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.
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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.

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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.

Chris, and thoughts on Native American history

I recently finished writing a fairly long travel essay (8000 words) about the Navajos of the southwestern United States. It is based mostly on my trips to their reservation (see map) while I was in Phoenix, Arizona. (The Navajo reservation is the largest reservation in the United States, about the size of West Virginia).

The extract below is from the second part of my essay, and describes my meeting and short conversation with a Navajo student, Chris, at Arizona State University. It also describes some of my thoughts on the broader topic of Native American history. If you happen to like what you read and wanted to have the full piece, please send me an email – my address is on this page.

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In the spring of 2005, I attended a seminar by Lance Morgan, a member of the Winnebago tribe in Nebraska. Morgan had a Harvard law degree and was now an entrepreneur. His seminar was at Arizona State University and was on the topic of tribal trust land. More than fifty students attended the talk and nearly all of them were Native American. Many of them might have been Navajos as well given their high numbers (nearly a thousand) at the university.

It was at the talk that I saw Chris, a mechanical engineering student at the university. Chris was a Navajo and his home was close to the capital of the Navajo reservation, Window Rock. He was short, well built young man with a dark, lustrous face. From the questions he asked at the end of the seminar, it seemed he had an aggressive and forceful demeanor.

I ran into Chris again that evening at the student recreation field in the university. He was playing a keenly contested intramural softball game. Chris was the captain of his team, and I slowly recognized the other players of his team: they were faces I had seen in the audience during Morgan’s talk. All the players wore t-shirts that said “Go Fighting Whites”; each t-shirt also had a 1960s style picture of a smiling white man. There was clearly some political theme here but I wasn’t sure what it was. At the time, I thought it quite subversive since the message, in my imagination at least, seemed to be directed against the opposition team: a team of young, heavily cheered white college students. I later learned that the t-shirt was supposed to be a riposte to the stereotyping of Native Americans implicit in team names such as Washington Redskins.

Chris’ team lost the game. His team members were upset; their faces had a sort of suppressed anger and disappointment over their own performance. Chris called his teammates into a huddle in an attempt to rally them for the next game. “We fucking beat ourselves,” he said and pointed out they with effort could do much better in the next game.

I caught up with Chris a little later, and talked with him for a while as we walked away from the recreation field. I had meant to ask him about tribal trust land, but ended up talking very little about it. Instead, I found myself telling him of my visit to the Navajo reservation the summer before; it was then that I had first heard about Kit Carson, the American soldier who led the campaign against the Navajos in the 1860s that resulted in the brutal eviction commonly called Long Walk. Kit Carson had followed a scorched earth policy, which ensured that cornfields were rendered uncultivable, livestock killed and peach trees felled. Already starving because of Carson’s campaign and now deprived comprehensively of their means of sustenance, thousands of Navajos surrendered and were herded in the long march to Bosque Redondo. Navajos numbers dwindled to only a few thousand during this period. It was a precarious position to be in; as a community, the Navajos were a whisker away from being obliterated, like tribes in the other parts of the United States.

Chris felt deeply about what had happened at the time; he used the loaded word genocide to describe it. He also had thoughts on the calamities that the Native Americans in North America had faced. His view was that too many nations had manipulated the Native Americans. When he learned that I was from India, he said:

“India really had to deal with only one country – the British. We had to deal with many different European countries. The Spanish, the French, the British.”

I felt his assessment of India wasn’t entirely accurate: British colonization was really the last in a series that went well back in time; invaders had come from Afghanistan and Central Asia since the beginning of the millennium. And one could go even further back.

Chris also expressed surprise that India, with so many different cultures and languages, had been unified into a single country. The lack of unity among tribes was for him the principal reason why the Native Americans had been unable to combat European incursions.

We were walking all this time; I wanted to talk more with Chris but he was headed in a different direction. I did not see him again. My conversation with Chris had been brief, but I’ve always attached a lot of importance to it. For it was also around that time that I’d begun to form some of my own thoughts about Native American history, and I’d been wanting for a while to talk to someone about it.

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There was truth to what Chris had said: the lack of unity amongst tribes was indeed one reason that had led to their subjugation. But clearly, there had been also other unalterable factors, geographical and environmental, that had worked against the Native Americans.

I had always been stymied by how European colonization efforts had gone so differently in the different continents. I was especially surprised by how sub-Saharan Africa, which like North America five hundred years ago, had consisted of chiefdoms, tribes and small kingdoms, today had more than 500 million people, while the Native Americans, despite an upward trend in the last century, were a mere 3 or 4 million in the United States population of 300 million (see Note 1). Somehow Africa’s terrain, its climate and diseases had thwarted permanent settlement of outsiders, allowing native populations – despite their own high mortality rate to the same diseases – to grow quickly in the last hundred years (see Note 2) . In a strange inversion of this, European diseases had decimated many Native American communities, and North America, not too dissimilar in places from Europe in climate, had turned out in the long run to be very favorable for settlement.

