Accidental Blogger

Hiroshima - Nagasaki: Places to Avoid

No sitting US president has ever visited the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only major urban centers on earth that bear testimony to the effects of nuclear warfare. President Jimmy Carter went to Hiroshima as an ex-president. Nancy Pelosi is the highest ranking US official to have paid a visit to Hiroshima while in office. 

President Obama will visit Japan during his Asian trip. Obama is hugely popular there and his winning the Nobel Peace Prize had raised the hopes of Japanese citizens that he might become the first US president to set foot in one of the two cities that the Japanese consider the strongest case against future nuclear proliferation and for banning nuclear weapons altogether. But Obama's tight schedule includes only a brief stop in Tokyo with no time left to go to either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Obama did assure the Japanese press in an interview that he will one day visit both places during his presidency. Incidentally, no sitting Japanese prime minister has ever visited Pearl Harbor.

Two reports here and here.

The Light Bulb Factory in Hiroshima - Ground Zero on August 6, 1945

Proving allegiance in hostile times - saving the Lost Battalion

A poignant war story, more than six decades old, describes the desperation and anxiety of Japanese Americans during World War II.  Citizens of the US, they had to prove their loyalty to their country in those uncertain times of suspicion and hostility. Sometimes that involved acts of conspicuous courage and valor.

Even 65 years later, Astro Tortolano thinks almost daily of his struggle to survive in the Vosges Mountains of northern France in October 1944.

Surrounded by German soldiers after stumbling into a trap, Tortolano and about 280 men in the 1st Battalion of the Texas 141st Infantry Regiment of the 36th Infantry Division rationed food and bullets. They fended off Nazi assaults. They thought all hope of surviving was lost.

Six days into the crisis, different soldiers — members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team — broke through enemy lines and led Tortolano and the surviving 211 members of the 1st battalion to safety.

“I'll be forever thankful,” the now 88-year-old said. “I've never forgotten how they saved us.”

Tortolano and 39 members of the 442nd and 141st reunited at Houston's Hyatt Regency Hotel Sunday for a special dinner hosted by the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation to honor them.

The aging veterans, many in their late 80s and 90s, flew in from all over the country this weekend for a possible last meeting between the “Lost Battalion” and their saviors — men in the now legendary 442nd, made up of Asian-Americans, mostly of Japanese descent.

When they met each other, they embraced and swapped stories of old times. And on Sunday, together possibly one last time, they remembered all that they had been through in 1944.

The majority of soldiers in the 442nd were known as Nisei, sons of Japanese immigrants in the United States.

Even with relatives being forced into relocation camps around the U.S., roughly 4,000 men initially agreed to fill the 442nd's ranks in 1943. The 442nd was united by a common bond: At a time of deep discrimination against Japanese-Americans, its members wanted to prove that they were Americans through and through.

“We were proud to do this,” said George Sakato, 88, a California native who joined the military when he was 20. “We wanted to serve our country.”

Shipped overseas after a few weeks of training, the 442nd saw some of the war's fiercest fighting. Members were sent to North Africa and saw intense battles in Italy. There, they developed their fearsome reputation as a respected fighting force.

Before long they were ordered to France. Having absorbed other Nisei from a sister battalion, that is where the 442nd encountered the Lost Battalion.

• •••

The rest of the story here.

The real reason why Pakistan is fragile

Staying on the topic of Pakistan for one more day - this time I bring you a book review by Indian journalist Manoj Joshi. Written by Pakistani born author Farzana Shaikh, the book examines the underlying causes of Pakistan's political and existential turmoil. According to the author, turning its back on the country's multicultural south Asian past and a deliberate (and sometimes conflicted) attempt to redefine itself as a militant (and military) Arabized Muslim nation may have played a role in precipitating an identity crisis in Pakistan. Created more than sixty years ago by the partition of British India, during the Cold War of the last century, Pakistan was used by the United States as its client state in South Asia as a buffer against both the former Soviet Union's influence in the region as well as India's socialist leaning "non-aligned" international stance. Should Pakistan once more reclaim its softer south Asian roots to counter the artificially imposed Arabic influence? Does making peace (even an uneasy one) with India offer Pakistan an option to settle the upheaval at home? Who knows? In politics things don't always work out the way common sense dictates.

In this context I will share with A.B. readers something very odd that I heard nearly a decade ago. In September, 2000 my husband and I were on a vacation in the beautiful state of Goa on the western Indian coast. One morning I woke up at an unholy early hour due to jet lag. With nothing else to do and the hotel's dining room not yet open for breakfast, I sat listening to an early morning TV interview with an Indian engineer who was also an amateur astrologer. The man made various predictions about world affairs. Two of them have stuck in my memory.  He said that in the upcoming US elections the following November (remember this was the year 2000), Al Gore would be the winner but there might be some "problems" with the results. The other prediction he made was that in 2013, India and Pakistan will form a loose federation with a common currency and that most hostilities between the two countries will cease. I don't believe in either homeopathy or astrology but stranger things have happened. Now on to Manoj's review.

Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (New Delhi/London, Foundation/Hurst, 2009)

Review by Manoj Joshi (Mail Today - November 1, 2009)

The uncertain national identity and contested relationship to Islam lie behind Pakistan’s social and political upheavals, says Farzana Shaikh.

INDIA HAS had difficult relations with Pakistan since inception, but that is understandable given our history. But today there is a widespread sense of exasperation in relation to that country across the world, as well as a sense of alarm. Just what is this country of 160 million people, some of great talent and industry, all about ? Farzana Shaikh’s book title provides perhaps the most comprehensive and well argued answer.

Shaikh, an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs ( Chatham House) in London concludes that the country’s uncertain national identity and contested relationship to Islam lie behind its social and political upheavals and its uncertainty as a nation. As she perceptively notes, the problem is not with Islam itself, but with “ the uncertainty about its influence over Pakistan’s identity as well as with the lack of consensus over the very terms of Islam.” She goes on to add, that it is the arguments and the fights over the “ multiple meanings of Islam” that result in the “ doubts about the meaning of Pakistan and the significance of being Pakistani.” India, of course, looms large in the Pakistani consciousness. As Shaikh has noted, “ much of the uncertainty over Pakistan’s identity stems from the nagging question of whether its identity is fundamentally dependent on India.” Fear of Indian hegemony, political, economic and cultural, has kept Pakistan in a campaign mode against India. To maintain effective parity against its much larger neighbour, Pakistan has sought external alliances, spent an unconscionably great amount of money on defence, made nuclear weapons and finally unleashed a covert war with the help of Islamist jihadis. In fact Shaikh sees Islamabad’s Afghan policy as yet another attempt to shore up its fragile identity by seeking parity with India in the form of assuming the role of a regional hegemon.

