Venkatesa Suprabhatam: The Song that awakens the Lord

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Venkatesa Supbrabhatan: The Story of India's Most Popular Prayer

Benkatash Parthasarathy

New Delhi: Westland Publications, 2020

There is hardly anyone in South India who hasd not heard the lilting sould stirring Venkteasa Subprabhatam rendered and sung in the most melodious voice by M S Subhalakshmi. Composed in the fifteenth century byPrativadi Bhayankara Anna this song has now become the ubiquitous hymn for Vishnu in his upa avatara as Venkatesvara, the Lord of the Tirumula Hills. This book is an interesting account of the song and its cultural and religious context. The author has done a good job in tracing the theological and philosophical background of Vaishnavism in the post Ramanuja epoch (1017-1137). My Grandmother could recite the entire Suprabhatam and her day started with a prayer to Venktesvara of Timumala Tirupathi. And this book is a good introduction to those who have heard the song and wondered what it signified.

Sri Vaihnava religion is predicated upon the belief that Vishnu the Supreme and to be worthy of prapthi or Salvation the Grace of the Lord is important and the Grace can be acquired through prayer and meditation as well as by leading a worthy and sinless life. But the grace or benediction is entirely left to Vishnu/Perumal/ Mayon. He can grant it at his pleasure and hence the two famous Schools which sees Garce asa product of our effort and the other which recognizes only the will and pleasure of the Lord of Vaikunta. From a very early period, Tirumal Hills were associated with  the worship of Mayon or Vishnu and is one of the 108 divya desham of the Sri Vaihnava tradition. And in Tondaimandalam of the medeival Tamil region, Tirumala Hills remained as important in sanctity as Kanchipuram and Sriperunbadur, the birth palce of Ramanuja. The hymns of the Alzhwars are rich in poetic expressions of immense passion towards the Deity and the language in which this devation was expressed freely drew from the corpus of early bardic composition, especially from the akam genre of poems. Andal, the poet of Srivilliputtur about whom the great king of Vijayanagara wrote in his Amuktamaldaya is the mast note votary of of Passion though poetic imagery and metaphor. The composer of the Suprabhatam drew from this rich repetoire of philosophical and religious texts.

The interesting feature of the rituals performed in the temple is that it maintained the circardian rhythm of a human. The Lord wakes up in the morning to the melody of the Suprabhatam and all the rituals mimic the activities of a human. Thus the importance of Prasada or cooked food offered to the God as talligai. From the reign of Saluva Narashima, the sale of prasada became an important feaure of the activities of the temple. Throughout the Vijayanagara period, Temple ritual was carried out on the basis of the Vaikhanasa tradition, unlike the panchratra tradition in the other graet Sri Vaishnava shrine, Srirangam Devalaya of Ranganatha.

This book tries to explain in a simple manner the complex set of ideas and concepts that are buit into this famous poem an d even the reference to antaryami is beautifully explained.  I enjoyed reading this book. Though it was rather thin on the History, both intellectual and political, of the Sri vaishnava shrine, this book must be read by all those who beleive that the Grace of Venkatesva is necessary for their earthy and spiritual well being.

Zosa Szajkowski and the Theft of History: Identity, Historiography and the Holocaust

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

The tragic history of Zoza Szajkowski (1911-1978) is many ways the story of a Historian, Chronicler or even a Memory Keeper who learnt or drew the wrong lessons from his own life experiences. The subject of a full lenght monographic study by Lisa Leff, Szajkowski, a Jew displaced from Europe who migrated to Paris as a young boy with his parents and siblings only to see all his close relatives die in the German concentration camps. The Holocaust took a terrible toll both in lives and in the capacity of the human mind to remember its horrors. And Zoza decided, for good or for evil, that the cultural treasures of Judaica in Europe are not safe and USA is the land that could protect Jewish Histrical artifacts particularly documents, manuscripts, organized archival material and memorobilia.  And to that end he embarked on a proffession of crime, stealing historical material from Libraries, Archives and Institutions and selling them to some of the most prestigous Universities such as Harvard, Columbia, Brandeis and several Jewish Institutions in Israel and New York.

