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.

____

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.

An awkward moment for Mr. Nixon

I am currently reading Martin Meredith’s The fate of Africa, and the first chapter, The Gold Coast Experiment, is about how Ghana became the first Sub-Saharan country to gain its independence in 1957. There's an interesting note in the chapter about the overly enthusiastic Richard Nixon, then the Vice President of the United States, who faced an embarrassing situation during the independence celebrations:

Messages of congratulations came [to Ghana] from an array of world leaders, from Eisenhower, Bulganin, Nehru and Zhou En-lai. Delegations from fifty-six countries arrived, exuding warmth and goodwill…But the most enthusiastic visitor was Richard Nixon, then the United States vice-president. From the moment he touched down in Accra, he rushed about shaking hands, hugging paramount chiefs, fondling black babies and posing for photographs. It was not always to good effect. Surrounded by a crowd of Ghanaians in an official ceremony, he slapped one man on the shoulder and asked him how it felt to be free. ‘I wouldn’t know sir,’ replied the man. ‘I am from Alabama.’

That’s quite a telling repartee, isn’t it? I wonder how Nixon reacted.

A short note on Dostoevsky's characters

This is my second post on Fyodor Dostoevsky; the first one is here.

One of the striking features of Dostoevsky’s work is how passionate and sometimes wild his characters are. His pages teem with greedy, ambitious, vile, and bacchanalian types; they are also incredibly vain, and paranoid about maintaining their dignity. Indeed what torments them all the more is this need for dignity despite the negating pull of their actions, actions that they are somehow unable to control. As Harold Rosenberg says in his introduction to The Idiot: “The Dostoevskian character cannot trust his feelings or his decisions; some aberrant impulse may cause him to act contrary to them.” The bulk of Dostoevsky’s voluminous works consist of large, garrulous parties and gatherings of just such characters, and these lead to impassioned outbursts and dramatic confrontations.

Why does he use such exaggerations? Because his supercharged characters, despite seeming unreal, are able convey the gamut of human emotions and thinking. Dostoevsky himself provides an answer in Part Four of The Idiot, when, for a few pages, he stops being the storyteller and instead muses on the novelist's biggest challenge: How is one to describe “ordinary” people in novels?

“In their novels and stories writers most often choose and present vividly and artistically social types which are extremely seldom encountered in real life, which are nevertheless more real than real life itself…”

“…what is the novelist to do with absolutely ordinary people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting? To leave them out of a story completely is not possible, since ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necessary links in the chain of human affairs; leaving them out therefore means to destroy credibility. To fill a novel entirely with types or, simply for the sake of interest, strange or unheard-of people, would be improbable and most likely not even interesting. In our opinion, the writer must try to find interesting and informative touches even among commonplace people.”

And for an even better answer, here’s Dostoevsky concisely expressing in a letter (written to somebody called Strachov), the central idea behind all of his art:

“I have my own idea about art, and it is this: What most people regard as fantastic and lacking in universality, I hold to be the most innate essence of truth.”

A short note on Lyon's history, and some pictures

From the top of Fourviere hill of the French city of Lyon - the second largest metropolitan area in the country - it is possible see the sprawl beneath: clusters of buildings, hundreds of them, large and small, with sloping, red roofs; the path of the Saone river, and more faintly, the path of the Rhone, the other major river that runs through the city (the two rivers converge south of the city center and enclose a peninsular strip called Perrache).

The view is fantastic (I wish I had a picture that could do justice) but it is all the more special because it reveals – just in that one view – the layers of the city’s history. The hill itself was, and continues to be be, a place of importance and interest. A majestic late 19th- century Basilica church stands there today. But one can go well back: back to first century BC when Romans controlled Fourviere hill and constructed a theater with a capacity of 10,000; and back, even further, to when the Gauls held the place.

With the decline of the Roman empire in the middle to late part of the first millennium, and with the arrival of the Germanic peoples, the population moved towards the foot of the hill, close to the Saone river. The old, darker rooftops visible immediately below Fourviere and close to the river are in a quarter called Vieux Lyon (Old Lyon), which had a large settlement during the middle ages and the Renaissance times. Further away, to the north, is Croix-Rousse where wealthy silk and garment merchants resided in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And now all around, stretching as far as the eye can see, are modern buildings, including a 142-meter high pencil shaped building (not to be confused, by any means, with the picture below), near the bustling Part Dieu railway station.

