Saturday, July 12, 2025

On the Origin of Time


Title: On the Origin of Time – Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory
Author: Thomas Hertog
Publisher: Penguin 2024 (First published 2023)
ISBN: 9781804991121
Pages: 313

Stephen Hawking was the face of physics for nearly three decades. His achievements in theoretical physics, especially the finding that black holes do emit radiation contrary to popular belief, was a game-changer in astrophysics. All of these in the face of a severely debilitating physical illness helped Hawking reach the level of an icon of resilience and hope. His best seller ‘A Brief History of Time’ was as legendary a work on popular science as its author was among physicists. People thought he would rest on his laurels since there was so much of it, but Hawking had other ideas. This book contains his research on the cosmos towards the end of his life long after he lost the whatever little power of muscles for electronic communication. Twenty years of the author’s conversations with Hawking are faithfully and truly woven into this narrative. The thrust of the story is on his so called final theory of the universe’s origin. Thomas Hertog is an internationally renowned cosmologist who was for many years a close collaborator of Stephen Hawking. He is currently professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leuven, where he studies the quantum nature of the big bang. He lives in Belgium.

A problem with cosmology is its inability to handle and explain the moment of origin. In spite of many theories elaborating on how ‘something came out of nothing’, they are unable to fulfil the basic criteria of a scientific theory on testability and falsifiability. Esoteric terms like quantum fluctuations of the void are thrown hither and thither, but the sad fact is that this aspect of physics – the exact point of origin – is still shrouded in mystery and conjecture, just like a religious myth. To add to the confusion and stoke the arsenal of religionists, Hawking and other writers toy with the concept of the appearance of design in the origin of the cosmos because it turned out in the future to be an ideal place for life in general and human life in particular. The book begins with the recollection of a talk with Hawking in which he commented that the universe appears ‘designed’. Most physicists believe that the universe’s delicately crafted architecture follows from an elegant mathematical principle at the core of the theory of everything. Then the universe’s apparent design would seem like a lucky accident of objective and impersonal nature. The author then contrasts the appearance of design at the root of things in physics and biology. This unnecessary exercise only serves to lure the attention of creationists and nothing more. Darwinism offers a thoroughly evolutionary understanding of the appearance of design in the living world. Physics and cosmology, on the other hand, have looked to the nature of timeless mathematical laws. Not history or evolution but timeless mathematical beauty is thought to rule at the deep bottom level of physics.

Even though the creation myth was part and parcel of the cultural milieu of every human society, the concept of a definite origin for the cosmos did not enter scientific thought till the last century. It was only when the expansion of the universe was established that scientists extrapolated it backwards in time to reach the starting point. Georges Lemaitre proposed a primeval atom which expanded to become the universe. The seed of big bang was sown then and interestingly Lemaitre was also a priest. He maintained that science and religion do not overlap. What happened to the primeval atom later is the realm of science while questions such as who created it or what went before it, is the subject matter of metaphysics and religion. Half a century later, Pope John Paul II claimed that every scientific hypothesis on the origin of the world such as the primeval atom or the big bang leaves open the problem of the beginnings of the universe. Science itself cannot resolve such a question which requires ‘revelation from god’. This remark was made in connection with the 1981 conference held in Vatican organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences convened to enhance the mutual understanding between science and religion. At this meeting, Hawking declared that the universe had no boundary and no definite moment of creation. Some curious facts about the universe’s expansion are also mentioned in the book which emerged recently from observations. We live in a hesitating universe, meaning the expansion rate was slow at first, but its period of hesitation ended a few billion years ago and is now expanding more rapidly. This was predicted by Lemaitre but contested by Einstein. Recent researches has proved Lemaitre right. A lot more has to be learned about the universe as well. 70 per cent of the universe consists of dark energy and 25 per cent with dark matter which do not interact with ordinary matter, which we are familiar with. Even according to the little chunk we know, it is difficult to explain strangely coincidental occurrences without resorting to concepts in quantum theory. The hot and slightly colder spots in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation is very essential for the formation of galaxies and life. Inflationary theory states that these spots are primeval quantum fuzz, magnified and writ large across the cosmic sky.

Hertog describes the development of many hypotheses in physics that deal with cosmological concepts and the role Stephen Hawking played in developing or modifying them. Hawking was bold, adventurous and ready to do a lot of intuition-driven practice of physics. This characterized much of Hawking’s later work, which is after the publication of Brief History. The paradoxes of the life cycle of black holes and with our place in the multiverse are the two vexing and hotly debated physics puzzles of the last decades. Hawking found that black holes emit some radiation and will eventually go into a void, destroying all information that had previously entered into it. But quantum theory states that this is impossible. Hawking’s clever attempts to rid the origin theories of a singularity at the very beginning are described in detail. The no-boundary hypothesis of Hartle and Hawking are illustrated, even though it is still very complicated to comprehend. The time dimension warps into one of space in the beginning of the cosmos. In this way, the singularity at big bang is conveniently taken out of the picture, but this looks more like a metaphysical somersault. This is also an approach towards developing a clear view of quantum gravity. In short, the theory holds that ‘once upon a time, there was no time’, because the time dimension is changed into one of space. The role of an observer in a quantum experiment is very critical as sometimes the effects fail to materialize in reality if there is nobody or nothing to observe it. In a quantum universe like ours, a tangible physical reality emerges from a whole horizon of possibilities by means of a continual process of questioning and observing. Now comes Hawking’s final theory. It offers a different explanation of the assertion that the universe originated in a big bang from nothingness. He held that nothingness at the beginning is nothing like the emptiness of a vacuum, but a much more profound epistemic horizon involving no space, no time and no physical laws. The origin of time is the limit of what can be said about our past, not just the beginning of all that is. This he calls the top-down approach (p.257).