The Holocaust offers a contranst between two distinct approaches to History. Raul Hilberg in his monumental, Destruction of the European Jews following the trend of Franz Nuemann appraoched the study of the systematic extermination of Jews and several other peoples and groups from the perpetrators set of institutions and in the course of 3 huge volumes succeeded in bringing the unspeakable into the light of History. The documents when placed in the right set of historical frameworks and stuctures speak eloquently. Indian histrorians, being ideologues rather than trained historins, seldom follow such an example and so we have drivel marinated in post colonial garbage masquerading as serious history. They must learn   a lesson from Raul Hilberg. Another approach is the collection of Testimonies of Eye Witnesses particularly of those who survived the extermination camps. Testimonies offered a set of sources that enabled the historian to prove the "Collective Guilt" imposed on the Germans after World War I. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners is a good example of the second approach. Here it is better to be a hedgehog rather than a fox. The War against the Jewish Population of Europe resulted in an almost total destruction of the collective and communal life lived by the Jews in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary and France. It is in the middle of this destructive war that Zosa Szajkowski decided that he could rescue Jewish Cultural Property and smuggle it to safety in the US.play his chosen role as the Saviour of Jewish Heritage. The Germans had looted Synaggues, Homes Libraries and Museums of books, manuscripts, records and documents. Zosa who arrived in Paris as a GI and with the ability to speak read write French Yiddish and German was tasked with the job of dealing with documents and cultural treasures left behind by the fleeing German Army. And seeing the horrors of the Holocaust he decided to appropriate the documents books and artifacts and sent them to US. Obviously the US Army and the Occupational Forces and their authorities winked, if not colluded with this dubious export of what Zosa thought were ownerless art and other objects of high cutural value.

After his return to USA he continued to make periodical visits to France and embarked on a serious career as an "archive thief". In 1961 he was caught red handed in Strausbourg but was allowed to escape. And in 1978 he was once again caught this time in New York Public Library and was handed over to the plice. Two days later he died by suicide taking all his secrets with him to the grave.

The life of Zosa obviously raises certain vital questions. Were the Institutions which bought the stolen documents complicit in the crime? Did he steal the documents as an act of defiance against the crimes committed against the Jews and wanted the memory of the Chosen People to be preserved? Does extreme identification with a religious or ethnic group innures the Historian to cerain ethical question about the purpose of writing History? Did Zosa in his own warped fashion anticipate the recrudesence of antisemitism in Europe and North America making exiles f the Jews nce again. Bth in USA and Europe there are definite signs of the revival of anti semeticism. The answers to these questions will never be known. The author has raised some of these questions in her fascinating study.

The post War confusion offered Zosa a number of opportunities to ransack and gather Jewish Cultural Material from Paris and other parts of France. To Zosa, a world that watched as he rationalized, silently as the European Jews were led to their death in German gas chambers will not hesitate to turn a blind eye should a similar ocassion arise and so the logic of Holocaust justified the unconventional route that he took. Be that as it may the rules governing the restitution of cultural property did not distinguish between Jewsa and other nationalities and there was every possiblity of the material belonging to dead Jews being returned back to the country of origin and this of course negated the whole tragedy of the Holocaust. While Raul Hilberg, the meticulous chronicler of the Sholah, was keen to answer the questin,how did Germany a modern western state transform itself into a murder organization, Zosa was not animated by large meta historical questions. His purpose was more immediate salvage as much as he could of the heritage still left and take it to USA which he felt was a safe zone. In a simialr manner, Leon Poliakov was intrumental in collectingGestapo records which came in useful as evidence in war crime trials which opened after the defeat of Germany.

This book makes a ood read. But there is the poignant tale of a dedicated scholars, historian, memory keeper going bad, horribly bad. Had USA treated him better coud the tale have been different. Who knows?

From Sacred Trash to Written History; The Cairo Geniza and the Historian

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

Abraham's Luggage: A Social Life f Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World by Elizabeth Lambourn is based on the India Letters found in the Geniza at Fusat in Old Cairo. Before dealing with this book, there is the facinating intellectual adventure relating to the discovery and decipherment of the records found in the Geniza, a place where any document or relic bearing the Hebrew paryer is deposited so that it is not defiled. It is an extremely salutary experience for an Indian historian like me who has worked on the Medieval History of South India to read about the great feat that lay behind the study of the Geniza Documents. The history of Israel has been a most tragic one particularly in the 20th Century when Germany perpetrated the horror of the Holocaust and it is no wonder that the study of the Jewish past/history became a passion for some historians, particularly S D Goitein whose magisterial history in five volumes the Mediterranean Society is the most elaborate and comprehensive analysis till date.

The Ben Erza Synagogue in Old Cairo is the place where it all began. Two twins, sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margret, while on a trip to the Sinai brought back to England some scraps of old documents to the leading scholar of Jewish theology and literature, Solomon Schechter, the Lecturer in Talmudic Studies at Cambridge. He at once regognized the fragments as being the oldest manuscript evidence of the Jewish prayer Ben Sira which Protestant critics of the Old Testament had dismissed as a compsition from the Second Temple Period roughly around the time of the Roman Empire. Solomon Schechter dismissed such interepretations stemmeing from the hermenutical method of Higher Criticism practiced in Germany and later in England as tinged with anti Semeticism as it denied the Prophetic Tradition underlying Jewish historiography, If a fragment of the ancient text could be broght tolight this controversey could be laid to rest. Off he went to Cairo and in 1896 when Cairo was under French and British political control, e succeeded in removing 190,000 documents from the Geniza nd transported them to the Univerity of Cambridge which hosts the worlds largest collection of these documents.