In some ways the book takes off where her first book, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India 1860- 1947 , ended. In answering the question "Why Pakistan?” she has argued that two rival discourses of Islam — the communitarian and the Islamist — have struggled “for ascendancy in defining Pakistan’s national identity.” The first was the discourse visible in the secularist politicians like Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim middle- class of central India who played such a key role in the founding of the state. The second is the Islamist discourse “grounded in a religious and at times radical reading of Islam.” The tension between the two yield many ambiguities, but there are also uncertainties associated with the fact that Partition was the consequence of an endgame gone awry, for which the principal political actors of the time — Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and others are responsible.

The problems in defining Pakistan spills over naturally into the other question “Who is a Pakistani?” Shaikh points out, that the definition of ‘the Pakistani’ is still “deeply contested.” It is not just the microscopic Hindu and Sikh minority, the Ahmediya community or even the mohajir whose "Pakistaniness” is questioned, Shia Muslims who comprise anywhere up to 20 per cent of the country’s population are looked on with suspicion. Today, with the radicalisation of the Deobandis, even the Ahle Sunnat or Barelwis are feeling the heat. This of course, does not take into account the alienation of the Pashtuns, the Baloch, Sindhis and the residents of the Northern Areas of occupied Kashmir.

Return; Reinstate; Refund

We have discussed this topic a couple of times here, the last time was not so long ago. What do modern nations owe each other regarding the return of or restitution for art and artifacts (some of them very ancient and invaluable) removed from their place of origin by way of sale, stealth or superior military  power?  In the current climate of globalization, international trade and treaties and resurgent nationalistic feelings, the debate can be long and heated. Usually the demands for restoration come from less wealthy nations whose ancient religious and cultural relics often adorn the glittering halls of museums in far away countries, some of them, past conquerors and colonizers. In recent days Egypt has demanded the return of the priceless (and gorgeous, I should add) bust of Queen Nefertiti which has been in German hands for more than a century.  It also wants some items housed in the Louvre to return home from France.  Ostensibly, as Egypt’s chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass has claimed, the wish to regain control of these objects of art arises from Egypt's pride in its national history.  But as it turns out, it may also have been influenced to a large extent by a recent political skirmish with the host nations.

BERLIN — As thousands lined up to catch a glimpse of Nefertiti at the newly reopened Neues Museum here, another skirmish erupted in the culture wars. Egypt’s chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, announced that his country wanted its queen handed back forthwith, unless Germany could prove that the 3,500-year-old bust of Akhenaten’s wife wasn’t spirited illegally out of Egypt nearly a century ago....

Globalization, it turns out, has only intensified, not diminished, cultural differences among nations. The forces of nationalism love to exploit culture because it’s symbolic, economically potent and couches identity politics in a legal context that tends to pit David against Goliath.

Mr. Hawass also recently fired a shot at France, demanding the Louvrereturn five fresco fragments it purchased in 2000 and 2003 from a gallery and at auction. They belonged to a 3,200-year-old tomb near Luxor and had been in storage at the museum. Egypt had made the demand before, but this time suspended the Louvre’s long-term excavation at Saqqara, near Cairo, and said it would stop collaborating on Louvre exhibitions.

France got the message. It promised to send the fragments back tout de suite.

It didn’t go unnoticed in Paris, Berlin or Cairo that Mr. Hawass pressed his case about Nefertiti and suspended the excavations by the Louvre just after his country’s culture minister, Farouk Hosny, bitterly lost a bid to become director general of the United Nations’ cultural agency, Unesco. The post went late last month to a Bulgarian diplomat instead. Mr. Hosny would have been the first Arab to land the job, and Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had banked a not insignificant amount of his own prestige on the minister’s getting it.

Also, a feud has begun between India and Albania (Macedonia may enter the fray soon) about the rightful resting place for a more recent relic - the remains of Mother Teresa who was born in a town that was once  part of Albania but which now belongs to Macedonia. As everyone knows, from the age of eighteen onwards, Mother Teresa lived and worked in India, where she also died.

India has rejected a demand by the Albanian government for the return of the remains of Nobel laureate Mother Teresa, buried in the city of Calcutta.

"Mother Teresa was an Indian citizen and she is resting in her own country, her own land," Foreign Ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash said.

A spokeswoman for the nun's Missionaries of Charity described the Albanian request as "absurd".

Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian, was born in Skopje, now part of Macedonia.

Correspondents say that the row over her resting place could develop into an ugly three-way squabble between India, where she worked most of her life, Albania where her parents came from and Macedonia where she lived the first 18 years of her life.

The row is expected to intensify by August next year - the 100th anniversary of Mother Teresa's birth - by which time many commentators expect her to have been canonised as a saint.

 

And then there is the report of a refund. It is taking place quietly without much fanfare. It seems that a highly touted "educational" merchandize did not quite do what it had promised eager consumers.   

Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses.

They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.

“We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.

  

October 2

October 2^nd is Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. Check out today's Google logo commemorating the anniversary.

Did Britain Wreck The World?

Certainly seems that way. More than half a century after Britannia ceased to rule the waves, the hot spots of sectarian conflicts it left behind continue to smolder and flare up around the world. Here is a list of some of the major political powder kegs in erstwhile British colonies. 

 

SRI LANKA
During their 150-year rule, the British favored Tamils and other minority ethnic groups over the majority Sinhalese. After 1947's national elections, the Sinhalese tried to reverse the discrimination, culminating in a quarter-century-long civil war.

INDIA/PAKISTAN
When the Brits arrived, the Subcontinent was a patchwork of princely states. When they left centuries later, they divvied it up by religion, prompting mass migration and perhaps a million deaths. Kashmir, which had a Hindu leader and a Muslim majority, has been contested ever since.

IRAQ
Border disputes and ethnic tensions have been rife since 1920, when the British forged modern-day Iraq out of three Ottoman states: Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The Brits decamped after a 1958 revolution, but their hellish handiwork lives on.

SUDAN
A British-Egyptian alliance ruled North and South Sudan separately until 1946, when the Brits abruptly changed their minds and decided the two should merge. The north was economically and politically favored over the south, and civil war has been on and off ever since.

ISRAEL/PALESTINE
As anti-Semitism gained ground in Europe, an influx of Jews complicated land claims, but the Brits—in charge of this former Ottoman territory starting in 1921—flip-flopped on the declaration of Israel as the Jewish homeland and proposed partition, which was rejected by both sides. In 1948 they cut their losses and left it up to the United Nations. Today, a solution is as far off as ever.