The first decade of this century was a golden period for cosmology books in which quite a good number of titles abundantly ‘infotained’ the audience. Most of them talked about the quest for a grand general theory of physics that would unify the four fundamental forces of strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity and electromagnetism. The general consensus was that string theory would one day become ripe enough to explain it all. The second decade was not so prolific after all with very few good books coming our way and this book steps into the role of updating people about the fortunes of the fabled string theory at present. It now seems that the theory has not been able to live up to the expectations. The fundamental structure of string theory remains somewhat elusive. If you were to ask a number of theorists, you are likely to get a range of different answers. String theorists have mostly had to supplant input from experiments with mathematical research. Over the years, the community has developed its own intricate checks and balances system to judge progress, baked mostly on criteria to do with mathematical consistency of the framework. Unlike the Einstein equations of general relativity or the Schrodinger or Dirac equations of quantum theory, a single agreed upon master equation that encapsulates the kernel of string theory has yet to be found. Many predictions offered by the theory are not testable in the short or medium term because of the very high energy levels required. This has put the research at a dead end. This is the impression readers get regarding the string theory.

The book is extremely unappealing to read for general and lay readers for whom completely reading this would be a test of endurance and steadfastness. I don’t use the word ‘boring’, only because I am being charitable. Several diagrams are included in the work, but they fail to enhance comprehensibility and the book lacks the ability to inform lay readers. Many chapters are highly abstract and not described with the general reader in mind. This tome is rather a tribute to Stephen Hawking who was the teacher, philosopher and mentor of the author for many years, rather than serving as a herald of new developments in the field. Even Hawking’s final theory is not very convincing and appear to be only a philosophical conjecture of possibilities rather than a snapshot of reality. It is felt that this idea many not go much further.

The book is not recommended for ordinary readers.

Rating: 2 Star

It’s All About Muhammad


Title: It’s All About Muhammad – A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet

Author: F W Burleigh
Publisher: Zenga Books, 2014 (First)
ISBN: 9780996046930
Pages: 554

As the title implies, this is an explosive book for the believer as well as non-believer but its relevance cannot be doubted. It is an unabashed criticism and the onus is now on the believers to come out refuting the claims in this book. The world is wracked by Islamist violence on an unprecedented scale in its history. This book claims that every thirty minutes or so, a murder is happening somewhere in the world committed by jihadis, of people who refuse to pronounce the first pillar of Islam – the kalima (p.12). This book was published in 2014, but its continued significance is attested by the Pahalgam terror incident in Kashmir two months ago where terrorists gunned down 26 Hindu male tourists in front of their wives for refusing to, or more probably, being ignorant of the kalima. In fact, this gory incident was a reason to read this book in order to understand why the jihadis go on such bloody rampages for the last fourteen centuries. This book asserts that Islam was imposed by violence, because it has no other way to sustain itself. This is claimed to be a biography of Prophet Muhammad compiled from original sources. It is not clear whether the author has used the Arabic versions or later translations. The author’s name, F W Burleigh, is evidently a pseudonym as no search on the Internet could extract any info on his identity (I believe the author to be a male). He claims that he had examined 20,000 pages of original Islamic texts for the research of this book. He was motivated by the 9/11 attack to delve deeper into the question of why hard-line Muslims resort to such violent measures.

His life and times are well chronicled by early Islamic writers and biographers and an extensive corpus of literature is available on this topic. It also surveys the socio-religious milieu of pre-Islamic Mecca. The town was the centrepiece of Arabian polytheism which housed the temple of moon worship by importing a human-like statue of the Nabatean moon good Hubal. This temple was without a roof and had a rectangular wall about the height of a single storey building. The walls were often breached by flash floods and the Meccans rebuilt it with a raised platform and roof and named it ‘the cube’, that is, kaba. There were people protesting against various aspects of the religion and a polytheistic apostate named Zayd ibn Amr believed in an idealized Abrahamic religion founded on belief in one true god and total submission to it. Meccans drove Zayd out of the town and he took up residence in a cave on Mount Hira. He used to come to the town at night and had discussions with Muhammad and other people who shared his interests.

Paganism is inherently tolerant. So it is with some astonishment that we read about why the Meccans drove him and his disciples away from the town. The narrowness of the new religion’s dogma was offensive to the Meccans who were traditionally tolerant of everyone’s god concept. Our protagonist ridiculed their idols and statues; he condemned each and every polytheist to the fires of hell. This was in no way acceptable to the Meccans who tolerated everything except intolerance. He performed his prayer routines in the open in front of their temple as a challenge at which the Meccans seethed in anger, but they could do nothing about it because such freedom was granted to everyone by default. Allah was one of the gods the Meccans worshipped. What was different in the new religion was its repudiation of all other deities. He branded the people of Mecca as idol worshippers whereas none of them disputed the existence of a supreme deity. They thought that the idols were only representations of higher powers and not the powers themselves. While most of his own Hashemite clan rejected him in the early stages, they supported him against any harm by other groups as a show of clan loyalty. This tribal affinity prevented the Meccans from dealing a severe personal assault. The new religion used the Meccans’ customs such as providing safe passage in specific months to good advantage even though they had little respect for the traditions. He was exploiting their openness and tolerance. The temple was open to worship for anybody to worship whatever they wished but he tolerated only his own idea of god. This was a bone of contention with the Meccans.