Soloman Schechter held Rabbnic Judaism in high esteem and was keen on studying early Jewish texts dealing with Ritual, Liturgy and Paryer. Indeed the early study of the Geniza was entirely devoted to Jewish liturgy and Ritual. Whlie the Geniza records written in Hebrew script and Arabic language contain a large number of documents dealing with Law, Social Customs, Contracts with Merchants and shipers, Marriage Contracts, Divorce settlements, Lists of Dowries,merchant correspondence etc, they facinated early Rabbanic scholars as they also ontained religious advice on such mundane issues as: Can Jews have sex  on Sabbath,? Can slave girls be laid? Questions that are quaint by today's standards but in an age infused with religion such questions were deeply meaningful. The Rabbis were audacious inventors of History and hence there was a great deal of real and imagined history in their religious opinions. Schechter was disdainful of the scholarship of his day and in a letter to a friend even said that Christian scholarship on the Nation of Israel is "higher anti semiticism". The same can be said of the scholarship from several white countries including USA which demean and humiliate an Old Civilization like India in rder to further their geo political ends and objectives. India Phobia is now the ruling idelogy of white Social Sciences. And in rejecting the Christian view, he was al negating the work of the Oxford School of Judaic studies. In the initial years of the 20th century, the Geniza was exploited almost entirely for textual criticism and for Talmudic sudies. Te turn to social and economic history came when S D Goitein entered the field.

S D Goitein (1900 -1985) like his more famous contemporary, Fernand Braudel studied the Mediterranean but from the Cairo end which was the refuge of Jews from Tunisia, Sicily, Spain and North Africa. Braudel's longue duree was his abstract division of time and temporality in the famous triptych of Geographical Time, Structural Time and Individual Time. S D Goitein measured time with the rhythym set by the fortunes of the Jewish people as they reponded to the challenges of the Reconquista, the Faimid Conquest, the Crusades and the Ottoman Conquest of Egypt. Each age brought its own set of challenges and the Geniza was a palimpsest inscribed with the trials of the moment. For a Historian who was a witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, the  medieval world would certainly appear more civilized and appealing and this perhaps expalins the fact that Goitein dedicated almost his entire life t the study of the Geniza. The last volume was published the day before he died in 1985. 

S D Goitein was a Monravian Jew who was educated in Hungary where he learnt Arabic, Hebrew and the Talmud from the leading scholars of his day and at the age of 24 he migrated to Israel. He taught at the Hebrew University and was considered for the post of Minister for ducation by that great hero, David Ben Gurion. The loss to the world of politics was certainly a fortune for the world of Historical Scholarship. Goitein in his methodology was a practioner of "thick description" one that brings the past alive by a close and systematic examination and analysis of empirical evidence, documents, arifacts, records etc. He was conscious of the position of jews as non muslims in an Islamic society: their life was full of "horror, dread and misery" and indigenus people f India can relate to this as India was under savage Mughal rule and before that the rule of the Turks and Afghans. The jews were dhimmis, peope of the Book unlike the indigenus people of India whose status was less than a dhimmi. Indian ideologues writing thie Party sponsored fairy tales for their faithful ignore the horrendous suffering of the indigenous people and of course, India cannot have a Historian of such towering eminence as S D Goitein.

The document on the left is the one that started S D Goitein on his life long intellectual adventure. This is the document which Elizabeth Lambourn analyses in her rather turgid post colonial cultural materialist exposition on the List of items of Luggage carried by Abraham from the coast of Mangalore back to Egypt after a stay of eleven long years in India. He must have landed on the Aabian Sea coast crossed the Desert and then sailed down the Nile to reach Cairo. In all he discovered 21 fragments in all which he published in his book on the India Trade and Indian ideologues use these documents to speak of the Cosmopolitan arena of the Malabar and the Indian Ocean. This trade with Malabar was in the hands of Tunisian merchants who lived in Egypt and traded with ports all alonf the Arabian Sea coast. This particular letter belongs to the 11th century when good commerical relations existed between India and the Red Sea. In a moment of epihany almost like that of Gibbon, Goitein writes: The idea for this book was conceived by me on September 17, 1954 while in Oxford, searching the treasure of the Bodleian Library. Soon he realized that the Indian trade was part of the larger commercial nexus radiating from the Mediterranen Sea and hence he had to venture far into the North African Mediterranean, not too distant fom that of Phillip II. 

