This book was given to me by a relative of the author. Published in 1922, just seven years after Gandhi’s arrival in India, it paints an unflattering portrait of the Mahatma. The author, Chettur Sankaran Nair, had been elected President of the Indian National Congress in 1897. In October 1915 (10 months after Gandhi’s arrival in India), Nair was appointed as a Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. He resigned in July 1919, soon after the Jallianwalabagh massacre. At that time he was the only Indian on the Council. Annie Besant and C F Andrews tried to persuade him to remain. Nair refused.

“Mr. Gandhi is not leading his followers in the direction of the promised land,” wrote Nair. “He is not only going in the opposite direction but instead of toughening our fibre by a life of toil and struggle is endeavouring to entirely emasculate us and render us altogether unfit for the glorious destiny that, but for him and others like him, is awaiting us.”

Nair was appalled by Gandhi’s views on mechanization. “His tirade against machinery and mill industries on account of the evils he has witnessed in the West is due to his ignorance; a little knowledge in his case has proved a dangerous thing. It is this feeling which has led him to advocate the use of spinning wheel in India. This might be useful as a cottage or home industry. It might find work for someone who would otherwise be idle. But he’s living in a fool’s paradise if he considers it a substitute for or will supplant machinery.”

Nair opined that Gandhi was justifying the caste system “to secure the support of the higher castes, without whose financial support his agitation must collapse.”

Citing a New India report of 27th October 1921, Nair stated tongue-in-cheek, “Mr. Gandhi said that if there was violence he would go to the Himalayas. There was a riot, but he did not go, but excused himself by saying that if it occurred a second time, he would go. A second riot occurred; he said nothing but did not go.” He further referred to a Times of India report published in October 1921. “Writing in the latest issue of Navajivan, his Gujarati newspaper, Mr. Gandhi makes the interesting announcement that if Swaraj is not obtained by December, he will either die of a broken heart or retire from public life.” That the Mahatma neither went to the Himalayas nor retired from public life, nor died of a broken heart is common knowledge.

Nair quotes extensively from Gandhi’s own writings, letters and speeches to highlight the sheer absurdity of the Mahatma’s stand:

• That which you consider to be the Mother of Parliaments is like a sterile woman and a prostitute. Both of these are harsh terms, but exactly fit the case. That Parliament has not yet of its own accord done a single good thing; hence I have compared it to a sterile woman……It is like a prostitute because it is under the control of ministers who change from time to time. Today it is under Mr. Asquith; tomorrow it may be under Mr. Balfour.

• Hospitals are the instruments that the devil has been using for his own purpose, in order to keep his hold on his kingdom. They perpetuate vice, misery and degradation and real slavery. (Written in 1909 in a letter to a friend in India.)

• I am not aiming at destroying railways or hospitals, though I would certainly welcome their natural destruction. Neither railways nor hospitals are a test of a high and pure civilization. At best they are a necessary evil. (Written in 1921.)

• When the charka comes into force in India, I would introduce the spinning wheel among the Afghan tribes and also thus prevent them from attacking the Indian territories. (In an interview to the Daily Express)

• If thirty crores of people say that they are not with me yet I shall do my work and win Swaraj…If you wish to accomplish work of thirty crores of men then come out with your money. Try to have money and ask me to give an account of the same. I appoint someone treasurer….If you know that you yourself cannot attain Swaraj then help one with money. If you do not help with money Swaraj will be difficult but not impossible to attain. (In a public address to the merchants of Calcutta on 30th January 1921.)

Well this is certainly not the Father of the Nation out history books told us about. Was Nair harbouring a grouse against Gandhi and out to malign him? Was he exaggerating, playing games with the truth, spreading canards? Well, he was too big a man to stoop to that level, and he wasn’t exactly competing with Gandhi.

Interestingly, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had similar views about Gandhi’s stand on various issues. Recently two South African professors of Indian origin published a well-researched book titled, “The South African Gandhi – Stretcher Bearer of Empire”, wherein we come to see a hitherto unknown side of the Mahatma. (Read review here: https://bookswehaveread.com/2016/07/05/the-south-african-gandhi/)

The book is now available online free of cost. https://archive.org/details/gandhianarchy00sankuoft/page/n6

Overall Assessment: Certainly worth reading.

Gandhi and Anarchy
Author: Sir C Sankaran Nair
Publisher: Tagore & Co., Madras
Publication Date: 1922

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

This one’s undoubtedly a masterpiece. Written by a British military historian it traces the origin and progress of warfare from ancient to modern times, exploring the military cultures of the Pacific Islanders, the Japanese samurai, the Zulus of southern Africa, the Cossacks of Europe, the Turkish Mamelukes and a host of other militant groups in an effort to understand the motivations, models and methods of warfare.

War pre-dates the state by many millennia. “All civilizations owe their origins to the warrior.” Our states, our institutions, even our laws have come to us through violence and conflict. Along with war, the institution of human slavery was created at the dawn of the human race. Yet it was abolished worldwide. Duelling, infanticide and human sacrifice are no longer in vogue.

Is war still fashionable or is it losing its sheen? In the 1960s the blunt refusal of the US conscripts and their families to imbibe warrior values caused the Vietnam War to be abandoned. Today cultural and material changes are impacting man’s proclivity for violence, and no one (apart from the political and military class) would venture to suggest that war is a justifiable activity. Can we now dream of a world without war?

“Half of human nature – the female half- is in any case highly ambivalent about war-making.” War is an entirely masculine activity. Does the differentiation of social roles between male and female have anything to do with the origin of warfare? The author discusses serotonin and testosterone levels, mention the XYY chromosome combination which is found in one in a thousand males, and wonders why science cannot explain why groups of men combine to fight other groups.

Many interesting examples are presented. For instance, the Aztecs of Mexico, obtained sacrificial victims by waging war. Human sacrifice being a religious necessity, the act of individual captive-taking was central to Aztec warfare. “…for a man to give a captive to a comrade who had not made a capture, as a favour to promote him in rank, carried the death penalty for both.”

Tool-making and home-making we owe to our remote ancestors such as Australopithecus, Homo Erectus and Neanderthals. Homo sapiens sapiens is roughly 40,000 years old. He did not invent hunting parties – he inherited the practice. His own innovations include farming, irrigation and animal husbandry. Towns and cities, and pottery making, metallurgy and religion are pretty ancient too. Jericho in Palestine had an 8 acre town by 7000 B.C. Catal Hyuk in Turkey, Crete and the Aegean coast of Greece all had massive human settlements by 6000 B.C. Interestingly, “None of the thirteen cities known to have existed at the beginning of the third millennium (B.C.), including Ur, Uruk and Kish, then had walls.”

