The Americas before Columbus, and the Old World: Some thoughts on history

Ever since I began reading about Native American history a few years ago, I’ve been intrigued by this question: Why did the highly original Pre-Columbian empires of Mexico, Central and South America – the Aztecs and the Incas – perish so abruptly and spectacularly under European conquests, while the ancient traditions, beliefs, books and languages of the Indian subcontinent, even while suffering destructive invasions through the ages, manage to adapt and survive so successfully to the present day? Why, in short, was history so different in these places?

The answer isn't simple. It would take a pretty hefty book to explain, and even then we won’t be able to do justice. But in this short post, let’s look at a couple of key factors – geography and connectedness – that played a pivotal role.

The cultures of the Indian subcontinent have never existed in isolation but have always been part of vast trade networks – if not directly, then by association. The networks spanned such diverse regions as the Middle East, Europe, North Africa (and parts of East Africa), Central, East, and Southeast Asia. Indeed these regions together formed the largest such landmass in the ancient world that was easily navigable by land and sea even though means of transportation weren’t sophisticated. It was a slow process that sometimes took many centuries but cultures belonging to this landmass – the Old World, in the Western historian’s parlance – began to reap the benefits of innovations from far-flung places.

Wheat and barley, for instance, were wild crops native to the Middle East and were first domesticated there about ten thousand years ago, but soon they spread to distant parts Europe and Asia, transformed agriculture and led to increases in population. Most domesticated animals of today – including horses and cows– were also Middle Eastern wild natives before they were tamed there, traded across regions and eventually went on to provide labor that was much needed in agriculture. (Jared Diamond has argued in Guns Germs and Steel that the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East had a head start in agriculture because it was endowed with such easily "domesticable" - my own word - wild crops and animals that other regions of the world lacked. Diamond argues that this is the reason the Middle East produced very early a significant number of organized societies.)

Exchanges were not restricted to crops and animals: philosophy, architecture (think of the Greco-Buddhist architectural tradition), and religious ideas also diffused easily. Europeans learned the use of gunpowder through the Arabs, who got it from the Chinese; the monotheisms of the Middle East reached the frontiers of Europe, Asia and North Africa; Chinese scholars visited India and took back Buddhist ideas. The method of representing numbers using the decimal system, which we all use today, was an Indian innovation; it reached Italian merchants via the treatises of an Uzbek mathematician, Khwarizmi, resident in Baghdad, and eventually replaced the cumbersome Roman numeral system.

Ancient Indian societies, thus, were as enriched by assimilations as others were by them. Contrast this with what went on in the Americas. There too, we find complex societies, two sets in particular: the Mesoamerican ones based in Mexico and Central America including such societies as the Olmec, Mayan and Aztec; and the Peruvian ones, of whom the Incas are the most famous. These were great civilizations too: the Mayans came up with their own writing system, and independently developed the idea of zero; the Incas built some remarkable suspension rope bridges on precarious landscapes; the 14th century Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (today Mexico City) was one of the grandest of the world at its time, with pyramids, causeways, aqueducts and botanical gardens. In the first paragraph of this post, I used the term “highly original” to describe these cultures. That was not an arbitrary choice. The Mesoamerican and Peruvian societies were indeed highly original; they did it all without influences from other parts of the world.

But what were these cultures of the Americas missing? Because of their geographical isolation, they were unaware of the great innovations and weaponry of the Old World. Even more critically they were missing immunity to such diseases as measles and smallpox, diseases of the Old World that had jumped from domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, and horses to humans (in the same way that avian influenza is on the verge of making the transition from birds to us today). The Americas before Columbus had no such mammals to rely on for domestication, and hence did not develop the same set of diseases.* (The actual explanation is, of course, a lot more complex, but we'll have to do with this for the sake of brevity.)

So when Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492, ending millennia of isolation, the shock – of devastating new diseases especially and superior military technology – was numbing: Native American societies simply crumbled. Millions of Native Americans throughout the continent perished from diseases they had never before known; nearly a fifth of humanity might have been lost this way. And the clash between the Aztecs of Mexico and the conquering Spanish in the early 1500s was probably one of the truly tremendous collisions in history. Because of their geographical solitude and the debilitation that disease brought, the Aztecs, and the Incas shortly after, were destined to lose.

It is true: history often rests on such quirks, and the effects can be devastating.

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Jared Diamond synthesized these ideas (which other anthropologists and historians have known for a while) in his superb book Guns Germs and Steel. But let me present the viewpoint of someone more literary and contemplative and who by virtue of his background and travels is uniquely positioned to comment on contrasts in ancient Mexican and Indian history: the Nobel-prize winning Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, who has also written some sterling historical essays.

Paz’s knowledge and grasp of Pre-Columbian cultures that comprise his heritage is exceptional. But he is equally adept at interpreting the Spanish and Catholic half of Mexico, which were undeniably more influential in the country's inception. And while serving six years as the Mexican ambassador to India (and earlier as an attaché), Paz seems to have gained a thorough knowledge of Indian history as well. It is no surprise then that we find a rich synthesis of all these different threads in his book In Light of India. I'll close this post with the following paragraphs from the book which summarize beautifully what I’ve been trying to convey:

…the Mesoamerican [or Pre-Columbian Mexican] cultures were born and grew in total isolation until the sixteenth century. India, in contrast, was always in communication with other peoples and cultures of the Old World: first with Mesopotamia, and later with the Persians, Greeks, Kuchans, Romans, Chinese, Afghans, Mongols. The thought, religion and art of India were adopted by many Asian peoples; in turn, the Indians absorbed and transformed the ideas and creations of other cultures. The Mexican cultures did not experience anything like the penetration of Buddhism into Ceylon, China, Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia, or the influence of Greek and Roman sculpture on Indian art, or the mutual borrowings among Christianity, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. The Mexican cultures lived in immense historical solitude; they never knew the essential and common experience of the Old World: the presence of the Other, the intrusion of strange civilizations with their gods, technical skills, visions of this world and next.

Mesoamerica lacked contact with foreign peoples, ideas and institutions. It moved without changing a perpetual return to the point of departure. All civilizations – including China and Japan – have been the result of intersections and clashes with foreign cultures. All, except the pre-Hispanic civilizations of America. The ancient Mexicans saw the Spanish as supernatural beings who had come from another world because they did not have mental categories in which to place them. They lacked the experience and concepts that marked the people of other civilizations.

