full.  Sometimes you could find an old villa that used to be a mint to build a small church on, but the center was full of mid-sized temples, which could be rededicated but not replaced, and huge imperial function spaces and government buildings, plus valuable real estate.  If you want to build a big new temple to a big new God, you need to do it in the not-yet-developed areas around the city’s edge.

You can rent a bike for a day and bike up the Appian Way to visit the tombs of the Roman necropolis.

Second, many of these sites were built on tombs, like St. Peter’s, built across the river in the cheap land no one wanted. Roman law banned burying the dead within the city limits, because disturbing a tomb could bring the wrath of the dead upon the city, but if you build immovable tombs in the middle of your city it makes city redevelopment impossible, so they have to be outside.  This is the origin of the necropolis or “city of the dead”, the cluster of tombs right outside the gates of a Roman city, where the residents bury their dead.  Some major Roman Roads, like the Via Appia, are still lined with rows of tombs stretching along the street for miles out from where the city limits used to be defined.  Thus early Christian martyrs were buried outside the city, and their cult sites developed at the edges of the city.  The land which became the Vatican, for example, was across the river, full of wild beasts and scary Etruscan tribesmen in archaic Rome, then was used for a necropolis in Imperial Rome, had enough empty cheap land to build a big circus (where much of the throwing of Christians to the lions happened, since only in such cheap real estate could you build a stadium big enough to hold the huge audiences who wanted to come see lions eat Christians), and finally Constantine demolished the circus and necropolis to build St. Peter’s to honor St. Peter who had been martyred in that circus and buried in the necropolis in secret 300 years before (when San Clemente was still a Mint).  St. Peter’s, and the other Christian sites, bring new importance to Rome’s outskirts.  We now have a bull’s-eye-shaped city, in which imperial government Rome is the center, and Christian Rome is a ring around the outside, with rings of thriving, happy commercial and residential districts in between.

 

Visigothic damage to the columns of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, now the Church of San Lorenzo.

435 AD: the Visigoths arrive and plunder the city.  Many thousands are killed, and the beautiful center of Rome is ransacked, temples toppled, looted, burned.  In the Forum, the raiders throw chains around the columns of one of my favorite layered Roman buildings, the temple of Antoninus and Faustina.  The Visigoths try to pull the columns down with their chains, and fail, but slice gouges deep into the stone which you can still see today.  To re-check time, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina was built in 141 AD, when San Clemente was a villa with an active Mithraeum in it.  When it received these scars in the Visigothic raid, the Mithraeum had been buried, and the church built on top was just starting to be decorated.  And underneath the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina we have found archaic grave sites which were 1,000 years old when the temple was built 2,000 years ago–the people buried in those graves very likely drank water from the spring that still burbles up under San Clemente.  As for the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, a few centuries after its near-miss, the temple will be rededicated as the major Roman church of San Lorenzo, due to a legend that it was on these temple steps that Saint Lawrence was sentenced to be grilled alive.  And not far from it, the Lapis Niger was excavated which contains a language which has not yet become Latin, much as San Clemente’s frescoes preserve one which is becoming Italian. One language evolved into another, then into a third, but this spot was still being used, just like today.

When buildings get knocked down: reuse, recycle.

Rome was sacked, but afterwards Rome was still there.  The Goths didn’t just take everything and leave – the Ostragoths who followed the Visigoths decided to become the new Roman Emperors and rule Italy.  The surviving Roman patrician families started working for the new Gothic king, but still had a Senate, taxes, processions, traffic cops, and did all the early Medieval equivalents of keeping the trains running on time.  A century later, in the 540s, the Plague of Justinian hits and Rome loses another huge hunk of its population. But it still ticks on, and there is still a Senate, and a people of Rome.

So what was different?  From a city-planning sense, the key is that the population was much smaller.  In a sprawling metropolis designed to hold a million people, we now had maybe twenty thousand.   Thus, as always happens when a city’s population shrinks, real estate was abandoned.  But instead of abandoning the outskirts, people abandoned the middle.  Rome was important mostly as a Christian center now, with the pope, and pilgrims coming to major temples, so they occupied the edges, and that’s where the money was.  Rome becomes a hollow city, a doughnut, with an abandoned center surrounded by a populated ring.  We have reached Medieval Rome.  The city population lives mainly over by the Vatican, in the once empty district across the river, and a few other Christian sites around the edge.  The middle of the city has been abandoned so long that the Tiber has buried the ruins, and people graze sheep in what used to be the Forum.  The old buildings are now little more than quarries, big piles of stone and brick which we can steal from if, for example, we happen to need some nice columns to build a new church on top of this old church of San Clemente.

A Renaissance map of Rome, with the population clustered by the Vatican.

Enter the Renaissance, Petrarch, and humanism.  Petrarch writes of the glory that was Rome, and convinces Italy that, if they can reconstruct that, they can be great again, just as when they conquered the Goths and Germans.  Popes and lords become hungry for the symbols of power which Rome once was.  Petrarch reads his Cicero and his Sallust, and visits the empty center of the city.  This is the Capitoline Hill, he says, where once stood the Temple of Jupiter, and where the Romans crowned their poets and triumphant generals.  Wanting to be great again, the popes volunteer to rebuild the Capitoline, as do the wealthy Roman families, who sincerely believe they are descended from the same Roman Senators who kept the bread and circuses running on time through Visigoths and more.  Michelangelo and Raphael crack their knuckles.  New palaces are built on the Capitoline Hill, neoclassical inventions based on what artists thought ancient authors like Vitruvius were talking about.  In time the population grows, and Rome’s wealth increases thanks to the Church and to the PR campaign of Petrarch and his followers. The empty parts of the inner city are re-colonized, by Cardinals building grand palaces, and poorer people building what they can to live near the Cardinals who give them employment.  But it is all built out of the convenient stone that’s lying around, and on top of convenient foundations that used to be the buildings of Constantinian Rome when she boasted 1,000,000 souls.

Still… so… many… stairs!

Rome grows and refills and grows and refills from the outside in, with the Capitoline as a new center artificially reconstructed by Renaissance ambition.  As the 18th and 19th centuries arrive, the city is full again, but the middle ring, between outside and center, is all the newest stuff, to the historian and tourist the least interesting.  This is why everything that tourists come to see in Rome is a long bus ride from everything else, and why you have to go up and down a million exhausting hills to get anywhere.  Rome has a belt of cultural no-man’s-land in and around it, separating the center from the Christian outskirts, and making it forever inconvenient.