Uruk appears to have acquired walls in the time of Gilgamesh (around 2700 B.C.) The Standard of Ur of the third millennium B.C. shows a four wheeled cart drawn by four onagers on a battlefield. Egypt was unified under a single ruler around 3200 B.C. and for nearly 14 centuries it seems to have spared the vagaries of warfare.

The chariot first appeared around 1700 B.C. and revolutionised war-making. Now horse-breeders gained the advantage. “After the end of the second millennium B.C. such predatory charioteers disrupted the course of civilization in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley…”

Somewhere along the way the concept of chivalry emerged. Warfare developed a set of rules. With the coming of Islam the creed of war obtained an ideology. Jihad became a religious and moral obligation. The prophet Mohammed preached as well as practised war. He decreed that all Muslims were brothers and should not fight each other. But all ‘infidels’ must be fought ‘until they proclaim that there is no god but Allah’.

The institution of military slaves or Mamelukes was an early Muslim innovation. A slave could rise to be a military commander or even king. (India’s Slave Dynasty is a case in point, though the author does not mention it.)

The Chinese were the first to devise a philosophy of war. Confucius then put forth the idea that ‘the superior man should be able to attain his ends without violence.” But in the 20th century, Mao’s principal contribution to military theory was the idea of ‘protracted war.’ On Mao’s Long March from south to north China in 1934-35, only some 8000 of the 80000 or so who set out survived. About 1 million ‘landlords’ were killed in the year after the communists came to power in China in 1948.

Over the course of 4000 years of experimentation and repetition, war-making became a human habit. But there were strong advocates of peace too. Jesus Christ advocated pacifism. Before Christ, Buddhism and Jainism advocated non-violence.

Does war have a future? The book does not have all the answers, but it certainly provides food for thought.

Overall Assessment: MUST read!

A History of Warfare
Author: John Keegan
Publisher: Vintage
Publication Date: November 1994

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

This is a book I was actually waiting for. I was pretty sure there were many women rulers in India whose names are virtually unknown. I’ve been doing my own share of research but this book made me realize the depth of my ignorance.

Yes, I know the Begums of Bhopal had ruled for a 100 years albeit with the help of the British. Yes, I had heard of the Dhenkanal copper plates, but the 100 year rule of the Bhaumakara queens of Odisha was a revelation to me. The dynasty had lasted 200 years. Of the 18 rulers, 6 were female, and they had ruled long and well. Tribhuvana Mahadevi, the first of the queens had ascended the throne in 846 CE. And not a single queen had adopted a son to bolster her own legitimacy.

I had hitherto believed that Abbakka Rani of Ullal was a single heroic woman who had valiantly fought off the Portuguese for decades. Now I learn there were two Abbakka Ranis.

There are tales of well known women like Razia Sultan, Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, Chand Bibi who defended the two sultanates of Bijapur and Ahmednagar, Kittur Rani Chennamma, Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore, and Nur Jahan, who was the de facto Mughal as her husband Jahangir lapsed into an alcoholic stupor and left the reins of the empire in her hands.

The surprises came in the shape of the Attingal Ranis of Kerala, and Rani Karnavati of Garhwal who acquired the epithet ‘naak-katti rani’ after she cut off the noses of Emperor Shah Jahan’s forces whom she defeated and captured. Garhwal went on to defy Aurangzeb, and still managed to survive.

I had never heard of Didda, Queen of Kashmir, who ruled ably for half a century from 958 to 1003 CE. And the author tells us that Kashmir had many women rulers before and after Didda. Before Didda another queen, Sugandhadevi, had wielded power for 50 years, first as regent and later as independent ruler. When Didda’s husband died she cleverly avoided committing sati by staging a superb drama. In fact the book mentions several women who committed sati and several others who refused to do so. I found this part most interesting.

In the 13th century Rudrama Devi of Orugallu (now Warangal) was groomed by her father Ganapati Deva of the Kakatiya dynasty to take over the reins of the kingdom after him. She was made co-ruler in 1259 CE and later in 1262 CE she ruled independently, although she sat on the throne only after the death of the king in 1269. Only a few decades earlier in 1231 CE the Delhi Sultan Itutmish of the Slave dynasty had declared his daughter Razia Sultan as his heir, overriding the claims of his three sons. Razia refused to be called Sultana because the word meant ‘sultan’s wife’. She was the only woman to adorn the throne of Delhi and her reign was short-lived. Rudrama Devi, however, lived to be 80 years old and died around 1289 CE.

A chapter titled “The Heroines of Chittor” makes interesting reading. The author points out that “Karmavati, Jawahirbai and Mirabai were all women who flouted the norm in choosing not to commit sati and came into prominence only after being widowed.” Rani Karmavati did not choose to die when her husband Rana Sanga died in 1528 of wounds sustained in battle, having been defeated by Babur. Bhojraj, Rana Sanga’s heir apparent and husband of the poet-saint Mirabai had already fallen in battle the previous year.

Several years later, in March 1535, Chittor was besieged by Bahadur Shah of Gujarat. When the walls were breached with Portuguese cannons, Rani Karmavati led 13000 Rajput women to commit jauhar, while the men fought to the last man. Earlier the queen mother Jawahirbai had led a cavalry charge to defend the breach and died a glorious death along with several other women dressed in male attire. Fortunately for Mirabai she had left Chittor for Merta in 1534, and thus she survived. She lived on until 1547 extolling the divinity of Lord Krishna.

Tarabai, the warrior wife of Prithviraj, often joined her husband on the battlefield. She was acclaimed for driving off a war elephant with her sword. The couple lived in Kumbhalgarh, where Prithviraj was poisoned by his brother in law. Tarabai chose to die on his funeral pyre. Looks like sati was fashionable, but the women did have a choice.

Down south in Madurai in 1682 CE, Rani Mangammal refused to commit sati when her husband Chokkanath Nayak died. Instead she ably guided her young son Virappa Naik, who died seven years later of small pox. When his pregnant wife tried to commit sati, Mangammal forcibly restrained her. The lady Muthuammal later gave birth to a son Vijaya Ranga and subsequently committed suicide. Mangammal continued to rule as regent until 1705, when she died in mysterious circumstances.

