The Battle for Sanskrit

Title: The Battle for Sanskrit – Is Sanskrit Political or Sacred? Oppressive or Liberating? Dead or Alive?
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2016 (First)
ISBN: 9789351775386
Pages: 468

Sanskrit has been the language that united India culturally and politically for millennia till the time of Islamic invasions. Though a thousand years of disuse since that episode had sapped some of its vitality in the political arena, Sanskrit continues as a link language for the spiritually minded. During British occupation, the whole genre of Orientalist studies was created to search India’s canons and texts in Sanskrit with a view to tweak the colonial regime to increase its efficiency. The ancient law books had to be translated into English which were then thought to act as the standard on which justice would be dispensed to Indians. However at no point in the growth of Orientalism was it concerned with the eventual replacement of English with Sanskrit. It co-opted some Indians trained in Western methods to translate Sanskrit works to English. With the fall of colonialism, scarcity of resources drove Orientalist research from Oxbridge to American universities, especially Harvard. Several American scholars gained a masterful grasp of Sanskrit and began to study the literature in detail. Most of the present-day Indians don’t know Sanskrit. Hence it fills them with immense pride with some gullibility to see a Westerner handling the ancient language pretty well even though it may be as short as reciting a couplet. Internal defences are lowered as an outcome and the Western scholar is poised to enjoy unlimited power in controlling the flow of patronage and resources from rich Indian businessmen and religious institutions. This book warns about the assault on our Vedic traditions coming from an American school of thought whose fundamental assumptions are dismissive of the sacred dimension of the language. We should not be naïve to hand over the keys to our institutions to outsiders to represent our legacy. The book also seeks to wake up traditional scholars of Sanskrit about an important Western school of Sanskrit studies whose scholars are intervening in modern Indian society with the explicitly stated view of detoxifying it of ‘poisons’ allegedly built into Sanskrit and to dismantle the ‘oppressive’ mindset against Dalits, women and Muslims. Rajiv Malhotra worked as a senior executive in the software and telecom industries before becoming a management consultant. He took early retirement in the 1990s at the age of 44 and established Infinity Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Most of the discussion is based on the work and activities of Sheldon Pollock of Harvard and the group of scholars under his guidance. The author defines two categories of Sanskrit researchers. The Outsiders refer to people from Western academies and the Insiders denote the traditional scholars of the language. He warns that the Outsiders are highly vocal and public in championing their view. At the same time, some of the Insiders are so naïve that they feel flattered when the Outsiders show interest on them which is really intended to dismantle the traditional world view. These Western scholars are accused to have gone too far in prescriptive study rather than descriptive and are more like political activists representing a foreign perspective seeking to topple and demolish Indian sanskriti in its present form. The Outsiders are so powerful that they control many of the important international conferences on Sanskrit, the prestigious chairs of research activity, the best-paid academic jobs and the availability of grants for research work. It is to be specified here that the categorization of Outsiders and Insiders does not in any way infer ethnic or racial divide. It’s only the worldview of the groups that make the difference. Indian scholars who do their research in India but subscribe to the Western precepts also deserve the epithet of ‘Outsiders’.

Malhotra explains how the nucleus of Sanskrit studies was shifted from Britain to the US after the fall of colonialism and the development of a new American Orientalism. This differed in one more aspect with the colonial variety in that it was shaped by the white society’s conflict with indigenous tribes of America at the frontier and African slaves within. This victor-vanquished aspect was later extended to India. It applied the image of the ‘savage’ to those deemed ‘idol worshippers’, ‘primitive’, ‘lacking in morals’ and ‘prone to violence’ etc. It often stereotyped ‘savage’ culture as being oppressive towards its women, children and lower social strata, described as subaltern groups. The modus operandi of this American group is also explained. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Indian Left was stranded without a patron. Just as the CIA recruited the former Soviet nuclear engineers to work for the US, agencies such as the Ford Foundation appropriated them to serve the American academics in the humanities. These scholars quickly learned that a sure path to rapid advancement in the field was to produce research demonstrating that exploitation was built into Indian society. The idea that Western colonialism was a thing of the past is implicit in the term ‘post-colonial’ which they widely circulated. At the same instant, the concept that Sanskrit was still exploiting was given wide currency. Besides, the Indian Left lacked adequate knowledge of Sanskrit. Even eminent historians who interpreted ancient inscriptions such as Romila Thapar or Irfan Habib are ignorant of Sanskrit. This made them vulnerable to ridicule over silly errors in their treatises. This proved a serious handicap for Indian leftists against traditionalists. This gap is now filled by a group of politically charged American Sanskrit scholars with Marxist commitments. This book is, in fact, a battle cry against them.

What is truly shocking in the book is the author’s expose of Sheldon Pollock’s strategies – both overt and covert. Even though he is widely acclaimed as a great Sanskrit scholar, this book argues and proves that Pollock has a clandestine agenda to revamp Sanskrit heritage on the mould of American ‘woke’ values. Pollock criticised scholars who romanticized the Sanskrit tradition. He believes in the ethical responsibility of scholars to expose the oppressiveness he sees within the tradition and to eliminate it by re-engineering the tradition. He rejected the Vedic roots of the heritage terming them primitive, superstitious and discriminatory. Pollock superimposed on to Hinduism the Western divide between Biblical theology/liturgy on the one hand and the performing arts on the other. This was a failure to comprehend the dichotomy of Western art with its established puritanical religion as the former had originated from its ancient paganism. This was not the case in India. He sets out to decouple kavyas from the Vedas as belonging to a secular viewpoint and transcendence respectively. Malhotra asserts this to be totally wrong. A truly outrageous finding of Pollock is that Sanskrit is the source of Nazi evil. He claims that Nazism and British Indology were merely building on the socio-political oppression that had always existed in Sanskrit language. In effect, Pollock argues that Sanskrit is at the root of all evil in the world. Is this the indicator of a scholar’s love for the language he had studied for a lifetime? He then goes on to deny the originality of the ancient composers of Sanskrit. Vedic Brahmins are alleged to have copied the new literary Sanskrit developed by Buddhists and created Ramayana. According to Pollock, Ramayana is plagiarized from a Jataka story. He then claims that Ramayana was used by the Brahmin-Kshatriya aristocracy to arouse Hindus and demonize Muslim invaders from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. In short, even resisting the fanatic Muslim conquerors – who erected towers of skulls of men they killed and took their women and children as sex slaves – is a sin the Indians had committed!

Malhotra successfully peels off the false arguments enveloping Pollock’s idea one by one and eventually reaches the core which is shockingly illogical and fallacious. Pollock refers to karma as a form of fatalism; but equating karma with the Western concept of mechanistic fate is a profound misunderstanding. Karma is the result of prior actions and its future can be altered by new ones. Pollock’s next attempt is to strike at the fault lines of Indian society and cleave it into many pieces. Pollock deconstructs kavya with a singular view to interpret it as an expression of the aestheticization of political power, which is only a ploy to make the power look glamorous to the subjects of the king and to keep them obedient. It was primarily produced in the royal courts by resident royal poets who were complicit in the socio-political stratification and oppression of Dalits and women. Hindu kings used Sanskrit grammar also as a tool of oppression is the next item in the charge sheet. Correct order and structure of language were thought to lead to correct order and structure in society. He brings in this argument in analogy with medieval Europe where laws were imposed on speakers of certain languages with the clear intention to oppress them. This European parable is not at all applicable to India as no Hindu king had banned any language.