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* Mammals like horses that could potentially have been domesticated did exist in the Americas, but they appear to have perished just around the time that the Native Americans first arrived there via the land bridge that used to connect Alaska with the eastern end of Russia. The reasons for this extinction are still being debated, but it appears that the newly arrived settlers hunted them extensively.

The first picture is of the Aztec God, Quetzalcoatl.

Other related posts: Knitting together seams of Pangaea, Chris and thoughts on Native American History; and some short notes on a couple of excellent books on history I read early this year: The Oregon Trail and 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.

The Ota Benga story

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was quite common in North America and Europe to display recently “discovered” tribal groups at fairs as scientific and anthropological curiosities, and have them beat drums or perform traditional dances. The people chosen for such purposes were typically Native Americans from North America (Geronimo of the Apaches was a famous draw) and - even more exotic and different-looking - people of certain groups from the African interior.

In 1906, the tradition appears to have reached its zenith, when Ota Benga (in picture), a pygmy from the Belgian Congo, found himself sharing a cage with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo as part of a tableaux intended to illustrate the stages of evolution. Ota Benga’s filed teeth – a tradition of cosmetic dentistry followed by his people – were mistaken as a sign of cannibalism. To further this false impression, zookeepers scattered bones in the cage. On some days, nearly 40,000 visitors are estimated to have visited the zoo to see Benga.

And the New York Times published a poem on Benga, which went like this:

From his native land of darkness
To the country of the free,
In the interest of science
And of broad humanity.

The outrage we feel today about this scarcely believable story from just over a century ago is an indication of just how much sensibilities have changed. But to me the key issue is not what happened to Ota Benga; rather, it is this: What is it that most of us do not condemn today and are complicit with that will in 2107 seem utterly outrageous?

Update: See Amit Varma's excellent response to the question in his weekly Mint column here.

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On a related note, James T Campbell, author of Middle Passages: African-American Journeys to Africa – a work of narrative non-fiction and also the book where I first read about Ota Benga – has this to say about how early scientific thinking actually accentuated ideas of race. The end of the 18th century, Campbell writes, coincided with

the birth of race, the idea still prevalent today, that the human species is divided by nature into a small number of distinct groups or races, each identifiable through phenotypic signatures (chiefly skin color and hair texture) and each endowed with distinct capacities and traits. The roots of this perdurable (and deeply misleading) notion are not easily disentangled. Clearly, they reach far back in time, to the earliest European encounters with sub-Saharan Africans in the middle of the fifteenth century. Yet they also reflect a series of specifically eighteenth century intellectual and cultural developments, most notably the rise of natural science, which was fast displacing religion as the primary idiom for describing human nature and variety. In an era in which all the world’s flora and fauna was being sorted into an elaborate classificatory scheme, it was perhaps inevitable that human beings too would be sorted and classified. Whatever the precise sources, the end result was a recognizably modern conception of biological race, complete with an insistence of the innate, ineradicable inferiority of people of African descent. In the nineteenth century, this belief would become the standard justification for slavery, and it remains the institution’s most enduring legacy.

Guha on NRI worship

In an essay in Outlook that is just as hilarious as it is satirical, Ramachandra Guha takes a swipe at Non-Resident Indians who expect to get worshiped in India - and who do get the adulation they crave for.

The funniest part is early in the article and is about writers of Indian origin: Guha compares the trinity of Salman Rushdie, Amartya Sen and VS Naipaul to Hindu holy trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva:

"Analagous to Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, we have Salman the Creator, Amartya the Preserver, and Sir Vidia the Destroyer. Just as Brahma gave birth to the world, Rushdie gave birth, through his magnificent novel Midnight's Children, to an innovative and globally influential school of Indian writing in English. Like the god he resembles he appears to have done little since—but, for that first and fundamental act of creation, we worship him still.

Vishnu the Preserver is supposed to have had 10 avatars. His successor probably exceeds him in this regard. Sometimes he comes to us as a Bangladeshi (by virtue of the fact that he was born in Dhaka), at other times as a Bengali, at still other times as a Global Indian. Other roles he has assumed include economist, philosopher, sociologist, historian, and seer. Like the god he resembles he comes to cheer us, to console us, to chastise us.

Siva could set the world ablaze with a mere blink of the eyelids. His modern successor can destroy a reputation by a word or two said (or unsaid). As with Siva, we fear Sir Vidia, we propitiate him, and we worship him. Who knows, if we are diligent and devoted enough, he may grant us some favours in this world (or the next)."

Read the full article! The excellent illustration above is by Sandeep Adhwaryu.

And this is a good time to put up a link to my review of Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi, easily one of my favorite books of the year.

China in Africa

One of the biggest current affairs dynamics of recent times has been China’s burgeoning presence and interest in Africa. Chinese migrants to Africa total about 750000, and these include shopkeepers, business executives, construction workers, and even – surprise – farmers. China needs energy and mineral resources to maintain its spectacular economic growth, and Africa has plenty to offer. Africa also has plenty to gain in return: it gets massive and much needed infrastructure projects from the Chinese, a number of which are currently in progress. One expensive Chinese gift to Africa, worth $150 million, will be a swanky conference center for the African Union in Addis Ababa.

But what are the nuances that go with China’s engagement in the continent? China does not carry – at least not yet – the baggage of an exploitative colonial past, an accompaniment, for better or worse, to any modern day Western initiative in Africa. China also claims not to interfere in the politics of the countries it is involved with. In fact, if you look at this graph, its largest investments are in Sudan, whose government has a terrible record in the Darfur conflict. And because China deliberately looks the other way and is so powerful in Sudan, it has come under intense pressure from activists to alter its dubious stance and put pressure on the Sudanese government.

There's no doubt that African economies are benefiting from Chinese investments. But there are murmurs of protest as well – and this is only to be expected in what is a clearly complex and still unfolding engagement between two regions with very different historical experiences and differently positioned on the ladder to development. In Zambia cheap Chinese manufactured textile goods (in some cases made from cheaply procured Zambian exports) have flooded the market, affecting local Zambian industry adversely. A recent blast in a Chinese owned explosives factory in the town of Chambishi – the worst industrial accident in Zambia’s history – has further fueled resentment. The blast killed nearly 50 people, most of them young men and women in their twenties. Though the causes of the blast are not yet understood, one Zambian employee who lost family members in the accident told the New York Times that he'd had concerns about how Chinese managers ran the factory. According to him, they emphasized productivity but were careless about the safety of the employees.