I didn’t read the book – I devoured it.

Overall Assessment: If you’re a history buff, you’ll simply love this book

The Women Who Ruled India
Author: Archana Garodia Gupta
Publisher: Hachette India
Publication Date: December 2017

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

What the Europeans did in India is what this book is all about. The progress of colonization and the cruelty of the colonists are elucidated using quotes and anecdotes from the colonizers themselves. The book is small, handy, and easily readable.

Vasco da Gama and his men on landing at Calicut in 1498 knelt to pray in a temple thinking it was a church. One of them later wrote about the sacred threads worn by the priests across their upper bodies. The men also took home “some white earth which the Christians of this country are wont to sprinkle on the forehead…”

In 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral arrived with six ships and bombarded Calicut. Then he left for Cochin, where the king allowed him to establish a factory. But the Zamorin’s fleet pursued him and he slunk away in the dead of night leaving behind 30 of his men. Ending up at Cannannore, he befriended the Raja. By then the Franciscan missionaries accompanying him had realized the difference between Hindus and Christians.

In 1502 Vasco da Gama returned. En route to Calicut the Portuguese encountered the Miri, a ship carrying pilgrims returning from Mecca. A Portuguese eyewitness described the chain of events: “We took a ship from Mecca in which were 380 men and many women and children, and we took from it fully 12,000 ducats, with goods worth at least another 10,000. And we burned the ship and all the people on board with gunpowder.” Another eyewitness recounted how the women offered their jewellery and held up their babies “that we may have pity on their innocence.” These are Portuguese accounts of Portuguese barbarity in a land where they came as traders looking for spices.

The Arab traders of Malabar resisted the Portuguese from the very beginning. The Zamorin ignored the Portuguese demand to expel them. (The Moplahs are said to be descended from 13 Arab merchants who settled on the River Beypore in the 9th century.) The Zamorin’s 32 ship fleet was destroyed by Portuguese guns. The ships were either sunk or set on fire and floated into Calicut harbour.

Next to arrive was Francisco de Almeida. His son was killed in a naval battle off the coast of Diu where the Zamorin’s ships teamed with an Egyptian fleet and successfully fought the Portuguese. But the betrayal of the Diu Governor precipitated the withdrawal of the Egyptians and the subsequent defeat of the Zamorin’s navy. Thereafter the Portuguese dominated the Arabian Sea coast. Alfonso de Albuquerque arrived next.

Goa derives its name from Govapuri at the mouth of the Mandovi River. In 1510 it was ruled by the Bijapur Sultan, Yusuf Adil Shah. Albuquerque easily captured it but fled when the Sultan’s army approached. The Portuguese massacred the Muslims before retreating to their ships. The fury of the monsoon prevented them from sailing. They ran out of food and were reduced to eating rats but did not surrender. Eventually they sailed away but returned on 25 November 1510, to capture Goa and put to death 6000 Muslims.

Albuquerque wrote to the King of Portugal, “I have decided that all the horses of Persia and Arabia should be in your hands, for two reasons: one being the heavy duties that they pay, and secondly, that the King of Vijayanagar and those of the Deccan may recognize that victory depends on you, for he who has the horses will defeat the other.”
Albuquerque, for all his cruelty, forbade the practice of sati in Goa.

In 1538 the first Bishop arrived in Goa. In 1540 the destruction of temples began. Francis Xavier arrived in 1542 and started mass conversions. He died off the coast of China in 1552, was first buried in Malacca and later shipped to Goa in 1554 to be finally interred at the Basilica of Bom Jesus. The author notes that “…parts of a shoulder blade are in Cochin, Malacca and Macao, the upper arm is in Japan, the internal organs have been distributed as relics…”

At Bassein in 1564, the Portuguese smashed the idols in a temple, killed a cow and sprinkled its blood in the sacred lake. The first Inquisition happened in 1560 in Goa. It was Francis Xavier who had recommended this horrendous practice to the Pope. 16,172 cases were investigated, thousands imprisoned, tortured and burnt at the stake before the practice was banned in 1774. The Inquisition was revived in 1778 and finally banned in 1812.

The book gives us many interesting anecdotes about the Kunjali Marakkars, commanders of the Zamorin’s fleet, who put up the fiercest resistance against Portuguese intrusion into Malabar. If the Zamorin hadn’t fallen out with them in the last decade of the 16th century and sided with the Portuguese, the history of Malabar may perhaps have taken a different turn. Marakkar’s surrender on 16th March 1600 was followed by treachery and tragedy. The Portuguese carted him off to Goa where he was publicly beheaded and his body dismembered and exhibited on the beaches. Then “his head was salted and conveyed to Cannanore, there to be stuck on a standard for a terror to the Moors.” The Zamorin had effectively dug his own grave. A century of resistance to colonization was over.

“Goa relied on a huge population of slaves……Women slaves were sold semi-naked at auctions and fetched more if they were virgins.” All the European powers exported slaves, mostly to the East Indies. “Slaves were commonplace in Madras. …The accounts show that in the month of September 1687 no fewer than 665 slaves were exported.” Edward Barlow, an English sailor noted in his journal in 1670 when his ship docked at the Company’s newly formed base at Valapattinam that the local people would not sell them cows but that for a small sum “you may buy their children”.

Bombay was ceded to Portugal in 1534 by the ruler of Gujarat. The Portuguese did nothing except destroy a few temples and build a few churches. In 1662 when Catherine of Braganza married Charles II of England, Bombay became part of her dowry. Six years later Charles II leased it to the East India Company. And the rest is history.

The author opines that the Mughal rulers, excepting Akbar, did little to improve the economy or the lives of the people. Thomas Roe stayed at Agra for three years and supplied alcohol to Emperor Jahangir. Shah Jahan ordered the destruction of Hindu temples. Aurangzeb converted Surat’s Jain temple into a mosque. His 50 year rule left a legacy of religious conflict that persists to this day.

Overall Assessment: Recommended for whites, blacks and browns alike.

The Theft of India
Author: Roy Moxham
Publisher: Harper Collins India
Year of Publication: 2016

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

This memoir was first published in London in 1824, two years after the death of the author. Born in Devonshire, James Scurry had gone to sea at a very young age, probably accompanying his father. His Indian ordeal began at the age of 15 when he was captured by the French off the Coromandel Coast and handed over to Hyder Ali. After a decade in captivity he made a daring escape and managed to return to England where he built a chequered career, and died at the age of age of 57, leaving behind a widow and son.