In the 18th and 19th centuries we also start to have archaeology, and dig up the Forum, and begin to protect and reconstruct the ancient monuments, and recognize that this largely abandoned patch of valley behind the Capitoline Hill is, arguably, the most important couple blocks of real estate that has ever existed in the history of the world.  We paint Romantic paintings of it, and sketch what it must have looked like once, and it becomes part of the coming-of-age of every elite young European to make the pilgrimage to it (that Freud so fears!) and see the relics of what once was Rome.  Everywhere else the classical layer is under a pile of palaces and churches and pizzerias, but here in the precious Forum valley, between those hills that sheltered the first Romans, we have lifted the upper layers and exposed Rome’s ancient heart.

HELLO!  I AM MUSSOLINI!  I AM THE NEW ROME!  MY EMPIRE WILL LAST 1000 YEARS!  MY STUFF IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THIS ANCIENT STUFF!  WHEN I AM DONE, NO ONE WILL CARE ABOUT CLASSICAL RELICS ANYMORE!  I AM GOING TO KNOCK DOWN ALL THE ANCIENT STUFF AND BUILD MY STUFF ON TOP!



Specifically Mussolini built a road straight through the middle of the Forum.  Fascism was a strange moment in human history, and Rome’s, and left a lot of scars.  One of them is the Via dei Fori Imperiali, a grand boulevard running along the Forum and around the Capitoline, which Mussolini built so he could have processions, and to declare to the world how sure he was that no one would care about the Roman relics he was paving over.  They would not care about the Temple of Jupiter, or the Renaissance palace on top of it, but about the new monuments he carved into the city’s heart. Those, and he, would be remembered, Caesar and Augustus forgotten.

To quote my favorite column by the old Anime Answerman: “Dear kid, please tell your friend that no one has ever been more wrong in the entire history of time.”

The Fascist road  through the Forum, and the enormous white “wedding cake” monument on the side of the  Capitoline hill.  It was a monument built for the Unification of Italy, later redecorated with a thick icing of fascist decor.  The Temple of Jupiter would be just off-camera to the right.

Unification monument, built into the Capitoline.

Mussolini, like the Visigoths, came but did not entirely go.  One of his remnants is a system of large boulevards scarred into the face of the city, intended for his grand Fascist processions.  Many of these are now difficult to eliminate, since car traffic in Rome is already a special kind of hell (fitting as a subsection of Circle 7 Part 2, I’d say, violence against ourselves and our creations, though it could be 4, hoarding/wasting, or yet another pouch of 8). The worst offender, though, is this road which is currently still covering up about a quarter of the ancient Forum, and also separates a quarter of the remaining Forum from the other half.  It is this road that the new Mayor proposes to eliminate.  The extra Fascist decoration which Mussolini added to the “wedding cake” will stay, the right call in my opinion, since Fascism is now one of Rome’s layers, just as much as the Visigothic scars on the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina.  But lifting the road away will give us the true breadth of the Forum back in a way no pocket diagram can replicate.  The transition will be painful for the FIATs and Vespas that now swarm where long ago the early Romans fought Etruscans and wild boar, but it is also an important validation of the Forum’s status as Rome’s most special spot. Everywhere else is layers.  Everywhere else, when there’s Baroque on top of Renaissance on top of medieval, we leave it there.  The altar stays behind the washing machine, and the need to open yet another catacomb is smaller than the need to have a working pizzeria.  But in the Forum the layers have been lifted away.  This one heart of one moment in Rome’s history, or at least one patch of about seven active centuries, we expose and preserve in honor of the importance that little spot has had as the definition of power, empire, war, and peace for Europe for 2,000 years.  Thus, I hope you will all join me saying thank you to Mayor Marino.

Rome’s marathon. No city planner would put these things in this arrangement, ever! But history did.

The Forum is our relic of Rome’s antiquity, but it is not, for one who knows the city, the true proof that this is a great ancient capital.  That would be clear even if not an inch of Roman marble remained in situ.  The proof of Rome’s antiquity is its layout, the organic development of a wildly inconvenient but rich city plan, with those impassable hills at the center, the Tiber dividing the main city from the across-the-river part which is still the “new” part and still politically distinct, with its own soccer team, even after thousands of years.  Antiquity is the nonsensical distribution of city mini-centers, the secondary hubs around the Vatican and St. John Lateran, the crowded shops clinging to the cliff-like faces of the hills, the Spanish Steps which are there because you have to go up that ridiculous hill and it’s really tall.  Antiquity is not the Colosseum, it’s the fact that the Colosseum is smack inconveniently in the middle of a terrible traffic circle, definitely not where anyone would put a Colosseum on purpose if the modern city planners had a choice.  Antiquity is structure, the presence of layers, unlike young, planned cities where everything is still in a place that makes sense because that city has only had one or two purposes throughout its history.  Rome has had many purposes: shelter, commerce, conquest, post-conquest/plague refugee camp, religious capital, center of cultural rebirth, new capital, finally tourist pilgrimage site.  All those Romes are in a pile, and the chaos that pile creates is the authentic ancient city.  Rome is that cafe bathroom with a curved wall that proves it is where Caesar was assassinated.  In another thousand years I don’t know what will be there, a space-ship docking station or a food cube kiosk, but whatever it is I know it will still have that curved back wall.

If you enjoyed this, see also my historical introduction to Florence.

FOOTNOTE:  For those who care, the context of that Anime Answerman quotation:
Kid writing in: “Dear Anime Answerman, my friend tells me that Inuyasha is a more violent show than Elfen Leid, and I don’t believe them, but I can’t tell them they’re wrong because my Mom won’t let me watch Elfen Leid.”

Answerman: “Dear kid, please tell your friend that no one has ever been more wrong in the entire history of time.”

This article is from: Ex Urbe

SRK - "My mother is from Andhra and lived in Karnataka ..."

How SRK’s Pathan father fell in love with his South Indian mother

  Priya Gupta, TNN | Aug 4, 2013, 12.00 AM IST

Shah Rukh KhanMore Pics

Rohit Shetty's Chennai Express is a romantic comedy about a man (played by Shah Rukh Khan) from one part of India, who lands up in another part with an entirely different culture and language, feeling like an alien in his own country.