So much, then, is encapsulated in the panoramic view from the vantage point on Fourviere that it can seem as if people have been spilling their buildings and their monuments over the hill over the last two thousand years, dispersing them far and wide. This presence of history everywhere – very old history blending seamlessly with more recent – is what makes travelers, Americans especially, coo in admiration.

A steep winding pathway that cuts through the wooded slope of Fourviere, leads to Vieux Lyon. Houses here crowd over each other; some streets are cobblestone; and there are narrow passageways unique to the city, called traboules. Close to the foot of the river is the St. John’s Cathedral, another magnificent church, even older than the Basilica atop the Fourviere. The cathedral was built from the over a period of 3 centuries, from the 12th to the 15th, its style Romanesque in the beginning and but later, towards the end of its construction, heavily Gothic.

Note on pictures: The first picture is that of the Basilica on Fourviere. The second is a tower I came across while walking through Vieux Lyon. Interestingly, the Wikipedia page on traboules, the narrow passageways of the old town, also has a picture of the same tower, and calls it the courtyard of a traboule. And below are some more pictures I took in Vieux Lyon: the first an alley; the second a heavy door to a building used for religious purposes; and the third the lower part of St.John Cathedral's facade.

Review: Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi

Throughout his massive, extensively researched historical work, India after Gandhi, Ramachandra Guha quotes Western doomsayers, who, before as well as after India’s independence, felt strongly that democracy in India could not survive, and that the country would collapse under the sheer weight of its diversity and social problems. In the epigraph of the very first chapter of his book, Guha quotes the former bishop of Calcutta who said in 1915 that “as soon as the last British soldier sailed from Bombay and Karachi, India would become the battlefield of antagonistic racial and religious forces”.

The bishop’s prediction did come true in the months following independence when the subcontinent was partitioned. And in the decades that followed class, caste, religious and secessionist conflicts have constantly rocked India. But despite all this, the country has managed to hold together; its democratic institutions have survived – though BR Ambedkar’s caveat that “democracy is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic” continues to be true in many parts of the country. Still, the success and relative stability of the Indian Union is remarkable given the upheavals and authoritarian regimes that have plagued other countries in Asia and Africa similarly emerging from colonialism.

This contrast – the contrast between the bleakness of all predictions about India and the country’s unlikely dodging of the pitfalls strewn along its path – is something Ramachandra Guha repeatedly heightens throughout the book; it is this contrast that gives his narrative its strength and tension.

Unlike Amartya Sen, who, in The Argumentative Indian, attributes the success of Indian democracy to historical precedents such as those set by the emperors Asoka and Akbar, Guha looks for answers in the political story of the country after independence (“...the real success story of modern India lies ... in [the domain] of politics”). He reserves his greatest praise for India’s founding fathers: Jawaharlal Nehru, to whom this book is a paean, and who succeeded during his 17-year long tenure in imparting his secular and liberal values to the country’s institutions; Vallabhbhai Patel, whose pivotal role in the integration of princely states ensured that territorially India would be what it is today; and BR Ambedkar, who, in his drafting of the Constitution made sure that the social iniquities of the past would – officially at least – begin to be reversed. Indeed, one of Guha’s main points is that though political leadership in India has steadily deteriorated, the decline cannot derail what was begun in the years after independence:

“In India, the sapling was planted by the nation’s founders, who lived long enough (and worked hard enough) to nurture it to adulthood. Those who came afterwards could disturb and degrade the tree of democracy but, try as they might, could not uproot and destroy it.”