Scurry begins his amateurish narrative by telling us he set sail from Plymouth Sound in the ship Hannibal and ended up near Ceylon where they ran into trouble with the French. He dived into the shark-infested waters and tried to swim to safety. “I had nothing about me but a silk handkerchief with two rupees, all my treasure, tied up in the corner.” He mentions Trincomalee, Batticaloa (which he called Bloody Bay), Tranquebar and finally Cuddalore where he was taken along with others after his capture. The year was 1781.

After two months of imprisonment in Hyder Ali’s fort of ‘Chillembroom’ where a famine was raging, the prisoners were marched off to Bangalore. “No butcher ever drove oxen with more cruelty than we were driven.”

Eventually, a group of 52 boys aged 12 to 17 were assembled and told they were now the ‘sons’ of Hyder Ali. They were marched off to Seringapatam, and their heads shaved. Months passed and Hyder Ali ‘Cawn’ died. “…towards the close of his life, when the ulcer was rapidly spreading, he, by advice, ordered several criminals at different times to be killed, in order to apply their livers to his sore.”

Scurry makes an intriguing observation that, “Hyat Saib was the rightful successor, but Tipoo proved the more powerful.” (Hyat (Ayaz Khan), was a Nambiar boy from Chirakkal who had been captured in 1766, converted and re-named before growing to be a prime favourite of Hyder Ali. Hyder is said to have publicly proclaimed that he wished Ayaz was his son and successor.) Did Hyder actually nominate Ayaz to succeed him? Or was Scurry referring to palace whispers?

Tipu’s accession aggravated the misery of the English captives, as they were incorporated into slave battalions. “Our ears were bored and a slave’s mark was put in each of them.”

Scurry describes the fate of Brahmin prisoners and English officers in Tipu’s custody. “…Colonel Bailey, who was in leg irons, with Captian Rumney, and Lieutenant Fraser and Sampson. The three latter had their throats cut at Mysore. Colonel Bailey appeared much emaciated; I rather think grief was the cause of destroying his constitution.”

Of the Malabar (Mangalore) Christians, Scurry records that 30,000 of them were driven to Seringapatam, “where all who were fit to carry arms were circumcised, and formed into four battalions.” Tipu wanted their daughters for his harem and when they refused, they were all imprisoned. “The chumbars, or sandal-makers were then sent for, and their noses, ears and upper lips were cut off; they were then mounted on asses, their faces towards the tail and led through Patam…”

“The principal street in Seringapatam, on each side, was ornamented with paintings, such as, elephants whirling Europeans in the air – tigers seizing whole battalions of English sepoys – five or six English officers supplicating for mercy…” Later when Tipu feared the English would get to Seringapatam, these paintings were removed.

Scurry asserts that Tipu was a coward and a tyrant, and probably mentally deranged. Tipu kept nine large tiger cages in front of his treasury. Three of his principal officers were thrown to the tigers and devoured in an instant. The tigers didn’t live long either. Tipu went hunting and brought in new ones. Scurry describes in detail the unique instruments of torture that Tipu used. “But his most common mode of punishment was that of drawing to death by the elephant’s feet.” This corroborates the accounts of other writers in Malayalam and English.

Scurry also describes Tipu’s ‘games’ that would have put the ancient Romans to shame. When Tipu concluded peace with the British in 1784, and the customary exchange of prisoners took place, Scurry and a 100 other boys were sorely disappointed. Had their government forsaken them? Scurry records that he went into depression for three months.

To cut a long story short, Scurry was circumcised, re-named Shamsher Khan (he spells it Shum Shu Cawn), and forced to marry a dark-skinned girl from Arcot, also a prisoner. “She was an affectionate creature by whom I had two children, one died and the other I left in the arms of its distracted mother.” Scurry eventually escaped into Mahratta territory and returned to England in 1793. His efforts to trace his wife and child proved futile. Recounting his final moments with them he wrote, “I was eager to give them a final embrace; but fearful of the consequences. Oh my God! What were my sensations then! And even now, after a lapse of more than thirty years!”

Scurry’s language and spellings are quaint. We hear of him speaking the “Moorish’ language, the Canary language and the Tellingey language. He also recounts ‘seeing the Bramin women ascend the funeral pyre with the dead bodies of their husbands, apparently with as much composure as we would sit down to our breakfast.” His words are straight from the heart of an unlettered man.

Overall Assessment: Certainly worth reading.

The captivity, sufferings, and escape of James Scurry, who was detained a prisoner during ten years, in the dominions of Hyder Ali and Tippoo Saib
Author: James Scurry
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Year of Publication: 2015 (Original 1824)

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

This book is part of a series by different authors detailing the global commercial activities of Indian merchants down the ages. It presents an amazing account of the trading practices of Punjabi businessmen, whose initiative and enterprise will certainly surprise the reader. Moreover, there’s a detailed account of the slave trade and the horse trade, which were inextricably intertwined.

India had been cultivating cotton and producing textiles from antiquity. Textile fragments excavated at Mohenjo Daro indicate that dyes were used for colouring. The Greek historian Herodotus had referred to Indian cottons.

The Arthashastra the Mahabharata and the Manusmriti refer to institutionalized slavery in India. Mahmud Ghazni took away not only India’s treasures but also hundreds of thousands of slaves. The Slave dynasty (builders of the Qutub Minar) also kept up the slave trade. When Timur sacked Delhi in 1398 he returned to Samarkand with plenty of wealth and slaves. Alauddin Khalji (ruled 1296-1316) had 50,000 slave boys and another 70,000 slaves engaged in construction works. Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1351 to 1388) had 180,000 slaves. Th author notes that, “The Mughals regularly included skilled slaves as gifts along with ambassadorial exchanges.”

In 1646 Shah Jahan’s army occupied Balkh and marched to Samarkand under Aurangzeb. Defetaed by the long, cold winter the Indian forces had to retreat. A central asian chronicler recorded that the Central Asian ‘wolves’ captured the retreating Indian ‘slave-sheep’ and sold them in the markets of Samarkand, Tashkent and Turkestan. The voluminous supply of slaves caused prices to plummet from 225 tanga in 1589 to 84 tanga in 1646.

