R Nagaswamy Archaeologist, Historian and Public Intellectual A Tribute

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

The death of Dr R Nagaswamy, the doyen of Tamil Archaeologists and Epigraphists is a great loss to the world of medieval studies in general and Tamil History in particular. The importance of Nagaswamy lay in his fearless and at times extremely sophisticated exposure of the identity politics driven scholarship that clogs the academic space in  the region today. Partly the identity politics in the Tamil cultural sphere revolves around the contentious issues of Language Culture and  Heritage. Nagaswamy was the only scholar who could effectively challenge the fake racial narrative of Dravidianism because he was well versed both in Tamil and Sanskrit. Perhaps he was the last Historian who could read the inscriptions of Rajaraja I in the Rajarajesvara Temple straight off the wall and he could as easily read the Sanskrit inscriptions on the walls of the Chidambaram Temple. This linguistic facility to read the languages and scripts of Tamil Nadu made him reject the pieties of the antiquity of the Tamil language.

Nagaswamy was not convinced that the Harappan Script was the ancestor of the Tamil script and though a prominent IAS Officer advanced the claim of reading several pictographs on the Harappan seals as variants of Tamil phonemes, Nagaswamy took the politically dangerous road of opposing the bogus identity politics driven research which was expedient. This did not mean that he did not take the early Tamil classics seriously. It is worth recalling that the marine exploration off the coast of Nagapattinam of the ancient site of Puhar was launched when he was the Director of the Department of Archaeology. Unlike the situation today, fifty years backs Archaeology was still a rational discipline which was practiced within reason and respected the protocols of research and verification. 

Nagaswmay founded the journal Damilica which had acquired a world wide reputation. I remember reading this journal which was printed on map litho paper when I was pursuing my PhD at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Inscriptions which were of particular importance were edited and published. And sometimes, as in the case of the famous Jambai Brahmi Inscription differing interpretations were possible. Nagaswmay discovered and published the Puzhankuruchi Inscription and that was a landmark discovery. He started a series entitled Tamil Mavattu Kalvettukal, Tamil District Inscriptions and more than eight districts were fully covered in this new series begun by Nagaswamy. And after he left the office of Director State Department of Archaeology this series like Damilica fell by the wayside. Nagaswamy was keen to see that the McKenzie  Manuscripts were made available to the world of scholarship and he encouraged his Department to edit the volumes and after the study of Taylor in the late nineteenth century we have Nagaswamy's contribution. To say the he enriched the world of scholarship would not be an understatement.

Nagawamy spent the decades after he retired from service exploring the Saiva Agamas. Generally neglected as historical sources, Nagaswamy identified the Maukuta Agama as the possible inspiration for the great temple of Rajaraja I at Tanjavur. Unfortunately most scholars in Tamil Nadu today can neither read Tamil or Sanskrit and consequently the quality of scholarship has declined sharply. 

Towards the end of his life, Nagaswamy took upon himself the onerous task of exposing the Sanskrit basis of Tamil literary creations. Though historians like George Hart and David Shulman have argued that Tamil is deeply indebted to Sanskrit and vice versa, the pulavars generally prefer to see an autonomous origin of the Tamil Language and Script. In their imagination the Indus Valley looms large.

Nagaswamy was a true bhakta and wanted to see the wealth of Temples preserved and protected. The Tiruchendur Temple Incident happened during his time and I am not aware of what his stand was. And given the circumstances it would have been dangerous for him. However, Nagaswamy played an important role in helping India recover the Sriviliputtur Bronzes from UK and the repatriation was on the basis of his expert testimony given in the London Court. More importantly, the judgement has set a precedent based on which India under Prime MInister Narendar Modi has successfully repatriated more than 250 pieces of stolen art.

Nagaswamy was a true scholar and the world of medieval history stands impoverished with his death.

Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America: A Review

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America

John McWhorter

Today USA is fast becoming an Orwellian dystopia where Mothers are called Birthing Persons and men win women's races by "identifying" as women. A College Women's  Swimming team faced this problem and the Twitter mob came out in strength yelling "Transphobic Bigots" which quickly sent the challengers scurrying for cover. Welcome to the Brave New World of Woke America. 

John McWhorter is a Professor of Linguistics teaching in an Ivy League University and is Black. Both these details are important as the book under discussion will be trashed by white liberals had it been written by a white person, worse he would have been called racist bigot by a lynch mob of raving wokes. The author prefers to call the new leaders of the emerging socio-political ideology in USA as Elect not woke as the term irritates them no end. Let it be remembered that the term woke first circulated in black communities as a catch all term for a person with a perceived heightened sense of racial justice, a social justice warrior in short. 

Is Wokeism a New Religion. The author argues that the new ideology has all the markings of a new religion or cult. Its Bible White Fragility and its priests a whole army of well educated "corporate" "wall street" millennials who imagine that their earrings in six figure salary is the outcome of "white privilege" and made to atone for their success by supporting the Black Lives Matter and other organizations that are in the forefront of this socio-political movement. Arguing that this movement is a religion with the Elect as the a Synod whose members are blessed with the great wisdom of sniffing out systemic racism wherever that ugly beast resides. American Universities, particularly the soft disciplines like the Social Sciences have already embraced the woke ideology without much critical discussion.  There can be no discussion as the Commissars of the New Left have already decreed that anyone questioning their statements or opinions is a racist and will face the consequences of his/her actions in the digital public square when the Twitter mob will be incited to "tar and feather" the offending person. 

The New cult of Wokeism has created a new crime Thought Crime. We had heard of Thought Crimes only in the dystopia of Orwell's 1984. No. Thought crimes are here and have consequences. The author has discussed a few instances in which journalists and writers, even teachers in schools and universities have faced serious punishment for expressing opinions or dissent against the ruling orthodoxy of the New Left. One unfortunate soul tweeted that All Lives Matter and that was enough to bring the enlightened ones out in all their fiendish hunger. The tweet wad disrespectful to George Floyd was the alleged reason for the collective howl of protest. And like in Orwell's 1984, a new language is slowly being fashioned to condition thought and police the boundaries of the thinkable. In the social practice of Wokeism, accusation is followed by condemnation and cancellation and no one wants to face that. USA is going through a nightmare of guilt and there is no hope of redemption in the Church of Wokedom, as the author repeatedly points. Being white marks you out for eternal damnation. The sins of Slavery rest on the shoulders of the whites as they have inherited country built on "systemic racism". 

The over politicisation of American society along racial lines is already eroding civil and constitutional liberties and rights. Though the writer does not discuss it, I would like to point out that the recent threat of the Department of Justice to investigate parents who show dissent about Critical Race Theory will be investigated as "domestic terrorists" under the Patriots Act. A chilling threat but one that the corporate media is quite comfortable with. During the Nazi era in Germany, neighbours were encouraged to spy on each other and we have the American Establishment openly aligning itself with those who want to use state apparatus to stamp down parental concern for a good education for their children.

Critical Race Theory as a pedagogic tool is unfit for a school curriculum as it is based on fake history and false science. Project 1619 which wants to project USA as being tainted by slavery from the very inception tries to argue that the American War of Independence was fought to preserve Slavery. Nothing is further form the truth. As a Historian, I can concede that by winning the war a new lease of life was given to Slavery but the purpose was not to protect the peculiar institution. As the author points out, it is futile to condemn Washington and Jefferson today as "slaveholders" as that was the moral standard of the day. This argument is not quite correct. There were quite a few eighteenth century philosophers and I can name Edmund Burke who had condemned the Atlantic Slave Trade. So the explanation for the institutionalization of Slavery has to be sought in the colonies themselves. 

This work is a sensible critique of a growing movement and it seems that the push back against woke thought has begun.