In India, where there are 1683 different spoken languages and where every 2000-5000 kms, the language, clothes and food change so dramatically, he finds that love is the only universal language. While we all know Shah Rukh is a Pathan, went to school in Delhi, has a cricket team in Kolkata and lives in Mumbai, we discovered his strong South connection over a conversation. We bring you an excerpt from the same, where Shah Rukh talks about how his Pathan father fell in love with his South Indian mother.

"My mother is from Andhra and lived in Karnataka and used to speak all four South languages. My grandfather was the Karnataka state chief engineer of Mangalore Port and was the first Oxford- educated engineer, who was highly respected. He designed and built the Mangalore Port. My grandfather once took his four daughters, eldest of whom was my mother, to Delhi for a visit. In those days, there were pillars at India Gate. They had an ice-cream in their car after which the car hit one of the pillars and overturned. My father was the cousin brother of General Shah Nawaz, who was the second-in-command to Subhash Chandra Bose (Mangal, Dhillon and Shah Nawaz were amongst the three biggest freedom fighters). My father and he were Pathans from Peshawar and would walk at India Gate in the evenings. Seeing the car overturned, they turned the car over and took my mother and her family to the hospital. My grandfather and my mother's three sisters became alright, but my mother lost her memory and needed matching blood. As luck would have it, my father's blood matched hers and he gave his blood to her. My grandmother (nani) surprisingly was pregnant at that time and thus, to not give her stress on the phone, my grandfather requested my father if he would go to Bangalore to give her the news about her family and my mother having lost her memory (a Pathan will often do that as my mom's family had no help in Delhi).

When he returned back from Bangalore, he would go everyday and look after this lady who had lost her memory and fell in love with her. My mom, coincidentally, was engaged at that time to someone else. He came to Bangalore and wanted to marry my mother. They were both Muslims and my grandparents agreed. I was born and brought up in Mangalore till the age of five. There were no men in my maternal side except my grandfather. My mother was the eldest daughter and my mausies had got married late. I, too, had an older sister, so I became the first boy in the family and my mom gave me for five years to be looked after by my grandmother, so I was brought up in Mangalore by my maternal aunts and my nani. In the fifth year, I think, she missed me a lot and took me back with her. So, I was brought up by women and spoke Kannada when I was small with the servants of the house. My maternal house is still in Toli Chowki, Hyderabad. After doing 72 films, life seems to have come a full circle with Chennai Express."

 This article is from: The Times of India

  

A Historical Sense

 17 August 2013

What Sanskrit has meant to me

BY Aatish Taseer EMAIL AUTHOR(S)

Tagged Under | language | roots | Sanskrit

Fount

(Illustration: VIVEK THAKKAR)

I had come to Sanskrit in search of roots, but I had not expected to have that need met so directly. I had not expected my wish for a ‘historical sense’ to be answered with linguistic roots.

Aged twenty-seven or so, when I first began to study Sanskrit as a private student at Oxford, I knew nothing about the shared origins of Indo-European languages. Not only did I not know the example given in my textbook—that the Sanskrit ãrya, the Avestan airya, from which we have the modern name Iran, and the Gaelic Eire, all the way on the Western rim of the Indo-European belt, were all probably cognate—I don’t even think I knew that word, ‘cognate’. It means ‘born together’: co + natus. And natus from gnascor is cognate with the Sanskrit root jan from where we have janma and the Ancient Greek gennaõ, ‘to beget’. Genesis, too.

And in those early days of learning Sanskrit, the shared genesis of these languages of a common source, spoken somewhere on the Pontic steppe in the third millennium BC, a source which had decayed and of which no direct record remains, absorbed me completely. Well, almost completely. The grammar was spectacularly difficult and, in that first year, it just kept mushrooming—besides three genders, three numbers and eight cases for every noun, there were several classes of verbs, in both an active and middle voice, each with three numbers and three persons, so that in just the present system, with its moods and the imperfect, I was obliged to memorise 72 terminations for a single verb alone.

And still I found time to marvel at how the Sanskrit vid, from where we have vidiã, was related to the Latin videre—to see—from where, in turn, we have such words as video and vision; veda too, of course, for as Calasso writes in Ka, the ancient seers, contrary to common conception, did not hear the Vedas, they saw them! Or that kãla, Time and Death, should be derived from the Sanskrit kãl, ‘to calculate or enumerate’—related to the Latin kalendarium, ‘account book’, the English calendar—imparting, it seemed to me, onto that word the suggestive notion that at the end of all our calculations comes Death. Almost as if k ¯ala did not simply mean Time, but had built into it the idea of its passage, the count of days, as it were.

These thrills were so self-evident that I did not stop to ask what lay behind them. But one day, a few months into my second term, the question was put to me by a sympathetic listener. An old editor at Penguin. I was in London assailing him over dinner, as I now am you, with my joy at having discovered these old threads, when he stopped me with: But what is this excitement? What is the excitement of discovering these old roots?

An oddly meta question, it should be said, oddly self- referential, and worthy of old India. For few ancient cultures were as concerned with the how and why of knowing as ancient India. And what my editor was saying was, you have the desire to know, fine—you have jijñãsa, desiderative of jña: ‘to know’—but what is it made of? What is this hunting about for linguistic roots? What comfort does this knowledge give? And, what, as an extension, can it tell us about our need for roots, more generally? It was that most basic of philosophical enquiries: why do we want to know the things we want to know?

+++

I grew up in late 20th century India, in a deracinated household. I use that word keeping in mind that racine is 'root' in French, and that is what we were: people whose roots had either been severed or could no longer be reached. A cultural and linguistic break had occurred, and between my grandparents’ and my parents’ generation, there lay an imporous layer of English education that prevented both my father in Pakistan, and my mother, in India, from being able to reach their roots. What the brilliant Sri Lankan art critic, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, had seen happening around him already in his time had happened to us (and is, I suppose, happening today all over India).

‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes in The Dance of Shiva, ‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.’

This is an accurate description of what we were. And what it meant for me, personally, as an Indian writer getting started with a writing career in India, was that the literary past of India was closed to me. The Sanskrit commentator, Mallinatha, working in 14th century Andhra, had with a casual ‘iti-Dandin: as Dandin says’, been able to go back seven or eight hundred years into his literary past. I could go back no further than fifty or sixty. The work of writers who had come before me, who had lived and worked in the places where I lived and worked today, was beyond reach. Their ideas of beauty; their feeling for the natural world; their notion of what it meant to be a writer, and what literature was—all this, and much more, were closed to me. And, as I will explain later, this was not simply for linguistic reasons.