In other cases – Angola for example – construction workers from China making a living in Africa stay in strictly utilitarian, low-cost, barrack-like settlements, segregated from where the locals live. Cooks brought from China make the food for these workers. And work keeps them so busy that they don’t get to explore the places they are helping rejuvenate. I am not sure how useful such separation will be – a lack of interaction can only increase resentment, and development projects can only be beneficial in the long run if skills are exchanged and pooled. But it would be simplistic to assume that there's no give and take and reaching out going on. In Ethiopian road construction projects some of it does seem to be happening as this article suggests: the supervisor interviewed in it is part of a small group from the China Road and Bridge Corporation, and works closely with Ethiopian engineers and designers despite language difficulties.

The big question is: where will the Chinese African courtship lead the two regions, say 30-40 years from now? I suspect there won’t be a clear answer then either: Africa is way too diverse for there to be any uniformity in results. And the answer is also tied to China’s rise, endlessly trumpeted in the media (along with the parallel rise of India) as the biggest event of this century.

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Both the BBC and New York Times have recently had special features and articles focusing on China in Africa. (This piece is based almost entirely on what I've read in these articles and some from allafrica.com - unfortunately, I'll have to rely on them until I actually travel and learn more. Hopefully that will happen in the next few years.) The BBC, true to its style, keeps its articles short and crisp (see 1, 2, 3 and 4) while the NYTimes ones are more elaborate (see 1 and 2). And there are photo features as well with notes on the side; I’ve often found them interesting and informative. Here are a couple: Chinese Businesses in Africa (the pictures are mostly from Malawi); and the rather naughtily titled China’s African road gangs. I pilfered the second picture from the latter feature, while the first picture is from this NYtimes article, and shows Chinese goods on display in a street in Lusaka, Zambia.

Some pictures

I was going through my pictures from a couple of my trips this year, and came across a few that I thought would be nice to post. So here they are:

South Dakota

Road curving through the Badlands National Park.

Church somewhere in southern South Dakota.


One sees innumerable cornfields while driving through the Great Plains, but there are fields of sunflowers too. The building in the distance is a silo.


Hampi (see more here)

Relief just outside the Virupaksha temple complex.

Examples of Islamic architecture in Hampi.

Tardiness, and a new blog

Apologies for not having been to post much this month – certain other activities (including traveling, binge dining and lazing around) have taken over. Should be back soon enough, I think, though I've made such promises in the past only to break them.

In the meantime, here’s another blog that I recently started: Out of Kilter. It’s actually related to my profession, operations research, which earns me a living and which is often described rather glibly and abstractly as The Science of Better (click to see a summary of what operations research means and entails). I’ll be posting some personal notes and opinions on some unconventional aspects of operations research in Out of Kilter. My introductory post is here – where you’ll find why the blog is named that way - while my first post on relationships that maximize HIV transmissions is here.

In the future, I'll post snippets from Out of Kilter in this space, just to add some variety, to go with posts on history, travel and literature that are the staple of this blog. Which reminds me: I just organized some selected posts over the last two years from some of these categories on my sidebar, so do take a look.

Nollywood, and exceprts from William Easterly's book

Ever wondered which movie industry is the most vibrant after Bollywood and Hollywood? It’s Nollywood apparently, and here’s the story:

In 1992, Nigerian moviemaker Ken Nnebue released a film called Living in Bondage, a melodrama about a man who joins a secret sect that promises him great wealth if he sacrifices his wife. The film’s dialogue is in Igbo, with subtitles in English. Rather than showing the movie in theaters, which many Nigerians could not have afforded, Nnebue released the film directly to video. This was born the Nigerian movie industry called Nollywood, sometimes called the third most vibrant movie industry in the world after Hollywood and Bollywood. Shooting with a very low budget and a tight schedule, Nigerian moviemakers churn out thousands of titles affordable to poor Africans. The industry reaches the African mass market by emphasizing local cultures and themes most relevant to Africans. People in Nigeria video stores often pass up the latest Hollywood release in favor of one of them from Nollywood.

That’s from William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the Rest have done so much ill and so little good. Easterly is a development economist at the New York University. His point in the book is that transformations in poor countries will happen through the efforts, small and large, of homegrown entrepreneurs – Ken Nnebue of Nollywood is one example – and not through the ineffective aid efforts of institutions such as the G8 or the World Bank. Easterly is also critical of Jeffrey Sachs, whose argument is the exact opposite: that West has not been providing enough aid. Easterly is particularly miffed at the grand-sounding title of Sachs’ latest book The End of Poverty: The Economic Possibilities of Our Time.

But to return now to another excerpt. In this - one of my favorites in the book - Easterly illustrates how a local entrepreneur's perseverance despite immense adversities has helped increase access to cell phones (their usage has grown spectacularly in Africa) and hence improve businesses:

Entrepreneur Alieu Conteh started building a cellular network in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) when it was still in the midst of its civil war in the 1990s. He couldn’t get foreign manufacturers to ship cellular towers into the country with rebel soldiers around, so he got local men to weld scrap metal into a makeshift tower. Demand exploded for Conteh’s phones, and in 2001 he formed a joint venture with the South African firm Vodacom. One illiterate fisherwoman who lives in the Congo without electricity relies on her cell phone to sell her fish. She can’t put the fish in a freezer, so she keeps them alive on a line in the river until customers call to place an order. Vodacom Congo now has 1.1 million subscribers and is adding more than a thousand a day.

America's Westward Expansion, the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee

I haven't done an article as long as this since this article from early last year. I did not anticipate it when I started writing - I wanted to convey certain points simply and concisely, but as so often happens, this piece grew on me. And though it can use some trimming, I'll let it stay the way it is. Given its size, I'll probably still be editing and finding typos for a week from now.

I'd like to note also that the notorious Wounded Knee incident that I write about here is based on Dee Brown's famous non-fiction narrative Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Dee Brown has his biases; his is a deliberate attempt to write history from the Native American point of view, which of course doesn't mean that he got his facts about the massacre right.

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The Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 was a turning point in the Indian independence struggle against the British. In an unfathomable act, Brigadier Reginald Dyer ordered soldiers in his command to fire on an unarmed crowd gathered for peaceful protest. Hundreds of men, women and children died in the shooting. The massacre alienated many Indians who had until then been ambivalent about the British. It catalyzed the freedom struggle and set into a motion a new series of rebellions and protest movements – including Mahatma Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement of 1920 – that led India to its independence in 1947.