A detailed analysis of the duplicitous nature of Pollock’s intellect is given in this book. In fact, he is widely regarded as a friend of India who has dedicated a lifetime of research to Sanskrit studies. The Indian government had conferred on him the prestigious Padma Shri in 2010. He is a close friend of the philanthropic billionaires in India and is the founding editor of the Murty Classical Library of India in the US which was set up with funds from the family of the Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murty. In fact, the author came into the foreground when the Sringeri Matha established by Adi Shankara was planning to finance a research effort by Pollock and his cronies which would have inflicted damage on the sacred tradition of Sanskrit. The author’s intervention was just in time to put a freeze on that decision. Malhotra alleges that in the mainstream media, Pollock projects great love for Sanskrit to impress traditional Indians and their government. Yet in his academic writings he claims that praising Sanskrit amounts to a ‘farcical repetition of myths of primevality’ (p.275). Pollock’s tirades even challenge the integrity of India. He claims that there was no Indian nation or even Indian civilization. He implored scholars to explore the historical contingencies that made nation-states of France and England but not of Tamil Nadu or Maharashtra (p.311). He seems to be troubled with the state of affairs that India did not disintegrate into multiple nationalities.

The book is excellently structured and brilliantly argued with logical pleas and descriptive examples. However, the author gets a bit carried away while dealing with traditional studies of Sanskrit and its oral tradition. It is claimed that mantras are understood as corresponding to vibrations ‘serving as keys to higher states of consciousness’. Hence writing them down and translating it defeats the whole purpose. This argument does not seem to be much rational. The author calls for new itihasas and smritis to be written in Sanskrit. He suggests the two long-lived traumatic events in the last millennium: the Islamic invasions which peaked with Aurangzeb’s rule and the British colonialism as subject matter of the proposed literary venture. What makes this volume priceless is its extra-sharp analytics of Pollock’s academic corpus. He takes great pains to explain and illustrate the theories of Pollock such as ‘aestheticization of power’ to make it understandable to general readers as well. Roping in the traditionalists to understand and respond to Pollock’s claims is another aim of this illustrative discourse. Criticism against Pollock made by other western scholars such as J. Hanneder is also included. 

Rajiv Malhotra is a true nationalist who is ever on the lookout for movements against the nation. One of his immensely prescient books is ‘Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Fault-lines’ which was reviewed earlier here.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

India Unbound

Title: India Unbound – From Independence to the Global Information Age
Author: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 2000)
ISBN: 9780143419259
Pages: 419

A big contradiction lies at the heart of the perception of Indian society regarding the growth of its economy in the last three decades, especially after the great Liberalization of 1991 put forward by Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao. It emancipated the economy and unleashed its animal spirit which was kept in bondage for four decades by the debilitating chains of Nehruvian socialism. Truly, 1991 can be designated as the year of India’s economic independence. But the irony is that most Indians still believe that the market makes ‘the rich richer and the poor poorer’ which would lead to corruption and crony-capitalism. The 1991 reforms and its aftereffects catapulted India to the position of the fifth largest economy in the world and lifted 415 million people out of poverty in the last fifteen years. Despite the market having generated widespread prosperity over two decades, people still distrust it and the nation continues to reform by stealth. This book is a jewel of sorts; you would find hundreds of books criticizing liberalization churned out by political and academic factories of the Left but rarely a book of this kind appears. It is in its core a biography of the author, but examines the Indian economy also in parallel. Das explains why the 1991 reforms was essential, how it progressed, what were the areas which needed accelerated reform and the changes it has wrought in Indian society. Gurcharan Das graduated in philosophy from Harvard and was CEO of Procter & Gamble India. He was instrumental in setting up the market for Vicks Vaporub, which is an American product. After taking early retirement at 50, he became a writer and consultant who give time only to young and promising companies.

This book is a must-read for those who want to understand how India failed to get its objectives correct. The leaders of the freedom struggle – Gandhi and Nehru – used their influence over the masses in a way harmful for them as well as for the nation. Fallacious arguments captivated the public mind such as ‘small companies are better than big ones’ (Gandhi), ‘public enterprises are better than private ones’ (Nehru) and ‘local companies are better than foreign ones’ (both). They so mesmerized India that the succeeding generation whose job was to jettison these foolish ideas, failed to do so and did us incalculable harm. And what did they achieve after half a century of mixed economy? After 50 years, the failure was staggering: 40 per cent of Indians were still illiterate, half were miserably poor earning less than a dollar a day, one-third of the people did not have access to safe drinking water, and only a sixth of the villages had modern medical facilities. In the end, this meant two generations who missed the opportunities. Instead of socialism, this path led to a corrupt, domineering state. Narasimha Rao was also forced by the IMF to bring in meaningful reforms. The 1991 Liberalization opened the economy to foreign investment and trade. It dismantled import controls, lowered customs duties, devalued the currency and virtually abolished the licensing controls on private investment. The reforms drastically cut down the tax rates and broke public sector monopolies. Growth immediately picked up to 7.5 per cent and foreign exchange reserves shot up from 1 billion to 20 billion USD. The author however notes that though the license raj was done away with, the inspector raj is still intact. The reforms are only half complete. This book was written in 1999, but the observed shortcomings still exist in the system.

The author remarks that the immediate post-independence years were a time of centre-left ideology in many countries and in fact Nehru was in sync with Fabian socialists of the UK. During his college days at Harvard, Das noted that students were left-of-centre in thought and were concerned with redistribution of wealth and ignored the whole subject of wealth creation. Many of India’s intellectuals and policy makers were trained in the West and suffered the same blind spot. Most of the teachers also had an anti-business bias which reinforced the student prejudices. Developmental economists thought that growth would provide jobs, raise incomes and pull up people from poverty. However, East Asia realized the futility of this policy after a decade or so of experimentation. They quickly changed track and went back to market-oriented reforms. But in India, the failed policies were consolidated under Indira Gandhi. She further tightened the rules which were already taut. It was the period in which the author completed his education and joined Richardson Hindustan which produced the ubiquitous balm of India – Vicks Vaporub.