I was—and I have TS Eliot in mind as I write this—a writer without a historical sense. Eliot who, in Tradition and the Individual Talent, describes the ‘historical sense’ as: a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense, he feels, compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but that [for him]—I’m paraphrasing now—the whole literature of Europe from Homer onwards to that of his own country has ‘a simultaneous existence’.

My problem was that I had next to nothing in my bones. Nothing but a handful of English novels, some Indian writing in English, and a few verses of Urdu poetry. That was all. And it was too little; it left the bones weak; I had no way to thread the world together.

The place I grew up in was not just culturally denuded, but—and this is to be expected, for we can only value what we have the means to assess—it held its past in contempt. Urdu was given some token respect—though no one really bothered to learn it—but Sanskrit was actively mocked and despised. It was as if the very sound of the language had become debased. People recoiled from names that were too Sanskritic, dismissing them as lower class: ‘Narindar,’ someone might say, ‘what a driver’s name!’ They preferred Armaan and Zhyra and Alaaya. The Sanskrit teacher in most elite schools was a figure of fun. And people took great joy at having come out of a school, such as The Doon School, say, without having learnt any more Sanskrit than a derisive little rhyme about flatulence.

What was even more dismaying was that very few people in this world regarded Sanskrit as a language of literature. In fact, Sanskrit, having fought so hard historically to escape its liturgical function and become a language of literature and statecraft, had in the India I grew up been confined once again to liturgy. And an upper-class lady, on hearing that you were learning Sanskrit, would think nothing of saying: ‘Oh, I hate all that chanting-shanting.’

Sanskrit was déclassé; it was a source of embarrassment; its position in our English-speaking world reminded me of the VS Naipaul story of the boy among the mighty Mayan ruins of Belize. ‘In the shadow of one such ruin,’ Naipaul writes in The Enigma of Arrival, ‘a Mayan boy (whatever his private emotions) giggled when I tried to talk to him about the monument. He giggled and covered his mouth; he seemed to be embarrassed. He was like a person asking to be forgiven for the absurdities of long ago…’

+++

To have Sanskrit in India was to know an equal measure of joy and distress. On the one hand, the language was all around me and things that had once seemed closed and inert came literally to be full of meaning. ‘Narindar’ might have sounded downmarket to the people I had grown up with, but it could no longer be that way for me. Not when I knew that beyond its simple meaning as ‘Lord of Men’, nara—cognate with the Latin nero and the Greek anér—was one of our oldest words for ‘man’. Some might turn their nose up at a name like Aparna, say, preferring a Kaireen or an Alaaya, but not me. Not when it was clear that parna was ‘leaf’, cognate with the English ‘fern’, and aparna, which meant ‘leafless’, was a name Kalid ¯a sa had himself given Paravati: ‘Because she rejected, gracious in speech though she was, even the high level of asceticism that is living only on leaves falling from trees of their own accord, those who know the past call her Aparna, the Leafless Lady.’

My little knowledge of Sanskrit made the walls speak and nothing was the same again. Words and names that had once seemed whole and complete—such as Anuja and Ksitaja—broke into their elements. I saw them for what they were: upapada compounds, which formed the most playful and, at times, playfully profound compounds. Anuja, because it meant ‘born after’, or ‘later’, was a name often given to the youngest son of a family. And ksitaja, which meant ‘born of the earth’—the ja being a contraction of jan, that ancient thread for birthing, begetting and generating—could be applied equally to an insect and a worm as well as the horizon, for they were both earth-born. And dvi|ja, twice born, could mean a Brahmin, for he is born, and then born again when he is initiated into the rites of his caste; it could mean ‘a bird’, for it is born once when it is conceived and then again from an egg; but it could also mean ‘a tooth’, for teeth, it was plain to see, had two lives too.

So, yes: once word and meaning were reunited, a lot that had seemed ordinary, under the influence of the world I grew up in, came literally to acquire new meaning. Nor did the knowledge of these things seem trifling to me, not simply a matter of curiosity, not just pretty baubles. Because the way a culture arrived at its words, the way it endowed sabda with artha, gave you a picture of its values, of its belief system, of the things it held sacred.

Consider, for instance, sarıra or ‘body’. One of its possible derivations is from √srr, which means ‘to break’ or ‘destroy’, so that sarıra is nothing but ‘that which is easily destroyed or dissolved.’ And how could one know that without forming a sense of the culture in which that word emerged and how it regarded the body? The body, which, as any student of John Locke will tell you (1), had so different a significance in other cultures.

I thought it no less interesting to observe the little jumps of meaning a root made as it travelled over the Indo-European belt. Take vertere, ‘to turn’, from the old Latin uortere: we have it in Sanskrit too: vrt, vartate: ‘to turn, turn round, revolve, roll; to be, to live, to exist, to abide and dwell’. It is related to the German werden—‘to become’. From where we have the Old English wyrd—‘fate, destiny’; but also werde: ‘death’. That extra layer of meaning restored, it was impossible ever to think of Shakespeare’s ‘weird sisters’ from Macbeth in the same way again.

What Sanskrit did for me was that it laid bare the deep tissue of language. The experience was akin to being able to see beneath the thick encroachment of slum and shanty, the preserved remains of a grander city, a place of gridded streets and sophisticated sewage systems, of magnificent civic architecture. But to go one step further with the metaphor of the ruined city, it was also like seeing Trajan’s forum as spolia on people’s houses. The language was there, but it was unthought-of, unregarded, hardly visible to the people living among it: there as remains, and little more. There are few places in the world where the past continues into the present as seamlessly as it does in India, and where people are so unaware of it.

Neither is the expectation of such an awareness an imposition of the present on the past. Nor is it an import from elsewhere; not—to use the Academic’s word—etic, but deeply emic to India. For it is safe to say that no ancient culture thought harder about language than India, no culture had better means to assess it. Nothing in old India went unanalysed; no part of speech was just a part of life, no word just slipped into usage, and could not be accounted for. This was the land of grammar and grammarians. And, if today, in that same country, men were without grammar, without means to assess language, it spoke of a decay that could be measured against the standards of India’s own past.

That decay—growing up with as little as I had—was what lay behind my need for roots and the keenness of my excitement at discovering them. It was the excitement, at a time when my cultural life felt thin and fragmentary, of glimpsing an underlying wholeness, a dream of unity, that we human beings never quite seem able to let go of. But there was something else. In India, where history had heaped confusion upon confusion, where everything was shoddy and haphazard and unplanned, the structure of Sanskrit, with its exquisite planning, was proof that it had not always been that way. It was like a little molecule of the Indian genius, intact, and saved in amber, for a country from which the memory of genius had departed.