The Lodi dynasty of Afghan Pashtuns (later overthrown by Babur) came to India as horse traders. “The fact that the ancient Indian ashwamedha, or horse sacrifice, is described already in the Rig Veda indicates that Indians were involved in this exchange many centuries before Herodotus,” the author points out. Marco Polo noticed that the Malabar rulers imported 10,000 horses a year at a cost of 2.2 million dinars – and all but 100 would be dead by the end of the year. Niccolao Manucci wrote in the latter half of the 17th century that 100,000 horses were led from Bukhara to India every year and 12000 of them went directly to Aurangzeb’s stables.

Babur wrote in 1504, “From Hindustan, caravans of ten, fifteen, twenty thousand pack animals bring slaves, textiles, rock sugar, refined sugar, and spices.” 22 years later he would defeat Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat and found the Mughal dynasty.

Successive rulers in India and Central Asia carefully protected the caravan trade. When Akbar learnt that Afghan and Baloch tribes were preying upon the caravans, he sent his army to subdue them. Thousands of tribesmen were killed and thousands more enslaved and deported.

The arrival of the Europeans did not impact the caravan trade. The Portuguese brought much silver from the Americas in exchange for spices and textiles. The 17th century French traveller Francois Bernier observed, “Gold and silver, after circulating in every corner of the globe, comes at length to be swallowed up, lost in some measure in Hindostan.” The French monk Raphael du Mans described India as a place “where all the money in the Universe is unloaded as if into an abyss.” Earlier in the 1st century Pliny the Elder and the anonymous author of Periplus Maris Erithraei had bemoaned Rome’s massive trade deficit with India.

Mulasthana or Mulastanapura became Multan in the 8th century following the Muslim conquest. Alexander the Great took the city in 326 B.C.E. 13th century records identify Multanis as money-lenders and wholesale textile dealers for the first time. Indian merchants were considered indispensable to the local economy and the term ‘Multani’ referred to both Hindus and Muslims. As Multan began to suffer repeated invasions in the mid 17th century, Multani merchants relocated en masse to Shikarpur in Sind.

In the 17th century the French jeweller Tavernier commented that Indian money-changers or Shroffs surpassed the Jews in their shrewdness. The Punjabi Khatris prospered due to Mughal patronage but outlasted several dynasties in India and Central Asia. There were Marwari Jains in Astrakhan in the 17th century.

Nadir Shah’s reign was the most disruptive period in the history of the Indian merchant diaspora. In 1736 he slaughtered the Hindu communities across Iran. After his assassination in 1747 Indians began to return.

Indian presence in Russian territory diminished in the second half of the 19th century due to Russian expansionist policies and harsh restrictions imposed on Indian businesses. Ivan the Terrible had annexed the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the 16th century. The 1917 Revolution virtually ended Indian enterprise in Russia. With Partition in 1947, the Indians in Afghanistan had to move elsewhere, as the trade lines were cut off.

In 1914 Paramanand Deepchand Hinduja moved from his native Shikarpur in Sind to Bombay where he established firm. Five years later he moved his business to Iran. When he passed way in 1971 his successors maintained a close relationship with the Shah as well as the Indian government. The business shifted to Europe after the 1979 Islamic Revolution but continued to thrive. Today they employ 70,000 people in 35 countries and have assets worth an estimated $35 billion.

Years ago I was travelling in Uzbekistan with a few women. We were frequently accosted on the streets by local women asking to be photographed with us. They would first ask “Hindustan? Hindustan?” and when we nodded they would signal that they wanted a picture. This happened in not only in Tashkent but also in Bukhara and Samarkand. I suspected it was Bollywood mania, but after reading this book I can see other reasons too.

Overall Assessment: Very Interesting

Caravans: Punjabi Khatri Merchants on the Silk Road
Author: Scott C. Levi
Publisher: Portfolio (Penguin Books)
Year of Publication: 2016

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

This 2016 book was probably written merely to cash in on the Tipu Sultan controversy. It’s full of conjecture and merely skims through some of the facts relating to Tipu Sultan, the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, and his father Haider Ali. The author makes a feeble and unsuccessful attempt to put herself in the shoes of the father-son duo and imagine the social and political scenario in 18th century India.

On the plus side, the book is small and can be read in a maximum of two hours. On the minus side, the facts cannot be taken at face value and the writer’s imagination must be discounted. I’m amazed that she could gloss over the cruelty of these two men simply by contending that in those times every ruler was cruel. Similarly, she makes light of forced religious conversions describing them as ‘punishments’ for standing up to these invading upstarts. She even goes to the extent of placing a disproportionate share of the blame on the British for many of Tipu’s failures.

If you’ve already read other writers on the subject of Tipu Sultan, you needn’t read this one. You won’t miss anything. Unless you’re interested in knowing the number of women in Tipu’s harem, counting the number of his sons and daughters, learning the names of his grandparents and so on. However, if you can ignore the conclusions and implications and skilfully separate the wheat from the chaff, you will find interesting nuggets of information.

Referring to Haider Ali’s role in the siege of Tiruchirapally in 1751-52 Brittlebank writes, “…Mysore allied itself with British forces during the succession dispute for the Nawabship of the Carnatic, whose capital was Arcot in northern Tamil Nadu. Subsequently, Mysore switched sides to the French, as a result of British broken promises.” Now what does this reveal? Haider Ali allied first with the British and then with the French. That doesn’t seem like ‘Indian nationalist zeal’, does it?

If you read between the lines, you realize that Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan invaded all their neighbouring kingdoms. They dislodged the Wodeyars from Mysore, the Ikkeris from Bidanur (Bednur), and repeatedly attacked Malabar, Arcot, Mangalore, Madras and even Travancore without the slightest provocation. In these circumstances, it just doesn’t make sense to blame the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad and the British for ganging up against Tipu. Perhaps it was the cruelty of the father and son that made the Marathas and the Nizam realize that that their only hope was to ally with the British. This was certainly the case with the Malabar chieftains, but the book hardly mentions the Mysorean incursions into Malabar.

When the author does mention Malabar, the accounts are ridiculously off the mark. Take this example: “By February 1783, Tipu and his army had returned to Mysore (after Haider Ali died in December 1782 near Chittoor); the newly installed ruler had unfinished business to attend to in Malabar, where the East India Company’s Bombay army was continuing its aggression.” Unfinished business indeed! Similarly, Haider Ali’s attacks on his neighbours are justified on specious grounds. “Access to Malabar ports was important for trade, as was the control of Bednur.” And “the incursion into Kodagu was the result of his intervention in a succession dispute…” You see, all is fair in love and war! In this manner one can rationalize any kind of brutality and injustice.