I began to wonder how things would have been had history gone differently, if the independent trajectory of Native American development had remained undisturbed. It was a probably a futile exercise but I was drawn to it. I imagined that intensive agriculture had somehow been adopted by most tribes, that their populations, unaffected by pandemics, had increased significantly; I imagined federations of tribes starting to coalesce into empires throughout the northern half of the continent; I imagined alliances and enmities, militaristic tribes and kingdoms forcing wars on their neighbors; I imagined social problems that have plagued civilizations in other parts of the world. But also I thought of unique cultural accomplishments, worldviews, of hundreds of different languages, customs and practices, not static or uninfluenced by other cultures, but continuously evolving yet retaining their distinctive character; I thought, in short, of what the world had missed.

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Note 1: The population estimates of North America before the coming of the Europeans remains a topic of controversy; estimates vary significantly. Charles Mann, in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, has a good discussion on the topic (I've also posted about the book here). The upshot of his book that there were far more Native Americans that lived at time of Columbus’s arrival than is presumed.

Note 2: Perhaps it was also crucial that Africa had not been as isolated from Asia and Europe before the fifteenth century as the Americas had been: West and North Africa always had links with the middle east and Europe; and the eastern coasts of Africa had traded with Asia along the sea routes of the Indian ocean.

Why Democracy?

While traveling in Washington DC for a few days last week, I attended an event at the National Archives, where short clips from different documentaries were shown. The theme was democracy and how people and cultures from different parts of the world interpret it. This is the website of the group that is organizing the documentary project - called Why Democracy? - and bringing it to fruition.

The clips I saw at the DC event were brilliant – I can’t wait for the release of these movies. Among the movies featured was Dinner with the President, an audacious and nuanced account of a Pakistani reporter's travels to different parts of her country. The reporter's goal is to get a sense of what people from all walks of life – including Musharraf, whom she meets at a dinner – feel about democracy and the current political situation. A preview of the movie is here.

Also in the collection is Iron Ladies of Liberia, about the new President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and her brave and intelligent mediation of political disputes; and Please Vote for Me, a hilarious yet disconcerting look at the election of a class monitor in a primary school in Wuhan, China. I was astonished by how expertly this movie (at least in the clip I saw) was able to encapsulate - through the actions of little kids! - the power play, corruption and grievances that entail the democratic process. It reminded me a bit of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Two themes from Dostoevsky's The Idiot

I’ve been reading Dostoevsky for the last month and a half. I finished Crime and Punishment, and am currently reading The Idiot. This post is about two of Dostoevsky's many themes in The Idiot. The first is about capital punishment – Dostoevsky himself faced a death sentence – and the second is about the essence of religious feeling. I found the expression of these themes in the novel powerful and moving, and I felt it would be good to provide some quotes and passages from the novel. All quotes in this post are from Henry and Olga Carlisle's translation.

I. The Death Sentence

In 1849, the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death for his involvement with a radical socialist group. Dostoevsky was in his late twenties then. He was about to be killed by the firing squad, when a last minute message repealed the death sentence. He was instead exiled to and imprisoned in Siberia for the next ten years.

Dostoevsky returns to this harrowing brush with death in his novel The Idiot – the second of his classic works, which was published after Crime and Punishment (this was in 1868, about eight years after his return to St.Petersburg). Many of his views are expressed through Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of The Idiot, a young man of nobility but who possesses no wealth when the novel begins. The prince – one of Dostoevsky’s most fascinating creations – is an unassuming person with a heart of gold, but who is mistaken as an idiot on account of his guilelessness.

In the first part of the novel, the prince, just returned to St.Petersburg, speaks to other characters of his experiences abroad in Europe, where he lived for four years. One of these experiences concerns a trip to Lyons in France, where he had observed a public execution:

“In France, they always cut their heads off…It’s done in an instant. They lie the man down, and this broad knife falls through a machine they call the guillotine – very powerfully and heavily – the head flies off before you can blink an eye. The preparations are horrible. When they read the death sentence, dress him and prepare him, tie him up and drag him onto the scaffold – all that is dreadful. People crowd in, even women – they don’t like women to look on though.”

A little later, the prince talks passionately of how the idea of certain death can be more difficult than any other ordeal:

“Who could say that human nature can endure such a trial without slipping into madness? Why this ghastly, needless outrage? Perhaps there is a man to whom the death sentence was read and who was allowed to suffer and then told, ‘Go, You are pardoned.’ Perhaps such a man could tell us something. This was the agony and the horror of which Christ told too. No, you cannot treat a man like that.”