SOMALIA
Fashioned in 1960 from a British protectorate and an Italian colony, Somalia has been divided against itself ever since. In the 1990s, after decades of civil strife, the government collapsed and the two neighbors declared autonomy.

NIGERIA
The West African nation was once two distinct states—officially joined in 1914, but administered by the British separately until independence in 1960. Here, the British favored the south, setting the stage for decades of strife.

The Ice House That Was'nt

I present here a longish excerpt from an essay by guest author Narayan Acharya (who goes by the name "narayan" in his writings). On a visit to India Narayan learnt about Elihu Yale's connections to the south Indian city of Madras (currently Chennai). He later traced Yale's footsteps from England to India and back in a book by Yale professor, Hiram Bingham. (Narayan's complete article can be found at Amardeep Singh's blog)

I, Eli & Hi

      - narayan

Madraspatnam / Medras / Chennai

Phonetics and orthography were at odds when the British named the city lately called Chennai. In 1639, factors of the Honourable East India Company (HEIC) trying to get a foothold on the South-Eastern coast of India, the Coromandel, leased land from the local Nayaks at Madraspatnam, a name of dubious origins. S. Muthiah, the popular-historian of Chennai, in his admirable and informative book "Madras Rediscovered”, says that it was by all accounts "a God forsaken place … a narrow protected peninsula [sic], but a site without a safe landing place". Francis Day, the junior factor, who was "a hard-drinking, enthusiastic gambler and lusty womaniser", finalized the deal, justifying his choice with the report that the hinterland offered "excellent long Cloath and better cheape by 20 percent than anywhere else”. Plus ça change! Muthiah credits the senior factor, Andrew Cogan, with "encouraging the boisterous Day, making the first official landing, building the first fortified factory which was to grow into Fort St. George, and colonizing the place – the result of which industry is Madras today". Neither Cogan and Day, nor their Indian aides, Thimmappa and Nagabattan, are memorialized anywhere in the city.

My 1980 trip to Medras (which native ever pronounced it otherwise?) was doomed from the start, a favor to a well-meaning uncle. I spent the morning on the verandah of a mansion, stretching out polite conversation with a taciturn woman, a scientist with a PhD from Europe, past marriageable age like myself. She too had a well-meaning uncle as I soon surmised. I had to catch a bus to Pondy in four hours and was determined to wait it out. Watching the sly antics of a chhipkali in the bushes outside helped. There was a brief interview with the ageing father, then the special lunch for the prospective son-in-law. She insisted on accompanying me to the bus station in their chauffeured Ambassador with cloth covered seats. In her relief at my departure she became voluble, pointing out landmarks to me as we skirted Marina Beach, the one place I remembered from occasional family trips in childhood. At one point she pointed to a large brick structure and said, "And that’s Yale’s Ice House". Seconds later I reacted, "What do you mean – Yale?" "You know, Yale – from the university. He was Governor here."

Kafka would have wept at the struggle at the bus station just to buy a ticket; he would have soiled his pants on the bus ride back from Pondy. Understandably, I forgot all about the Medras fiasco until I was safely back in Boston. Months later, while browsing through the stacks at the public library, I came upon Hiram Bingham’s 1939 book "Elihu Yale - The American Nabob of Queen Square". Excuse me? Shouldn’t that be "Welsh Nabob of Medras"? After a prefatory nod to Kipling, a man who had never ventured south of the Vindhyas, Bingham begins : "Before the War it was exciting to go and find behind the ranges of the Andes the white temples of Machu Picchu and the palace of the last of the Incas." More about this later.

Yale

Elihu Yale’s father David, unmarried at twenty-three, emigrated from Wales to Boston, with his mother Anne, two siblings, his stepfather Theophilus Eaton, and two Eaton children. Shortly after, they moved to the new settlement of New Haven, then back to Boston after six years of domestic and social instability. David married at thirty and engaged in trade, but chafing at the theocratic rule of the Massachusetts Bay Colony decided to try his luck in Cromwell’s England. Elihu, David’s second child, was three in 1652 when he left Boston; he never set foot in America again. David succeeded in trade and became a man of property. He used his influence to get Elihu a berth in the HEIC as a Writer, paying a bond of £500 for the privilege.

When he set foot in Fort St. George in June 1672 after a six month voyage from England, Elihu was twenty three and at the bottom rung of the company. By the time he left India in February 1699 he had become Governor of the colony, only to be recalled under a cloud of suspicion. The story of the intervening years is Bingham’s to tell; it would be foolish of me to attempt a précis here. Rushdie and Swift together could not have conjured up the Munchausenesque events, intrigue, and personalities that inhabit the two hundred pages of Bingham’s book that detail Elihu’s twenty-seven year tenure in India.

From Oil Town To Space City

On the eve of the 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Houston remembers how it was transformed from a regional oil town to the international space center - home of NASA. The fast developing space race of the 1960s quickly began to leave its mark on the city's broader culture. From Tranquility Park in downtown Houston to professional sports teams known as the Rockets and the Astros (who played their games in the first of its kind modernistic sports arena, the Astrodome), the city enthusiastically embraced its new image. Did you know that the first word spoken on the moon was Houston?

“Houston Gets $60 Million Space Lab for Research on Moon Shot” blared the Houston Chronicle headline on Sept. 19, 1961. The coup was big, big news, commanding nearly all the front page, relegating the city's usual preoccupations — oil, football, hurricanes and communism — to the forlorn bottom corners.

And why not? Project Apollo, “the quest for the moon,” was coming to town. A “spacious, self-contained research city” would be built 22 miles southeast of downtown, and the capsules “in which the moon voyagers will ride” would be designed here. Other cities might build the rockets or be home to the launch pad, but thanks to an exercise in raw political power, Houston would be the moon shots' command center — the boss.

Project Apollo broadened Houston: To the oilmen who dominated its civic psyche, the city added astronauts and engineers. Apollo fixed Houston's eyes on the future: After years of being part of the backwoods oil patch, it became Space City, USA, where engineers were designing the world of tomorrow. And Apollo cemented Houston's notion that it is a can-do place, able to git 'er done no matter how big the job.

During the heady race for the moon, backwoods, bumptious Houston suddenly felt like the center of the universe. When Kennedy talked of “The New Frontier,” he seemed to be talking about the young, barely tamed city itself. The Manned Space Center sprouted on land where cattle had grazed.

And bang: Just like that, Houston, home of the Fat Stock Show, suddenly, surprisingly, became the city from which humans reached for the stars.