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1 ‘Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State of Nature hath provided, and left in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.’

This article is taken from: OPEN

 

'Caste system a recent development'

By Express News Service - HYDERABAD | 10th August 2013 11:20 AM





The symbolic admixture of Indian population - ancestral north Indians and ancestral 
south Indians. (Right) Senior principal scientist K Thangaraj in his laboratory at the 
Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad on Friday.

A recent study has revealed that the caste system prevalent in Indian society is the result of a recent population mixture among divergent demographic groups.

Scientists from  CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA have provided evidence that modern-day India is the result of a recent population mixture among divergent demographic groups. It shows evidence that modern-day India is an admixture of various groups.

The findings, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics on Thursday, describe how India transformed itself from a country where mixture between different populations was rampant to one where endogamy, that is, marrying within the local community and a key attribute of the caste system, became the norm.

In 2009 the same team had published a paper in Nature, based on an analysis of 25 different Indian population groups. The paper described that in the pre-historic India, there were only two ancestral populations; Ancestral North Indians (ANI), who were related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians (ASI), who were primarily from the subcontinent.

Further, they have demonstrated that all contemporary populations in India show evidence of a genetic admixture of the above two ancestral (ANI and ASI) groups. However, at that point of time, they could not establish the precise date of admixture.

“We now want to establish the clear evidence as to when in history did such admixture occur. For that we have studied about one million genetic markers in 73 additional Indian populations, predominantly represented by Dravidian and Indo-European speakers” Kumarasamy Thangaraj, a senior scientist at CSIR-CCMB said.

The researchers took advantage of the fact that the genomes of Indian people are a mosaic of chromosomal segments of ANI and ASI ancestry. Originally, when the ANI and ASI populations mixed, these segments would have been extremely long, extending the entire lengths of chromosomes. However, after admixture these segments would have broken up at one or two places per chromosome, per generation, recombining the maternal and paternal genetic material that occurs during the production of egg and sperm.

By measuring the lengths of the chromosome segments of ANI and ASI ancestry in Indian genomes, the authors were thus able to obtain precise estimates of the age of population mixture, which they infer varied about 1,900 to 4,200 years, depending on the population analysed.

“Only a few thousand years ago was the Indian population structure vastly different from today,” says co-senior author David Reich, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

“The caste system has been around for a long time but not forever. “Prior to about 4,000 years ago there was no mixture. After that, widespread mixture affected almost every group in India, even the most isolated tribal groups. And finally, endogamy set in and froze everything in place,’’ he said.

“The fact that every population in India evolved from randomly mixed populations suggests that social classifications like the caste system are not likely to have existed in the same way before the mixture,” said co-senior author Lalji Singh, currently vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi and former director of CCMB. “Thus, the present-day structure of the caste system came into being only relatively recently in Indian history.”

While the findings show that no groups in India are free of such mixture, the researchers did identify a geographic element. “Groups in the north tend to have more recent dates and southern groups have older dates, This is likely because the northern groups have multiple mixtures,” co-first author Priya Moorjani said.

But once established, the caste system became genetically effective, the researchers observed. Mixture across groups became very rare.

“An important consequence of these results is that the high incidence of genetic and population-specific diseases that is characteristic of present-day India is likely to have increased only in the last few thousand years when groups in India started following strict endogamous marriage,” Thangaraj added.

This article is from: The New Indian Express

Beautiful Lies

Blood, sweat and tears on the sets of the Telugu film industry
By Stefano De Luigi | 1 August 2013



The actor Sneha rests on the set of the Telugu film Adivishnu (God Almighty) in Hyderabad in March 2008. She debuted in a Malayalam film and went on to win a Filmfare Award in 2002 for Best Supporting Actress in a Tamil film.


ANDHRA PRADESH WAS NOT ALWAYS home to Telugu movies. When the Telugu film industry began life in the 1920s, starting with Raghupathi Venkaiah Naidu’s Bhisma Pratighna in 1921, and leading up to the first talkie, Bhakta Prahlada, in 1931, most Telugu films were shot in studios in Bombay and Calcutta—the centres of pioneering Indian film industries—and shown in the Tamil-majority Madras Presidency. The first Telugu film studio in Madras, Vel Pictures, was established in the 1930s. Vel Pictures marked the beginning of film production, if not quite at home, then in the metropolis closest to the Telugu-speaking areas of South India.

At the time, many of these districts were still bound by the zamindari system. Wealthy landed families from the area would soon begin to invest in the new industry—Saradhi Studios, Hyderabad’s first film production studio, was built by one such family. In 1948, film production in newly independent India experienced an economic boom, which led to more production houses, studios and cinema halls opening across the country, including the area which became Andhra Pradesh in 1956, when the States Reorganisation Act merged the linguistically similar regions of Telangana—the Telugu speaking parts of what used to be Hyderabad state—and Andhra, the northern districts of the Madras State, into one new state.

All this while, the city of Madras had remained the centre of the Telugu film industry. This had troubled people like Gudavalli Ramabrahmam, filmmaker and early patriot, whose seminal Telugu movies in the 1930s had advocated for social reform and critiqued the zamindari system, which, ironically, had financed some of these very films. Film scholar SV Srinivas writes that Ramabrahmam was concerned that Madras was not an appropriate centre for Telugu cinema. The lack of movie halls in Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh, he complained, was bad enough, but the greater problem was that people in Madras simply did not have the appetite for Telugu cinema. He believed Telugu films were not profitable in Madras; this was linked to the fact that they were void of something distinct, a ‘Teluguness’ that defined the Andhra spirit. They needed their own Telugu film studio, in Andhra Pradesh.

And so, in the fifties, the great shift began with the founding of Saradhi Studios. Over 300 Telugu films were made in that decade. Today, Andhra Pradesh is the second largest producer of films in India. The Hindi film industry released 206 films in 2011—the highest producer that year. The Telugu industry released 192 films the same year, while the Tamil industry released 185.

In 2008, photographer Stefano de Luigi travelled to Hyderabad to photograph the making of Telugu films in two of the industry’s landmark locations: Ramoji Film City and Annapurna Studios. De Luigi’s photographs blur the line between fiction and reality. These images are not just behind-the-scenes film stills. Elements like the silhouetted film unit in the obscure foreground of some of the photographs lend the images a documentary feel, but the dramatic lighting and the imitation of the cinematic frame give them a sense of being staged, or artificial.