Gurcharan Das provides an excellent survey of the misfortune that is euphemistically called Nehruvian socialism or the mixed economy. The 1956 Industrial Policy Resolution was a great blunder of Nehru and his planning advisor Mahalanobis. It reserved seventeen sectors exclusively for state enterprises. When G D Birla requested for permission to start a steel plant, consent was denied! The Tatas made 119 proposals between 1960 and 1989 to start new businesses or expand old ones and all of them ended in the bureaucratic files. Nehru in his naivety dampened the competitive spirit of India’s entrepreneurs when he innocently enquired of the need for having ‘nineteen brands of toothpaste’ (p.153). Another ‘gem’ of stupidity came later when Nehru declared in parliament that ‘public sector’s aim is not to make profit but to meet social objectives’. He nationalized a number of industries without adequately compensating the owners. His public sector was marked by low return on capital, lack of autonomy and accountability of senior managers. The supreme leader’s callous attitude did not instill in them a concern for profit and efficiency. In fact, this complacency to profits continued until recently till the government linked the employees’ wage revision to the company’s profitability.

If Nehru’s economic policy was unfortunate, Indira Gandhi’s trajectory was nothing short of a disaster. Since the author was personally at the receiving end of some of her bad policies, he argues with spirit and conviction. Under her tenure, India withdrew further from world trade, raised tariffs and taxes even higher and became one of the worst performing economies. He estimates that Indira’s follies cost about 1.3 per cent lower in terms of GDP per year. The stringency of laws was in direct proportion to corruption. It could also be that the rules were hardened to thoroughly milk the industry in terms of kickbacks. The MRTP act brought in to curb monopolistic and restrictive trade practices in 1969 was so draconian that it crippled private industry for a generation. Under this law, any business group with combined assets worth rupees 20 crores or above was declared a monopoly and effectively debarred from expanding its business and placed under strict anti-monopolistic supervision and control. Rajiv Gandhi ‘graciously’ raised the limit to rupees 100 crores, but Narasimha Rao entirely scrapped this ridiculous law. Pranab Mukherji, who was the finance minister of Indira and later the nation’s president, was totally closed to any new idea and embarrassingly arrogant when he answered questions (p.197). The Janata party which replaced Indira continued to hoist Gandhian socialism and sacrificed growth. They reserved 863 industries for the small sector. Only entrepreneurs who invested less than rupees 60 lakhs could enter one of these industries. Competition from large and medium enterprises vanished and the sector moved into paralysis. A great irony of this period was that some of the future champions of the 1991 Liberalization were part of the government and responsible for some of its stringent regulations. There were many outstanding economists in government and academia such as I G Patel and Manmohan Singh who didn’t blow the whistle. They kept serving a morally bankrupt system for years, providing it with intellectual respectability and support.

The author joined Vicks very early and has contributed a great deal in making the product widely acceptable and used. It is amusing to learn that people thought it to be an original Ayurvedic remedy while in fact it was researched and developed in the US. It was only in the 1980s that it was marketed as Ayurvedic after ascertaining that its constituents were described in Ayurvedic textbooks. Their efforts to ensure customer satisfaction at every level of the employees are enlightening. Having partnered and worked with foreign and Indian professionals for many decades, Das feels that Indians are not good at working as a team. He claims that the poor teamwork of Indians is a festering, chronic disease. This divisive character is a national competitive disadvantage. A recurring refrain in the book is that intellectuals have not been able to sell the 1991 Reforms to the common public as a beneficial thing. Most of the people who really understand it remain mute while the politically motivated gang continuously point to the mindless jargon of ‘growing inequality’ as something that is going to seriously affect the lives of the less well-off. This book provides several arguments to decimate such propaganda of naysayers. The author comments in this regard that greater benefits owned by a few could be justified if the inequality improved the situation of the poor. A CEO earns many times more salary than the ordinary workers, but they consent to it as long as it motivated him to earn more profit to the company and the workers get higher wages as a result.

The book includes biographical sketches of Aditya Birla, Dhirubhai Ambani and Sam Pitroda as a kind of motivational story for young entrepreneurs. The latter parts of the volume deals with a review of the 1991 reforms and the areas which have not improved in the year 1999 when this book was written. A drawback is that it includes long sermons to the government, politicians, businessmen and the people which can be a bit tiring for the readers. This edition of the book is published in 2015 and includes a fresh Introduction and Afterword which brims with claims of vindication of the author’s original arguments. His viewpoints are very bold and are excellent examples of out-of-the-box thinking. Das presents data to show that the British rule was not so damaging to India on the economic front, particularly after the last decades of the nineteenth century. Running the empire was definitely not a hugely profitable enterprise. Several grave blunders of Nehru’s economic policy are listed in the book which can supplement Rajnikant Puranik’s famous book, ‘Nehru’s 97 Major Blunders’ and would help him complete a century and a few more points. You can find my review of that book here.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Title: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed
Author: Slavenka Drakulic
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2016 (First published 1992)
ISBN: 9780060975401
Pages: 197

There were times at the peak of the Cold War when the world was really nervous about the prospect of a false step from one of the rivals unintentionally setting in motion a nuclear holocaust. Fortunately, one of the contenders – the Communists – collapsed surprisingly quickly in the matter of around three years straddling 1990. The people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe found themselves standing exposed to the world one fine morning. The new world which they saw unfolding right in front of their eyes was full of challenges of the new capitalist system. How they coped with this ‘revolutionary’ change is a question that becomes relevant only after their life under the communist system is studied in detail. There are several books on this interesting topic and their perspectives also differ widely. This book provides a refreshingly new viewpoint and aspires to provide a snapshot of the lives and feelings of the unfortunate men and women – mostly women – who had had no option but to stay under the yoke of communism. The book is dedicated to all women of Eastern Europe, who too made possible the changes in 1989. It tells some anecdotes about how they lived a joyless existence where the seventy years of communism’s authoritarian rule could not provide them with their most basic needs. Slavenka Drakulic is a respected journalist and cultural commentator of Croatia. Her works had appeared in major world journals. She was one of the founders of the network of eastern European women’s groups. She has also produced three other books. This book covers the life in the former Yugoslavia of which Croatia was a part and is based on the author’s firsthand experiences and interviews with women in other communist regimes in the critical period of the dismantling of socialism.

Drakulic presents a fine view of how life was under the repressive Communist state and its never-ending status quo of ordinary life. One was trained to fear change, so that when change eventually began to take place, one was suspicious and afraid, because every change one has ever experienced was always for the worse. What Communism instilled in its victims was the sense of immobility, the absence of a future, the absence of a dream, of the possibility of imagining their lives differently. Everything in society or any abstract idea was first tested on the touchstone of ideological consistency with Marxist-Leninist thought. Growing up in a Communist country, one learns very young that politics is an abstract concept but a powerful force influencing people’s everyday lives. The state intruded into every minutiae of ordinary life. The political authority and the trivia of daily living were inseparably connected. The author then asserts that communism, more than a political ideology or a method of government, is a state of mind. Everyone watched their steps and felt the breath of the state’s censors behind their neck. The socialist state had also brought to perfection the social game called ‘reading between the lines’. The censoring was harsh and the punishment for even minor infractions matched it.