Rest of the report here. (check out the related videos and links on the page)

The Moose Is Back

So is the Hockey Mama for Obama ... this time as Sarah Palin.

Thanks to Sandy and Richard Riccardi, makers of the videos, for sending me the link. Yes, I too think she will run in 2012. Like a moth attracted to the bright flame, I doubt she can resist the lure of the national limelight.  

A Return Journey

Readers may remember this book review about the Crypto Jews of Spain and Portugal. Their stories were a complicated maze of religious faith, persecution and conversion under duress. Above all, their history was also about tenaciously and secretly holding on to a personal identity despite considerable external threats. Christian persecution of Jews is now mostly a matter of the past and the Crypto Jews, several generations removed from their ancestors, have mostly assimilated into the larger Christian population. Puzzled by some odd family traditions, some Hispanic Catholics in the southwestern states of the US (mostly immigrants from Mexico) are eagerly investigating possible Judaic roots, including genetic testing, to establish Sephardic Jewish descent. Their clues come from certain seemingly non-Christian practices amidst their Christian lives which they believe hark back to a Jewish past. One such story of a Catholic woman from Houston who believes she has found her way back to the faith of her Sephardic ancestors.

At an East Galveston beach, Mari Barkhausen is waist-deep in the cool, brown water. After repeating Hebrew blessings, she is immersed once, twice. When she emerges from the water a third time, she is a Jew.

She hugs her rabbi, looking to the shoreline at her husband and two sons who are waiting for their mikveh, the ritual immersion for Jewish converts.

“Mazel tov, everyone,” declares Rabbi Stuart Federow. “This day begins the rest of your education. Jewish learning never stops.”

Barkhausen’s journey began decades ago as she watched her maternal grandmother’s peculiar ways. Her Mexican-American abuela would light candles on Fridays and draw the curtains before sundown, cover mirrors at home when a relative died and examine eggs for blood spots.

No one questioned her ways, and no explanation was ever offered to little Mari or her siblings.

Years later, Barkhausen would realize those customs were not one woman’s idiosyncrasies. They were Jewish customs.

Lighting of candles marked the beginning of the Sabbath. Many cover mirrors when someone dies to avoid concentrating on their grief-stricken appearances. And the Old Testament teaches that life is in the blood.

Grandma did all these things, Barkhausen remembered. But Grandma wasn’t Jewish. She was Catholic.

Saved From The Savages

Nearly three years ago I addressed the issue of looted, neglected or destroyed treasures of the world - whether the value of rare, ancient art and artifacts should be measured in regional and nationalistic terms or do they represent the foot prints of history pertinent to all humankind and therefore qualify as global treasures? I wrote:

Those of us born in antique lands with long and continuously evolving histories spanning several centuries and millennia, will identify with the question I am about to pose. It pertains to the theft and sale of ancient artifacts that leave the countries of their origin and find new homes in the museums and private collections elsewhere in distant lands. Trafficking in art and artifacts flows exclusively in one direction - from the poorer nations to the more prosperous ones.  India, China, Egypt and much of the middle and far east have seen ancient religious and cultural artifacts leave native shores and surface in Europe and America.  The fact that much of the art was "taken" by occupiers and colonizers often without even an unscrupulous middleman making money from the sales, is a particularly touchy and often painful aspect of this transfer.

But the story is not as simple as it would appear on considerations of ownership alone.  Many valuable objects were taken or stolen during colonial times.  In the modern era after independence of the host nations, some were acquired legally while others changed hands illegally on the black market. Most countries now ban the sale or transfer of antiquities but rare and ancient artifacts continue to find their way into public and private collections beyond the borders. It is difficult to speculate on the possible fate of the artifacts had they been left where they originally belonged. Would the local governments and museums have had the will or the wherewithal to offer them the wide exposure and  pride of place they have come to enjoy in western museums?  Or would they have crumbled, gathered dust and disappeared altogether? Do poorer nations have the capability to care for their priceless ancient heritage?  Given the immediate economic concerns of more pressing nature, should that even be their priority? There is even a question about how much value locals assign to ancient stone piles and crumbling edifices from a long forgotten era. Can those who are embattled by today's precarious existence, worry about yesterday's fine art?  While "creating" art is the prerogative of the poor and the rich alike, is "preserving" art a luxury afforded only by the wealthy?   The dilemma is indeed a wrenching one - place of origin or centers of preservation and greater visibility?  This is a bit like asking, "Are endangered species better off in their threatened and disappearing habitat or in a well kept zoo?" Should destitute and incapable parents give up their children for adoption or let them struggle and languish in a desperate family milieu? Difficult to answer.

There is another disconcerting factor to consider here other than the priority and capability of less prosperous nations to preserve their heritage. The political tensions that can often overrun the national psyche in developing nations can put historical treasures at risk. Changing ideologies can make monuments and artifacts belonging to opposing political or religious camps vulnerable to vindictive abuse. Think the rampage of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Think Babri Masjid in India. Think the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. 

Ah, the Bamiyan Buddhas! I am not overly sentimental about the disappearance of antique treasures, especially those that are lost to the usual ravages of time. But I find their deliberate destruction for political or religious extremist causes repulsive. The demolition of the nearly 1500 year old colossi of Buddha, in the Bamiyan region of Afghanistan in 2001 by Taliban zealots was unforgivably barbaric, in my angry opinion. The images built in the Greco-Indian style that the local Muslim villagers had peacefully co-existed with for centuries, calling them by the endearing names of Big Neighbor and Small Neighbor, dated back to the Gandhara period when Buddhism flourished in Afghanistan. Ignorant religious fanatics thought nothing of reducing them to rubble for the sake of ideological purity, depriving the world of an awesome ancient record of inspired artistic tribute.   

Yesterday a friend and I went to see the exhibition Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The exhibit comprises ancient treasures of art, worship and craftsmanship, some archaeological finds dating back to the Bronze Age. The mostly pre-Islamic relics hark back to Afghanistan's  mercurial early history influenced in turn by early Greek and Indian conquerors as well as the central Asian nomads who passed through its rugged terrain. The art treasures were rescued and kept hidden by Afghan museum curators and art lovers from the rage filled eyes of the Taliban lest they too became prey to the same fate that befell the Bamiyan Buddhas.

My friend and I found the well designed exhibition admirable and the efforts of those who saved the treasures of their ravaged nation from disappearing, even more so. An excerpt from the museum brochure:

Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul explores the rich cultural heritage of ancient Afghanistan from the Bronze Age (2500 B.C.) through the rise of trade along the Silk Road in the first century A.D.