Comparisons can sometimes be simplistic. But Jallianwala Bagh was the first thing that came to mind when I visited the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in Pine Ridge reservation, South Dakota. Here too, on a wintry December morning in 1890, the United States’ Seventh Cavalry had opened fire and needlessly killed Sioux men, women and children. But what struck me was the contrast: whereas the anger Indians felt about Jallianwala Bagh had revitalized their freedom struggle, Wounded Knee is associated in United States’ history with the end of Native American resistance. In the years that followed there was no renewed vigor borne of outrage. The United States had all but won the frontier by then: most tribes to the west of the Mississippi had been subdued and shepherded into reservations. Wounded Knee merely marked the formal end to the threat posed by an already weakened Sioux. It was the last in the roster of tragic 19th century events – such as the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the Long Walk of the Navajos, to name just two – that were direct consequences of the frenetic westward expansion of the United States.

Manifest Destiny

The roots of this expansion go back to the beginning of the 19th century. The United States was less than three decades old at the time and confined to a cluster of east coast states. That changed in 1803, however, when the Louisiana Purchase was finalized under Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. And the very next year, the Lewis and Clarke Expedition set off to find an overland route to the Pacific Ocean. Both events were pivotal. They gave the United States a glimpse of its immense territorial possibilities: the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country giving it its future middle, while the Lewis and Clarke expedition seeded the idea of a nation stretching “from sea to shining sea”.

There is much to be admired in the energy and courage of Americans who emigrated to these new lands in the decades that followed. Their perseverance in face of countless difficulties is endlessly commemorated, and rightly so. Every little town founded on the frontier at the time and that still exists today venerates these pioneers through museums, monuments and writings. At the Akta Lakota museum in Chamberlain (South Dakota) I found this description that bears witness to the travails that attended the great westward movement:

Deep wagon ruts marking the paths west scarred the land. Trails were littered with broken equipment, discarded possessions, and the graves of those had died along the way.

And Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail provides us invaluable, first-hand accounts of emigrant parties traveling in long wagon trains across the Great Plains:

Those were the first emigrants we had overtaken, although we had found abundant and melancholy traces of their progress throughout the course of the journey. Sometimes we passed the grave of one who had sickened and died on the way. The earth was usually torn up, and covered thickly with wolf-tracks. Some had escaped this violation. One morning, a piece of plank, standing upright on the summit of a grassy hill, attracted our notice, and riding up to it, we found the following words very roughly traced upon it apparently with a red-hot piece of iron:-

MARY ELLIS
DIED May 7th, 1845
AGED TWO MONTHS

Such tokens were of common occurrence.

Something very profound was happening in the United States at the time. The Native Americans would have had an inkling of this from adventurous white trappers and mountain men who preceded the wave of emigrants. These men would have told of the “coming of an unimaginable force, of a gathering shadow on the eastern horizon, gorging itself on the continent as it pressed steadily this way.” [from Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder]

But no warning could have prepared them for what followed. As the frontier inexorably shifted west and gold was discovered in many places, dozens of tribes were swindled of their lands. (An article needs to be written on just how many tribes there were, if only to dispel the common perception that the land was empty, or at best consisted of a mere smattering). Treaties were broken at will. The grandiose term Manifest Destiny was used to justify settlement. Dee Brown launches a scathing attack on Manifest Destiny in his 1970s’ classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:

To justify these breaches of the ‘permanent Indian frontier’, the policy makers in Washington invented Manifest Destiny, a term which lifted land hunger to a lofty plane. The Europeans and their descendants were ordained by destiny to rule all of America. They were the dominant race and therefore responsible for the Indians – along with their lands, their forests, their mineral wealth. Only the New Englanders, who had destroyed or driven out all their Indians, spoke against Manifest Destiny.

Perhaps there exists no better illustration of Manifest Destiny than John Gast’s painting American Progress (circa 1872). The angel-like figure in the painting is Columbia, the female representation of America (just as Uncle Sam is the male one). Columbia is a beacon of progress leading men westward. She is stringing telegraph wires as she travels; and marching along with her are covered wagons, trains, and pioneers with cattle. At the back of the painting are boats and ships on what is possibly the Mississippi river. And ahead of her, fleeing from the advance, are Native Americans and wild animals. One of the depictions is that of a fleeing herd of buffalo to the left-center. This last feature encapsulates a fundamental dynamic of the time: not only were the Plains Tribes swiftly losing their lands, but large herds of buffalo, which they depended on for sustenance, were disappearing fast. Settlers often needlessly killed large numbers of buffalo, thus making the tribes' situation even more precarious.

The Ghost Dance movement and the road to Wounded Knee

In the late 1880s, just when hope appeared to be at its lowest ebb for the Native Americans, there emerged an astonishing religious revival movement. At its center was the messiah Wovoka, a Northern Paiute from Nevada. His belief was simple: that Native Americans should dance to emancipate themselves and regain their past glory. It is striking how quickly his message spread and that too among very diverse groups of Native Americans. Clearly, Wovoka had articulated something special – intentionally or otherwise we shall never unequivocally know. Had the social context been different and had Wovoka backed his beliefs with a pragmatic agenda, his following could have transformed itself into an effective political force. A few decades later and in a different part of the world, Mahatma Gandhi used his own singular methods to evoke the nationalist sentiment in the vast Indian subcontinent that had up to then been divided along the lines of caste, language, region and religion. Some such unifying force is the first step to greater demands. The Native Americans needed it on a vast scale for their resistance to be successful. But European diseases – and this is where the colonization of the Americas is radically different from that of other continents – coupled with decades of land conquest had greatly reduced their numbers. There was no cohesive political entity that could put up a stiff resistance.

The Wovoka inspired movement, though, gave a glimpse of what was possible. It was called the Ghost Dance and its tenets were infused with Christian ideas. Wovoka spoke of Christ coming again to earth, not as a white man, but as a Native American. He spoke also of a resurrection that would come the following spring. As Ian Frazier writes in On the Rez:

Essentially, the Ghost Dance was an Indian version of the religious revivals so popular on the frontier; but in this case, the Promised Land it evoked would be here on earth, with all the Indians who had ever lived restored to life, and the buffalo herds as well. In this paradise the earth itself would be renewed and would cover all white people and their works to a depth of five times the height of man. What believers must do to hurry the arrival of paradise was dance, leaders of the Ghost Dance said.