A good part of the book details how the people of a socialist state always lived with shortages of essential goods. All means and methods of production were under state control and a bunch of bureaucrats decided what to produce and how much of it. This created imbalances such that any item could go out of stock any time. People developed the precautionary habit of storing everything that went through their hands – whether useful or not because you never knew when it might become useful. The planned economy and industrialization drive didn’t care for small things in life. Consumer goods were of poor quality and unappealing. It is the superiority of the West in mass-producing cheap, good quality consumer goods that dazzled the people of socialist states and made them look at their system with inward contempt and suppressed anger. Aesthetics was considered superficial, bourgeois invention. Women were declared equal to men and the state saw no point in them trying to look beautiful! They were made to work everywhere proving that they were even physically equal. The communist ideal was a robust woman who didn’t look much different from a man. Without a choice of cosmetics or clothes, with bad food, hard work and no spare time, it wasn’t hard to create a uniformity that comes out of an equal distribution of poverty and the neglect of people’s real needs. As a result, women in Eastern Europe looked tired and older than they really were. People were instructed to be good workers and party members. To cultivate individualism, to perceive oneself as an individual in a mass society, was looked down upon. Communism liked the homogeneity of cattle a better role model than the fissiparousness of a free-thinking human society.

Continuing with the analogy to cattle, we read about instances where the state control over an individual’s life was suffocatingly tight. Life under communism lacked any kind of privacy. Everybody was comrade to everybody else and every member watched over the life of others because only when there is no privacy can there be total control. Besides, the thinking was that why one needs privacy if he has nothing to hide? In communist Yugoslavia, the state found a novel way to address shortage of housing which the author experienced and describes. The government divided big apartments into rooms, forcing complete strangers to live in a kind of commune. Socialism feared privacy in each of its manifestations. There was only one state-owned channel on television, broadcasting programs designed to brainwash people and bore them to death. However, the party/state functionaries were a class of its own and enjoyed a life fuller and richer than the ordinary comrades. It was hard for common folk even to peek into their houses, protected by high walls, watchmen and dogs and a general element of fear. Consequently, many people ran away from their homes and crossed the border to the West at great risk. They were so desperate and determined to escape the clutches of communism that they ignored the risk of guards shooting them dead if their movement was detected. The author talks about a museum in former East Germany where the devices people created to escape out of their dreary and worthless existence are displayed. This includes a home-made submarine which sailed under the Baltic Sea to reach Denmark. There’s a small aircraft with a car motor, a hot air balloon and a chair-lift with rope using which a whole family escaped.

The author was surprised to see several beggars going about the streets in US cities soliciting something from passersby. It was new to her. Whatever may be its shortcomings, the socialist state had ensured that nobody wandered the streets aimlessly except the gypsies who didn’t count. The cutthroat nationalism of the constituent provinces was also kept under check as long as communism reigned. The first thing people experienced in a state de-shackled from the communist yoke was the civil war that broke out between the different provinces. The warring nations had restarted their fight which was cut off after World War II when socialism had enveloped them. For 45 years, within the iron embrace of the communist party, the wounds of nationalism had not healed. Instead, they were simply ordered to disappear. Drakulic also identifies a deep trait of the socialist society regarding the passivity or detachment of the people in the administration of their social assets. Cities in Eastern Europe fell into decrepitude relatively fast. Low quality of paint, pollution, bad gasoline and bad cars were reasons of this but not the whole story. What caused this degeneration were the people themselves with decades of apathy behind them. Their conviction was that somebody else – the government, the party or those ‘above’ – was in charge of it. How could it be the people when they were not in charge even of their own lives?

The author declares at the outset that this is not a story of big heroes, political prisoners or dissidents, but of ordinary people – especially women – who were under the wheel of communism’s juggernaut who couldn’t stand it anymore. Since it came from the very foundations like a cataclysmic earthquake, the socialist regimes fell like dominoes one by one rather quickly. Readers can enjoy the biting sarcasm displayed in the book against the socialist state thinking big and omitting the mundane things useful in the daily lives of the people. The book is also noted for subtle humour and sarcasm. Political ones aside, she describes about a window-shopping trip in New York with a friend and remarks that ‘due to the fact that we had no money, we were enjoying the expensive clothes just as someone would enjoy an exhibition of modern art’. Most likely the book is a compilation of articles the author had written on journals as all chapters are of equal length. Unfortunately, the author has not examined much on the life of the nomenklatura – the top brass of the party and government – who enjoyed all luxuries of life while almost all others in the country languished in squalor.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Developmental Modernity in Kerala

Title: Developmental Modernity in Kerala – Narayana Guru, SNDP Yogam and Social Reform
Author: P. Chandramohan
Publisher: Tulika Books, 2019 (First published 2016)
ISBN: 9788193926987
Pages: 260

The state of social reforms and standard of living varied much among the British Indian provinces and native states neighbouring them in the colonial period. Even among the princely states, matters differed very much. Travancore was a model state among them having high literacy, emancipation of the backward castes and better healthcare systems as compared to other states. Social reforms implemented in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in the little southwestern kingdom were the fountainhead for the onset of modernity in Travancore. The reforms in society and transformation of the economy went hand-in-hand to usher in development in all spheres of life. This book explains the development of modernity in Travancore and the social work of Sri Narayana Guru and SNDP Yogam which acted complementary to open up a modern state along the lines of a constitutional monarchy. It nicely describes how the reforms sought to create a social climate for modernization. P. Chandramohan retired as curator of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi after having served in various positions in that institution for over thirty years. He is a scholar politically oriented towards the Left and this book is an attempt to ‘prove’ that the reform movement in Kerala followed Marxist precepts on the origin and development of social classes and the struggle between them. The book is an academic product of JNU and is a revised version of the author’s M. Phil dissertation which was submitted at its Centre for Historical Studies in 1982. The narrative covers the time interval from around 1891 in which the Malayali Memorial was submitted and till 1936 when all government temples in Travancore were thrown open to all Hindus irrespective of caste differences.

The subject matter of the book primarily deals with the Ezhava community, Sri Narayana Guru who rose up spiritually from its ranks and the community’s social organisation called Sri Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (hereafter referred as SNDP Yogam). The Ezhavas constituted nearly a fifth of Travancore’s population and hierarchically enjoyed a good position among the untouchable castes. Their main occupations were cultivation, manufacture of coir, fiber and jiggery and the extraction of palm-tree products like toddy. Even though they nominally belonged to Hinduism, the Hindu community was stratified based on degrees of purity and pollution. Any kind of solidarity among Hindus in terms of religion was absent. In no other part of India was casteism more rigidly practiced than in Kerala that Swami Vivekananda likened it to a lunatic asylum. Narayana Guru and the SNDP Yogam found the most distressing social issue as the prevalence of the caste system which segregated people on a hierarchically ordained model on the basis of ritual status. The book explains the many situations like the consecration of a Siva temple at Aruvippuram when the Guru and the Yogam came to clash with entrenched dogma. Chandramohan claims that the reforms led to the formation of a new intelligentsia and a middle class whose objective was to determine the contours of a new inter-caste society. This tendency to map anything anywhere to comply with the Marxist principle of class struggle is a recurrent theme in the book.