Strategically located on the commercial routes between China and India in the East and Europe in the West, Afghanistan was at the crossroads of civilizations in Central Asia. This unique blend of cultures and artistic styles is seen in nearly 230 artworks: Bronze Age incised gold vases; bronze and stone sculptures of Greek heroes; graceful ivory apsaras, the beautiful women of Indian tradition; Roman type glass vessels and plaster reliefs; magnificent Persian and Scythian style gold jewelry; as well as distinctively local works. Gold ornaments from the famed Bactrian hoard, a 2,000-year-old treasure cache discovered in 1978 but hidden from view until 2003, are included. Visitors also will gain insight into how the artifacts survived the recent decades of war and chaos and will learn the stories of heroic Afghans who risked their lives to save these and other national cultural treasures from destruction during Soviet occupation and Taliban rule.

More, including slide shows, on the Hidden Tresures exhibits in the National Geographic.

Cracking a 4000 year old linguistic mystery?

Are scientists on the path to deciphering the Indus Valley script?  The story here and here.

An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.

Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures.

"The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what's found in many languages," said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao.

The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.

In 1877, British archaeologist Alexander Cunningham hypothesized that the Indus script was a forerunner of modern-day Brahmic scripts, used from Central to Southeast Asia. Other researchers disagreed. Fueled by scores of competing and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to decipher the script, that contentious state of affairs has persisted to the present.

Among the languages linked to the mysterious script are Chinese Lolo, Sumerian, Egyptian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Old Slavic, even Easter Island — and, finally, no language at all. In 2004, linguist Steve Farmer published a paper asserting that the Indus script was nothing more than political and religious symbols. It was a controversial notion, but not an unpopular one.

Who are the real pirates?

Why become a pirate? Perhaps because other "honest" means of livelihood have been destroyed? Lawlessness is a menace whether perpetrated by pirates or "civilized" governments. So reveals Johann Hari in the Independent. (via 3 QD) Hari also reflects on the rebellious and brutal history of pirates, some of whom were mercenaries for legitimate European regimes.

Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

Ruining the Pirate Myth

I didn't know grown men play make-believe pirate games. Apparently, it is a popular pastime for some who are beguiled by the tales of high jinks on high seas popularized in books, theme parks and movies. Those daredevil outlaws of the past occupy a romanticized place in the hearts of some modern day men with sedate lives. In their spare time, they like to put on eye patches, dress up in tight pants, fancy hats, assume flamboyant names and play at being swashbuckling buccaneers.  But the recent real life crack down on scruffy Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean who prey on merchant ships that has shone the light on the unglamorous aspects of piracy may have put a damper on the  playful spirits of the fantasy pirates on land.

America’s pirate subculture is a peculiar world where grown men strap on eye patches, sing pirate chanteys and take on names like, in Clayton Jackson’s case, Morick Towain.

Once a month, Jackson dresses up in pirate garb — such as a head wrap, pair of pointy boots and special piratey pants. Then he hits the bars for some drinks with a few similarly dressed friends.

“Being a pirate is about freedom, it’s the lifestyle of that old-time period that catches my attention,” said Jackson of Dallas, who runs a social group for Texas pirates. Spurred by popular movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, interest in pirates of centuries past has skyrocketed in recent years.

But the recent worldwide furor over real-life Somali pirates raises a pressing question: Should people really be romanticizing murderous pirates — even old ones?

In the tightknit pirate subculture, the issue is a touchy subject and rarely discussed. Leaders of the movement say they’ve recently begun fielding more pointed, occasionally uncomfortable questions.

“If we had been thinking ahead we would have called it `Talk Like a Buccaneer Day,' ” said John Baur, speaking of the now famous Talk Like a Pirate Day he co-founded with friend Mark Summers in 1995.

Summers became so concerned with the issue of modern-day piracy, he recently wrote an open letter to the Somali pirates in a trade magazine.

The Last Jew in Afghanistan

Here. Passover begins tomorrow. I wonder what Zablon Simantov will be celebrating.

The Little Known Gateway to America

When we think of immigration to the US, Ellis Island in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty comes to mind. But there have been other historic points of entry for foreigners wishing to seek their fortunes in the land of opportunity. Angel Island in northern California was the main processing station for far east Asian immigrants arriving via the Pacific (see the story of immigrant poetry on the walls of Angel Island). Texas too had its own gateway. Galveston Island near Houston saw some 200,000 foreigners from many different countries come through its port from the late 19th to the mid 20th century.

A.I. Schepps, his mother and seven siblings left Russia in 1913 on the steamship Chemnitz, bound for a new life in the United States.

But they never sailed through the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and never set foot on storied Ellis Island. Their immigrant journey took them farther south, through the Gulf of Mexico and into an island community still recovering from a devastating hurricane a decade earlier.

From there, the family traveled more than 250 miles north to Dallas, where Schepps’ father and three other siblings were preparing to start the farm that would become one of the largest dairies in the nation.

Theirs is the quintessential immigrant success story — they arrived tired and poor, and their brood was likely a huddled mass — but it has a Texas twist: They were among an estimated 200,000 immigrants who came to America via the port of Galveston between 1865 and 1924.

That number, considered by some scholars a conservative estimate, puts Galveston among the 10 biggest immigrant ports of 19th- and 20th-century America.

“People do not think much about Galveston as a national port of entry to the United States,” said Suzanne Seriff, curator of the Forgotten Gateway, a new exhibit that chronicles Galveston as a major port of entry for U.S. immigrants.

On display at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, the exhibit will come to Galveston’s Moody Gardens in November.

“We are trying to add to our national history about a port that has largely been forgotten,” Seriff said.

Like those who arrived via other ports of the time, those who came through Galveston were overwhelmingly European. During the late 19th century, they arrived from countries such as Germany and what was then Czechoslovakia. Later, they increasingly were from Italy or Greece.

As Galveston became more developed, some settled there as tailors and merchants. Others moved on to different states. Many branched out to other communities in Texas, establishing ethnic enclaves such as Fredericksburg and New Braunfels.

The rest of the story here.

Boneheads

George W. Bush's aristocratic family boasted several dedicated Yalies, many of whom were members of Yale University's ultra secret Skull and Bones Society, home to a number of movers and shakers of America's establishment ruling class. A decades old adventure of one Bonesman Bush is now the basis for a modern day lawsuit. George Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush is said to have robbed the grave of the famous Apache leader Geronimo, for his "skull and bones" as a treasured prize for the  eponymous secretive fraternity. It is tempting to speculate that the same arrogance that plagued the grave-robbing Bush ancestor, may have manifested itself as an atavistic trait in his frat boy grandson whose monumental prank as president nearly turned the nation of Iraq into a graveyard. Geronimo  the warrior, who spent his life fighting against occupiers, can't even turn over in his own grave.  