The author refers to forced conversions thus: “This was not a religious policy but one of chastisement.” Really? I’m surprised the Sanghis missed this one. Another snide remark that really takes the cake: “One of the malcontents with whom they (the British) aligned themselves was the Raja of Travancore, Rama Varma…” And what had the poor Travancore ruler done to deserve this rude epithet? In the author’s own words, “Rama Varma had harboured resentments against Mysore since he had fallen out with Haider in the 1760s. The defensive lines he had constructed in 1764 ran from east to west to protect from invasion an exposed part of Travancore’s northern border.” So protecting his border from an invader was the one crime committed by Rama Varma. Did Travancore invade Mysore? No questions, please! This is a story – and stories are written to entertain.

The entire book seems like an attempt to whitewash the sins of Tipu Sultan. The publisher Juggernaut Books ought to have been more discerning. At least the proof readers could have corrected the errors. Ever heard of a Tadri port on the Malabar coast? North Kanara, my dear Juggernaut!

Tiger: The Life of Tipu Sultan
Author: Kate Brittlebank
Publisher: Juggernaut Books
Year of Publication: 2016

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

A collector’s delight, this book has more photos than text. Even if you aren’t a serious reader you can enjoy the pictures and their captions. The gruesome realities of war come alive through the pages. According to Max Weber, the British and French armies comprised “niggers, Gurkhas, and the barbarians of the world.”

One and a half million Indians participated in the war. Over 70,000 were martyred. Gandhi, Tilak and Sarojini Naidu persuaded Indians to serve the imperial cause. Gandhi’s ‘Appeal for Enlistment’ leaflet said: “If we want to learn the use of arms with the greatest possible dispatch, it is our duty to enlist ourselves in the army.” The 700 odd princely states saw the war as an opportunity to curry favour with the British.

The soldiers left behind hardly any traces of their thoughts, feelings and experiences. Most of the information was gleaned by reading their censored letters. There is only one first person account of soldier’s war experiences. Two Bengali gentlemen, Dr. Kalyan Mukherjee and Sisir Sarbadhikari, who wrote their memoirs, were part of the medical corps.

Havildar Abdul Rahman wrote to a friend in May 1915: “For God’s sake, don’t come don’t come don’t come to war in Europe…and tell my brother Mohammed Yakub Khan for God’s sake do not enlist. If you have any relatives, my advice is don’t let them enlist.” Amir Khan in a letter to wrote to Khan Zaman in Rawalpindi district, “…our guns have filled the German trenches with the dead and made them brim with blood. God grant us grace, for grace is needed. Oh God, we repent! Oh God, we repent!” Gulab Singh wrote, “Many men have had their feet cut off for they had been burnt by the frost.” Santa Singh wrote to his mother, “As a man climbs a plum tree and shakes down the plums (so that) they fall and lie in heaps, so are men here fallen….They too are the children of mothers.”

When a sepoy decided to marry a Frenchwoman, a fellow sepoy wrote, “Mahomed Khan, the lance dafadar, is engaged to a Frenchwoman on the condition that he becomes a Christian. The marriage ceremony is to take place in two or three days. We have done our best to prevent it, but all has been in vain.”

Ragbir Singh wrote, “I have been wounded twice, and now this is the third time that I am being sent to the trenches….If Parmeshwar (God) allows I will escape but the butcher does not let the goat escape.”

The Home Office sanctioned cremation at a site near Brighton, although the 1902 Cremation Act virtually banned open-air cremation. When ghee was in short supply and there was talk of serving margarine to the wounded sepoys, the War Office intervened with a note: “If it got about that we were using margarine, there might be an explosion similar to the old cartridge trouble of the Mutiny.”

By January 1915 Germany had decided to build a mosque near Berlin to cater to Muslim POWs. The Germans had initially protested against the use of Indian and African soldiers in the war – something they viewed as a breach of racial etiquette. A few months later these barriers crumbled and new liaisons emerged.

The story of the two Afridi Pathan brothers, Mir Dast and Mir Mast, makes interesting reading. The former won the Victoria Cross for bravery in war. The other defected to the German side along with twenty two others and later joined a German mission to Afghanistan to convince the Emir to invade India. The British had increased the Emir’s stipend so he was in no mood to rebel. Both Mir Dast and Mir Mast survived the war.

206 Indian POWs lie buried in a forgotten cemetery fifty miles outside Berlin. In fact the Indian dead are scattered all over Europe, some with memorials, some without. The question ‘who will remember me’ hangs heavy.

It wasn’t just Europe. 40% of Indian soldiers served in Mesopotamia in the blazing heat and chilling winters of the Arabian Desert. Sarbadhikari describes an incident where he and another soldier, after marching continuously for three days in hunger and cold, set off to look for food and found a piece of bread in the haversack of a dead white soldier. “We divided it between us and were eating it in the dark, when we realized that the bread had a peculiar taste. Then we understood. The bread had soaked up the soldier’s blood…”

In April 1916, 17000 British- Indian troops under Captain Townshend surrendered to the Turks after enduring a five month long siege at Kut al-Amara. They were marched off through the desert to a location in present-day Syria to build the Baghdad-Istanbul railway. They witnessed the Armenian genocide. A small Armenian boy who was the lone survivor of his family was adopted by an Indian sweeper, given the name Babulal, and brought back to India after the war.

The vast majority of sepoys took their sad stories with them to their graves. As Amitav Ghosh states in the Foreword, “…silence was one of the sepoy’s most enduring traits; it goes so far back and is so consistent that it is hard not to see it as an act of resistance in itself.”

The troops were demobilized after the war and many were out of work. Their story too remains untold. During the clashes that preceded the burning of the police station at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, Bhagwan Ahir, a Mesopotamia veteran, was thrashed by the police. The rest is history.

Overall Assessment: Invaluable for the photos.

‘If I Die Here Who Will Remember Me?’ India and the First World War
AUTHOR: Vedica Kant
PUBLISHER: Roli Books
Date of Publication: 2014

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

A brilliant book detailing the last three decades of the British Raj. The tactics used by successive British leaders to bring about irreconcilable differences between Hindus and Muslims are clearly outlined. The Brits used every weapon in their armoury to keep India in the crown. These weapons included deceit, dilly-dallying and divisiveness.