The book lists out the land reforms introduced in the kingdom of Travancore which transformed the agrarian society in which the king was the sole owner of all land in the state into a modern system in which proprietorship was transferred to his subjects in return for a nominal tax on land they possessed. Important legislations that introduced the concept of private property came into being. In 1865, the government enunciated the Paattam Proclamation which is considered to be the magna carta of Travancore agriculturists. It granted full ownership rights of about 200,000 acres of government-owned land to the holders/tenants. These could then be treated as private, heritable, saleable and otherwise transferable property. This put an end to state landlordism and created peasant proprietorship. The landed ‘assets’ of the state became the landed ‘property’ of the people. Eventually, this would lead to the partition and liquidation of the joint family system. This accounted for 80 per cent of the land. The remaining 20 per cent of jenmam lands was addressed by reforms just two years later in 1867. It redefined the power of jenmis (zamindars) making the eviction of a tenant much more difficult although they were required to continue giving rent to the jenmis. In 1896, the Jenmi-Kudiyaan act came into being. It ensured permanent occupancy rights and fixed rents for kaanam kudiyaans. An amendment was introduced to this regulation in 1932. It converted all tenants into proprietors who were to remit rent to the jenmi. Rent payment had to be made only in cash. Thus the kudiyaans acquired full ownership of the land including tis output. The author also narrates the development of cash economy in the nineteenth century with spread of plantation crops, growth of industries like coir, cashew nut and cotton spinning effected rapid economic change in that century’s last quarter. A middle class cutting across caste lines grew up as a result.

The chapter on Narayana Guru neatly summarizes his contributions to social reform. He melded tradition and modernity and at the same time produced a result greater than the sum of its parts. Guru’s genius lay in completely eliminating some meaningless rituals like mock marriage of pre-pubescent girls (thalikettukalyanam) and those associated with attaining puberty (thirandukuli) while only modifying the practices in some other fields. Superstitious procedures and obscure social customs were summarily reformed. He deconsecrated Ezhavas’ till-then-favoured gods like Chathan, Marutha or Madan and introduced the mainstream Hindu deities minus the Brahmin priesthood. Chandramohan bestows the full credit in spreading universal education on the Christian missionaries. He even praises them for enabling the upward social mobility of the Ezhavas (p.40) because ‘the community used to have interactions with the missionaries’! This does not take into account the potential or limitations of missionaries in an objective way as done in the book, ‘Missionaries and a Hindu State: Travancore 1858-1936’ by Koji Kawashima reviewed earlier here. There is some confusion on the numerical strength of the schools run by them. On p.86-87, the missionaries were said to be running 416 out of 1901 schools (22 per cent), but on the next page, the ratio enlarges to 46 per cent. The mindset of the Travancore government and the people in making it the most literate state on Indian independence is glimpsed in the book. In 1897, 24 per cent of the students were the offspring of labourers/coolies who had recognized the utility of sending their children to schools rather than following the livelihood of their parents. The kingdom provided free education and encouraged new schools. In 1903, it spent 9.56 per cent of its total revenue on education.

The author analyses the socio-economic background which helped caste organizations like the SNDP Yogam to grow up. Contrary to popular perception that the entire Ezhava community engaged in toddy tapping, distilling and distribution, by the end of the nineteenth century, only 3.8 per cent of them were employed in this profession. Others were occupied in lucrative employment and prosperous trade. The government stopped the practice of unpaid compulsory manual labour for public works and instead employed labourers with wages to construct roads. Coir export to the US increased and the price of toddy and arrack doubled. A middle class arose from these developments who found the time to be ripe for collective action for social mobility. In 1896, Dr. Palpu formed the Ezhava Mahasabha but found it difficult to make it popular. Swami Vivekananda advised Palpu to find a spiritual leader around whom a social organization could be built up. That’s how Guru and Palpu met and the SNDP Yogam was born.

The nature and character of the Yogam is analysed in detail and Chandramohan claims that it was an elitist group at least for the first quarter century of its existence. According to the articles of association of the Yogam, it was largely commercial in nature. Membership fee was prohibitively high. Not more than a fourth collected in a year was to be used for that year’s expenses. The remaining was to be loaned out on interest in order to accumulate capital. Stringent restrictions were in place for members defaulting in payment of the fees. In 1916, the Yogam took court action against members who failed to pay subscription, sealed their houses and held up their property. The organization was said to be led by the educated middle class and the laboring class had no say in its functioning. The presidential address and most of the speeches at its annual meetings were in English. T K Madhavan was the leader who brought Yogam to the ground and made it accessible to all. He considerably reduced the fees in 1927 that helped ordinary men to afford membership. The number of members rose from 3818 to 63674 as a result in just two years. The book also includes a brief exposition on the lower castes gaining the right of temple entry and the agitation that went into it. Curiously, the lower castes were not very enthusiastic in entering government-owned temples. It was C. Raman Thampi and Janardhana Menon, two Nair leaders, who advocated for temple entry before any avarna voiced it. The author claims that Vaikom Satyagraha which demanded only the opening up of public roads around that temple to lower castes, was organized by the Congress, upper castes and T K Madhavan, while the Yogam kept aloof from it. The decade that followed it was a crucial one. Ezhavas allied with Christians and Muslims in the Abstention Movement and obtained reservation for the community in government jobs. An argument gained strength among Ezhavas to convert en masse to Christianity in order to break the shackles of caste oppression. The government was then quick to introduce the Temple Entry Proclamation which ensured the right of every Hindu to enter temples.

Even though the book is in original a part of the academic repertoire – being the author’s M. Phil dissertation – it’s very much readable. The argument regarding the social indices of various communities is backed by many tables culled from census data. The book is very reverent to Narayana Guru and adulatory to his work but is against the SNDP Yogam because of its roots among the middle class and its nonchalant approach to class struggle. As noted before, this book is an attempt to evaluate how modernity developed in Kerala in accordance with Marxist theory. The abolition of meaningless rituals like talikettukalyanam, thirandukuli and pulikudi is said to be ‘a phase in the evolution of bourgeois capitalism’ (p.124). The actions of the Guru are claimed to be similar to the liberal tendencies of the modern bourgeoisie (p.134). In the first few chapters of the book, the author maintains self-control in using leftist jargon. So we read about ‘how the ideas of the Guru suited the aspirations of the Ezhava middle class’ and the Guru’s religious reforms in rituals having a ‘democratic element’ in them. The term ‘bourgeois’ appears for the first time on page 128 and is a constant presence thereafter. The funniest part is that the book contains references to EMS Namboodiripad’s works who was nothing more than a jack of all trades but a master of political sectarianism. His arguments and opinions prove nothing but this seems to be a feeble attempt on the part of the author to a logical fallacy called ‘appeal to authority’. To cap it tightly with political rhetoric, it includes a Foreword by the well-known Marxist historian K N Panikkar.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Babur: The Chessboard King

Title: Babur: The Chessboard King
Author: Aabhas Maldahiyar
Publisher: Vintage, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9780670099542
Pages: 403