The Ghost Dance spread like wildfire: all over the West, from Dakota to Arizona to Okhlahoma to Nevada. It was an act of prayer and gave Native Americans hope. Kicking Bear, one of the Sioux leaders, even claimed that if Indians donned the sacred garments of the Ghost Dance – shirts with magic symbols – they would come to no harm. Not even bullets, he said, could penetrate such shirts. By November of 1890,

Ghost Dancing was so prevalent on Sioux reservations that almost all other activities came to a halt. No pupils appeared at schoolhouses, the trading stores were empty, no work was done on the little farms. At Pine Ridge a frightened agent telegraphed Washington: ‘Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy…We need protection and need it now.’ [from Bury my heart at Wounded Knee]

Though the dance itself did not imply aggression (Wovoka had spoken against violence), many Americans found it alarming because of the breadth of its appeal and the intensity of the dances. The government mobilized troops by the thousands and made a list of leaders who they felt were perpetuating these dances, and whom they wanted in captivity. Sitting Bull, a Sioux leader of great standing, was on this list. But the lieutenant of the Indian police, while arresting Sitting Bull, accidentally killed him. The shot was meant for a Sioux Ghost Dancer who was protesting the arrest along with other dancers.

In other circumstances, the death of such an influential leader might have sparked a large-scale revolt. But the Sioux had great faith in what the dances would bring in just a few months - in spring “the grass would be knee high, the earth would be covered with new soil which will bury all the white men…Great herds of buffalo and horses would come back.” But the very next month came an even bigger tragedy, enough to numb the most enthusiastic and hopeful Ghost Dancer.

The final sequence of events that led to Wounded Knee began with the arrest of Big Foot, the leader of the Minneconjou Sioux band, which numbered more than 300. The War Department wanted Big Foot prisoner as he, like many other leaders, had encouraged the Ghost Dance. The arrest happened when Big Foot was leading his people to Pine Ridge, to join Red Cloud’s Oglala Sioux: the troops of the Seventh Cavalry intercepted them en-route and took the group to Wounded Knee creek. It was the evening of December 28th, 1890. Since light was fading and it was bitterly cold, Major Samuel Whitside of the cavalry decided that the Big Foot’s people would be disarmed the next morning. Whitside even allowed a stove to be placed in Big Foot’s tent and a surgeon to attend to his pneumonia, which had worsened during the journey.

The search for weapons next morning was intense: tents were scoured for axes, knives, and tent stakes; the warriors in the Big Foot’s group were asked to remove their blankets, which angered them particularly. Around this time a stray shot was fired by a Sioux who apparently possessed a Winchester rifle. The shot doesn’t seem to have killed or hurt anyone. But the atmosphere was so charged with suspicion and hostility – many of the Seventh Cavalry had been involved in bloody past battles with the Sioux – that the soldiers needed only the slightest provocation. The loud report from the stray shot was the tipping point, and this is what followed:

In the first seconds of violence, the firing of carbines was deafening, filling the air with powder smoke. Among the dying who lay sprawled on the frozen ground was Big Foot. Then there was a brief lull in the rattle of arms, with small groups of Indians and soldiers grappling at close quarters, using knives, clubs and pistols. As few Indians had arms, they soon had to flee, and then the big Hotchkiss guns on the hill opened up on them, firing almost a shell a second, raking the Indian camp, shredding the teepees with flying shrapnel, killing men, women and children…When the madness ended, Big Foot and more than half of his people were dead or seriously wounded; 153 were known dead, but many of the wounded crawled away to die afterward…The soldiers lost twenty five dead and thirty nine wounded, most of them struck by their own bullets or shrapnel. [from Bury my heart at Wounded Knee]

What happened that morning was first called a battle and was subsequently termed as a massacre. A hundred years later, in 1990, the government of the United States formally apologized to the Sioux for the actions of the Seventh Cavalry.

It is easy to be sentimental about Wounded Knee – even though it pales in comparison to the clinical large scale exterminations that were to plague the world in the 20th century. Wounded Knee has a special significance because it spelled an end to the possibilities of resistance for the American Indian. The Ghost Dance slowly faded out; the spring of 1891 came and went, and nothing happened of course.

I'll end this essay with a quote of Spotted Tail (1823-1881), another in the pantheon of famous Sioux leaders. Spotted Tail was a great statesman, who preferred negotiations to battles. I jotted this quote down at the Akta Lakota museum in Chamberlain, South Dakota. There is a lyrical quality to it, and there is profoundness too: Spotted Tail clearly had an understanding of where the calamities and decline that Native Americans faced fit in the grand scheme of things:

There is a time appointed for all things. Think for a moment how many multitudes of animal tribes we [the Sioux or perhaps Native Americans] ourselves have destroyed; look upon the snow that appears today – tomorrow it is water. Listen to the dirge of dry leaves that were green and vigorous but a few moons before! We are part of that life and it seems our time has come.

_____

Assorted Notes

1. Pictures: The first picture is of the cemetery at Wounded Knee that I took this summer when I visited the site. The allegorical depiction of Manifest Destiny is from this page. And the third picture of the dead Big Foot, lying in the snow at Wounded Knee after the massacre, is from here. For a description of the landscape of the Great Plains see this post.

2. South Dakota has several reservations today – remnants of the Great Sioux reservation of the 19th century. One of them is Pine Ridge, where the village of Wounded Knee is. I have lots to write about the other aspects of my trip and the people I met there. I also passed through the Rosebud reservation where Spotted Tail is buried.

Congratulations, Amit Varma

Congratulations to Amit Varma, one of my favorite bloggers, for winning the Bastiat Prize for journalism. A picture from the ceremony is here. And here is Amit's account of the lead up to the announcement in New York. The essays that won him the prize are here, here and here.

Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British empire

Two reviews, here and here, of a sweeping new work of history by Piers Brendon, which chronicles more than a hundred years of the British Empire. And it doesn’t appear to be a boring history - consider this wonderful nugget from Maya Jasanoff’s review:

Brendon gleefully traces the career of that characteristic imperial accessory, the moustache. British cultivation of the hairy upper lip was inspired, he suggests, by Indian ideals of virility, and would decline in proportion with the empire's reach: Harold Macmillan was "the last British prime minister to sport a moustache."