He and his companions were forced to leave Mecca as their lives were at risk. Yathrib (present day Medina) was the preferred destination because the Khazraj and Aws tribes which resided there were more receptive to monotheism. They had exposure to the Jewish faith who constituted nearly half of the population. Prophets guided the Jewish religion. Besides, the warring tribes in Yathrib needed a strong leader to unify them. Polytheism was weak there and no communal worship was in place. After the alliance with the Yathrib tribes was sealed, revelations were received to fight for the cause since peaceful proselytization could not make much impact. Once the group relocated to the new desert oasis, there began plunder of caravans and he claimed a fifth of the booty which made him and many of his followers rich beyond their wildest dreams. The victory at the battle of Badar gave them confidence to take on his enemies in Yathrib. All criticism was silenced; several poets who mocked him in verse were assassinated. After the base was secured, hostile tribes in Arabia were targeted. Heavenly sex or terrestrial booty was promised to the loyal fanatics who fought on his side. If they did not fall in line, the threat of perpetual hellfire was an effective clincher.

The consolidation and empowerment of his reign in Yathrib is explained in quite some detail. The string of assassinations and expulsion of Qaynuqa Jews brought about a rapid expansion of his religion and it included much of the non-Jewish population of Yathrib. The book provides a graphical description of the massacre of Qurayza Jews in which 900 men and grown up boys who surrendered were beheaded five or six at a time and dumped into a trench dug nearby for that purpose. The author claims that this was exactly what the ISIS did in Iraq and Syria and concludes that terror was a convincing missionary. Boys were killed if they had reached puberty. If there was any doubt about their age, they were checked for pubic hair. If so, they too were beheaded. Men with clothes worth preserving were forced to remove them so that some of them died naked (p.311). Their women and children were forced to watch this ordeal and were then sold into slavery. He was ferocious than any of his opponents and overwhelmed them until his very name caused fear. Though his enemies were able to inflict occasional setbacks on him, they ultimately saw the embrace of his religion as the only refuge from the pain and misery he was able to impose on them. Thus his religion grew. Proactive attacks on enemies, real or imagined, were carried out through numerous raids, forceful conversions, fundraising through plunder and spreading terror. He invited the people to convert to his religion. If they refused, he proclaimed them guilty of turning their back on truth. They were then subject to god’s punishment; attacking them was rendering divine justice (p.380). The book contains a vivid description of the brutal interrogation of the leader of Khybar Jews named Kinana regarding the places where he had hidden his wealth.

Burleigh makes a character sketch of our protagonist which has some positive and mostly negative aspects. He is alleged to possess some psychiatric problems and is claimed to have gained control of anxiety disorder by ‘elaborating and practising a complex prayer ritual marked by repetition and precise, time-consuming body movements. He is also said to be a control freak. Creating rules was fundamental to his controlling nature and he never passed up an opportunity to create laws about matters as they arose, no matter how trivial. It also went into areas he did not comprehend fully. For instance, he prohibited intercalation of the Arabian calendar which added a month every three years to keep the lunar calendar in sync with the solar cycle and seasons. With this omission, the Muslim calendar began to slip the sun by eleven days each year. This act was contrary in spirit to what Gregory XIII did nearly a millennium later. His family life is treated in a gentle manner throughout the book and a chapter titled menage-a-quatorze is reserved for a detailed analysis which is surprisingly devoid of harsh recriminations. Such allegations are reserved for the personality assessment. Very harsh terms like epileptic psychopath, deluded mass murderer, revelations were hallucinations, etc. are included in the book. At the same time, some qualities are also indicated. He is said to be a creative genius, masterful at reading his audience, gift of eloquence, astute leadership, make others die for him, ability to convince people he had the truth etc. He is also credited to have created a trans-tribal super tribe of believers.

The book is claimed to be entirely based on the original literature of the religion. If the readers find the protagonist of this biography disturbing, it is asserted to be because what is written about him in the original literature is disturbing. The lay followers of the religion are obliged to follow the protagonist’s practice and they are violent to non-believers because he was so. Burleigh declares this book an antidote to what the protagonist created and to facilitate the ‘the aggressive, relentless and unapologetic exposure of the truth about him, particularly through dramatization in film’ (p.477). The book contains several illustrations of the protagonist contrary to the dictates of the religion not to personify him in any way and also as committing or superintending violent acts. The author advocates the production of a movie depicting these events. If such a movie is ever produced, it would be the ultimate expose of the religion and is sure to produce a violent backlash all over the world. Probably, it could be distributed only in the electronic format but would spread to every corner of the globe like wild fire. The book is dedicated to Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film director who was assassinated in 2004 in Amsterdam by a Muslim who resented his film Submission, Part 1 which criticized the treatment of women in Islam.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Sunday, June 29, 2025

Sati


Title: Sati – Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries and the Changing Colonial Discourse 
Author: Meenakshi Jain
Publisher: Aryan Books, 2016 (First)
ISBN: 9788173055522
Pages: 464