This trader ran a bronze factory at Mangalore and ran what appears from the documents a successful venture. The Geniza Records display a wide variety of scripts, languages and scribal skills. An interesting feature was the durability of the documents. There were sveral instances when douments whose primary text lay in the 9th or 10th century contained writing from 2 or even 3 centuries later. Since paper was scarce, old documents continued to be used long after theyhad server their primary purpose. Therefore the Geniza was not an archive. It was merely the place where documents were shifted without the thought of reuse. Goitein was a firm believer in Israel and its Destiny and was therefore an honest historian not given to distortions like South Asian "historians" for whom the past is only a political artifact. He said; I regard my work as that of a Histrian and philologist not that of expounder of socio economic or political theories".

There cannot be a more searing indictment of Marxian pretentions than this statement.

Part II will deal with Abraham's Luggage

Delhi Riots 2020: A Chronicle and a Searing Indictment

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

The series of riots in Delhi 2019 to Febuary 22nd to 14th centering around the Act passed by Parliament, the ammendment to the Citizenship Act, is extensively documented in this short and well documented book written by three women who call themselves, a Group of Intellectuals. This is a welcome step in the right direction as Riots are nt documented and hence a fake narrative soon replaces the real sequence of events and the White Media is ever keen to misreport and misrepresent the events making victims the villians, the perpetrators of violence the heroes or sheroes, and completely distort the rea;ity in order to further the agenda f hostile countries/societies. In recent years, the Western Media particularly the American Media which once enjoyed an enviable reputation for fair reporting has now degenerated into an agenda driven woke inspired propaganga machine of almost Orwellian dimensions.

The authors rightly start with the genesis of the riots which they trace to the concerted, organized and deliberate infiltration of anti Indian propaganda into a purely domestic matter which has been hanging fire since 1947. The Partition in 1947, hasty, brutal, ill conceived and anarchic was imposed on India by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mountbatten. In the violence that followed Jawaharlal Nehru's Tryst with Destiny, at least 3 to 4 million Hindus and Sikhs were killed and many more displaced. The Prime Minister of Pakistan and of India agreed in the famous Liaqat-Nehru Pact to repatriate indigenous people still left in Pakistan. This became necessary as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was created exclusvely for Moslems while India true to its liberal ethos did not insist on an exchange of Population. Unfortunately over the years the indigenous people of India left behid in the "belly of the beast" have had enormous suffering imposed on them. Forced conversion, abduction of young women and girls, discrimination in employment, violence directed at community leaders, lack of edcational opportunities and the consequent ghettoization of the indigenous communities consisting largely of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhist, Jain and Christian. Even Christians, recognized as People of the Book, have been systematically persecuted under the draconian Anti Blasphemy Laws. Right from the time of Nehru the issue of granting relief to the indigenous people has been hanging fire and the BJP had promised the CAA not only in the 2014 Eletion Manifesto but also in 2019. In December 2019 the CAA was passed and in January 2020 it became Law after securing the assent of the President of India.

Deliberate concentrated and sustained propaganda was set afoot to incite Muslims all over India. The CAA was not designed to take the Citizenship away form Indian Muslims and though the educated ones were aware of this fact they deliberately colluded with ant Indian elements to propagate the view that Indian muslims would lose their Citizenship. Also the legal requirement of a verified National Population Register (NPR) which will be initiated soon was invoked as an assault of Mslems being equal citizens of  India. Unfortunately Moslem Identity Poltics which had its origin in the Khilafat Agitatin of 1921 and led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has not been countered effectively by the pabulum called Secularism. And since the time of Nehru successive Congress and non Congress regimes have incited Moslem Identity assertion and its accompanying baggage of victimhood to shepherd them into a reliable votng block, the infamous Vote Bank that political reporters speak of.

Against this background, the victory of the BJP twice in a row deeply affected the interests and offered a serious challenge to the self image of its so called intellectual elites who have lorded over the Academia, Media and the Entertainment world. The CAA provided just the pretext for a show of strength, the aar paar ki ladai as the leader f the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi put it. A fight to end all fights would be a rough translation. The students of the Left leaning JNU, Moslem universities like JMI and AMU were mobilized and funds from Western countries and from the Middle East were pumped in to set the Riots in motion. For months from December 2019 Shaheen Bagh a predominantly Moslem area was virtually a no go zone much like the "liberated zones" of USA taken over by the Black Lives Matter agitators. Te Government of India showed enormous patience and did little to have the squatters evicted and in the Shaheen Bagh and many felt that the Gvernment of India has suddenly goe soft on the agitators. After the visit of President Trup was confirmed, the agitators started ramping up the agittion and scaling it up to draw the attention of the international/White Media.