Estimating the economic output of a nation in the form of GDP is extremely complicated as the period of study goes further and further back in time. However, some scholars have made intelligent guesses based on ancient commercial sources and the flow of history. In the year 1000 CE, the share of India’s GDP to that of the entire world was 28 per cent while China accounted for 22 per cent. In 1950, this had declined to a measly 4.2 per cent for India and 4.6 per cent for China, even though China kept up its momentum till 1820 in which year its share was an impressive 33 per cent. What caused this devastation of Indian economy in these 1000 years? What caused the decline of agriculture and industry and also the collapse of native social structures? The answer is not hard to find. 700 years of Islamic colonialism and 200 years of British colonialism had sapped India dry of her resources. Till the establishment of the Kimberly mines in South Africa in 1870, Golconda in India was the only major diamond mine in the world. However, each one of the huge number of stones extracted from Golconda was taken out of India by force or trickery. India’s gold and silver alleviated poverty and established infrastructure in the distant lands of Persia, Arabia, Khorasan and Great Britain in that millennium of colonialism and slavery. Mohammed of Ghor led the first wave of Islamic occupation while Babur led the second. This is in addition to the transitory yet thoroughly ruining plundering raids of Mahmud of Ghazni, Timur, Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Durrani. However, there is a stream of Indian academia which glorifies the invasion and occupation of Islamic powers as having provided something beneficial to India. This book is an attempt to recreate the history of Babur from primary sources of which the most prominent is his own diary, the Baburnama. Aabhas Maldahiyar is an architect and urban designer who has an intense love for history. A nationalist to the core, Maldahiyar is also a skilled reader of Persian manuscripts. The GDP data mentioned above is taken from the appendix of this book with original references from the book, ‘Contours of the World Economy, AD 1 – 2030’ by Angus Maddison.

Maldahiyar begins with an excellent introductory chapter that seethes with indignation at the slavish way history is taught in post-independence India through a curriculum cleverly crafted by Left historians. The author identifies three traits seen in all NCERT (the state agency which prepares school text books at the national level) text books as 1) all invaders except the British were not bad 2) no invaders including the British had any religious zeal, and 3) before the arrival of the great invaders, India was a place of the worst practices like Sati, untouchability etc. This scam has made not merely wee-sized harm but a catastrophe set to dismantle the pride and respect of our land and civilization. This is nothing short of intellectual dishonesty. The fact that this obfuscation is deliberate is proved by the observation that unlike the British, the earlier colonialists like the Sultanates and Mughals were very honest about their deeds and all the ‘namas’ contain descriptions of the worst kind of atrocities they inflicted upon our ancestors. In their eyes, the atrocities upon the Kafirs were virtuous; hence they saw no reason for hiding it. However, post-independence historians – Leftists on the one hand and Islamists posing as Left on the other – ignored this clear evidence and portrayed these brutal monsters as great kings. The book includes a prescient quote by Heinlein that ‘a generation which ignores history has no past and no future’. This book is claimed to be an attempt to set the record straight by delving deep into the primary sources.

The author plans a grand scheme for the book which envisages the most important primary source – Babur’s journal titled ‘Baburnama’ – superimposed on the happenings around the world during that period. Since this approach does not seek to make any verdict or frame opinion on the subject matter, Maldahiyar proposes to provide a new perspective on Babur. He stresses again at another point that if you must trust something in history, it must be the primary source corroborated with other primary sources on the same subject. With this magnificent objective in place, the author embarks on his journey into the sixteenth century narrative written by Babur but flounders on the very first chapter itself. A lot of details from Babur’s memoir are simply reproduced with no correspondence or correlation. Readers are not able to follow the storyline even if they are well-versed in the biography of Babur. Making an excellent replica of what Babur had written, this book lists out about 20-30 different names of people or places on each page and readers are rendered utterly clueless about what’s happening. In the Sherlock Holmes’ story ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League’, the complainant is asked to simply copy the Encyclopedia Britannica on to plain paper with no questions asked. This book is somewhat similar with the difference that the Baburnama is the source of the copying. Incomprehensible sentences like ‘Baqi Chaghaniani, a younger brother of Khusrau Shah, who was more Chaghanian, Shahr-i-Safa, and Tirmiz, sent the khatib of Qarshi to Babur’ (p.168) are repeated without any clarification. This is just one among the numerous such instances. Even the names of the singers who performed in a binge party thrown by Babur are listed faithfully as if the data is crucial in re-evaluating a flawed narrative of Indian historiography. The author has not shown any trace of judgment in selecting the topics and instead portrays Babur as a hero for most of the book. About 20 pages are earmarked to reproduce verbatim Babur’s observations on Kabul city – its geography, climate, fruits, crops and other details – like a gazetteer.

Babur meticulously recorded his impressions on other people – friend and foe alike. He observed places, societies, battles and politics to form his opinion and strategy about them. Babur ruled Kabul for around two decades before invading India and he used this time to effectively subjugate the whole of Afghanistan. Many Muslim tribes were at the receiving end of his battle fury and had to submit to humiliating treatment at the hands of this proud descendant of Timur. We read about some interesting anecdotes in this book on how they responded to defeat in battle. Assuming the disdainful pride of the conqueror of Afghan tribes, Babur writes, “we had been told that when Afghans are powerless to resist, they go before their foe with grass between their teeth as if to say ‘I am your cow’” (p.206). This was what exactly happened at the battle of Kohat. But Babur was not impressed with this spineless and opportunistic display of servility and ordered to behead the Afghans one by one. The book contains a detailed narrative on Babur’s campaigns in Afghanistan, especially his frequent attacks on the Turkmen Hazara tribes. Babur claims that he ‘drove them like deer by valley and ridge; we shot those wretches like deer; we made captive their people of sorts; we laid hands on their men of renown; their wives and their children we took’ (p.255).

The book is extremely boring except for the Introduction and Epilogue which are finely structured and establishes the logic behind writing this book. In fact, these two chapters are the only part of the volume where the author handles his own creation. Regarding the hundreds of pages in which the reader finds no relevance or interest, we can only say that it was a great disappointment. The author appears thoroughly clueless in organizing the content of Babur’s journal in a meaningful way so as to tell a coherent story. Besides, the significance of the title ‘chessboard king’ is not elaborated in the text. Readers are left to form their own conjectures on this critical point. This book is said to be the first among many volumes of a similar nature covering the entire history of Mughals. Maldahiyar may save himself the trouble if the other volumes are also planned to repeat the spirit and style of this book. In fact, I would have given one more star in the rating had I not purchased the book thinking that it’d be a good one on the Mughals. Hence the proverb ‘never judge a book by its cover’ stays very relevant.

The book is a waste of time and not recommended.

