Of tarpaulin and other things

The apartment complex where my parents live flanks the Bangalore-Bellary road that is being widened in preparation for the new international airport. Bangalore, burgeoning with new development projects, seems to be splitting at its seams here: earthmovers raking up heaps of rubble on the roadsides; wage-laborers patiently striking heavy hammers to break existing concrete structures; and uprooted trunks and roots of what had once been massive trees, still caked with the red earth of the subterranean depths from which they had been disinterred.

On my many bus trips from Yelahanka – where my parents live – to central Bangalore, I noticed especially the frequent use of the sturdy, waterproof canvas sackcloth also known as tarpaulin. I’ve asked myself: why did I notice tarpaulin of all things? Why did other roadside ubiquities – dogs waiting patiently outside kebab stalls; tea shacks; corrugated tin, iron and plastic sheets; thatched roofs made of dried branches of coconut trees – not catch my attention as much? I’ve surmised that it has something to do with my love of the word tarpaulin, just the way it sounds. Or was it the pervasiveness of its use, not as a word, but actual, physical, practical use?

Patchwork of tarpaulin, blue, black, green and white! Sheets of tarpaulin, under which: pyramidal mounds of apples and pomegranates! Sacks of tarpaulin, for shoe-smiths to protect still-not-fixed, still-strapless leather slippers and sandals! Tents of tarpaulin, in the dark depths of which I saw a blackened stove and a few utensils!

Near the Hebbal bus stop is a cluster of just such tents as I’ve announced above with much exclamatory pomp. Most of those who live in these portable tents are artisans – maybe migrants from the villages and tribal districts of Karnataka’s interior – and flanking the road for a more than a thousand feet are their creations, for sale. I like their woodworked items – mostly faces, religious and otherwise, that they shaped from chunks of timber. I also had the fortune to see them at work, as they carved with ease on the cylindrical pieces of wood, a foot or so thick. They were putting to intelligent use the trunks of the many coconut trees that were being felled for road-widening efforts along the Bangalore-Bellary road. I couldn’t help but be struck by the sheer practicality of this.

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler

Last year, I learnt from a friend of Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel (GGS), which attempts to answer one of the unfathomable and persistent questions of our times: why is history the way it is; why are some communities or – in today’s context – some nations affluent and powerful, while others are not? Such questions usually elicit resigned shrugs, simplistic explanations, or get enmeshed in theories of the inherent superiority of the value systems and mental capacities of certain races – as those espoused in the controversial The Bell Curve. Jared Diamond suggests it was ancient environmental and geographical happenstance – the concentration in certain regions of Eurasia of certain nutritious and robust crops, and wild animals that lent themselves easily to domestication – that led to the present day dominance of Eurasian societies and their colonies. Given the depth of the question, critics have accused Diamond of being too deterministic, too dismissive of cultural influences and racial differences and therefore too politically correct (though in one review it was tartly stated that political correctness does not necessarily conflict with the correctness of his theories).

A few months ago I learnt of Nicholas Ostler’s book, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, whose sweep is as broad as that of GGS but in the realm of languages: why are some languages so successful while others evanescent; why do some languages, established for long periods of time, perish without a trace while others are resilient? From what I have so far read of this book, the answers are nowhere as clear as in GGS. The factors that decide of the fate of a language are many and depend on the particular language in question. Ostler quashes through convincing examples the belief that the dominance of language can be assured through conquest or political subjugation: the Mongols during their reign very much gave in to the languages and culture of the lands they conquered; Dutch has not been very successful in Indonesia though colonial rule there was as long as that of the British in India. There are plenty of other examples; throughout the book Ostler contrasts languages that followed opposite trajectories.

The chapter on Sanskrit (Charming like a Creeper: The Cultured Career of Sanskrit) is a great read, full of wonderful anecdotes. Ostler follows the language from its beginnings to its zenith when it was popular throughout Southeast, Central and East Asia traveling with its two principal disseminators Hinduism and Buddhism, to its decline during the second millennium after Muslim conquests, and its present limited but steady existence as a liturgical language. Indeed, when as a young child I had unerringly recited, from sheer rote learning, a thousand incomprehensible verses of the Vishnu Sahasranamam, I had been inadvertently sustaining Sanskrit’s liturgical function.