They claim his body was taken by members of Skull and Bones, a secret student society, and are hidden at Yale University.

George W Bush's grandfather and two other members of the group are said to have taken the remains of the Apache warrior Geronimo during the First World War.

However, the society's repeated refusal to comment on the story, or on rumours that new members have to kiss the chief's skull, have prompted the extraordinary lawsuit.

In a court action that names not only Yale and the society, but also Barack Obama and Robert Gates, his defence secretary, 20 descendants of the famous American Indian leader are seeking to recover his remains so his spirit can be laid to rest in his tribal homeland.

Their legal action, filed this week in a federal-district court in Washington DC on the 100th anniversary of his death, will seek to determine the truth of rumours that Geronimo's burial at Fort Sill in Oklahoma was not his final resting place.

Three Bonesmen, including Prescott Bush, served at Fort Sill during the First World War.

The trio were rumoured to have dug up Geronimo's remains in 1918 and took some of them back to Yale where they are supposedly still kept in the society's hall – known as the "Tomb" – on the university campus.

The Skull and Bones, whose illustrious membership has numbered three US presidents including both Bushes, supposedly makes new members kiss the Chiricahua Apache's skull.

Then there is Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania whose right wing blather no longer reverberates on the senate floor but is unfortunately still to be heard on the speaking circuit where he continues to spread fear and misinformation about war and peace. On a recent tour of college campuses to "present his idea that Americans do not truly understand why the United States is at war," Santorum tried to explain the conflict in the middle east to students at the University of Nebraska. Mixing politics and religion to make his case, the senator proved that he is ignorant on both fronts.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum visited the auditorium of the Nebraska Union on Tuesday to present his idea that Americans do not truly understand why the United States is at war.

Santorum is passing through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as a part of his college campus tour on which he describes to students what he believes are the dangers in not knowing what is going on in the Middle East.

“I talk to college students because I can have an intellectual conversation, and they usually don’t agree with me,” Santorum said. “I like to state my case (to students) and let them decide who to believe.”

Santorum was a member of the United States Senate from 1994-2007. He believes that the Bush administration made a huge mistake in not informing Americans exactly what’s happening with the wars and who America is fighting. He said the Obama administration is making the same mistake.

“America has little information and Bush went out of his way to mystify who the enemy really is,” Santorum said. “Is that true, are we really fighting ‘terrorists?’”

Santorum also gave the audience a lecture on Islam. When he asked the audience who knew the difference between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, three audience members raised their hands. Santorum said this proved his point – America has been at war with Islam for seven years and doesn’t know the two branches.

Santorum said he supported the war when it was unpopular because he thinks not fighting could destroy western civilization. He said he believes that Muslims are America’s enemy because they read their religion literally and apply it to real life, instead of in historical context.

The lecture continued when Santorum pointed out what he thought were the main differences between Christians and Muslims. Santorum said Christians, who believe in Jesus Christ, never governed or conquered anyone, but Mohammed was a warrior and killed people.

Santorum said he believes Muslims’ religious views cannot be changed or altered, so Middle Easterners reject American, democratic ideals.

“A democracy could not exist because Mohammed already made the perfect law,” Santorum said. “The Quran is perfect just the way it is, that’s why it is only written in Islamic.” (emphasis mine)

Someone needs to inform the senator that the Quran is NOT written in Islamic. Just as the New Testament is not written in the Christian language, the Torah in Jewish, the Gita in Hindu ... nor by the way, the US Constitution in American. And also, Santorum conveniently forgot Christianity's messy Crusades, Inquistion and colonialism.  

Still Overrated

Just in time for Presidents Day, C-Span has surveyed 65 historians for their opinion of American presidents.  Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt top the list at  #1, 2 and 3 respectively. James Buchanan ranks last. Predictably enough, George W. Bush is among the ten worst, coming in at # 36. That makes him the seventh worst president to date. But I feel that it is  still too high a position for such a dangerous and clueless man. I am convinced that Bush will slide down the list as his misdeeds and missteps are evaluated more objectively in the proper historical perspective of time and distance from his disastrous reign.

Further analysis of the survey here.

An Indian Revolutionary in Mexico

I guess to be perfectly accurate, in Mexico he was more of a "green" revolutionary - a Norman Borlaug of sorts.

This is the first time I have heard of Pandurang Khankhoje, an Indian nationalist who traveled the world seeking support for India's freedom from British rule. For a while Khankhoje settled in Mexico where he applied his training as an agricultural scientist to help Mexican farmers successfully grow sturdier varieties of corn. For his efforts and his popularity, Mexican artist Diego Rivera painted a picture of the revolutionary scientist at the head of a dinner table, sharing bread with others. Although I have seen numerous paintings by Diego Rivera, I was unaware of the painting of Khankhoje, just as I was of his life story.  (Thanks to my sister Mandira for the link to the story)

Pandurang Sadashiv Khankhoje, born in Wardha in 1886, was an angry young man who wanted freedom for India and dignity for Indians. He was raised on stirring tales of 1857 and was in constant trouble with the British police who had a long history sheet on him. The fiery young revolutionary had to flee India when the British spread a dragnet for him.

He became a founder-member of the Ghadar Party in America (many of whose members were executed by the British) and worked unrelentingly to gain international sympathy for the cause of India’s freedom.  Khankhoje’s adventures took him to Japan, Russia, Persia, the US and finally to Mexico, where he settled with his devoted Belgian wife, Jeanne, and had two daughters, Savitri and Maya. A stauch believer in the tenets of the Holy Gita, he started free agricultural colleges for the Mexicans, successfully experimented with varieties of corn, pioneering Mexico's ‘Green Revolution’ and was part of the country’s vibrant artistic and intellectual circle. The image (right) is of a mural by the great  Mexican artist Diego Rivera showing Khankhoje distributing bread to the nations of the world.

However, despite his busy, useful life in Mexico where he felt safe and welcome, Khankhoje pined deeply for his homeland. He saw her gain freedom and came home for good, settling in Pune, re-reading his beloved Gita and the Upanishads. He passed away in 1967. His pediatrician daughter, Savitri Sawhney, who married into the Indian Army, has written a wonderful account of her father's life, called I Shall Never Ask Pardon (Penguin India, 2008, Rs 399). This inspiring and moving Indian life story is truly worth celebrating. Here's a taste:

From frumpy to foxy - reincarnating the first First Lady

A second post on the same day about altered images - or at least an extrapolated one. This one does not involve plagiarism or copyright infringement. Rather it is an exercise in the restoration of national vanity.