Guha states early in the book that his approach to writing the history of modern India –an unimaginably vast and unwieldy subject matter – is that of an explorer “making a rapid survey of the horizon before plunging into thickets from which the wider view is no longer possible.” And so, while the political story of India after independence forms the main narrative thread, we also learn of a number of important and often ignored people and stories. To list just a few, we learn how Sardar Tarlok Singh, an Indian Civil Service officer, guided the effort to settle and allot cultivable land to tens of thousands of refugees from West Punjab in Pakistan; the sheer scale of the logistical and administrative effort that Sukumar Sen, India’s first election commissioner, faced in holding elections; how the reorganization of states along linguistic lines came to be, and the role the activist Potti Sriramulu, who fasted for 58 days and died, played in it; how movements for greater autonomy and separatism unfolded, guided by Sheik Abdullah and Phizo, in Kashmir and Nagaland. As Aditya Adhikari writes in his review at Mecocosm, “encountering the host of characters in the [book’s] pages is one of the volume’s principal pleasures”.

The other success of the book is the perspective it is able to provide on some of the important developments in the Indian political scene in the last two decades. The rise of Hindu nationalist parties; the tendency towards decentralization evidenced in the growing strength of regional parties; the increasing importance of caste: all these trends, because of the scope and timeline considered, do not come across as isolated but as part of a larger story of ebbs and surges. By describing, for instance, the RSS and the views of its leader Golwalkar in the 1950s and the political role of the Jana Sangh in the 1960s and 70s, Guha is able to provide us a better understanding of the roots and aspirations of the Bhartiya Janata Party and the parties of the Sangh Parivar.

In telling his stories Guha liberally quotes and excerpts from reports, newspapers, essays of traveling journalists, and recently released archives and letters: his narrative is a deftly crafted collage. But there are also portions, particularly towards the end, where his prose turns into a monotonous recitation of events – Amit Chaudhuri, in his review of the book, calls the chapter devoted to entertainment the weakest one in the book, a “Wikipedia-like accounts of cultural achievements”. Also, Guha often only peripherally touches on many of the issues facing contemporary India, leaving the reader desperately wanting a deeper engagement. But these are minor quibbles; they should not detract from grand scale of Guha’s undertaking and the lucidity with which he has rendered it.
_____

Finally, some links: for some informal analyses of Guha’s background, his writing interests, and influences check this and this and this. An archive of Guha’s articles on Outlook India can be found here; the most recent of them, an analysis of why southern India currently fares much better that the north, is here (login needed). An excellent recent article by Guha on the conflict in the tribal Bastar region of central India – hardly discussed in the mainstream media – can be found here.

Also, on The Middle Stage, Chandrahas has an informal 4-part series that marks the 60th anniversary of India's independence: 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Coming up

in the next few weeks: a review of Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi: The history of the world’s largest democracy; a note about the history of the French city of Lyon and also my travels in the town of St. Etienne; and perhaps, over the next couple of months, reviews and non-fiction articles on Martin Meredith’s decidedly bleak The fate of Africa: From hopes of freedom to the heart of despair, and James Campbell’s narrative non-fiction work Middle Passages: African American journeys to Africa, which I’d promised to write about earlier, but never managed to.

For the next few days, meanwhile, I’ll be at Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota - this will be my last trip in a summer full of travel. Hopefully, I'll be able to meet some people there and get a sense of the place.

Knitting together the seams of Pangaea

Just over five hundred years ago, before the European colonization of the Americas, tomatoes, potatoes and chilies, the widely used vegetables of today (the first two at least), were unknown to Africa, Europe and Asia. It seems unimaginable now, but before the 15th century, the cuisines of Thailand and the Indian subcontinent were actually bereft of chilies! Similarly, the Americas did not have wheat or rice, just as the rest of the world had no knowledge of maize (corn).

Charles Mann in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus provides an intriguing take on the topic:

“Until about 200 million years ago Eurasia and the Americas” [as indeed the rest of the world] “were lashed together in a single landmass that geologists call Pangaea. Pangaea broke into pieces, sending the continents drifting like barges across the ocean floor. For millions of years, the separate fragments of Pangaea had almost no communication. Evolution set their species spinning of on separate trajectories, and the flora and fauna of each land diverged…”

But with Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, the pieces of Pangaea that had drifted apart for countless millennia were now brought together: not literally but through a massive exchange of people, plants, crops and animals from the different continents. The historian and professor Alfred Crosby who first proposed the idea in his books (Mann borrows heavily from Crosby’s writings) refers to this exchange as the Columbian Exchange: a “knitting together of the seams of Pangaea”.