On Sep 3, 1987, a young man aged 24 died in a Rajasthan hospital due to illness. On the next day, his widow, 18-year old Roop Kanwar, sat on the funeral pyre and burnt herself along with her dead husband. This caused a huge uproar in India and overseas. This was clearly a suicide but the fact that it was committed under the full glare of a large throng of people made them culpable. No cases were registered against anybody. However, by the time of the incident’s first anniversary in 1988, a stringent law had been in place and it came down heavily on a few people who glorified Kanwar and the practice. 45 people were charged for the offense which carried a prison sentence of seven years. The trial proceedings went on interminably as usual. After 17 years of deliberations, 25 were acquitted in 2004 for insufficient evidence, eight people were set free in 2024 for the same reason (after 37 years), four are still absconding and the remaining eight died in the meanwhile. This was a classic instance of overzealous legislation ruining innocent lives. Instances of widows immolating themselves on the pyres of their husbands have occurred intermittently even after the notorious 1987 Deorala incident. Despite the ban on glorification of sati, temples dedicated to sati matas exist and continue to thrive. This book is not a work on sati as such, its origins or voluntary or mandatory nature of its performance. The primary focus is on the colonial debate on sati and the role of evangelicals and Baptist missionaries in it. Sati was an exceptional act performed by a miniscule number of Hindu widows but its occurrence was exaggerated by the missionaries in the nineteenth century who were eager to Christianize and anglicize India. Meenakshi Jain is an associate professor in history at Gargi College, University of Delhi and is a former Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

Jain looks at information from foreign sources regarding the practice of sati and also at the religious sanction for this weird custom. Sati is not sanctioned in ancient texts. In fact, Vedas specifically ask the widow to return to life. Even Manu Smriti, which is generally deemed to be mildly misogynist, recommends the widow to remain chaste after the death of her husband and promises a place for her in heaven for that. Sati came into being in the Puranic age, but still its occurrence was highly sporadic. The Greek historian Diadorus writes about a voluntary immolation in 316 BCE in Persia where a contingent of Indian soldiers was stationed. All observations indicated that the rite was not obligatory and ridiculed the men folk for not dissuading the women from committing it. By the early middle ages, it became more common but never universal. Up to 1000 CE, satis were rare in the Deccan and an exception in the extreme South also. However, it flourished under the Chola dynasty.

The book notices the shift in European perspective on sati after they obtained political power in India. By the late-eighteenth century, the earlier sentiments of approbation and awe in foreign accounts which mostly stressed the voluntary nature of the rite, were replaced with condemnation and demands for intervention and abolition of the custom. This may also have something to do with the work of Orientalists. By the late-eighteenth century, a long line of scholars whose work worthily assessed ancient India’s contributions which put the country a notch higher in the cultural ladder even though she was chained in political bondage. Christianity was reinventing itself in Britain at that time from the ideals of Enlightenment with bold assertions to abolish slavery and carry the religion to every corner of the world to convert the heathens. This necessitated India to be projected in a bad light which urgently required the civilizing effort of missionaries. As a consequence, the 1800s witnessed foreign accounts suddenly assuming monumental dimensions which were at odds with earlier narratives. With the advent of the Baptists, earlier sentiments of wonder and astonishment were replaced with condemnation. The sati rites were sporadic but the Baptists asserted that it was rampant.

Jain makes a diligent assessment of the social climate in Britain at the moment it donned the mantle of self-righteousness and looked down upon India. Whatever might have been their antecedents back home, English society in late-1700s India was noted for their low morality, high cost of living, gluttony and concubinage. It was as if the Europeans left their religion behind them at the Cape of Good Hope to be resumed when they returned from India. Evangelicalism in India derived much of its motive force from hostility to the French revolution. They believed that the root of the crisis in France lay in the rampant irreligion and endeavoured to prevent a similar outburst in England by a religious movement to make the lower classes religious and reverent. Cambridge University was the intellectual centre of the Evangelical Movement under Isaac Milner and Charles Simeon. Till 1813, the East India Company did not permit the missionaries to operate in India for fear of an adverse impact on its trading activities. Charles Grant, who was the commercial agent of the company in Malda, was the first British official to argue for the Christianization and Anglicization of India. Grant’s commentaries invented the reform agenda for the British and thereby provided a justification for British rule in India. He termed Indian religions – all of them – ‘false, corrupt, impure, extravagant and ridiculous’ (p.99). He also pleaded for the permanence of British rule in the country. Intellectual heavyweights in England were arrayed on the side of the missionaries. James Mill was instrumental in underpinning a theoretical background for the effort of dismantling Indian civilization. His six-volume work ‘History of British India’ made a decisive and transforming contribution to reverse the trend of admiration for the civilization of the East due to the work of Orientalists. Mill categorized the Hindu civilization the rudest and weakest state of the human mind.

The author notes that not all Orientalist writing was actuated by noble motives. Some of them translated Hindu texts to English with the intention to ‘expose those mysterious sacred nothings that had maintained their celebrity so long merely by being kept from the inspection of any’ (p.125). But old India hands and administrators refuted the missionary claim of women burning themselves on the pyres of their husbands as ‘not any more a religious rite than suicide was a part of Christianity’. The missionary effort in India was a concerted one and determined to show results. From 1793, missionaries started coming to Kolkata without valid licenses due to the encouragement Charles Grant in India and his Evangelical friends in England were providing them. Incidents of widow immolation in Bengal were embellished by Evangelicals and missionaries to gain the right of proselytization and to justify their presence and British rule in India. Missionaries falsely proclaimed that more than 10,000 widows were burnt a year in Bengal and 100,000 devotees committed ritual suicide under the wheels of Lord Jagannath’s rath at Puri. The Evangelical-missionary campaign against sati falls into two phases – the first, from 1803 to 1813 when the case was prepared and the second, from 1813 to 1829 when awesome figures were marshalled to demonstrate that it was a raging practice. The author points out that it was at this moment a pronounced anti-Brahmin sentiment became palpable in missionary writings because they were an obstacle to proselytization. The missionaries made all efforts to undermine the status of Brahmins.