(In the chapter on Sanskrit, I also came across the technical expression for the unique pronunciation of certain alphabets that speakers of South Asian languages are known for and that is partly responsible for their distinctive accent. The sounds t, d, k are often spoken without aspiration with the tongue held against the roof of the mouth. These sounds are due to retroflex consonants, common in many South Asian languages)

Empires of the Word starts with the remarkable conversation between the Aztec king Montezuma and the Spanish conquistador Cortez. It is interesting to speculate on the difficulties of language that both Montezuma and Cortez must have undoubtedly faced. Montezuma spoke in Nahuatl, which was then translated into a particular dialect of Mayan by a Mexican noblewoman; a Spanish priest then translated the Mayan to Spanish. It was 1512, less than thirty years since Columbus’s pioneering effort, the so-called “discovery” of the New World, which would irrevocably set into motion the colonization of the Americas, and which brought about that most peculiar intersection of peoples of Europe and the Americas who had lived apart long enough to have endowed the former with guns, horses, metal implements and diseases, all of which proved cataclysmic for the latter. The conversation between Montezuma and Cortez is but one of the many - in Ostler’s words – “pioneer moments of fatal impact that have happened throughout human history” when “the pattern was set for the irruption of one language community into another”.

Ostler feels that for a language to be taken up by communities other than its own, it needs to have persuasive power. Motives for this persuasive power can be very different, as history has demonstrated: military domination, hopes of prosperity, cultural prestige, attendance at a boarding school among many others. English today has tremendous persuasive power – in India and in many other countries of the world, its persuasiveness is particularly rampant – but the lessons of history show that no language, however widespread and popular it might have been in its heyday, has escaped decline. The argument in favor of English, of course, is that its supremacy coincides with the emergence of a global interlinked culture and for this reason it seems quite impregnable. But the history of languages has always of been full of surprises and one would expect the same of the future.

Empires of the Word is extremely detailed but its great feature is the self-contained nature of its chapters; naturally, it is a good reference for all the major languages in human history. Ostler currently lives in Bath, England, and also manages the following website for endangered languages http://www.ogmios.org/home.htm.

On alcove residences and Chaco Canyon

More than a millennium ago, Native American communities – those that are today referred to as the Anasazi or Pueblo – used a geological feature distinctive to the dry canyon country of the American Southwest to construct their houses. Though water was and still is a scarce commodity, run-offs from seasonal rainfalls and melted snow slowly permeate through the porous sandstone of canyon walls. Over hundreds of years and many seasons, the constant cycle of freeze and thaw causes exfoliation, or peeling off of the sandstone layer, leading to the formation of alcoves, located well above the base of the canyon. Usually, such high alcoves occur at the intersection of a sandstone layer and a solid impermeable layer of shale that eventually forms the base of the alcove.

I did not expect alcoves to be so big as to be the setting of an entire village until I saw a long-abandoned dwelling at the Navajo National Monument. It was a startling sight: a hundred or so box-like rooms, of the same color as that of canyon walls – as if the intent were to camouflage – and sloping precariously towards the edge. Since the alcove is gouged high in a canyon wall, it is accessed only by steep trails. The advantages of such a setting are immediately obvious: water seeping through sandstone meant the presence of an aquifer, though any supply of water from it could only have been meager; protection from the hot sun; and a natural vantage point from which to detect approaching danger.

There are many such abandoned alcove dwellings in the southwest, but the most famous ones are at Mesa Verde National Park in southern Colorado in the San Juan Mountains. The park was mentioned in some tour-book as the Disneyland of the Pueblo sites, and indeed, it seemed very much like a theme park when I visited it this summer: car doors slamming everywhere; large families; long lines of people waiting to reserve a spot for a ranger-guided tours of the alcove sites; and a crowded restaurant with a lunch buffet.

Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, by contrast, is a quiet spot in a remote part of northeastern New Mexico, accessed only by a dirt road with washboard bumps. Here, from the 8th to 10th centuries, the Puebloans constructed structures that are today called the Great Houses, massive complexes that were once four to five stories high, used possibly for ceremonial and religious purposes. The Great Houses are not alcove dwellings and represent a break from the past architecture of the Puebloans; they are indicative of the emergence of a stratified, hierarchical society, which might have been on of the reasons for its decline.

If you go to Chaco Canyon, do attend a 90-minute tour of park ranger Kirk Peterson, who will take you through Pueblo Bonito, one of the largest sites in the canyon. His tour touches on everything from the history of preservation of the site, to the ingenious construction techniques of the tenth century Chacoans, and why it might have been abandoned. Peterson readily acknowledges the shortcomings of attempting to understand an antiquated culture using such fields as anthropology or archaeology; his talk, therefore, is informed by a nuanced understanding of the worldviews of the present day Puebloan communities who consider themselves as descendents of Chacoans.

The Colorado Plateau

The Colorado plateau is a physiographic region in the southwestern United States that spans the four states of Arizona, Mexico, Colorado and Utah. The plateau is named after the Colorado river (the state itself has little of the plateau), which has, along with its tributaries, side-streams, run-offs and other forces of nature formed the canyons the region is famous for: Grand Canyon in Arizona, Zion and Bryce in Utah and hundreds of others, perhaps not as grand as these but just as beautiful. Why is the Colorado River such a great carver of canyons, while the Mississippi that runs longer is not? I overheard a ranger at the Grand Canyon National Park give a succinct answer: the Colorado has a sharp gradient owing to its descent from the Rockies, and also carries much grit – cutting power – in the form of rocks. The river runs into the elevated Colorado plateau that is brittle on account of its aridity, and cuts through it, chipping a little of the plateau every year. It has taken over five million years, a length of time too hard for us to imagine but that is not more than a blink of an eye in geological terms, for something of such magnificence as the Grand Canyon to form. There is, of course, much pooh-poohing of this theory – You’re telling me a river caused this? – and there should be, for even geologists do not concur on this topic, and theories do change over time, the newest ones overriding the existing ones.

Phoenix, Arizona

Phoenix received more rain this spring than it usually does - which is not much at all. For the most part, the skies were gloomy and the rain wasn’t much more than a drizzle. And yet, it seemed excessive for the desert. Bushes with flat, many-lobed leaves that I had never seen before grew lush in places where water had accumulated: near fences, edges of roads, and signboards of plazas. The open space behind my apartment, fenced off possibly for new construction, was thick these bushes, weeds and grasses. On days that the sun shone brightly, the yellow and white flowers they spawned were resplendent.

Even the little hill next to the university that usually has a barren, brown look had a tinge of green to it. The trail to the top is winding and steep in places and ends at a rocky outcrop, just next to an assemblage of steel that serves as some sort of a receiving or transmitting station. On late afternoons, somewhat breathless from the strain of the ascent, I liked to rest at the summit and enjoy the view: the great suburban sprawl; the gloomy amber street lights that seemed to flicker; the harried rush of cars, toy-like from where I saw them on the tortuous freeways; the glimmer of the lake and the lighted bridge that arched over it; the mountain ranges and their jagged peaks that stretched in every direction. Sometimes I lingered to watch the approach of planes, now specks in the distance, now perilously close, banking this way and that, portholes clearly visible, as they aligned themselves to the parallel strips of blue light along the runway a few miles away.

A football stadium straddles the hill and a smaller adjacent butte. I like to think of it as saucer-shaped spaceship that has somehow forcefully wedged itself in the little space that there is between the hill and the butte. On many fall weekends, the sudden explosion of fireworks follows the roar of many thousands of fans at the stadium. Once, while walking up the hill, I stopped dead in my tracks, entranced by the fireworks that shot through the sky and burst in succession into plumes of smoke that, for the few seconds before they thinned into nothingness, matched convincingly the forms and shapes of the clouds scattered in the darkening sky.

Fire and trails of smoke have always had something about them: from my childhood, I remember being drawn to smoke curling from incense sticks, the crackle of matches, the glob of fire on the oil-dipped wicker of brass lamps, and long minutes on terraces observing the widening contrails of jet planes that sailed inaccessibly in the sky.