Despite the Telugu industry’s shift to Hyderabad, and the advanced resources available there for filming and post-production, some filmmakers still choose to record music for Telugu films in Chennai. Earlier this year, the Andhra Pradesh Film, TV and Theatre Development Corporation announced that they had marked a deadline, 15 August, by which they expected all music directors and producers outside Andhra Pradesh to complete the pieces they are working on for Telugu films. Following this, any recordings produced for a Telugu film are to be carried out within Andhra Pradesh. Filmmakers who comply with this regulation will pay an entertainment tax of only 12 percent, while those who fail to comply will have to pay a tax of 24 percent.

The AP Cine Musicians Association intends to help enforce this rule. RP Patnaik, honorary president of AP Cine Musicians Association, told the Times of India, “We have enough musicians here and there are several talented singers. Our effort from now on will be to see that local musicians and technicians only get to work for Telugu films.” In an effort to capitalise on local talent, Telugu cinema continues its journey from Tamil Nadu to Hyderabad.


Text by Sukruti Anah Staneley

Stefano De Luigi is a contributor to many international magazines including Stern, Paris Match, Le Monde Magazine, Time and The New Yorker. De Luigi has won the World Press Photo award three times.

This article is from: The Caravan, A Journal of Politics & Culture

Carving out Telangana: New states may not mean good economic governance

By Avinash Celestine, ET Bureau | 4 Aug, 2013, 01.07PM IST

Quite apart from the political rationale, the economic case for smaller states seems clear-cut. Carving out Telangana from Andhra Pradesh, so the argument goes, can facilitate better economic governance.



New states may not necessarily mean fiscal independence. 
States are now more dependent on the Centre than ever 
before for resources

A smaller and more compact state will ease administration and improve the delivery of services. With reduced ethnic and regional tensions (such as those in Telangana), bureaucrats and politicians have more bandwidth to focus on growth and governance.

But ironically even as, in political and administrative terms, India has become more decentralised in recent decades with the creation of new states, all states have become more dependent on the Centre for funds. A big chunk of such funds is collected by the Centre and transferred to states under the provisions of the Constitution.

But a significant amount of funds are also transferred by the central government outside state budgets, directly to district-level institutions, under various schemes. "States have become increasingly dependent on the central government for funds," says DK Srivastava of the Madras School of Economics.

CENTRAL DOLE

Under the Constitution, states and the central government have the right to collect different types of taxes. The central government collects corporate and income taxes, but is required to share a part of such tax revenues with the states (currently slightly less than a third).

In addition to this, the central government transfers funds to states to support statelevel development programmes and schemes. And finally, the central government also transfers funds to the state government to enable it to implement specific plans and schemes developed by it.

Currently, the total volume of all such funds transferred by the Centre to the states comprises 74% of the revenue collected by all states put together, on their own. This is at its highest level since at least 1991.

During the 1990s, the states went through a serious fiscal crisis. In recent years, state finances have improved, but even this has been at the behest of the Centre. An annual Reserve Bank of India review of the finances of states pointed out that the improvement of state revenues in what it calls the 'consolidation phase' (2004-08, when state finances improved), "was largely attributable to an increase in central transfers, although the states' own revenues also increased over the same period".

And after the financial crisis of 2008, states' own revenues fell, but their budgets were propped up by an increased volume of central transfers.

"Over the past 10 years, the buoyancy [the extent to which tax revenues rise as economic growth improves] rose faster for the taxes collected by the central government than those collected by states," points out Srivastava. States vary widely in the extent to which they are dependent on central funds to prop up their budgets. States like Andhra Pradesh for instance are better off with central funds accounting for less than half of taxes or other revenues they themselves have mobilised.

At the other extreme is a state like Bihar, where central funds to the state are more than 2.5 times the size of taxes that the Bihar government itself manages to raise. Effectively, the state government, large and politically important that it is, is hugely dependent on central government funds for its survival.

Bihar ironically, is even worse off than Jharkhand, its 'daughter' state where central transfers are 1.5 times the size of the funds it is able to raise on its own. And Madhya Pradesh, where central transfers account for 96% of the resources it is able to raise on its own, is worse than its 'daughter' state, Chhattisgarh, where central transfers account for 80% of its own revenues.

Little wonder then, that states like Bihar and Odisha have demanded what is called special category status. Special category states, including those in the Northeast but also J&K, Himachal and Uttarakhand, are states which are entitled to preferential treatment in the distribution of central funds because of what are seen as inherent disadvantages that they have - difficult terrain, low population density, or because they have strategic importance and have international borders with unfriendly neighbours.

"Special category states are especially highly dependent on central transfers," says Srivastava.

TYPES OF TRANSFERS

While the size of central transfers to states may loom large in state budgets, not all such transfers can or should be seen as handouts or favours. The transfers under the Constitution for instance are resources that the states are entitled to, based on the level of their development and their size and are determined according to a formula which leaves the central government with little discretion on how much to give or who to give it to.

Quite apart from this, the Planning Commission too transfers funds to states to help them implement schemes or projects of their own. Together, these account for the bulk of such transfers. The problem here is, of course, the fact that richer states complain that they get less under the formula than poorer states despite the fact that the central government raises the bulk of its taxes and resources from them.

In recent years however, the biggest bone of contention has been socalled centrally sponsored schemes (CSS) like MNREGA or the Indira Awas Yojana. While other forms of transfers and assistance are not tied to specific schemes or sectors, leaving the states free to spend on the areas or sectors it thinks are important, funds under such centrally sponsored schemes must be spent only on those schemes, developed at the Centre, with the state only being the implementing body.

Under these schemes, funds are transferred from the Centre to the states, but states have little discretion on what to spend them on. They are essentially implementing agencies. At 10% of the overall funds (in net terms) offered to states by the Centre in 2012-13, the amount remains dwarfed by the large transfers under the Constitution.

But this is only half the story. A large chunk of central spending in states completely bypasses state government budgets altogether, and is sent directly to district-level implementing agencies to be spent. Huge schemes like the rural employment guarantee scheme and the Indira Awas Yojana fall into this category. And while centrally sponsored schemes transferred to state governments comprised Rs 55,200 crore in 2012-13 (budget estimates), funds transferred by the Centre directly to the district level, and leaving state governments out of the picture altogether, comprised around Rs 1,33,500 crore, more than double that amount.