This book also examines the demographic profile of women who performed sati and how could anyone voluntarily undergo immolation in public. The need to accompany her husband in death was carefully inculcated in girls’ minds so that it was not the result of a momentary impulse, but of a long-resolved determination. They conducted themselves not like mad enthusiasts but as martyrs expecting and getting respect from all assembled at the spot. However, in some cases use of psychedelic drugs is to be suspected. The British were at first agreeable to permit sati if neither coercion nor narcotics was involved and the voluntary nature of the act was convincingly established by interrogation of the widow by high officials. Brahmins constituted 34 per cent of the sati cases, Kshatriyas 14.8 per cent and Vaishyas 3.1 per cent. Almost half of the satis were in the age group of 50 or above and two-thirds 40 or above, but 5 per cent were between 11 and 20 years of age. State registration of cases of sati began in 1815. The appointment of William Bentinck as governor general in 1828 gave momentum to the campaign against sati. Bentinck had already decided on abolition even before his arrival in India. Hindu thinkers and social activists like Raja Rammohan Roy and Mrityunjaya Vidyalankar advocated for its abolition. They suggested an ascetic life for widows and remarriage was not there even in their horizon. They were also reluctant on an outright ban but in imposing harsher conditions so as to make its occurrence progressively more and more burdensome. Hindus who opposed abolition led by Radhakant Deb did not defend the legality of widow burning and opposed only the government intervention in Hindu affairs. They did not encourage sati in their own families. When the British finally decided to put down the practice, what worried them most was the backlash from Hindus as a response to British meddling in religion. Bentinck consulted 49 military officers on the effect abolition would have on their men. Most of them supported immediate action. Sati was abolished in December 1829. As it was never a commonly observed rite, there was little protest on its official prohibition.

This book does its job well. It has brought to light the ‘missionary position’ in effecting a ban on sati. It explains that what prompted them in this venture is a desire to demote Hinduism as barbarous and to get enough funding from England to gain maximum converts in India. It has also proved two points beyond doubt – that the act was voluntary in most cases and that the number of sati cases was statistically insignificant. This is an effective argument, but the fact remains that this was not ethically or morally acceptable. A huge crowd witnessing the immolation of a woman and facilitating it by pouring oil and other flammable articles on to the flame is impossible to accept as normal by any person. Sati would have had to go at any cost, but it would have been infinitely better if its demise was caused by the effort of Hindu reformers alone. This is the message sent out by this nice work which is well researched. Section B of the narrative, which is almost half of the book, is dedicated to foreign accounts of sati. It exposes the condemnation and attitude of racial superiority of the British towards their colonial subjects in India. One official remarks with scarcely hidden contempt that when he reached a place of sati, he found that the ‘coolies had dug a hole’. Here, the term ‘coolie’ refers not to the labourers but all Indians. Jain provides some references which show how the British estimated people of different provinces on their valour and sense of injustice. Bentinck notes that if sati was more prevalent in the upper provinces (present day Uttar Pradesh and parts of Bihar) from which most of the soldiers came, he would be more circumspect because the people are more bold and manly (p.409). An earlier review of the book ‘Immolating Women’ by Jorg Fisch can be read here as a related topic.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

Dethroned


Title: Dethroned – Patel, Menon and the Integration of Princely India
Author: John Zubrzycki
Publisher: Juggernaut, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9789353451691
Pages: 337
 
“My own personal wish is to abdicate and to serve Islam. I have not amassed a fortune but that does not matter as long as I can serve Islam and Pakistan. I am prepared to serve Pakistan in any capacity”. This excerpt is from a letter written by Hamidullah Khan, the Nawab (king) of Bhopal to Jinnah on Aug 2, 1947, hardly two weeks before freedom dawned on India. A cursory glance at the map would convince any political novice that the Bhopal ruler’s wish to join Pakistan was physically impossible, yet it contained a political dynamite that was sure to wreck the unity of India. There were around 565 native states in undivided India, of which only ten states came inside the geographical boundary of Pakistan which easily acceded to it with the exception of Kalat in Baluchistan. The situation in India was different. All the Muslim rulers and even some of the Hindu rulers did not want to join India for various reasons, most of them religious or selfish. The native states were too dispersed geographically and too interconnected economically with British India for having any chance ever to become truly autonomous. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and V P Menon achieved their integration with India in an astonishingly short time. This book tells the story of India’s native princes from the arrival of Lord Mountbatten as the viceroy in March 1947 until the abolition of the former rulers’ titles, privileges and privy purses in Dec 1971. John Zubrzycki is the author of several books on Indian royalty of the twentieth century. He majored in South Asian history and Hindi at the Australian National University and has a PhD in Indian history. He had worked in India as a diplomat and as foreign correspondent of The Australian newspaper. My review of his earlier book ‘The Last Nizam’ can be read here.
 
The author makes an analysis of how the native states were managed by the rulers. There were large states such as Hyderabad which equalled France in geographical area but most were very small and the titular rulers were practically nothing more than zamindars. Some states – such as Mysore, Travancore and Baroda – were administered better than British India, but most of the others were backward fiefs. Whatever laws existed in many princely states were a jumble of personal decrees, British Indian laws and local customs. Britain, being the paramount power, did not interfere in their administrative affairs in return for cooperation and support of the princes when they needed it. The India Office in London was the final authority on recognizing successions and determining when to hand over powers in the case of minors. The system of gun salutes tied the princes to a feudal hierarchy. Out of the 565-odd states, only 149 were privileged to have gun salutes ranging from 9 to 21. By comparison, the Viceroy was entitled to 31 gun salutes and the King Emperor 101. Personal misrule freely occurred in many states. The proclivity of the princes towards sexual perversions reached gross proportions in some cases. In the summer of 1947, four tons of paper containing correspondence between the local British resident and the political department in Delhi regarding the secret affairs of the princes were clandestinely confined to flames so as not to reach the hands of the leaders of independent India. Congress withdrew its earlier stand-offish stance in the 1938 Haripura AICC session. It declared that the Congress stood for the same political, social and economic freedom in the states as in the rest of India and considered the states as integral parts of India which cannot be separated.
 