But, more seriously, the business of empire was of course a ghastly affair as this excerpt reminds us:

Necessarily, blood flows freely through this book. At Cawnpore in 1857, where nearly 200 British women and children had been notoriously slaughtered by the Indian mutineers, the British forced suspected perpetrators to "lick blood from the slaughter-house floor before they were hanged". At Isandhlwana in 1879, British soldiers were shredded by Zulu iklwas blades, "so named in imitation of the sucking sound they made when pulled from human flesh". But it was mass slaughter, 20th century-style, that would truly bring the empire down. During the Boer war 160,000 white civilians would be rounded up into ghastly concentration camps - creating a precedent explicitly cited by the Nazis. The first world war carried Canadians and Indians to "the bone-chilling, gut-wrenching, soul-destroying shambles of the western front", and Australians and New Zealanders to the hell of Gallipoli, where relentless firing turned "their trenches into cemeteries".

A glimpse there of the disparate peoples that were affected. And that's one reason why a book like this could be very useful: it could help us understand the legacies - dubious or otherwise - the British left behind in different parts of the world.

A poem from long ago

One of the pleasures (and agonies) of writing, I feel, is browsing through one's own work from very long ago, and realizing with a shake of the head and a smile just how absurd or bad the writing is. Consider this poem that I wrote when I was in the second year of my college in Trichy – I was seventeen then. My intent was to write something that rhymed, was funny and yet conveyed a serious message. I find my phrases and word choices bizarre now - to say the least - but at the time of writing I was quite convinced that this was a brilliant poem. I even put it up proudly on the online bulletin board of our college computing center for everyone to read. Here it is:


THE JUNGLE BOOK 1

PROJECT TIGER

Ascending a tree ain't no flattering feat,
specially when you have a man eater at your feet,
snappin' and snarlin' in it's attempt to glean,
all anatomy of mine, neat and clean.

On breathing you feel it's sweltering heat,
that turns your toes to molten feet.
The end of the road is here to greet,
me with death and the tiger with fresh meat!

I rise up the tree up to it's peak,
maybe the branch was a wee bit weak,
as in due time I heard it creak,
a dreadful sound, a nice old tweak
Shock! Surprise! Oh, did I shriek!

Luckily I fell into a creek
the water was cold, deliciously deep
from it's depths did I peek
to hear the croc say, ‘I got you cheap.’
But there were other things that made my soul creep
it was not one of them, it was an entire fleet!

But the tiger ain't no slouch for speed;
it was there at the creek, quick and sleek,
after all, would you miss your fresh meat?

Its TIGER VS CROCS at the creek
but spectators like me never seek
to wait for the winner to shake hands with me,
I had gray cells enough to see
this was my chance, I had to flee!

Later, hidden behind far-off trees
i contemplated rather daintily
that though the tiger was an enemy
it was a friend, life savior indeed!

Decades later, to my offspring i repeat
the same ol' story precise and neat
with a lot of pain, do i discover
that all my children have fallen asleep!

But don't you start to doze or sleep
or soon the tiger shall fall asleep...

Save the tiger, without it a forest is never complete!

_____________

That's quite a cheesy message, isn’t it? Despite the poem's obvious flaws I still have a lot of affection for it. It's titled The Jungle Book 1 because this was the first of a series of wildlife poems. The second was set in a waterhole and featured: bathing elephants and hippos; a lion who challenges an elephant to a duel but is sent sulking off "in a narrow lane" (I was trying the patli gali idea here); and a crane that scratches the elephant’s itchy back - it's itchy, the elephant says, because of "the indestructible fungal reign".

The third poem was set in the plains of the Serengeti and was about a cheetah futilely chasing a herd of gazelles. And the final one was about a fiercely efficient army of red ants hunting a scorpion before a spider interrupts, weaves a web of magic that stymies the ants, and allows the scorpion to escape. I'd planned a fifth one too, about birds, but that never got completed. But what fun I had concocting these stories in rhyme!

You see, I can get quite carried away - this is what I call wallowing in nostalgia.

Patience and fairness

While I struggle with my next post, I'd like to divert readers to this interesting article in the Economist. It explains recent experiments that try to show differences between apes and humans when it comes “patience” and “fairness” (the definition of fairness in the article is not as straightforward), and also, in the process, reveal the sequence of evolution and genetic underpinnings of these “virtues”.

Some short notes and pictures from Hampi

This isn't a detailed post - just thought I'd put together some thoughts, descriptions, anecdotes and pictures (do click on the pictures for a better view) from my Hampi trip. Most likely, after some reading, I'll write an elaborate article on the historical context of the place.

I

Just a few days ago, I was in Hampi, a small town on the eastern flank of Karnataka, and once the center of the impressive Vijayanagara Empire of the 14th-16th centuries. The monuments of this empire – large temple complexes with some brilliant sculptures and reliefs, aqueducts, water tanks, fortifications, and markets – were built from large blocks of stone. This doesn’t seem surprising if one looks at the landscape: the region is plentifully endowed with boulders of all sizes. The hills and mounds here are striking, natural agglomerations of such boulders, finely balanced and seemingly precarious.

I became aware of the Vijayanagara Empire only after reading V.S.Naipaul’s interpretation of its historical context in India: A Wounded Civilization. He saw it as the last stand of the “Hindu-Buddhist” tradition that in his view had come to end of its possibilities. He saw it also as a victim of Muslim invasions from the north: the destruction of Hampi in the 16th century was to Naipaul just one example of what had happened elsewhere. But more on that in another post.

II

The region immediately around Hampi is supposed to be the mythological Kishkinda, the Vanara Kingdom mentioned in the Ramayana. At the top of one of the hills (Anjanadri Hill) is a plain white temple with a domed red top and a saffron flag. Its cool interior houses an abstract, bright orange relief of Hanuman on a slab of stone. With my parents I climbed the six hundred steps to the temple. It was breezy at the top, and the wide meandering curve of the Tungabhadra River was clearly visible. On our side of the river was the extensive patchwork of rice, maize, sugarcane fields and orchards of plantain and coconut; on the other, faintly discernible in the bright sun, were the ruins of Hampi.