In this colorful description below, Mann summarizes how agriculture was radically transformed in many parts of the world :

“Ever since 1492 the hemispheres have become more and more alike, as people mix the world’s organisms into a global stew. Thus bananas and coffee, two African crops, become the principal agricultural exports of Central America; maize and manioc, domesticated in Mesoamerica [today Mexico and Central America] and Amazonia respectively, return the favor by becoming the staples in tropical Africa. Meanwhile, plantations of rubber trees, an Amazonian native, undulate across Malaysian hillsides; peppers and tomatoes from Mesoamerica form the culinary backbones of Thailand and Italy; Andean potatoes lead Ireland to feast and famine; and apples, native to the Middle East, appear in markets from Manaus to Manila to Manhattan.”

But there were some very unpleasant and tragic consequences as well. Smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria, measles, all diseases from Europe swept through the American continent. Native Americans, who had no immunity to these diseases, died in inordinately large numbers. Nearly a fifth of humanity perished.

Even more startling is Crosby’s assessment of the impact of all this on Africa. When the Native American crops of maize, manioc and peanuts reached Africa after the 15th century, they transformed African agriculture and led to a population boom. As Native Americans vanished in large numbers, the colonizing Europeans faced a labor shortage. They now looked towards Africa for slaves. In Crosby’s view, “the maize-fed population boom [in Africa]” allowed “the awful [slave] trade [to] continue without pumping the well dry.”

These interpretations show just how oddly interconnected and cruel the twists of history can be.

___

Finally, here’s Crosby again stating in these superbly composed paragraphs (link to complete essay here) how the migration of people in the last few thousand years has altered the dominant pattern of biological evolution:

“For tens of millions of years the dominant pattern of biological evolution on this planet has been one of geographical divergence dictated by the simple fact of the separateness of the continents. Even where climates have been similar, as in the Amazon and Congo basins, organisms have tended to get more different rather than more alike because they had little or no contact with each other. The Amazon has jaguars, the Congo leopards.

However, very, very recently—that is to say, in the last few thousand years—there has been a countervailing force, us, or, if you want to be scientific about it, Homo sapiens. We are world-travelers, trekkers of deserts and crossers of oceans. We have gone to and lived or at least spent some time everywhere, taking with us, intentionally, our crops and domesticated animals and, unintentionally, our weeds, varmints, disease organisms, and such free-loaders as house sparrows. Humans have in the very last tick of time reversed the ancient trend of geographical biodiversification.”

Kamila Shamsie on telling the truth through fiction

The Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie writes of how her urge tell the truth through fiction developed while living under Zia Ul-Haq’s dictatorship. I liked most the part where she summarizes the great strength of fiction, something well known, but worth reiterating:

“Fiction writers go where news reporters and historians dare not tread: into characters' heads, into the dreams they lose at the moment of waking, into the memories forgotten, the fears never articulated even to themselves. We do all this, even while making stuff up or distorting and embellishing "what really happened" for the sake of a dramatic arc; and, in so doing, we claim our ability to convey emotional truths, more revelatory about a time and place than any series of facts.”

But Shamsie writes also that the social context and the world of facts can never be ignored and is quite important:

“But the fact is, making up the emotional truths would not be possible without facts. You need to know the contours of the world into which you are going to drop your made-up characters and their made-up lives; when people ask me which parts of my novel are based on things that really happened, I point out that I can't make up context, only the shapes that fill it. And though my editing process consists in good part of cutting out every fact I've garnered through research, I would never have been able to write the books without that research itself.”

The full article is here.

My blog turns two

My blog turns two this July – July 21st to be exact (here’s my first post), but since I won’t be around then, I’ve decided to celebrate early. I had no idea when I began this blog that it would survive this long. So to mark the occasion here’s some commemorative trivia:

1. How my blog's name came to be: In July 2005 my immigration documents were giving me much administrative trouble because officials always misinterpreted my long name. So it seemed only natural at the time to somehow reflect this in the blog. Admittedly, there wasn't much logic in my choice, but then that's just the way it was :)

2. The average number of visitors per day to my blog is currently 8 – while this is dismal by the standards of megablogs such as this one, my average has doubled in the last year. (Ah, how one can get to dissecting these petty things! But there’s no denying the pleasure I get from such analyses!)