The image reproduced on the left is an iconic image of the Shaheen Bagh Agitation. It shows a man firing at the police and there are several such images. In pursuit of one such violent gang the Delhi Police in a hot chase entered the seat of the agittion, the Jamia Milia Islamia University as the rioters had taken refuge there. And a pliant media was ready at hand to project that as an asssault on an "educational institution" and "ppor inncent students". Short heavily edited videos were circulated on the Social Media Platforms, particularly Telegram and WhattsApp to incite more violence. All these facts are ably brought out in the book.

The preparations for the violence was systematic, particularly in East Delhi. Tahir, a respected leader of the Moslems had organized acid, pistols, stones, gas cylinders, catpults and firearms on high rise buildings to attack the Police and one Intelleigence Officer Ankit Sharma was caputred and tortured by the molem supporters of Tahir for more than 7 hours before he was killed and his body dumped in a drain. (picture on the left).

The Delhi Riots were a terrible disaster that visited Delhi and on a smaller scale it had all the hallmarks of the 1984 anti Sikh Pogram organized by the Congress party under Rajiv Gandhi. There was considerable planning for violence, the core constituency was radicalized, weapons and arms gathered and the Foreigh Media was kept briefed about the events from the perspective of the rioters

This book is valuable contribution and it is a pity that a white male orgnizer of literary events who grandly calls himself a "historian" used the colour of his skin, white privilege, to ensure that this piece of credible documentation lies burried forever. It is a sign of the times that he did not succeed.

India in Edingurgh: 1750 to the Present Colonialism and Nationalism in Scotland A Critique

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

UK needs a museum of colonialism ... it’s being realistic about some of the really terrible things that happened in our past and teaching them to our children —@DalrympleWill
William Dalrymple, a journalist currently residing in in the "Orient", the same India that enriched his Scottish ancestors beyond their wildest dreams in the 18th century, pleads for, a "Museum of Colonialism", Just go to a Mirror and you have your Museum. For a member of a privileged colonial society to speak of Colonialism is not just graceless it is tinged with the very racism it seeks to excoriate, A Museum of Colonialism will only glorify the very essence of violence, racism and domination, that Colonialism represents by appropriating the language of criticism and political legitimacy by making indigenous people once more the objects of 'representational discourse" something that post colonial theory has been conniving at, for over two decades now and counting. We reject this ugly notion of a Museum of Colonialism as a means of rendering justice to over two hunderd years of unmitigated violence and tyranny.
Scottish historians have had a difficult task before them and Sir T M Devine exemplifies the difficulty in an honest manner, unlike William Dalrymple who seems quite ignorant of challenges faced by New Scottish Historiography which seeks to balance between imperial privilege enjoyed by Scotland after the Act of Union 1707 making it hugely prosperous within three decades of the Union and the inner tensions unleashed by that very Act. In short how is Scotland to account for its place in William Dalrymple's Museum of Colonialism. Was Scotland an Imperial power or merely an accessory to England's imperial enterprise. Imperial Historiography with its triumphalist flourish will find a new habitation in such exclusive spaces as Museums of Colonialism. And then is the question of Slavery and Slave Trade. The work of Catherine and Nicholas Draper have conclusively established Scottish presence in the Slave Trade, though the English Ports like Bristol and Liverpool handled more than 85% of the Slaving traffic. Scottish presence as Sir T M Devine points out was indirect and Scots were employed as Overseers, Surgeons and Accoutants in the Plantations of Trinidad and Jamaica. And when the Slave Compensation Data is analysed, Scottish claims are quite widespread. Given such a historical background we can do without the virtue signalling by journalists like William Dalrymple.
The book under review is a serious and well researched one. Roger Jeffery has put together a collection of essays that traverses in a lucid and elegant manner the two centuries of Scottish presence in India. Devine assimilates the presence of Scots in India to a "Diaspora" from Scotland. The term "Diaspora" is inaccurate as Scots migrated to places like India not out of compulsion but out of choice: to shake the pagoda tree and return with huge fortunes while their cousins tried to eke out a lving by investing in the Tobacco Trade with Virginia. The Scottish Administrators like Sir Thomas Munroe, Sir John Malcolmn, Robert Clive, and scores more returned to Scotland with a fortune of nearly 500,000 pounds and this money was extracted in India and transfered to Scotland only to be invested in urban properties, acqusition of Parliamentary seats and the like. George McGlivary, eschewing the charms of post colonial theory, follows the money trail and in his paper has shown that the fortunes made in India were transferred to Scotland through Agency Houses controlled by David Scott, William Fairlie, and the Barrings Bank had its roots in one such agency house. Another way by which Scots transferred their wealth from India to Scotland was to convert liquid cash into high value assets and we know that diamonds were carried back by returning Scots. Of course, many died in India, But William Dalrymple's Museum of Colonialism will gloss over such details because woke liberlism is only concerned with the optics and the rhetoric not the ugly reality.
On page 3, the chapter there is a strange remark that I would like to cntest. The authors claim that Edinburgh's reputation for heavy drug consumption in the nineteeth century is "unsourced". meaning that there is some ambiguity about the claim. Scotland gave the world the firm, Jardine and Matheson, the most notorious traffickers of narcotics in the nineteenth century and Opium sourced frm India was sent to China as payment for tea bought by the English against Silver. This triangular trade involving Sugar, Silver and Tea was financed by Opium and so obviously some of the Opium did reach a niche market in Scotland.
Some of the essays in this book deal with the vital issue: the large presence of Scots in the Administration of the East India Company in India. Almost all the Presidencies had Scottish Governors in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, before the ICS examination was introduced. In a study by John Mackenzie and T M Devine, Scotland and the British Empire, the authors on the basis of a study of 1267 Doctors wh were appointed to various posts in India between 1767 and 1815, 539 were Scots, nearly 43% of the total. A similar prosopographical study needs to be done fr the other appointments. Traditionally the argument given is that the English elite coopted the Scottish gentry by offering them lucrative posts in the company. The work of Holden Furber n Henry Dundas certainly substantiates this conclusion. And the gentry of course was not too unwilling a partner as it feared Jacobinism more than grieving over the loss of freedom. The University of Edinburgh played a major role in sending Administrators to India.
Some of the articles in this book particularly those by Frederike Voigt, Anne Buddle, and Henry Noltie deal with the acquisition of Indian Sculpture and botanical specimens from India. Scottish men working in India sent to Edinburgh a variety of Indian Art and the Scottish National Museum has a rich collection f Indian sculpture abstracted from India. The tranfrmation of religious icons into pieces of art, to be displayed in museums, was the direct result of imperial gaze and one wonders if Dalryple's Museum of Colonialism will still retain such stolen art. In the heyday of phrenlogy skulls became the objects through which Inteligence and Creativity were determined and Sir William Turner collected skulls from India, a Museum of Horrors to use Dalrymple's innane metaphor of museum, and his craniological researches were regared as some of the most accurate. Even Stephen Gould in his Mismeasure of Man refers to this "scientist".
Though I have been somewhat critical of the work, I must end by saying that almost all the papers published in this work are based on excellent research and the authors have generally avoided the banal decsent into Post Colonial theories and have not attempted to "provincialise Scotland".

Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship

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

Edward II: Terrors of Kingship

Christopher Given-Wilson

Penguin Books,2015.

  

 Edward II, imortalized by Christopher Marlowe is said to have been murdered in Berkeley Castle on September 21, 1327. Or was he? Recent research by Ian Mortimer has raised serious doubts about the pretty gruesome end of this unpopular and hated monarch. There is eveidence to suggest that Edward II was alive atleast till 1330 and so the story of his death was merely a cover for the illegal rule of Sir Roger Mortimer and the king's wife, Queen Isabella. The Queen seems to have had a relationship with Sir Roger Mortimer and the the story of the murder/assasination put out in order to quell public clamour over the illegitimacy of the rule of Issabella and Mortimer, And thereby hangs a tale told vividly and narrated with a verve and flourish few historians possess today.

Dr Christopher Gavin-Wilson is a Professor of Medieval History at the University of St Andrews. In a short work of less than 130 pages he has brought to life the tumultus reign of a tragic and perhaps largely misunderstood monarch of medieval England. The first Prince of Wales, so named as Edward was born when his father Edward I was fighting the Welsh in 1307, Edward II was by all medieval accounts a competent warrior, though he did not have too many successes on the battlefield and hence always fared poorly when compared with his more famous father. The shattering defeat at the Battle of Bannockburn in June 1314 was partly due to the desertion of powerful magnates like the Earls of Lancaster, Warwick and Arundel, there is also the lurking suspicion that Robert Bruce had completely outwitted Edward with his schilrron formation, tightly packed pikemen holding 12 foot pikes and moving as one formation and defending themselves with thick shields which deflected the arrows of the long bow archers quite successfully. The defeat at this crucial battle only intensified the internal war between the King and his magnates. 