Rating: 1 Star

Omens and Superstitions of Southern India

Title: Omens and Superstitions of Southern India
Author: Edgar Thurston
Publisher: Shilpy Prakashan, Delhi 2019 (First published 1912)
ISBN: 9788187405016
Pages: 311

Faith is an integral part of Indian life. Regardless of economic circumstances, social position or geographical diversity, most of us keep some fond beliefs which sometimes turn out to be, well, not very rational. This state of affairs existed for a long time and we see a British anthropologist taking a keen interest in them. Edgar Thurston studied medicine but worked in a variety of fields such as numismatics, ethnography, geology and anthropology. He served as the superintendent of the Madras Government Museum for 23 years. He has published books on all topics of his interest. This book is an attempt to categorize the various faces of superstitious belief prevalent in southern India around the beginning of the twentieth century. As it was included in the Madras presidency, a part of present-day Odisha is also included in the book. One important thing to keep in mind is that the effort to list out the superstitious traits in the country is neither purely academic nor entirely benign. This book is clearly another tool in the arsenal of British evangelists to paint the whole of South Indian society with the brush of backwardness and barbarity by elaborating on some of the obscure rituals rarely practiced by a few people, as representative of the entire genre of Hinduism. The book includes several notes from missionaries, priests and bishops detailing the gory aspects of some local custom which fall just short of advocacy to the people to convert to Christianity in order to get redeemed of the worship of the devil. With this caveat at the back of one’s mind, this book is an interesting read as it helps to assess the current society and marvel at the several habits they still possess which are narrated in the book. The book is divided into many chapters such as omens, animal superstitions, evil eye, snake worship, vows, votive and other offerings, charms, human sacrifice, magic and magicians, divination and fortune-telling, agricultural and rain-making ceremonies. The Onam and Vishu celebrations in Kerala are also clubbed with superstition in the true spirit of colonial haughtiness and evangelical disdain.

The book includes detailed descriptions of the gory practice of animal sacrifice. Cutting the body open and observing the quivering or throbbing internal organs was the usual way. Sometimes, sanctified water is thrown over the animals brought to be sacrificed to see if they shiver in a specified manner which is taken as a good omen. Thurston seamlessly shift from the horrid description of animal sacrifices in one paragraph to an analysis of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala in the next where the throbbing of the right arm is given mystic interpretations. Readers are expected to grasp the unspoken clue that all (emphasis added) of India is riddled with superstition and heresy. Many observations recorded in the book regarding brutal rituals are always made by Christian missionaries who operated in these regions in search of converts. Bishop Whitehead tells a tale in which the situation is made most disgusting by adding nauseating bits of truth or falsehood. He says of an incident where the blood of a sacrificial pig is fed to itself while still alive along with rice. If it eats the material, that is taken as a good omen. Whitehead adds that the pujari finally cuts the throat of the animal. These stories are cleverly woven to cause maximum revulsion and encourage educated natives to convert to Christianity. While discussing the magical practice of bottling evil spirits and casting the bottles away, Thurston tactfully inserts the legend of the goddess Bhagavati of Kodungallur being rescued by a fisherman when he found her shut up in a jar at sea (p.247). This clearly exposes the colonial narrative of equating Hindu gods with evil spirits.

In the many chapters comprising the book, one encounters numerous practices which are grotesque, brutal, harmless or even outright funny. In Telugu, the number ‘seven’ is unlucky because the word ‘yedu’ is the same as that for weeping. Even a treasury officer, who was a university graduate, is reported as pronouncing ‘six and one’ when he was required to say ‘seven’. Omens were observed not only before starting auspicious ventures. The robber castes indulged in watching omens before a thieving expedition which occasionally included animal sacrifices. A gang of Donga Dasaris proceed to a Hanuman temple and garland the deity with a wreath of flowers. The garland hangs on both sides of the neck. If any of the flowers on the right side drop down first, it is regarded as the permission granted by the god to start on their plundering trip. If a tree snake bites a person, things are a bit humorous. The snake is believed to ascend the nearest palm tree and waits until it sees the smoke ascending from the funeral pyre of the victim. The only chance of saving his life is to have a mock funeral where a straw effigy is burnt. Seeing the smoke, the deluded snake comes down from the tree and the bitten person recovers. The gullible natives sometimes adored even foreigners as gods. A horse-riding Bengali babu was worshipped as a deity for giving protection to fishermen in a coastal hamlet of Odisha. It is noted that in the Ayudha Puja at the Madras School of Arts, the puja was done to a bust of the late Bishop Gell upon an improvised altar with a cast of Saraswati above and various members of the Hindu pantheon around.

Altogether, some of the practices followed by the people blended them easily into nature and their habitat even though they were not exactly rational. Sparrows were credited with bringing good luck to the house in which they build their nests. For this purpose, when a house is under construction, holes are left in the walls or ceiling, or certain earthen pots are hung on the wall by means of nails, as an attractive site for roosting. Wild elephants were held in veneration by the jungle tribe of Kadirs, whereas tame ones are believed to have lost the divine element. People of other religions also practiced irrational beliefs. A Mappila thangal (Mohammedan priest) once cursed the crows for dropping their excrement on his person, and that’s why it is believed that the crow does not exist in the Lakshadweep Islands. Muslims killed geckos unlike other social groups. The reason for this is shrouded in misty religious history. When some fugitive Muslims were hiding from their enemies in a well, one gecko came and nodded its head in their direction till their enemies saw them. In another interesting anecdote, a Lambadi was seen repeating mantrams over his patients and touched their heads with a book which was a small edition of the Telugu translation of St. John’s Gospel! Neither the physician nor the patient could read and had no idea of the contents of the book. Still, the disease was cured occasionally. All Hindu castes, irrespective of the hierarchy in ranking made vows and offerings to gods worshipped by them or other castes with the object of securing their good will or appeasing their anger. The lower castes sought to propitiate minor deities while the higher castes usually performed vows to the deities of Tirupati, Palani, Tiruvallur or Melkote. But they also sought the good offices of the minor deities when afflicted with serious illness or reversal of fortunes (p.133).

An amusing thing to note is that some of the harmless practices are still followed in South India. The propensity to avoid the '‘evil eye’ is widely persisting. We come across hideous effigies erected at construction sites and painting of large black dots on children’s faces to avert the evil eye. There is a good illustration of snake worship in Kerala and the rituals of Mannarasala are given prominence. On the other hand, the author never for an instant forgets that he belongs to a colonial master race tasked by destiny to rule over black ignoramuses steeped in superstition. So he is sensitive to even inoffensive local beliefs and disrespectful to what the natives consider as sacred. Overarching colonial contempt makes him offer a few coins to a native woman in return for her tali which is tied around her neck by the groom at the time of marriage. In England, this would have been tantamount to offering a price to a lady’s wedding ring. But the Indian woman set the record straight by giving a stream of abuse in return for this indecent proposal. In another instance, Thurston describes a head mason who always carried a copper coin which was six centuries old and was reluctant to part with. His attachment to this antique object is made fun of (p.191). In some cases the author does not comprehend what is going on around him but still ventures to pass judgment. Ceremonies related to Vaastu which sometimes involve drawing a human figure on the ground where a house is to be constructed is confused as pertaining to human sacrifice (p.212). Amid the rule of the British, the author mentions some events which indicate that there was a strong undercurrent of resentment among the people against foreign rule. In the chapter on rain-prophesies, the author remarks that in the year before the Mutiny, the prophecy was ‘they have risen against the white ants’.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Ring of Truth