"The number of CSS proliferated by including considerable areas of activity performed by the states. The important reasons for increased involvement of Centre on state subjects are: inability of the states to provide adequate resources for socially relevant programmes, lack of a clear strategy to implement social sector programme by the states and inadequate commitment of resources on priority programmes," says the RBI review of state finances.

The Comptroller and Auditor General routinely raises questions over the practice of the central government bypassing state budgets. In its audit report on the state finances of Tamil Nadu 2011-12, for instance, the CAG stated that, "...direct transfer of funds from government of India to state implementing agencies ran the risk of improper utilisation of funds by these agencies," pointing out that monitoring the funds of such agencies was "difficult".

In Tamil Nadu's case, funds transferred directly to state agencies were Rs 7,608 crore in 2011-12. Compared to that, grants from the central government to the state government were around Rs 7,286 crore.

In a submission made to the 13th Finance Commission, which decides what proportion of central taxes should be shared with states, the Ministry of Panchayati Raj pointed out the strange anomalies created by such a system. "The ministry also noted the relative incongruity of [panchayats] having substantial funds to implement these CSS on the one hand, and little by way of 'discretionary' funds for adequately meeting their administrative costs, performing their core functions, and leveraging the CSS releases to meet local needs on the other," the commission noted.

LESSER AUTONOMY?

"Spending in many activities, which are ostensibly under the ambit of the state, has been taken over by the Centre," points out NR Bhanumurthy, professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. He points to areas such as health, education and roads, where a major amount of funding now comes from the central government. "There are questions being raised over whether such spending and interventions weaken the federal set up."

And as he points out, with the Goods and Services Tax likely to become a reality over the next few years, state's autonomy in the areas of taxation will be further reduced. This is something that the RBI report points out as well. "The proposed shift to the Goods and Services Tax [GST] regime would reduce the states' flexibility in determining the rates for taxes that will get subsumed in the GST. Raising tax revenues then would depend more on improving efficiency and compliance by tightening vigilance and increasing the use of information technology for tax collections."

In recent years, clashes between the Centre and states over a range of issues, from terrorism — witness the controversy over the then home minister P Chidambaram's move to set up the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) — to taxation, have been widespread. Expect such fights to continue in future. And quite possibly, get worse.

Excerpt from: The Economic Times

శ్రీ కౌముది ఆగస్ట్ 2013

Telangana at the Cost of India

UPA's decision to divide Andhra Pradesh is based on narrow political calculations for 2014 Lok Sabha polls and risks prolonged agitations in other states

Amarnath K. Menon and Sandeep Unnithan  August 2, 2013 | UPDATED 10:34 IST


Kalavakuntala Chandrasekhara Rao, 59, the man who fought a bitter 12-year political struggle for a separate Telangana state, was not sure that his battle was about to end. On July 30, KCR, as the founder president of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) is popularly known, remained closeted in his Telangana Bhavan office for four hours. The MP from Mahbubnagar whose 11-day fast unto death in 2009 forced the UPA to first announce statehood, was bewildered by the swift political endgame in the Capital that created the new state within hours. First UPA endorsed the statehood decision, then, a few hours later, the Congress Working Committee (SWS) green-lighted it. India's fourth largest state would jointly share its capital, Hyderabad, with Andhra Pradesh. KCR stepped out of his office to offer a guarded reaction only after Digvijaya Singh, Congress general secretary managing Andhra Pradesh affairs, announced the formation of India's 29th state.

"We have to be cautious until Parliament enacts an appropriate legislation for the state," said KCR, not allowing himself to be overwhelmed by the clouds of pink and crowds of supporters who had broken into riotous celebration. "It's like a dream come true," Ponnam Prabhakar, Congress MP from Karimnagar, said in New Delhi. "I never thought I would see it in my lifetime." Clearly, it was not just trs that was taken by surprise.












Here's what India's 29th state will mean for players in the fray in the next Lok Sabha elections.

"Dividing Andhra Pradesh is for the welfare of the people and not for any political expediency," Digvijaya Singh said on July 30. But the Congress's Telangana plan is simple. Andhra Pradesh voted in the two largest blocks of Congress MPs, 29 in 2004 and 33 in 2009. It laid the foundations for UPA 1 and UPA 2. Faced with a near-total rout in 2014, the party, in an alliance with TRS, hopes to sweep Telangana's 17 Lok Sabha seats. The party hopes to corral N. Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy's ysr Congress in coastal Andhra Pradesh where it hopes to gain at least five Lok Sabha seats. Neither YSR Congress nor TDP has been able to consolidate its position in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema regions which have a total of 25 Lok Sabha and 175 Assembly seats.

Consequence of statehood

The Srikrishna Commission report of 2011, appointed by UPA to suggest a way out of the Telangana imbroglio, recommended a separate state. But with a caveat. Because, "while creation of Telangana would satisfy a large majority of people from the region," the report said, "it would also throw up several serious problems." The Congress decision, driven by pure political survival instinct, came without studying the larger economic and political costs. It ignored home ministry assessments warning of a revival of Naxalism in the new state, the billions of rupees coastal Andhra Pradesh would spend on a new state capital when it moves out of Hyderabad, and recent Intelligence Bureau (IB) assessments warning of public outrage opposing division.


















A July 24 report by the home ministry's internal division warns of at least 21 more demands for new states.

But the biggest fear, a home ministry report of July 24 warns, is of "unrest and prolonged agitations" in other states including Uttar Pradesh, Assam, West Bengal and Maharashtra, where people have been demanding new states. Even before CWC took its final call, Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) called for a 72-hour shutdown in Darjeeling in support of Gorkhaland. In Maharashtra, BJP and Shiv Sena braced themselves to raise the issue of a separate Vidarbha. In Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati upped the ante for carving four states out of Uttar Pradesh.

Andhra Pradesh was the first state created on a linguistic basis when the Telugu-speaking areas of erstwhile Hyderabad state were merged with Andhra state in 1956. Experts predict Telangana could spawn secessionist trends. "This thoughtless decision may lead to a demand for a separate Telugu nation, the 17th largest in the world," says political commentator C. Narasimha Rao.

Rise in militancy











The Ministry of Home Affairs is the nodal agency for the creation of the new state, a process that is likely to take 
approximately between four and six months.

The home ministry report says Telangana could become a bastion for India's gravest internal security threat, the Maoists. The new state, "could become an easy target, considering its proximity to the worst-affected regions of Chhattisgarh's Bastar district and Maharashtra's Gadchiroli district", it notes. Twelve of the 15 members of the Maoists' central committee hail from the new state. The Maoists were driven out of the state by the Andhra Pradesh Police a decade ago. The report predicts Maoists could infiltrate again, taking advantage of the six months it will take to create Telangana.