Sir Aurel Stein and the Treasures of the Silk Road The Dunhuang Cave and its Paintings PART II

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Sir Aurel Stein and the Treasures of the Silk Road: The Dunhuang Caves

Part II

The Dunhuang Caves excavated by Sir Aurel Stein was the site of an ancient Buddhist Monastery dating back to the Tang Period which housed a secret ante chamber containing a wealth of manuscripts, silk scrolls, paintings and books. It is estimated that atleast 50,000 manuscripts and other culturally significant artefacts were removed from the cave by Aurel Stein and the British Museum together with the Victoria and Albert Museum contain these treasures. 

We have illustrated a typical painting here. The Dunhuang Cave itself was a spectacular creation which reminded Stein of the Ajanta Caves and he saw a remarkable similarity in the style employed in the paintings found in these tow places. The caves located at the very edge of the Gobi desert were patronized by the merchants who traded with the societies that lived along the oases and the Silk Road. Rich deposits of coins found amidst the ruins scattered all along the desert are testimonies to the commercial artery  that linked the Orient with the West. Dunhuang itself was at the intersection of the road from Tibet and throughout the Tang dynasty a strong military presence was maintained here. The presence of letters written in Tibetan discovered in a watch tower, a letter from a Tibetan soldier complaining about the harsh conditions in which the garrison lived, showed that for some time the Tibetans had ousted the Chinese. 

Throughout his explorations both in Kashgar and Khotan Stein found evidence of a rich culture which demonstrated the hold India exercised on the imagination of the ancient world. Aurel Stein coined the term Serndia to characterize the culture, Indian in origin and expressed in Greek and Chinese idiom. In fact in his monumental work on his Second Expedition he has traced this culture to the Kushanas, who though of Central Asian origin, adopted Indian culture and played an important role in transmitting it along the Silk Road to Central Asia and beyond.  Stein collected documents written on birch bark and paper making his collection the earliest known use of rag paper in history. The scripts derived from Ashokan Brahmi or Kharoshti are of course vital clues to the positive impact India has had on the region. 

Sir Aural Stein was the first archaeologist to cross the Taklimakan Desert and explore the Tarim Basin. Miran was a site in which Stein collected hundreds of Tibetan documents along with wooden tablets on which writing was present. From the large number of documents recovered he concluded that an entire archive located ion one of the higher floors had decayed and its collection of documents fell below, and the dry arid atmosphere of the desert had preserved them for over 2000 years. Serindia then covered the entire region from Kashgar across the Hindu Kush to the Tarim Basin.

The Dunhuang site was littered with the remains of statues of Buddha and Stein identified the Rawak Stupa as one of the oldest structures of the region which bore distinct resemblance to its Indian counterparts in Sarnath and Sanchi. 

We have illustrated one of the many manuscripts taken by Sir Aurel Stein.  The rich harvest of manuscripts from the region was not without its share of academic controversy. Knowing that manuscripts were in great demand, some enterprising Uighurs/Turks began forging books which they passed off as ancient  manuscripts. An eminent Orientalist in Calcutta was a victim of this hoax and it fell upon the shoulders of Aurel Stein to expose it.

The exquisite silk scrolls found by Stein during the course of his Second and Third expeditions are now in United Kingdom. The region from which these exquisite pieces of art came from falls under the political  jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China. Turkestan itself was hotly contested through much of its history between Russia, China and Tibet. For nearly seven hundred years the Turks ruled over the region putting an end to the Buddhist and 

other religions lie Christianity that once flourished here. Hence given the complex history of the region a simplistic national origin argument to justify a Chinese claim over the treasures of Central Asia cannot be realistically entertained. India has a far more tangible claim over the treasures as they were inspired by Indian cultural interactions and influence.  Aurel Stein himself recognized the extent of Indian cultural influence in this region when he coined the term, SerIndia.