The president of the United States is widely perceived to be the most powerful person in the world. So far only males of the species have occupied the august office. Their mates, the first ladies, have played public roles that have ranged from ceremonially ornamental to activist partners. Apparently, it irks some folks that any consort of a US president should be perceived as "frumpy," even if the woman in question has been dead for more than two hundred years. The very first First Lady, Martha Washington is the lady in question.  Her likeness in existing portraits, most of them painted in middle age, are as one historian describes it, of the double-chinned Old Mother Hubbard variety. So, armed with ultra modern technology, a few historians and museum curators embarked upon a mission to revise or rather, photo shop history. With the help of forensic anthropologists at the Lousiana State University's special project known as Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services, or FACES, a new image of a twenty five year old Martha Washington was created by working backwards from her middle aged visage. This painstaking Benjamin Buttoning of the first lady has yielded a satisfactorily attractive and lissome young woman and revamped her "dumpy" reputation.  

  This just in: Martha Washington was hot. Or at least hotter than we thought.

Our image of the mother of our country, vague and insubstantial as it is, is drawn from portraits painted after her death showing a frumpy, dumpy, plump old lady, a fussy jumble of needlework in her lap, wearing what could pass for a shower cap with pink sponge rollers rolled too tight underneath.

But today, 250 years after Martha and George tied the knot, a handful of historians are seeking to revamp the former first lady's fusty image, using the few surviving records of things she wrote, asking forensic anthropologists to do a computerized age-regression portrait of her in her mid-20s and, perhaps most importantly, displaying for the first time in decades the avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that she wore on her wedding day.

Take that, Sally Fairfax.

History is about to be revised.

"We always see Martha with a withered face in her old age. But she was quite a beautiful woman in her younger years, and Washington loved her deeply," said Edward Lengel, senior editor at the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia. "What's happening now is revisionist. But I think it's a whole lot closer to the reality of what she was."

The full story in the Washington Post here.

The Dreamer ... And Now, The Doer?

The juxtaposition of Martin Luther King Jr's birthday today and Barack Obama's presidential inauguration tomorrow has not escaped the notice of Americans. Many see the two events as book ends of America's troubled and often violent racial history. Obama's election to the most powerful position in world politics is widely perceived as the successful culmination of King's dream -that America has indeed taken the first significant step towards becoming a nation where its citizens will be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.

The editorial in today's Houston Chronicle takes note of the historic significance of the two dates:

Text, Book, Matter (Dean)

The latest Chronicle of Higher Education (January 9, 2009) includes a brief article (sub'n req'd) about an English professor and his biologist brother, who together are developing a way to use DNA to determine the local origins of medieval manuscripts.

While in Europe researching the origins of a poem, Timothy L. Stinson, an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University, became frustrated with the limited methods available for determining where the original text came from and when it was produced.

"And then there was sort of this light bulb," Mr. Stinson recalled. "Wait a minute, they're on animal skin. Why can't we look at DNA?"

Indeed, in the age before paper was widely available and affordable, the written word was recorded on the hides of sheep, goats, and cattle. Shortly after Mr. Stinson had his epiphany, he began putting his idea into practice. Working with his brother, a biologist who has performed DNA extraction and analysis, Mr. Stinson is developing a method of using DNA to determine when and where medieval manuscripts were written. The approach will significantly improve the accuracy of the standard identification process, which typically relies on analysis of the author's handwriting and dialect — approaches that are "notoriously unreliable," Mr. Stinson says.

Here is where the disciplines of art and science (and history and sociology...) perfectly complement one another. There is some precedent for this partnership. In the mid-'80s, Paul Needham, currently rare books librarian at Princeton, but then at the Pierpont Morgan Library, worked with physicists at (if memory serves me well) UC Davis to conduct cyclotron analysis of the ink used by Gutenberg in the production of his Bible. Their work (see the articles cited at the end of the the foregoing link) produced fascinating conjectures about the details of work in Gutenberg's atelier, tied to findings about the physical substance comprising his books.

But before Needham, there was Allan Stevenson. I read Stevenson's monumental Problem of the Missale Speciale (London: Bibliographical Society, 1967) in one sitting at UCLA's library school shortly after the Needham cyclotron articles appeared. Obviously, Stevenson worked with cruder technology than Needham and Stinson: a microscope, photography, his unaided vision, the historical tools of papermaking. Watermarks are formed by wires shaped and anchored to the wire mesh of a papermold, the bed on which paper was made. Naturally, the shaped wires began to lose their shape as more paper was produced on the mold. Observing the gradual deformation of watermarks in the paper used to print the eponymous missal, Stevenson, like Needham, was able to suggest how the work proceeded from copy to copy.

"And then there was sort of this light bulb..." Perhaps it's not at all ironic for Stinson to resort to a not quite antiquated figure to reflect the moment of his discovery.

Happy Holidays And A Blogging Hiatus

Season's Greetings to our readers and my co-bloggers. Hope everyone returns to A.B. refreshed and cheered after the holiday festivities are over and done with for the year. I am going on a short trip and won't be blogging for some time. Unless someone else finds the time to post, the front page will remain static for a few days. I will leave you with a potpourri of unrelated but interesting links to muse over if you find time to visit during the holiday rush.

Two thoughtful essays about the recent bombings in Mumbai and the tensions that tug at the national fabric of India - Ramachandra Guha in the WSJ and Badri Raina in ZNet.

TS Eliot on The Naming Of Cats.

An insect crime buster in Finland!

Enjoy the holidays!

When Hindus mourned a Muslim martyr

Today or tomorrow, depending on the sighting of the moon, is Eid al-Adha, a day of celebration for Muslims worldwide. This year, December is also the month of Muharram, a religious event of lament and mourning observed by the Shia Muslim sect.

I recently finished reading The Girl From Foreign by American documentary film maker Sadia Shepard which I had previewed here a few months ago. Shepard's journey in search of her Indian born Jewish/ Muslim grandmother's roots crisscrosses through western India and the Pakistani city of Karachi. It is a fascinating story which I plan to describe at a later date. Today however, I wish to bring up a little known fragment of Indian history that had laid buried in my memory for decades and which an anecdote in Shepard's book helped shake loose. 