The book includes the fabulous intrigues and machinations undertaken by the Congress, Muslim League and the British in the run up to and immediately after independence. Most white officials had no qualms to see India disintegrating into a multitude of small, independent nations. Some of them even cherished the idea, while some others came around to embrace a nationalist outlook later on. Conrad Corfield, the political secretary to the Viceroy, was of the former type and he gave the rulers the assurance that their states would become independent once the British left, as was promised earlier by the Cabinet Mission plan. Mountbatten also toyed with the concept of disintegration at first. He was having a Balkanizing plan for independent India. Eleven provinces of British India would become free along with most of the native states which would negotiate with the provinces regarding accession. Nehru was furious at this callous proposal which would forever put India’s political unification to doom. It was on May 10, 1947 that V P Menon articulated a plan to Mountbatten which eventually materialized. On May 18, Menon and Mountbatten flew to London with the plan and convinced the British cabinet. This established Menon as an irreplaceable factor in the States ministry. An interesting anecdote is told in the book that exemplifies Jinnah’s subterfuges to destabilise India after he got assurance of Pakistan. The Patiala kingdom was reluctant to join India while entertaining hopes for an independent existence. Jinnah quickly seized the opportunity and in May 1947 urged Yadavindra Singh, the ruler of Patiala, to join Pakistan and offered an array of carrots. Singh refused. Undeterred, Jinnah invited him to his residence in Delhi two days later for an informal chat where his sister Fatima ‘made excellent tea’ while Jinnah repeated his offers. Once more, the Maharaja remained unmoved, but Pakistan’s reputation for preparing excellent tea for ‘Indian guests’ (remember Abhinandan Varthaman) appears to be long established.
 
The author covers most of the contentious cases where the rulers had to be forced to see reason and fall in line. It is to be remembered that not a drop of royal blood was spilt in the process. That was why Khrushchev once remarked that ‘India liquidated the princely states without liquidating the princes’. Patel’s powerful personality, which mixed fury with charm and persuasion with coercion complemented Menon’s skills as a tactician. Most rulers held Patel in awe and esteem. Menon cleverly handled this to his advantage. Even a mere hint from him that a point of contention might have to be referred to Sardar was sufficient to bring the rulers around. Menon and Patel thus achieved their wonderful goal of creating a politically cohesive India and of extending responsible, democratically elected government to the people of the states. No longer could the ruling princes run their states like fiefdoms. Rulers surrendered all their governing powers in return for a guaranteed privy purse amounting to ten per cent of the revenue of their states in 1947. This money was tax-free and this was an important concession considering the exorbitant levels of taxation at that time. Princes were allowed to retain their palaces, personal privileges and titles. Integration yielded, in addition to territory and population, cash and investments worth almost Rs. 100 crores, half of which had come from the bonds of just one state – Gwalior. In return, the government of India committed itself to paying privy purses costing around Rs. 4.5 crores in the first year, which would shrink with each succeeding year.
 
This book is unique because of two reasons. One is that it describes how the native states acceded to Pakistan while the same process was going on in India. Fortunately for them, they had to handle only ten states out of the 565. Even then, the accession of Kalat in Baluchistan was a coercive one that totally alienated the sentiments of Baloch nationalists. Pakistan is still paying a bloody price for disregarding the wishes of Baloch people in the form of a thriving freedom movement and militancy. It is interesting to note that Pakistan too revoked the privy purses shortly after India did so. The second noteworthy feature of the book is the clear exposition of Indira Gandhi’s rationale in rescinding the privy purses. After their states were merged to the union and their powers conceded, many rulers had taken to electoral politics cashing in on their immense clout with the local populace. The former rulers had begun to unite on the political front and tried to influence electoral outcomes in many constituencies. Indira Gandhi was not someone who would acquiesce in to such encroachment on territory which she deemed sacrosanct for popular politicians. One thing led to another and with a showdown with judiciary, Indira achieved what she wanted in taking away the incomes of the former princes. Whatever may be the democratic justifications, readers feel that the abrupt cancellation of princely privileges was a breach of promise Nehru and Patel had vowed to them while merging their territories voluntarily with India.
 
While the book is an enjoyable read, it presents the most blatant one-sided and pro-Pakistan outlook coming from a Western author. The accounts of even Pakistani authors such as Ayesha Jalal are much more balanced than this one which has completely gone over the fence as far as neutral readers are concerned. Zubrzycki’s narration is a totally partisan account of atrocities as if the Muslims alone were at the receiving end. He justifies the Pakistani attack on Kashmir in 1947 that propelled its king Hari Singh into the arms of India as a justifiable outrage of Pashtun tribals at the ill-treatment of Muslims in Kashmir. He alleges that Patel sanctioned ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Alwar by the state forces. He again stoops so low as to mimic the Pakistani propaganda piece that the atrocities committed by Razakars in Hyderabad were fake and fabricated by K M Munshi, India’s agent in that state. It is as If this author was asked to prepare an account on the losses of World War II, he would come up with only German losses suffered subsequent to Allied bombings while claiming the Holocaust as ‘fake and fabricated’. This book’s handling of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir is terribly off-balance by propping up a biased overview of the alleged violence on Muslims of Kashmir by the Dogra ruler. Plain communal disturbances are portrayed as ‘anti-monarchical protests’. He accuses the minority Kashmiri Pandit community of having 78 per cent representation in state services as a valid justification of the jihadi violence on them. By the same token, we would expect that this author would mention that Muslims cornered 85 per cent of the state services in the Nizam-ruled Hyderabad, but he maintains a stoic silence on this issue. Moreover, atrocities on Hindus are just ‘sectarian violence’ for him (p.222). This book also attempts to whitewash the Bhopal Nawab’s bigoted overtures to join Pakistan with a dubious allegation that the preference of a handful of fellow princes to the Hindu Mahasabha had driven Nawab Hamidullah Khan into the folds of the Muslim League and Pakistan (p.55). This kind of an argument would come only from a hard-line Muslim League supporter and Zubrzycki’s parroting of this line only proves his incompetence and ignorance of Indian politics and society.
 