Britain’s prosperity had long depended upon the exploitation of faraway colonies. When the American colonies bid goodbye in 1776, India became the ‘jewel in the crown’. After the First World War, when the danger of losing India loomed large, the Brits acquired new territories in Palestine, Jordan and Iraq. Their commercial instincts remained uppermost.

A million Indians fought overseas in World War I and 54,000 died. The Brits followed different protocols for burying their own dead, whereas dead Indians were dumped in mass graves. The Memorial of the Missing at Basra (Mesopotamia) mentions about 8000 Brits by name. 665 Indian officers are named too but 33,222 Indian soldiers are reduced to a mere number. This was the pattern all over Europe: Cemeteries, tombstones and markers for the Brits, nothing for the Indians.

Churchill wrote in the Daily Mail in November 1929: “The rescue of India from ages of barbarism, tyranny and internecine war, and its slow but ceaseless forward march to civilization constitute upon the whole the finest achievement of our history. This work has been done in four of five generations by the willing sacrifices of the best of our race.”OMG! I’d always believed Churchill was a consummate racist but reading this statement really gave me the creeps!

When the Gandhi Irwin Pact was debated in the House of Commons on 12th March 1931, Baldwin made his infamous speech quoting a line from his cousin Rudyard Kipling, about the press having “power without responsibility…the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.”

When Lord Willingdon, Viceroy of India, was refused entry to the Royal Bombay Yacht Club because he was accompanied by Indian friends, he established the Willingdon Sports Club which was open to all races. Lord Linlithgow, who became Viceroy in 1936, was prone to chasing butterflies in the Shimla hills. The book has a sprinkling of uncharitable observations on political opponents by various personages. The author even mentions that Nehru’s Gandhi cap was made by Scot of London. And Jinnah owned over 300 suits.

On 3rd September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany and the same day Linlithgow coolly made a radio announcement that India was at war with Germany. Earlier in August he had already sent Indian troops to Aden, Egypt and Singapore.

“Gandhi…thought that in the face of Hitler’s aggression, German Jews and Czechs should simply resort to non-violence and Britain should submit to German occupation.” When VK Krishna Menon was asked whether he’d rather see India occupied by the Japanese or the British, he said, “You might as well ask a fish whether it preferred being fried in butter or margarine.” The remark ‘a post dated cheque on a crashing bank’ is usually attributed to Gandhi but it was Nehru who said it.

The League’s demand for partition was by no means unique. Elsewhere in the empire there were similar instances. Though the dominion of Canada was created in 1867, Manitoba, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island came in years later, and Newfoundland joined as late as 1949. When Australia became free, New South Wales and Western Australia chose to stay apart for years – and New Zealand became a separate country.

“Until the war, India had owed money to Britain. As the war went on she became a substantial creditor…” By 1945 Britain owed India 1260 million pounds. When the war ended Britain was indebted to the United States – and the loan was finally repaid only in 2006!

Of the INA, the author states: “The facts are that (1) about 40,500 Indian troops were captured in Malaya/Singapore of which 16,000 joined the INA; (2)a second unit of the INA was set up in 1943 and perhaps 24,000 Indian POWs were recruited; (3) at the war’s end there were thus about 40,000 men in the INA.” I tried to do the math. Only 500 soldiers were unaccounted for. Perhaps they had died or disappeared. In any case it looks like 100% of Indian POWs joined the INA, if British records are to be believed.

1942 was turbulent year. The Japanese captured Singapore-Malaya, Burma and the Andamans in quick succession. Gandhi launched the Quit India movement. “Rail and telegraph communications were struck at. In Madras, Bihar and the united Province, British servicemen were attacked and murdered…..The Government responded with enormous force……Rioters were fired at and aircraft were used to strafe saboteurs who were tearing up railway lines. In Bombay demonstrators were beaten with rattan canes. Order was not restored for six weeks.” It was estimated that 4000 to 10000 Indian lost their lives in the crackdown. On 31st August the Viceroy informed Churchill, “I am engaged here in meeting by far the most serious rebellions since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security. Mob violence remains rampant over large tracts of the countryside.”

“American forces had been arriving in India from the beginning of the year (1942) and by the end of the war there were half a million American troops there.” We learn a few interesting facts about America’s attitude to British imperialism. Just before the Cripps Mission set off for India, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill suggesting that a temporary dominion government be set up in India.

Churchill in his war memoirs claimed that “…the peoples of Hindustan…were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island.” Feel like throwing up? So do I.

Overall assessment: Worth reading.

Keeping The Jewel in the Crown: The British Betrayal of India
Author: Walter Reid
PUBLISHER: Viking – Penguin Random House
Year of Publication: 2016

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

A delightful book by an erudite scholar with a penchant for genuine research and a superb style of presentation. Easy to read, easy to understand, difficult to put down. A masterly blend of history, geography, politics, biology, geology, genetics, and archaeology, interspersed with anecdotes and personal testimonies. This book ought to be adapted as a school textbook.

The author eschews the traditional narratives of history presented from the western viewpoint and gives us rare insights into the goings-on in the Indian Ocean rim from pre-history to the present. From the Ranis of Ullal who consistently resisted Portuguese incursions to Marthanda Varma of Travancore who decisively defeated the Dutch at Colachel, and the Chinese Admiral Zheng He’s whose ‘treasure fleet’ visited many Indian ocean ports, the author chronicles the crucial events in India’s history and deftly places everything in perspective.

“When Prithviraj Chauhan, ruler of Delhi, fended off a raid by Muhammed Ghori in 1191, he allowed the invader to return home to Afghanistan! Ghori returned the following year to defeat and kill Prithviraj. This led to the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate and opened up the rest of India to conquest.” Around 1200 Nalanda University was laid waste by Bakhtiyar Khilji.

The book begins with the fascinating story of Pallava king Nandivarman II whose 65 year reign ended in A.D.796. He was shipped in from a faraway kingdom in south-east Asia at the tender age of 12 to fill the vacant throne. Five generations ago, the brother of the Pallava king had migrated to the remote kingdom, married a princess and inherited the throne. When the time came to send an heir to Kanchi, the youngest of the four sons of the reigning monarch was chosen. And, boy, did he prove his mettle!