Edward II was probably gay and his alledged lover, Piers Gavestone. The influece of this man on the King was deeply resented by the nobility and a section headed by the Earl of Lancaster began plotting to rid the realm of this 'evil influence" which in the medieval period meant nothng less than plotting for hs death. Gavestone was captured and put to death by Lancaster which only exacerbated the deep faultlines within the nobility. An interesting feature of the reign of Edward II was the promulgation of what came to be called the Ordinances, perhaps after the Magna Carta, the first set of written principles according to which England was to be governed, a compact between the nobles and the Crown.The Compact was essentially the work of the Earls of Glouchester, Lincoln and Lancaster and from a  political theory point of view is innovative as it makes a clear disctinction between the Crown and the person of the King, a precocious Cromwellian moment in the fourteenth century. The King undertook to rule in consultation with the nobles assembled in Parliament. And of course, Edward had no intention of letting Royal Prerogative slip from his hands. 

In 1318 yet another royal favourite, Hugh Despenser made his appearance and the struggle with Lancaster ended only with the capture and execution of Thomas Lancaster in 1318. Hugh made the same fatal mistake of Gavestone. he openly flaunted his nearness to the King and as one medieval chronicler put it was seen as a "second king". Accumulating earldoms was a sure sign of both political and material progress and soon the Despensers were the most powerful political clan i  all of England. As the Despensers grew in wealth, the loyal nobles that Edward II had inherited from his father started veering away from the Court, a sure sign that they were not secure in the new order. The Despensers helped Edward II in his struggle against Lancaster and in 1322 had help defeat him in the Battle of Boroughbridge in which Hereford was killed Lancaster captured only to die at the hands of an executioner two days later. The  ascendency of the Despensers was also accompanied by the first systematic attempt at augmenting the Royal Exchequer since 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest. Collection of taxes, forced loans, forefeiture of Property, fines for pardons were some of the innovative means by which Edward II raised monies for his wars. And at the time of his death had -l- 62,000 in the treasury.

As Hugh Despenser became powerful opposition began to build up and leading the contrarians were Sir Hugh Mortimer and the King's wife , Issabella. Medieval chroniclers have portrayed the relationship between the two as an adultrous one.

The Execution of Hugh Despenser

The last five years of Edward's reign were indeed filled with wars, rebellions, court intrigues and factional strife. He was quite unsuited to govern given his character and general lack of confidence in all but a handful of trusted nobles. Even the City of London was not spared his high handedness. He sought to curtail the financial and other liberties enjoyed by the City and even suspended the Mayor. Distrusting the Londoners, the Tower of London was garissoned with Flemmish mercenaries. Blaming London for the escape of Mortimer and Isabella, Edward was rapidly loosing ground.

The struggle against Roger Mortimer provoked an early but certainly precocious instance of the conflict between Church and King that was to erupt later immortalized by Thomas Beckett. Edward accused Adam Orleton, a prelate of aiding the escape of Roger Mortimer and tried to bring charges against him, the Archbishop invoked "clerical privilege" and came into the Court Room and took the prelate out and Edward could do little about it.

The book though a short account is well written and certainly worth reading. 

    

RAW A History of India's Covert Operations: Tiger Zinda hai?

RAW and Covert operations

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

To a cynic like me, Indian Intelligence Operations, covert or overt sound like an oxymoron and the History of Indian Inteligence agencies since Independence has more or less proved me right. India does not have a Christopher Andrew to write on Statecraft and its liason with Espionage, Intteligence Gathering and Strategy. Having said that there have been a few books, Kao boys of the RAW, Mission RAW and the book under review, RAW A History of India's Covert Operations which plough lonely half hearted furrows in a field in which gossip exchanged over the diplomatic cocktail circuit passes off as "intel alerts" and popular press cuttings are palced in files bearing the label "Secret Confidential". And in this dismal situation any work on Indian Inteligence, covert, overt or secret is welcome and Yatish Yadav has written a competent work. However, he does not reveal much except some details about the infamous Rabindra Singh case.

Throughout the years of the Raj, the Intteligence Bureau or IB was the Agency responsible for both Internal and External espionage. At least by having one central agency, the rivalry between agencies and needless duplication of work was obviated. A development from the Thugee Department, the IB was quite successful in executing its mandate. It provided deep information on Tibet that fortified India's position in the Simla Conference of 1905, it successfully ran the Great Game with Russia, kept a vigil on the Wahabbis in the NorthWest Frontier and of course had pentrated deep into the Congress Movement, the Communist Movement and the Trade Union Movement. The reaon for its success was simple: Inteligence gathering had a clear political goal, the preservation of the Empire. With Independence, the Congress leadershipwhich neither had political vision nor the ability to shape a distinct civilizational goal for India after nearly thousand years of savagery, used the IB only to keep tabs on its internal opponents, the Communists, the family of Netaji Subash Bose, and sundry other such targets.  Nehru was blissfullu unaware of China's intention in both Tibet and Askai Chin. Indian Government was unaware of the deteriorating situation on the McMohan Line and the rest is History. The purpose of establishing the RAW, Research and Analysis Wing of the Cabinet Secretariat, was to provide actionable information to the Prime MInister on India's vital National Security Interests. With a budget hidden from Parlimantary scrutiny, with untramelled access to the top political leadership, the R&W was supposed to be the eyes and ears of India abroad. Instead as Yadav points out many of the R&W agents turned out to be double agents on the pay of the CIA, like Rabindra Singh, though perhaps not to the same abysmal level. 