Since this book is just a Pakistani propaganda piece, it is not recommended for general readers.
 
Rating: 1 Star

Saturday, May 31, 2025

Slave Empire


Title: Slave Empire – How Slavery Built Modern Britain
Author: Padraic X. Scanlan
Publisher: Robinson, 2020 (First)
ISBN: 9781472142337
Pages: 448

Britain’s raise to the pinnacle of political and economic power in the nineteenth century was marked by the two parallel streams of imperialism and slavery both of which we abhor today. Britain did not have any compunction at all in buying people from West Africa in exchange for cotton, selling opium in China and enforcing a war on them when the local government objected and displacing unsuspecting native rulers who were gullible enough to expect the British to stick to the spirit of signed treaties. Britain was the greatest beneficiary of the transatlantic slave trade. Slavery was used for labour in plantations of the western hemisphere that produced tobacco, coffee, cotton, rice and sugar. The island colonies of the Caribbean, which produced sugar in copious quantities, were among Britain’s most valuable imperial prizes. Then came Enlightenment and its ideals helped to push purely economic goals to the back and bring a moral perspective to the fore, possibly for the first time in human history. This change of atmosphere was first sensed by religious sects who lost no time in appropriating the refreshingly pristine outlook of a small, yet thriving antislavery movement. Their sustained propaganda slowly chipped away resistance and brought the regime around to share their perspective. In 1807, the parliament abolished slave trade in Britain and its colonies and in 1833, slavery itself was legislatively cast away. A staggering sum of 20 million GBP was paid to slaveholders as compensation for the loss of their ‘property’. The slaves were required to continue the same work for their previous masters for a further period of six years of apprenticeship, at the expiry of which they were free to get employed anywhere they liked as wage labourers. This book examines the closing chapter of a shameful episode in history. Padraic X. Scanlan is an associate professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He has also held appointments at the London School of Economics and Harvard University.

Scanlan makes a survey of the beginnings of slave trade in the early part of the book. It may come as a surprise to many to learn that from 1475 to 1540, Portuguese merchants sold more than 12,000 slaves to Gold Coast in W. Africa to work in their gold mines. With the opening of sugar plantations in the New World, the direction changed, especially from the year 1580. Apart from the loss of manpower due to selling of slaves, textiles comprised more than half of the total goods offered in exchange for enslaved people. These cheap imports destroyed West African industry. Slave trade in British colonies began in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia with the purchase of twenty African slaves by white settlers. Slave labour caused lasting changes in the agricultural profile and food habits of Western societies. Originally, sugar was a luxury item coming from Asia. With the opening of large sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean manned by slave labour imported from Africa, the prices crumbled and sugar became a staple. The book explains how the slave trade contributed to British colonial economy and helped them establish a ‘slave empire’. When ships full of enslaved captives arrived in the US and Caribbean, slaveholders would borrow money to buy enslaved workers using credit extended by British banks. More than that, insurers in Britain underwrote policies protecting plantations, slaving voyages and the bodies of enslaved people.

The pitiable condition of the slaves is visible in the narrative. Their physical circumstances might have been better in some instances when compared to poor white workers in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. But the demeaning nature of slavery was enough for its victims to wish for freedom even at the cost of a large part of their resources, such as buying one’s own freedom. A slave was not a legal person – they could not own property, sue or be sued, hold public office or marry. Slaveholders had the right to punish enslaved labourers however cruelly they wished, such as whipping, starving or branding. The murder of a slave was punished with a fine of mere 25 GBP or 3000 pounds of sugar. Penalty for killing another person’s slave was higher, because the perpetrator was destroying another man’s property. To slaveholders, the primary importance of the enslaved family was to produce a new generation of enslaved labourers. Fathers were written out of the records and not considered part of the family unit. Even in 1820 when colonial laws prevented separation of family members caused by slave sales, it defined family as consisting of a mother and her minor children. This sorrowful state of affairs was something shielded from European eyes. Rich slaveholders purchased landed assets and resided in Britain as absentee planters of the Caribbean islands and spent their money in rich abundance, forcing one thinker to caustically remark that the ‘slave empire’s splendour is at our doors, while the miseries are across the Atlantic’.