A single-story house stood in rocky space opposite the temple, and a man was reclined on a ledge of the verandah. Because of his relaxed posture, and the rather secluded location, I thought he might have chosen to stay here to retire from the affairs of the world. But some time later, when we were ready to leave after our darshan and the ritual offering of bananas to the monkeys around, the man, now standing next to the bearded pujari of the temple, broke this news to us. “Kumaraswamy has agreed to resign,” he said in fluent Hindi, evidently pleased at the development. “He has agreed proceed with the power sharing agreement with the BJP.” This was a reference to the still ongoing political crisis in Karnataka (Kumaraswamy is presently the chief minister of the state).

I thought: what an unlikely place to receive such a dispatch! The mention of politics in the idyll of a remote shrine was incongruous – and somehow comical too. (It is quite another matter that news was untrue and was based perhaps only on speculation. For Kumaraswamy, of the JD-S, has not yet resigned and refuses to yield power to the BJP, as had been agreed when the two parties had jointly formed the government. And just today there’s been a call for fresh elections.)

The pujari, as he helped us dispense our bananas, enthusiastically participated in the brief discussion on politics that followed. He, too, like the man who told us of the resignation, wasn’t from around Hampi – the shrine wasn't managed by locals as I'd expected – but from Pandharpur in Maharashtra. Later I found that there were many Ram-bhakts like him, from the northern states, in the other temples and shrines around Hampi. One of them, a short man, dressed in a brown robe and with a cigarette in hand, hitched a ride with us in our auto. And the passages of some temples were full of the gleaming, just-washed stainless steel utensils of these wandering men.

Sam Harris' lecture and the debate on religion

The debate about religion and its role in society is a contentious one these days with theories about clashing civilizations flying thick and fast. How much of society's ills are because of religion? Do we need religion at all? My own views on the topic have varied a lot and have been influenced recently by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s books. In his novels and through his passionate characters, Dostoevsky – a devout man himself – engages deeply with Christianity and what it means to be Christian, and more broadly with the essence of religious feeling. I touched upon the theme a little in my post about The Idiot. I'll reproduce here again a quote that I particularly like; it is from Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of the novel:

“ …the essence of religious feeling doesn’t depend on reasoning, and it has nothing to do with crime or atheism. There is something else there and there always will be, and atheists will always pass over it and will never be talking about that.” [Dostoevsky’s italics].

A few weeks ago, after listening to this engrossing 53-minute lecture by Sam Harris, author of The end of faith, I wondered how a debate between Harris and Dostoevsky, if it were ever held, would go. Would their positions, I wondered, be as far apart as they seem when viewed cursorily? What points would they concur on, if at all?

Harris is unrelentingly critical of religion, and wonders whether we need to be lugging today this burdensome and sapping baggage of the past. He states at the outset that “religion is the most divisive and dangerous ideology we’ve ever produced”. But his lecture is not a tirade; it is a reasoned and methodical dismantling of the tenets of some major faiths – Harris targets especially the Abrahamic ones in the lecture. His broadside is backed by his mastery of the key texts of these religions.

I won’t discuss the lecture or its main points at length, but instead will give a gist of how Harris sets about his task. He divides arguments in defense of religion into three broad categories. The first such argument is that a particular religion should be followed because it is right. The second is that “religion is useful and indeed so useful as to be necessary.” And the third is that the alternative to faith, atheism, “is essentially another religion, dogmatic, intolerant and worthy of contempt.”

To each of these three proffered defenses, Harris provides some good rejoinders. Personally, since the first assertion of the “rightness”of a specific faith is rather naive and arrogant, I was interested only in his responses to the last two claims, both of which I’ve held to some extent but am now beginning to rethink. In countering the usefulness and necessity of religion, Harris argues that morality does not require the framework of religion as is sometimes supposed. I think this is an important point – though obvious, it is often overlooked. And he clarifies that atheism should not be misunderstood as a dogma (this too is routinely done: the ideas and actions of such leaders as Stalin and Mao are attributed to their atheism) but as a tradition of healthy scepticism and of submitting everything to close scrutiny.

It is difficult, however, to accept Harris' lack of support even for moderates who are tolerant of religions. As an atheist, his recommendation, naturally, is that since the lofty claims on which most religions are based are false, we should do away with faith altogether. But how is such a thing to be done, and what of the unimaginable vacuum that this will surely leave behind? (There must be something about this in Harris' The end of faith, and in Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion as well, but I haven't read them to be able to comment yet.)

What lends a degree of moderation to Harris’ views is his sincere acknowledgement that certain experiences at the personal or individual level can be powerful. As he says, his arguments should not be “construed as a denial of the possibilities of spiritual experience, and indeed of the importance of spiritual experience.” And though nothing escapes the rigor of Harris' gaze, this is perhaps where he comes closest to admitting that some special and inexplicable feeling or state or connection – that same something that Prince Myshkin talks about above – can exist.

Travel potpourri

I am currently in Bangalore for two weeks with my parents, and am lazing around and enjoying the food, the cricket, the excellent weather in Bangalore, and, less happily, pondering my US consulate appointment that's coming up in a couple days – with all these things, I haven't been able to write anything substantial. So I thought I'd put up a potpourri post, based on some of my recent travels.

Here are a few of my pictures and notes from trips this summer:

1. I took this picture from the window of my hotel room in St.Etienne, France, immediately after checking in. I'd arrived at the St.Etienne train station at about 8 in the evening, tired after a twenty-hour journey. The streets of the town were such a maze – crooked, some of them narrow and intersecting at all possible angles – and my hotel’s location so obscure, that I was disoriented and clueless. I found the hotel after nearly an hour of roaming around parts of the town and went to my 8th floor room, ready to collapse. But when I opened the large window in the room to let the air in, I was soothed and gladdened by the view. I stayed up, sat by the window and took pictures from different angles while it was still light.

2. The first picture below shows shoots of either yuccas or agaves (I am always unable to tell the difference between the two plants). Their thin protrusions and flowers dramatize the arid landscape of the southwestern United States and parts of Mexico. This particular set was just outside the archaeological site of Casas Grandes, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuaua, which I visited in May. The next picture is of a flower of a prickly pear cactus - I chanced upon it when our group stopped by the roadside on a highway in Mexico.

3. Finally, two pictures from my trip to South Dakota. This was a long road trip on Interstate 90 which runs east-west through the state. En-route, at the Badlands National Park, I spotted these sprightly, long-eared jackrabbits.