The Maoist bastion threat is also a scenario advanced by Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy who is opposed to the division. The state police, however, say that in the Telangana districts, the few incidents have been restricted to five sub-divisions in Khammam and Warangal. "Andhra Pradesh is a role model for the rest of the country in fighting Maoists with an exclusive commando force and intelligence-gathering mechanism," explains Andhra Pradesh dgp V. Dinesh Reddy.

There are apprehensions that the demographic changes could result in communal flare-ups. All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) is opposed to the division. "Creating Telangana is going to help only bjp in the long run," says AIMIM president and Hyderabad Lok Sabha MP Asaduddin Owaisi. The party, which has seven MLAs, is wary of its diminishing administrative clout in Hyderabad.

Colossal expense

Creation of new states means the Centre has to provide funds to develop infrastructure. Chhattisgarh is spending Rs.20,000 crore to develop its new state capital, Naya Raipur, besides other administration-related costs. A new capital for Andhra will cost much more unless both states agree to function from Hyderabad. Other investments will include sharing of water and natural resources. This was the reason why Congress leaders such as Union Science and Technology Minister S. Jaipal Reddy endorsed the now-aborted idea of including Kurnool and Anantapur districts in the new state. Telangana would then have the Srisailam dam and reservoir on the Krishna river, and the 1,670 mw hydel station. Unmindful of the consequences, Congress is working on a plan that will please its dynasts. Digvijaya Singh has set a 215-day timeline to complete the formation of the state. The process for creating a separate state will be initiated on August 20-Rajiv Gandhi's birthday-and given a concrete shape by December 9-Sonia Gandhi's birthday.

The decision to split Andhra has horrified the united Andhra 'Seemandhra' supporters within Andhra Pradesh. P.V. Satish Kumar, MLA from East Godavari district, sent his resignation to the Assembly speaker within hours of the Telangana decision. Bandhs were called in coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema. Seemandhra leaders say they are worried about what will happen to them in Hyderabad especially when the state eventually becomes the capital of Telangana.

Several Congress leaders feel betrayed by the bifurcation. "We have paid a terrible price for trusting one family," says another Seemandhra MLA. There are indications that their discontent could spiral into a landslide of resignations to scuttle the resolution on the new state in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly. Home ministry officials say they have readied a Plan B. In case of en-masse resignations, the home ministry will dismiss Kiran Kumar Reddy's government and impose President's Rule. Nothing, it seems, can now come in the way of statehood for Telangana.

with Bhavna Vij-Aurora

Excerpt from: India Today

Gandhi is an old fool and his character is doubtful, Nizam said

Josy Joseph, TNN | Aug 1, 2013, 11.16 PM IST

NEW DELHI: A set of newly declassified files regarding the liberation of Hyderabad in 1948 provides interesting insights into the recent history of Andhra Pradesh, its unification, the end of Nizam's rule and the faultlines that have contributed further to the creation of Telangana.

Several secret coded telegrams sent by the Nizam of Hyderabad over the tense months of 1947-48, after he had declared his intention not to join India and Pakistan, also provide insights into his bitterness and his plan to hire a European prime minister for Hyderabad. The standoff finally ended after India launched Operation Polo to liberate Hyderabad in September, 1948.

"Gandhi has started his fast with the intention of unifying the Muslims but he is an old fool and his character is doubtful," the Nizam says in one of his several telegrams to his legal advisor Sir Walter Monckton, who played a key role in the Nizam's negotiations with Lord Mountbatten after Hyderabad declared its intention to remain independent.

In another telegram, the Nizam tells Monckton to find a European prime minister for Hyderabad, so as to further firm up his declared independence, which was being opposed by the communists, the Congress and the Indian state. "Try for dominion status for Hyderabad within the Commonwealth. Try to get a European prime minister," according to the Nizam's telegram to Monckton.

According to a note of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), these telegrams were sent by the Nizam to Monckton "in code," after the arrival of K M Munshi as India's agent general in Hyderabad and Mahatma Gandhi's fast.

The telegrams show that the Nizam was heavily dependent on Monckton to advice him through the crisis. "Come early, the condition in the state is worsening day by day. India government is trying to strangle Hyderabad and is giving all kinds of difficulties. She is encouraging border incidents. These rascals are unnecessarily creating trouble regarding the Rs 20 crore loan to Pakistan. There was nothing wrong in transferring the Indian securities into Pakistan securities. Hyderabad is prepared for the worst. Give also this information to the authorities in England. Come early," the Nizam wires Monckton.

In another telegram, the Nizam tells his advisor that Mountbatten is likely to come to Hyderabad and force it to accede to the Indian Union. "If he comes here with that intention, the condition here will worsen as the people would not like that. I have already declared my independence and I am not ready to rescind from that position and accede, whatever may happen. My people are also with me," the Nizam says. And then again appeals to Monckton to come early because Mountbatten was expected to visit in February, 1948.

The Nizam also reveals in one of his telegrams that the 'Stand Still Agreement' signed on November 29, 1947 with India was only to "mark time".

Also among the declassified documents are many other intelligence reports that bring out the deep suspicion that Indian agencies had of British officers of the Indian Army. One assessment says they are mostly "pro-Muslim and are creating as much trouble as they can before they quit India next year", and they must be sent back at the earliest.

This particular report — put up by V P Menon for the perusal of Mountbatten — also talks of the need to remove the British brigadier posted in Secunderabad. Among the intelligence reports are also several inputs about the irregular fighters, communists, movement of foreign journalists and others.

As tensions further mounted, in August 1948, the agent general was told in a detailed secret report that "aerial gun running is still going on between Karachi and Hyderabad. The planes are mostly landing at Warangal and occasionally at Bidar. Incidents have been reported of two and even three planes arriving the same day. It is through these planes that emissaries of Hyderabad travel to Pakistan and the places abroad".
On September 18, 1948, Major General Syed Ahmed El Edroos, the commander-in-chief of the Hyderabad State Forces, surrendered his army to Indian troops under Major General J N Choudhuri, who later became the Army chief. Hyderabad became an independent state between 1948 and 1956, and then it was split up among Andhra Pradesh, Bombay — later divided into Gujarat and Maharashtra — and Karnataka.

Excerpt from: The Times of India