The book provides a summary picture of how slavery affected British politics and the part antislavery movement played in it. The wealth generated in the slave plantations helped to unify the otherwise divisive nations of Britain – England, Wales and Scotland. The British vowed not to become slaves themselves, but the liberty they treasured was rooted in slavery nor did it forbade them from owning slaves elsewhere in the empire. Demands to end slave trade as a moral necessity arose with Enlightenment. The number of slaves getting killed on the passage through the Atlantic was staggering. About ten per cent of the human cargo perished at sea which was only slightly better than that of horses similarly transported in the middle ages. This amounted to sheer murder. The American Revolution shaped the growing British antislavery movement. The loss of American colonies broke off some of the most powerful slaveholders in the empire. British antislavery flowed in complicated ways from Evangelicalism, Enlightenment and the rise of sensibility. A general sense that slavery was morally wrong extended even to slaveholders. In late-1780s this sentiment was harnessed into a movement to abolish the British slave trade. Law courts established that any enslaved person with the means to sue their owner in a British court would be manumitted. It does not mean that slaves had resigned to their fate to fall into passive suffering. In 1781, slaves revolted in Saint Domingue (Haiti) which was under French occupation. The British sent troops to capture the island as mainland France was in the clutches of the revolutionary regime. France abolished slavery in all its colonies in 1794 and enlisted the freedmen to fight against Britain. The British were defeated. Napoleon revoked the order of emancipation and sent force to re-annex the island. The rebels fought and decimated the French army also. The independent black kingdom of Haiti came into being in 1804 as a result.

The political process of emancipation was long drawn-out and littered with obstacles. William Wilberforce was the voice and face of the abolitionist movement. The trade in slaves was abolished through an act in 1807. Legislation was timid at first. The Dolben’s Act of 1788 merely fixed the maximum number of enslaved people who could be held captive in a slave ship. The planters readily came out in support of slavery. The argument in support of it was that the Old Testament approved of slavery and that the material comfort of the enslaved people was better than that of free British poor. Gradual emancipation was attempted through incremental reforms like amelioration of the plight of the enslaved. In the colonies, rumours widely circulated that slavery was abolished and the local masters were not honouring the legislation. Riots broke out in many places as the slaves believed that the parliamentary resolutions have granted them freedom but the white colonist has refused to carry them out. The Emancipation Act was passed in 1833 which prohibited slavery from the next year onwards. The abolitionists expected that the enslaved would accept their superior judgment in committing the newly manumitted people to continue to serve their former masters for another six years through an apprenticeship at the end of which they would be set free. This experiment failed and the intake of the former slaves as free, wage labourers also failed. The breakdown of this experiment hardened the resolve of American planters in continuing with slavery. A civil war had to be fought before the recalcitrant South saw reason. In the British case which we were examining in this book, the electoral reforms had also helped to weed out ultraconservative slaveholders from the parliament floor. The Reform Act of 1832 extended the populace’s voice in government. It closed rotten boroughs and eroded the power of slaveholders in the house. People with no landed wealth had little patience for slaveholders’ claims.

The book also looks at how slavery was wound down by adopting various measures to check an abrupt changeover. The abolitionists feared that the ‘uncivilized blacks’ could not prosper in a civilized society. They planned to leave the freed people landless, poor and politically weak so as to force them to wage labour which was thought to be having a civilizing effect on its practitioners. This envisaged a temporary period of low-wage work and exploitation. The concern was that if the wages were high, workers would quickly purchase land with their savings and would sit idle by producing their essentials from the land and thus removing themselves from the economic mainstream. In effect, after emancipation, the law would replace the whip and the slaveholders would become landlords. A severe rider on emancipation was the disbursement of compensation for slaveholders for the loss of slaves. A huge figure of 20 million GBP (which corresponded to 1.9 billion GBP in today’s money) was identified for payment. The compensation fund was amassed by perpetual bonds which were finally redeemed only in 2015 by paying 200 million GBP by the David Cameron government. The end of slavery marked Britain’s focus shifting to imperialism. By virtue of having abolished slavery, Britain was projected to have earned the moral right to take new colonies in the name of a civilization that itself had been made in the crucible of a slave empire.

Even though Scanlan makes an overview of Caribbean slavery and how it came to an end through legislative measures, the book contains a lot of references of its impact on India which was not related by ethnicity or commerce to the slave trade. The author claims that slavery existed in India too where the enslaved labourers were claimed as property by local aristocrats and not by Europeans as in the Caribbean. Here, it seems the author is confusing the caste system with slavery. While it is true that the caste system was highly oppressive and intimidating to the lower ones, it is not at all comparable to the slave system where a person could be sold to another and the rights of fathers over their offspring were not recognised. British racism on the conceptual level was different in India than in the Caribbean where workers of African descent were considered physically formidable but lazy and in need of rigid discipline in order to be put to work. Asian workers were imagined to be weak and effeminate, incapable of meeting the challenges of sugarcane cultivation. After emancipation, the sugar plantations faced severe labour shortages as the former slaves left work which was a mark of bondage. The planters then opted for indentured labour from India and Southeast Asia. Between 1833 and 1917, more than 3.5 million Indian workers went mainly to British Caribbean. The thriving societies of Indian ethnicity existing presently in these islands are the descendants of these labourers. Cotton also played a large part in the development of Indian nationalism and slavery has a direct link to it. As noted earlier, slave labour was mainly involved in cotton production in the US which was the staple commodity of British industry. As antislavery efforts picked up momentum in Britain, it extended cotton cultivation to India using cheap wage labour. This established a native cotton industry in India but it had a terrible side-effect. In some provinces, up to 21 per cent of all arable land was devoted to cotton. This rapid expansion came at a harrowing human cost. From 1876 to 1878, ten million Indians died in famines in South India. Cotton was not the only cause, but great swathes of land that might have grown staples had been converted to cotton.

With a lucid presentation style and delightful vocabulary, this book offers a pleasurable experience to readers. Enlightenment values are claimed to be behind the gradual transformation of the abolitionist outlook. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the Evangelists wanted to convert the entire slave population to their religion and thereafter did not intend them to keep them in servility. This dichotomy between the two sources is not elaborated sufficiently in the text and stands as a distinct disadvantage.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star