Over the century and a quarter since Stein's expeditions to Central Asia a huge controversy has erupted over his legacy. That the expeditions to Central Asia were part of the Great Game is clear from the fact that throughout his travels he mapped surveyed and made detailed topographical and geographically based maps and in this task he was ably assisted by Ram Singh a surveyor sent by the Survey of India to assist him. The Chinese authorities were quite aware of what Sir Aurel Stein was doing but given the turbulent nature of China after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, there was little China could do. And with the Russians breathing down heavily with the construction of the trans Caspian Railway, the Chinese felt that they had to keep the English in good humour and that was the same attitude that they displayed in Lhasa in 1911 when the Traety was signed with Sir Francis Younghusband. 

Basil Davidson in his book Turkestan Alive has recollected the numerous instances during his travels in the region when he heard Aurel Stein denounced as a "bandit" "thief" "vandal". True Sir Aurel Stein took possession of vast culturally significant treasure. However in hind sight we can safely say that but for his intervention much of the heritage may have been detroyed in the endemic civil wars that too palce during the Nationalist Period and during the Cultural Revolution. And in anycasr Turkestan is predominantly Muslim and so the Buddhist heritage has become alien to the region.

Aurel Stein is still remembered as a explorer and an intrepid adventurer following the footsteps of Alexander, a seventh century Buddhist monk and Marco Polo.

Sir Aurel Stein and the Treasures of the Silk Road: Can Communist China reclaim the Buddhist Artefacts Manuscripts and Scrolls

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Sir Aurel Stein and the Great Game 

Part I

Sir Aurel Stein (1862 - 1943) is  not a name that will ring too many bells today. But in his day he was regarded as an explorer extraordinaire and an archaeologist in a league all by himself. His prodigious output in terms of scholarly studies like Serindia, Ancient Khotan, Ruins of Desert Cathay and his On the Tracks of Alexander were all regarded as classics in his day. Though a citizen of Hungary, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which was ranged against Britain during World War I, Aural Stein rose to become one of the most respected figures of the imperial British establishment both in India and England. Like Mortimer Durand and Percy Sykes, Aurel Stein too was a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, a decoration specially created to honor those who rendered service to the Empire. What exactly did that service consist of?

The late nineteenth century witnessed the rivalry between the Russian Empire and the British Empire, a rivalry in which India was sucked in due to its proximity to Central Asia and Afghanistan in which Russia had begun to take active interest. The main theatre of this rivalry was actually the Straits of Bosporusa and the Straits of Dardanelles both in Ottoman territory. The Crimean War was fought only to preserve the Ottoman Empire as none of the other European powers could agree about what its territorial gains would be should the Ottoman Empire be partitioned. Indeed all three major European powers had conflicting and divergent interests and so the status quo was the only solution. On the Asian frontier the situation  was quite complicated, a bundle of political and military skirmishes, high and low level intrigue, arming tribal groups of whom the Afriddis are the most notorious, using nomadic peasants as information suppliers, to which Arthur Connoly  in an inspired moment called the Great Game. And Great Game it was as both Russia and India under the Raj believed that the Chinese part of Turkestan the Sinkiang of today, the Uighur territory, was open for political and economic hegemony. The British had supported a warlord, Yakub Beg, for a few years towards the close of the nineteenth century, but the Russians were not far behind.

The Great Game had one unexpected participant: Aurel Stein. He was born of Jewish parents but given the anti s Semitism of the Austro Hungarian Empire his family thought it prudent to have him baptized. Aurel Stein converted to the Anglican Religion as he lay dying in Kabul in 1943. In 1883, Stein took his PhD in Oriental languages and he was trained in both Sanskrit and Persian. After his doctorate he came to India and soon found  employment in the Punjab where he served as the Registrar of Punjab University. The first major academic project undertaken by Aurel Stein was the translation of Kalhana's Rajatarangini into English. With the help of a Kashmiri pundit, Govind Kaul, managed to appropriate a manuscript written in the Sharada script which formed the basis of the Three volume Translation of the Rajatarangini. Impressed by his erudite lecture in Sanskrit the Maharaja of Kashmir retained Aurel Stein to catalogue the Sanskrit Manuscripts preserved in the Temple attached to the Royal Court. 

 To be continued