“…Think! When there is torture there is pain and wounds, physical agony, and all this distracts the mind from mental suffering, so that one is tormented only by the wounds until the moment of death. But the most terrible agony many not be in the wounds themselves but in knowing for certain that within an hour, then within ten minutes, then within half a minute, now at this very instant – your soul will leave your body and you will no longer be a person, and that is certain; the worst thing is that it is certain.” [Dostoevsky’s italics].

That’s probably how Dostoevsky felt. I’ve only quoted a few passages here, but there’s more in the novel. There’s a section forty pages later when the prince, talking to a different audience in St.Petersburg – that is what the first part of The Idiot is about: the prince’s encounter and conversations many different people in St.Petersburg – imagines the details how the man he saw executed on a guillotine must have felt in his final hours, minutes.

“Then three or four hours were spent on usual things: the priest, the breakfast, at which he was given wine, coffee and beef. (Isn’t that mockery? You think how cruel it is, and yet, by heaven, those innocent people do this out of the kindness of their hearts and are convinced they are being humane.) …Finally he is taken through the town to the scaffold. I think as he is being driven there he feels he has still an eternity to live…All around is crowd, noise, ten thousand faces, ten thousand eyes…”

Dostoevsky’s special achievement has always been his imagining of the inner workings of troubled minds – such as the imagining of the murderer Raskolnikov’s mind in Crime and Punishment. But in recreating what the man who was to face the guillotine felt on the day of his execution, Dostoevsky was drawing from his own experience, even though his planned execution was not a public one.

II. The Essence of Religious Feeling

Six months later – we are now in the second part of the novel; a lot has happened by now – the prince talks to Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son, one of the novel’s main characters. He talks of his travels in an unnamed Russian province. Because he was in Europe in his formative years, the prince knows very little about Russia. It is only now that he has begun to understand the country and how deeply religious it is. And in the series of anecdotes that the prince tells, I found one of Dostoevsky’s recurring themes – religion, and what it means to be Christian – beautifully expressed.

While traveling on a train to the province the prince meets an atheist, a very learned and well-bred man. But the prince notices in the atheist what he has seen in other atheists too - that they sidestep the question of God, though it might appear that they are addressing it.

“He doesn’t believe in God. Except one thing struck me: he didn’t seem to be talking about that at all, the whole time, and this struck me precisely because whenever I’ve met disbelievers before, and no matter how many of their books I read, it always seems to me that they are always speaking and writing of something else, though on the surface it seems to be that.”

Later, while the prince is staying at hotel in the province, he learns of a murder that had happened there the night before. Two close peasant friends had shared a room at the hotel. One of them wore a silver watch on a beaded ribbon, which the other, despite being a close friend, had not previously known about.

“The first was not a thief, he was in fact a honest man and for a peasant not all that poor. But he was so taken by this watch, so tempted by it that he finally could not restrain himself, he took a knife and when his friend’s back was turned came up cautiously behind him, took aim, raised his eyes to heaven, crossed himself, and bitterly and silently prayed, ‘Lord, forgive me for Christ’s sake!’ and he cut his friend’s throat with one stroke, like a sheep, and took his watch.”

At this, Rogozhin, to whom the prince is talking, laughs uncontrollably and says:

“One fellow doesn’t believe in God at all, while the other believes in Him so much he murders people with a prayer on his lips. No my dear prince, you could have never have invented just that. Ha, ha, ha! No, that beats everything!”

But the prince’s point – and Dostoevsky’s too – is a lot more complicated than the irony that Rogozhin finds irresistibly funny. The prince now tells Rogozhin of the following experience from his second day at the province:

“ ...as I was going back to my hotel, I came upon a peasant woman with a tiny baby. The woman was quite young and the baby six weeks old. The child smiled at her for the first time in his life. I watched and suddenly she crossed herself with great devotion. ‘What are you doing my dear?’ (I was always asking questions in those days). ‘There is joy for a mother in the child’s first smile, just as God rejoices when from heaven he sees a sinner praying to Him with his whole heart.’ This is what that peasant woman said to me, almost in those very words, such a profound, subtle and truly religious thought in which the whole essence of Christianity is expressed – I mean the whole conception of God as our own Father and of God’s joy in man, like a father’s in his own child – Christ’s fundamental thought!”

And this is the prince’s final message – a sort of denouement – to Rogozhin:

“ …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].

It is a remarkable message and it resonates even today. The genuine personal connection that people all over the world feel with their faith, irrespective of whom or what they believe in, cannot be explained easily. But it is something special and indisputable; it is something millions of people draw comfort and strength from.