3. Astonishingly, I have posted only 58 times in the last two years! But May and June 2007 were unique in that in that I posted 4 times (a first) in each of these months. Again by the standards of megablogs who pile upwards of 300 posts annually, this is dismal. Nevertheless my increased output is worth mentioning. :)

4. The price of pencils easily takes the top position for the maximum number of comments. The second position is shared by The necessary vanity of a writer and My grandfather and my name.

5. The founding story of Tenochtitlan, my short note on the magnificent city of the Mexicas before the Spanish conquest, was the most frequently visited post this year because of certain Google search terms that led browsers to it. Other posts which most frequently get visitors through Google: Premchand’s Shatranj ke Khiladi, The great movement west, and The lost boys of Sudan.

6. Some of my favorite posts this year are: Two themes from Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Romila Thapar and the history of India, Naipaul on travel writing, Books this year, and Zadie Smith on writers and writing.

7. This self-commemorative post will not be complete without a hat tip towards the blogs I have learned a lot from and follow religiously. The literary blogger Chandrahas Choudhury’s The Middle Stage is exceptional in my opinion, and is my favorite blog by far. If Chandrahas maintains the sort of momentum he currently has (and I wish him the best), he's certain to go places. Other blogs I follow regularly are: Jai Arjun Singh, Amit Varma’s India Uncut, Sonia Faleiro, Prufrock’s Page, Samanth Subramanium, and Manasi Subramanium. And Kartikeya Date’s A Cricketing View deserves a special mention.

P.S: Will be traveling all of next week (going to a conference in St.Etienne), so the next post will be a while.

On al-Khwarizmi and the diffusion of ideas

In the last few years, I’ve been fascinated by how ideas that originate in one place diffuse and reach other cultures, and how these receiving cultures shape them in their own distinctive ways. Recently, I found these paragraphs that explain how the numbers we use today – commonly called Arabic numerals – and take for granted made their way in the 8th century from India to the brilliant mathematician Musa al-Khwarizmi, originally an Uzbek but resident at the time in Baghdad. It was through Musa al-Khwarizmi’s treatise On the Calculation of Hindu Numerals that the Europeans got to know of this system of representing numbers (which is why they called it Arabic numerals). Because of its advantages over the cumbersome, alphabetic Roman numeral system, Italian merchants like Fibonacci preferred it:

“Traditional systems had used different letters of the alphabet to represent numbers or cumbersome Roman numerals, and the new system was far superior, for it allowed people to multiply and divide easily and check their work. The merchant Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa, who had learned about Arabic numerals in Tunis, wrote a treatise rejecting the abacus in favor of the Arab method of reckoning, and as a result, the system of Hindu-Arabic numeration caught on quickly in Central Italy. By the fourteenth century, Italian merchants and bankers had abandoned the abacus and were doing their calculations using pen and paper, in much the same way we do today.”

Musa al-Khwarizmi also pioneered the field of algebra (root al-jabr). The paragraph below explains, how the alphabet x came to represent the unknown in all of mathematics:

“Al-Khwarizmi had used the Arabic word for "thing" (shay) to refer to the quantity sought, the unknown. When al-Khwarizmi's work was translated in Spain, the Arabic word shay was transcribed as xay, since the letter x was pronounced as sh in Spain. In time this word was abbreviated as x, the universal algebraic symbol for the unknown.”

And here’s how word ‘algorithm’ came into being:

“Robert of Chester's translation of al-Khwarzmi's treatise on algebra opens with the words dixit Algorithmi, "Algorithmi says." In time, the mathematician's epithet of his Central Asian origin, al-Khwarizmi, came in the West to denote first the new process of reckoning with Hindu-Arabic numerals, algorithmus, and then the entire step-by-step process of solving mathematical problems, algorithm.”

The picture above of Musa al-Khwarzmi is from this Wikipedia website, and, interestingly, is a commemorative stamp issued by the Soviet Union in 1983.