The student population of my school in New Delhi was composed of girls from practically every part of India belonging to several different linguistic groups and religions. Nearly fifty percent of the Punjabi and Bengali students came from families who had lost their ancestral homes in the partition of India in 1947, my own being among them. In middle school, a class mate whose folks had moved to India from the Pakistani city of Lahore, once casually commented that her father's family used to observe Muharram in their hometown before the partition. At the time I didn't think much of what my friend had said. We were young and many of us had heard interesting pre-partition tales from our parents. It is only now, on thinking back, that her story acquires a special meaning and given the subsequent deterioration in Hindu-Muslim relations in general and between India and Pakistan in particular, also a certain amount of poignancy. You see, the remarkable thing about my friend's Muharram story was that she was not a Muslim, but a Hindu Brahmin. 

My class mate belonged to the Punjabi community of Dutts, in more communally harmonious times also known as the Hussaini Brahmins. They, along with their Shia Muslim friends and neighbors, used to commemorate and grieve the deaths of Imam Hussain and his disciples in the bloody battle of Karbala during the 7th century power struggle among early Muslims. Of the Dutts was said the following:

Wah Dutt Sultan,
Hindu ka Dharam
Musalman ka Iman,

Wah Dutt Sultan
Adha Hindu Adha Musalman

[Oh, Dutt the king,
follows the religion of the Hindu
And the faith of the Muslim.

Oh, Dutt the king,
He is half Hindu, half Muslim.]

I do not bring up my friend's story in any specially sentimental way. Looking back on her simply told tale with the political events of today as the backdrop, evokes more wonder than sorrow.  I was born a few years after the tumultous partition of India. The political and psychological wounds of that cataclysmic event were raw on both sides of the divide during my childhood. Yet amazingly enough, there probably was more mutual understanding between the two battling communities then than there is today. After decades of mistrust and alienation, the line in the sand that was drawn across Hindu and Muslim identities around 1947, has now hardened and appears set in concrete. As one of the linked articles explains in its somewhat flowery text:  

The Hussaini Brahmins, along with other Hindu devotees of the Muslim Imam, are today a rapidly vanishing community. Younger generation Hussaini Brahmins are said to be abandoning their ancestral heritage, some seeing it as embarrassingly deviant. No longer, it seems, can an ambiguous, yet comfortable, liminality be sustained, fuzzy communal identities giving way under the relentless pressure to conform to the logic of neatly demarcated ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities. And so, these and scores of other religious communities that once straddled the frontier between Hinduism and Islam seem destined for perdition, or else to folkloric curiosities that tell of a bygone age, when it was truly possible to be both Hindu as well as Muslim at the same time.

I am not a starry eyed optimist. I harbor no illusions that the complicated politics of the Indian subcontinent are going to be solved simply by harping on the feel-good history of shared culture - of food, music, language, ethnicities and sometimes even religious celebrations. Nonetheless, those who have turned the region into a powder keg of hostilities and have fueled communal fires with lies and revisionist history, need to be reminded perhaps, that if the present mayhem is always the consequence of past injustices, there are also many examples of peaceful co-existence that could serve as the model for reconciliation between south Asian Muslims and Hindus.  

Eid Mubarak  to our Muslim readers and to any one else who may wish to rejoice with their Muslim friends on this day.   

A "Pardesi" Life in "Desi" Land

In Hindi / Urdu, pardesi means foreign or foreigner - as opposed to desi which stands for native Indian or south Asian.

Ever since I read Nathan Katz's detailed and interesting account of Indian Jews, I have wanted, whenever the opportunity presents itself during my trips back to India, to seek out the markers that chronicle the history of the once thriving but now drastically dwindling Jewish community of India. Historic evidence of a Jewish presence in the form of people and edifices are few and far between on the vast Indian landscape. A handful of synagogues that once served as centers of religious as well as social lives of Indian Jews are scattered in different corners of India. They remain a scant reminder of the now almost disappeared community which was once a tiny part of India's colorful and diverse social fabric. For details of the ethnicities and dates of arrival of the different diasporic Jewish communities of India, please see the review of Katz's book that I have linked to at the beginning of the post.

During my last trip to India, my sister and I took a short vacation in the city of Cochin in Kerala, on the southwestern coast of the Indian peninsula along the Arabian Sea.  There we visited the oldest standing Indian synagogue built by Sephardic Jews who first arrived on the Kerala coast in the 16th century, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Well before their arrival, a small but established Jewish community was already living in peace and prosperity on the Malabar Coast of Kerala, believed to have settled there since the 10th century. The immigrants from Spain expected (correctly) and found safe haven among fellow co-religionists of India. Although the Spanish Jews were warmly welcomed by their Indian hosts, the two Jewish communities, distinguished by the color of their skins, remained socially apart. The original group of Malabari Jews had become racially integrated within the larger Keralite community and were therefore dark complected like others of the region. The new comers from Europe who chose not to intermarry with the Indian Jews retained their relatively light complexions. The synagogue in Cochin built by the newly arrived Sephardic Jews in 1567-68, is called the Pardesi Synagogue - "the synagogue of foreigners."

Located at the end of an alley backing up to a Hindu temple on the compound of the Mattancheri Palace (or the Dutch Palace), the abode of the former kings of Cochin, the Pardesi Synagogue is a quaint little reminder of Kerala's past. It remains a functional synagogue to this day and attracts numerous tourists, many of them from Israel. Arts/ crafts / antique shops and spice markets lining the Synagogue Lane thrive on tourist trade although most of the artifacts sold are not  related to Judaism. The Mattencheri post office located on the same street will post mark your mail, upon request, with the Star of David. The post master claimed that it is the only post office in the world with that unique postal facility. I don't know if that is true.

The Pardesi Synagogue is currently under the supervision of eleven (yes eleven persons, not families) Cochin Jews who must be rather formidable folks because the shopkeepers seemed quite terrified of them.  They took care to speak with us in whispers on the street during the afternoon siesta hours for fear of disturbing the mostly senior Jewish residents who occupy the lovely old homes lining the alley. "Do Not Disturb Between 1-4 PM" signs hang on several front doors. I don't know what will happen to the synagogue after the current proprietors are gone or become enfeebled by old age. I expect the Indian Archaeological Society or the state government of Kerala will take over and maintain it as a historic public monument. The World Heritage Foundation already contributes to its upkeep. As of now, visitors' access to the interior of the synagogue is controlled solely by its crusty custodians. The story of the remaining eleven Cochin Jews has recently been recorded in a book by author Edna Fernandes.

(from left to right : the interior of Pardesi synagogue; the Star of David post mark at Mattancheri post office;Synagogue Lane ending at Pardesi Synagogue;