And at the western end of South Dakota, the monotonous, gently undulating prairie does a jig and transforms itself into the pine-forested and mountainous Black Hills. The rocky top of one of these hills, Mount Rushmore, has been meticulously and brilliantly sculpted to mimic the grim, thoughtful countenances of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln.

But let me ask with a mischievous wink: Will Dubya's face ever find its way to Mount Rushmore?

About the plains

The landscape of the Great Plains, the swathe of prairie that runs through the middle of the United States, is quite special. While traveling to Fargo, North Dakota last year, I had my first glimpse of it as my flight approached the airport. The incredibly flat, largely treeless expanse around Fargo was apportioned neatly into farms. And later, on the ground, I felt odd because my sense of perspective was altered by the flatness: because there were so few trees, the view was uninterrupted in all directions, and the sky seemed large and imposing. A character of Willa Cather’s describes aptly in her novel My Antonia the feeling of insignificance one feels on the vast prairie: “Between the earth and the sky, I felt erased, blotted out.”

When I drove through South Dakota and Nebraska last month (and quite a bit of Minnesota too), I got to see the prairie again and was able to better appreciate its variations. I learned, for instance, that it isn't always flat, and that it undulates gently - an ocean of farms and grassland with swells and lows. And pretty much throughout my trip, I found large bales of hay arrayed upon the farms that flanked the road, sometimes in an orderly fashion, as in the picture below.

I’ll stop here for now, but there will be more in coming months about the plains – not only about its landscape, but also of its history, and if I have the time, a review of Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneer, set in the newly settled plains of late nineteenth century Nebraska.

I took these pictures somewhere near the very small settlement of Carter (hamlet is perhaps the right word) in southern South Dakota.

The Ishango bone

The Ishango bone was found in the 1950s, in a fishing village on the Congo-Uganda border and dates to around 20,000-30,000 BC. It is an exhibit today at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences at Brussels. The bone is the fibula of a baboon, and what makes it interesting is the set of notches that were deliberately marked on its surface, presumably by the people who lived in the region then.

The number of these notches and their grouping seem to imply a knowledge of mathematics and calculation - of prime numbers, multiplication and division - quite advanced for its time and unheard of elsewhere. If indeed the markings were inscribed with these concepts in mind, the Ishango bone would be the earliest evidence of "mathematical thinking". But is it just a coincidence that the notches are uniquely grouped and have certain mathematical properties? Or do they represent a calendar, as has been proposed by some? The problem with these interpretations, of course, is that they use modern day notions to explain something from a very, very long time ago. Nevertheless, here’s a interesting link that talks more about the markings, and also points to other such examples, including what might be an ancient calendar in the form of dots (just a little younger than Ishango), in the famous caves of Lascaux in France.

My adventures with ajvar

Last year, when I first went to the international foods store here in Rochester, I spotted, at the end of the main aisle, an array of glass jars containing a type of relish called ajvar. The jars were stylish: they had wonderful curved contours, and some even had a cloth draped over the lid, held in place by a golden string. I was quite taken by the appearance of these jars, and the bright red color of ajvar had me salivating.

Ajvar is made from red bell peppers, eggplant, garlic, chili pepper, and vegetable oil, and is popular among the people of the Balkans. When I tried my first jar (which I had some difficulty opening) I found it as delicious as I’d hoped it would be. My way of having ajvar wasn’t by any means Balkan. I had it as a side dish to flavor the last course of my evening meal - I had it, in other words, with the Tamilian staple of rice and yogurt.

Around the same time, I found, to my delight, that a Serbian couple lived on the top floor of my apartment. Who better to ask about ajvar and its nuances! We got acquainted and they invited me to their place a few times last winter. We talked of many things – I remember how much they liked the system of arranged marriages in India, and said they wished Serbia had it too – but I steered the topic towards food, asking about the ingredients in the pancakes they’d offered me, and inevitably, about ajvar.

“What’s a good brand of ajvar to buy?” I asked, “The one I’ve bought says it’s home made.” I described the shape of the jar, hoping that would suggest something. It didn’t. I went down to my apartment and brought the jar to them. They inspected it, and nodding vigorously said, to my great pleasure, that it was the right brand.

“You see”, they told me, “this brand is made in Macedonia. The climate there is ideal for the ingredients that go into ajvar. In general, when it comes to these sorts of products, buy ones that are made in Macedonia.”

I gladly followed their advice. But soon I faced a new obstacle. The second time I bought Macedonian ajvar, I couldn’t open the tightly sealed lid. Try as I might, no matter how much I twisted my wrists and fingers or tried such tricks as using a towel to cover the lid, it wouldn’t open. I was left only with aches and a terrible disappointment. The ajvar sat on my kitchen table for a week; I would look at the jar every day and then suddenly, in a burst of newfound confidence and anticipation, I would unleash myself upon it and attempt to open it, but to no avail. I went back to my Serbian friends. They taught me the technique of knocking on the lid with a fork in a friendly manner, as if soothing an unruly steed, then slowly prising the lid with the fork to let the pressure out, before opening it with ease.

Thus empowered, I bought and consumed jar after jar or ajvar. I stopped only once, to ask my friends upstairs if something so delicious could possibly be healthy. They told me what I wanted to hear: it was used as a winter salad and spread, and was quite harmless.

The spree went on during the winter months. I was laden with empty jars of ajvar, and since I was so enamored of them, I couldn’t dispose them. They proliferated in my kitchen; I knocked over them while chopping onions on the cutting board; they jostled for space with the plates and cups in my shelves. It took me a while to realize I could put them to good use: I could use them to store my spices.

So the jars now hold all kinds of Indian spices: mustard and cumin and assorted tadka seeds; manthakkali vathal (used to make the incomparable south Indian vathal kozumbu); vangibhaat powder – to name just a few. My craze for ajvar has now passed – replaced this summer by my obsession with expensive cherries – but the jars are constant reminders of just how much I craved for this relish not too long ago. Who knows, I might turn back to it again some time soon – but then what will I do with the new jars?

Terracottas of the Nok culture

I am fascinated by the beautiful terracotta sculptures of the Nigerian Nok culture, which date back to 500 B.C. These sculptures were unearthed in the first half of the 19th century, in Jos Plateau region of Nigeria. They make one wonder about the society and the people that produced such art. Unfortunately, though, not much is known. But here's a good website that discusses the style and the composition of the sculptures .

Information about the picture to the right is on this Wikipedia page. I got the picture below a while ago from some forum but am unable to trace the source now.