Yatish Yadav is a patriot who does not explain or rationalize the momumental failure of Indan Inteligence. In fact he has done us a great fvour by bringing out the absolute amatuer nature of India's external operations.  He says that one counter inteligence operation which was handed over to the Ministry of External Affairs during the regime of V P Singh  in 1989 more than $ 100.000 dollars were spent and not one single sheet of policy recomendations came out of it (221).  This is not to say that there were no patriotic agents working for the R&W. The author shows that the R&W inspite of serious operational and logistic weakness was able to break the Khalistani Extremist Movement by penetrating into various front organizations in USA and Canada and provideing information that led Julio Reberio and K P S Gill successfully challenge and exterminate the threat at the source itself. But such successes were few and far between.

The R&W was called upon to deal with three major crises in India's external environment and unfortunately it failed in all three: Bangla Desh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. India helped Bangal Desh "liberate" itself from Pakistan. The political objective behind this policy was to create a friendly state surrounded by Indian territory so that Pakistan is weakened. paradoxically liberating Bangla Desh was a huge mistake as, with the benefit of hindsight we know now that political Islam is dominant and having cut off a revenue consuminf territory, India inadvertental strengthened Pakistan which was now free to stir trouble in India using the secular card, inflaming muslim passion against the kafir Hindus, promoting muslim identity politics and secession in Kashmir, India was not prepared for te coup that brought Mujib down on 15th August 1975, barely three years after so called Liberation. R&W was taken by surprise and Mujib, India's hopes were shattered and it has not been the same ever again. In fact India nas now the unwelcome task of weeding out Banlga Desh infiltrators who have spread all across India and are now a political issue after the CAA. The R&W did redeem itself somewhat by tracing an important fugitive who had fled to Calcutta and in an act of extra ordnary rendition had him smuggled back into Bangal Desh where the decades out death warrant was promptly executed.

In Sri Lanka, India was a total disaster and Yadav  recognizes that fact but is not able to see the deeper currents. India will never accept an independent Tamil State in Sri Lnaka and the spill over into the Indian territory will fuel violent identity politics. And if Independence cannot be accepted then why did R&W under Indira Gandhi train LTTE and TULF cadres to wage unconventional war against the State in Sri Lanka. The reason again is simple: To acquire some leverage against Sri Lanka when it was seen to become close to China. This sort of Big Power Game can be played by USA and Israel. India neither has the institutional nor intellectual strenght to play this game. And India failed miserably in Sri Lanka. Once again the political objective of sending the Indian Peace Keeping Force was not clear. Was it to maintain peace or to bring Prabhakaran and the LTTE to the negotiating table. Sri Lanka, on the other hand was able to use Pakistan and China effectively and in May 2009 was succeful in getting Israeli cooperation to track down the satellite phone which was used by the leaders. India withdrew from Sri Lanka and the killing of one of India's political leaders was the direct result of this failed experiment. R&W was uable to provide ground level intelligence to the indian Army and on one ocassion when it had located Prabhakaran and reported the matter toPMO for advice, the Indian Army was ordered not to kill Prabhakaran. A costly mistake.

The most serious issue before India from 1979 when the then Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, was the question of India's role in that landlocked country. Though India was not happy with the invasion. it thought it prudent to keep quiet. And thus left the field open for the CIA. The Americans sent in some $ US 15 billion dollars in military aid to the country through Pakistan. And the high level of sectarian violence is the result of the American encouragement to jihad which culminated in the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York city. Now as the Americans prepare to leave India does not have groups to support Indian interests there and the carnage of indigenus people in Afghanistan by ISIS groups (incidentally recruited from Malapuram, Kerala) demonstrates clearly that India has lost the game. The R&W has cultivated some assets in the Baluchi Moveent but it would have been better had Pakhtunistan Independence been encouraged as that would essentially weaken Pakistan considerably.

The book is an interesting read and anyone who wants to know abut Indian intelligence operations will rrofit by reading this book.