Title: The Ring of Truth – Myths of Sex and Jewelry
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Speaking Tiger, 2019 (First published 2017)
ISBN: 9789389231755
Pages: 397

Many legends and stories from all parts of the civilized world are in fact recognition stories in which a long-lost husband, wife or offspring is reunited with his or her relatives when they come across a piece of jewelry, most typically a ring, in the custody of the unknown person. Kalidasa’s Shakuntala is the most well-known tale in India in which the royal lover forgot about his sweetheart in a hermitage and refused to recognize her when she presented herself at his court with unmistakable signs of pregnancy. Unfortunately, the girl had also lost the ring gifted by the king. By a strange coincidence of events, the ring which was lost in a river was swallowed by a fish which ends up in the royal kitchen. The king quickly remembered the ring’s past and is reunited with his wife and son. This book narrates similar stories from other cultures as well, such as ancient Greece, medieval Europe and Arabia. The pattern of such stories strikingly resembles each other across cultures. The stories given here are about circular jewelry, particularly rings even though bracelets and necklaces also make in their appearance quite regularly. The shape mimes the circle of eternity in the face of ephemeral human lives. We also find that sex and jewelry are often connected. Stories of rings frequently get into marriage and adultery, love and betrayal, loss and recovery and identity and masquerade. Wendy Doniger is a controversial professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. Her book ‘The Hindus – An Alternative History’ is banned in India because of the contemptible way in which it handled the sacred lore of Hinduism. You can, however, find it reviewed here.

Readers are treated with a fine variety of legendary stories from various parts of the world. A curious exemption is China from where nothing is heard though this may be attributed to the author’s poor research on the Far East. Apart from the genre of innocent wives who are reunited with their husbands upon presenting the ring which was gifted by him earlier in the story, there is another category called clever wives whose stratagems outsmart the restrictions set by a heartless husband who declines to consummate the marriage and set restrictions upon the wife which could be mitigated only by the son borne to her of him who leaves her. Such clever wives escape their detention, goes in disguise to follow the husband and trap him in the guise of a dancing girl or courtesan. The union eventually results in the birth of a male child thus setting into play one of the conditions of mitigation. The first seven chapters deal with stories of rings throughout history. The next two chapters veer towards necklaces in particular cultures and particular historical periods. The final two chapters return to rings and to the invention of the mythology of diamond engagement rings and a concluding consideration on the cash value of rings and the clash between reason and convention throughout the world. It may come as a surprise to many that the practice of presenting a diamond ring to the would-be bride at the time of betrothal was the result of a change in social mores brought about by persistent advertising campaign initiated by the De Beers company which produced diamonds around the end of World War II.

The author’s exposure to Indian mythology helps to construct parallels between it and European concepts which are very similar. A great deal of Orientalist study has gone into this subject so as to puff up the current comparative literature to such levels of advancement. The ancient myth of the submarine mare is a case in point. According to this legend, a mare triggers the final fire and the final flood. Hindu mythology tells of a fire that threatened to destroy the universe until it was placed in the mouth of a mare that roams at the bottom of the ocean. The flames that shoot out of her mouth are simultaneously bridled by and bridling the waters of the ocean. This delicate balance and the hair-trigger suspension will finally be disturbed at the moment of doomsday. Doniger mentions Scandinavian and Norse myths comparable to this Indian tale. Richard Wagener’s nineteenth century operas featuring the adventure of Siegfried and Brunnhilde also display cross-cultural affinity.

The book includes different variants of the Shakuntala story and we wonder at the freedom taken by Kalidasa as poetic license in embellishing and transforming a minor story in the Mahabharata into a world classic. Doniger quotes the comments of other scholars on these and unfortunately, she has chosen only Left-Islamists like Romila Thapar and Akhtar Hussain Raipuri who handles the subject matter under the lens of their religio-political prejudices. Raipuri had translated Kalidasa’s works into Urdu. He finds fault with Kalidasa and argues that he was a man identified with ‘Brahminical high culture’ and changed the original story. It is only in India that we find the opinions of Islamists posing as liberals getting a treatment at par with established wisdom. Hussain Raipuri is, in spirit, almost on the same page as those Muslim scholars in the Mughal court who were tasked with translation of Hindu texts to Persian. Even though they did the job well, they bitterly complained about ‘the unsavoury task of handling a religious text of the unbelievers’. Mulla Shiri, who translated the Mahabharata, termed the epic as containing ‘rambling, extravagant stories that are like the dreams of a feverish, hallucinating man’. Centuries have gone by, but this genre of bigoted scholars remains the same. For further details on the translation of Hindu texts in the Mughal era, please read my review of Audrey Truschke’s ‘Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court’ here. Doniger has learned Sanskrit well and her treatment of the nuances in literary texts point to the fact that she has mastered the language. However, this mastery is not translated into respect to the ancient texts. Her irreverent, mocking style sets her up as an insensitive braggart. Once she remarks that ‘Had Dushyanta, Yven, Tristan and Siegfried lived to our time, they might have attributed their memory lapses to another sort of a drug and cited a study reported in an article in Nature Genetics (p.135). In another instance, the author describes the legends linked to Durga Puja in Bengal and claims that Parvati berates Shiva for his ‘refusal to beget a son, his addiction to marijuana, his poverty, his infidelity and his refusal to get a job’ (p.150). Such is her disgusting style.

A good point of the author’s effort in writing this book is the consolidation of narratives similar in action and morals neatly laid out across cultures and millennia. A really creative attempt is to link the tales to the present-day world where myths are still widely prevalent but which are spawned and spread by commercial organisations for facilitating increased sales of their product – such as diamonds by De Beers. The significance of the genuineness of jewelry also seems to have made a diametrical shift. Whereas in old tales it was the genuineness of the ornaments that ensured that everything went well, in the modern stories the recurring theme is that faithful women cannot afford to possess expensive, real gems like genuine diamonds or pearls. We read of some stories in which a supposedly loyal wife silently implores an appraiser to pronounce a pearl necklace in her possession as fake when in fact it was gifted to her by another man. Morals change over time and so does morality – that’s what the author stresses. The book also provides an accidental glimpse of the loot of India in the colonial period, and the author is an unwitting party to it. Doniger proudly claims that she wears a bracelet of ancient Indian gold coins from the fifth century Gupta period. John Marshall, who excavated them, stole this treasure and gifted it to his mistress in the 1930s. She eventually married another man but kept the coins for herself. It was later bequeathed to the author. The book is not difficult to read but feminism ooze out of every pore in the narrative. Without implying any kind of disrespect to the author and solely copying an old Sanskrit idiom, let me conclude that the literary content of this book is like a garland in the hands of a monkey!

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star