Apart from debunking the Aryan Invasion Theory and a host of other myths such as the pacifism of Emperor Ashoka and the patriotism of Tipu Sultan, Sanyal tell us how Britain acquired the island of Manhattan, what they gave the Dutch in exchange, why the merchant Naruttam helped the Omanis recapture Muscat from the Portuguese, how the Bali islanders chose to make their last desperate stand against the Dutch in the chilling style typical of Indian warrior clans, and a lot more. The book is a treasure trove of historical facts that have been painstakingly researched, verified and cross-checked.

Remains of a 23000 year old farming settlement have been discovered near the Sea of Galilee in Israel. Europeans may have acquired their fair skin as recently as 5000 B.C. The Harappans exported ghee and cotton textiles. Many of the so-called ‘Indian spices’ were from Indonesia, e.g. cloves and nutmeg.

The Rig Veda indicates no knowledge of Central Asia or southern India. Its geographical canvas is the Sapta Sindhu or land of the Seven Rivers. The river Saraswathi mentioned in the Hindu texts is the Ghaggar River that rose in the Himalayas in the Punjab-Haryana region and finally flowed into the Rann of Kutch. The Sutlej and the Yamuna were among its tributaries. The Indus also used to flow into Kutch until an earthquake in 1819 diverted its course.

Indian soldiers were a global tribe long before the two World Wars. They had seen action at Gaugamela in 311 B.C. when Alexander of Macedon and Darius of Persia came face to face. The Indian cavalry continued fighting even after Darius had fled the battlefield. In 326 B.C. Alexander massacred 7000 Indian soldiers of the Massagan army because they refused to join his invasion of India. Seleucus Nikator gained an edge over the other generals of Alexander when he acquired 500 war elephants from Chandragupta Maurya (in exchange for Baluchistan and Afghanistan). Not to be outdone, Ptolemy managed to get elephants from Ethiopia and smuggled in Indian mahouts to train them for battle.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea tells us there were a large number of Indians in Socotra Island (Yemen). Sanyal tells us the name is derived from the Sanskrit word ‘Sukhadhara’.

Nearly half a century after Ashoka’s death, Kharavela of Kalinga sacked Pataliputra and sounded the death knell of the Maurya empire, yet his name is absent from history books.

The Kingdom of Funan in the Mekong delta, the first Indianized kingdom in southeast Asia, was established in the first century B.C. Nalanda University was partly funded by the Srivijaya kings of Sumatra. Roman women used to consult Indian astrologers. Madagascar was colonised by the Indonesians. By the Pallava period there were large Indian communities living in Chinese port towns. One of the largest merchant guilds called ‘The Five Hundred’ was established in Aihole, Karnataka.

Answers to many intriguing questions can be found in this book. How long have the Tamils been in Sri Lanka? Where did the Sinhalese come from? Why does Cuttack in Odisha have an annual fair called ‘Bali Yatra’? Why do the Mohyal Brahmins of Punjab join the Shia Muslims during the ritual mourning during Muharram? Why was Muhammad bin Qasim executed soon after his invasion of Sindh? Who first owned the Kohinoor diamond? And so on.

Observing that humans carry the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans in small proportions, Sanyal remarks tongue in cheek, “Given all this mixing, forget racial purity, it seems most of us are not even pure Homo sapiens!”

Overall Assessment: Truly a masterpiece. One of the best books I’ve read in recent years.

The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History
AUTHOR: Sanjeev Sanyal
PUBLISHER: Penguin
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: August 2016

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

This is an English translation by Rana Safvi of the Urdu original by Zahir Dehlvi. It gives a fascinating first person account of life in Delhi during India’s First War of Independence, an earth-shaking event that the British simply called the ‘Sepoy Mutiny.’ Zahir Dehlvi was a privileged official in the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, and he saw and reported everything that went on in those tumultuous days.

The Enfield rifles supplied to the Indian soldiers by the British rulers had greased cartridges said to be coated with cow and pig fat, which was obnoxious to Hindus and Muslims alike. They refused to bite the bullet. Instead they revolted. Soldiers from the Meerut cantonment killed their British officers, marched to Delhi on 11th May 1857 and declared the octogenarian Mughal as Emperor of Hindustan. The aged poet, a pensioner of the British, was simply not up to the task. Zahir Dehlvi was then 22 years old. His wrote his memoirs on his deathbed. While he is no historian and his narrative is prone to hyperbole and unmistakably pro-British it gives us rare insights into the events of the day, and for this reason alone deserves to be read. The translator has done a commendable job and the publisher has ensured that the book itself is a collector’s delight.

Dehlvi’s father and grandfather served the Emperor and he too was presented in court at the age of 12. He led a leisurely and lavish existence, riding horses, smoking the hookah, writing poetry and mingling with the likes of Mirza Ghalib. “Our days were festive like perpetual Eid….” Until the advent of the rebels.

After the mutiny was suppressed the Emperor was exiled to Rangoon and all his employees were fired. Dehlvi was destitute, having lost all his wealth and his ghazals as well. He fled with his family and later took up employment in the states of Alwar, Jaipur and Tonk which he described in great detail. He also presented interesting portraits of Bhopal, Baroda and Hyderabad where he had brief sojourns.

Here are some quotes and anecdotes from the book:

“There is a mosque here, which was built by Qutbuddin, though it is in a dilapidated condition. This mosque was built from the remains of temples. It had only been half done when the Badshah-e-Islam dies, and was thus left incomplete…….In the courtyard of this mosque is the broken temple, which is absolutely different and unique…….The iron pillar which people call killi or nail, has been installed in this courtyard. It has inscriptions in khat-e-shastri.” (The author meant Sanskrit but he was wrong. The translator tells us it was Brahmi script.)

“Once some Hindus, along with officers of the British government, hatched a plot to throw all the butchers slaughtering cows out of the city. The British government gave orders stating that these butchers should take their shops out of the city. They had all the shops within the city closed.” When the butchers and their families moved out and camped outside the city, the emperor insisted on pitching his tent alongside them. He stayed put until the British Resident rescinded the order.

The rebel soldiers after capturing Delhi appealed to the Emperor, “We are employees of the British. We have helped establish British rule from Calcutta to Kabul by sacrificing our lives, since they did not bring an army with them from England. All their conquests are due to the Indian army……And now…they want to destroy our faith and religion and convert the whole of Hindustan to Christianity. ….Now the time for revolt has come and the entire army has risen and refused to obey orders.” The Emperor’s response was, “Who calls me badshah? I am but a mendicant who is somehow living a Sufi’s life in the fort with my progeny…….The monarchy left my house 100 years ago.” His hapless grandfather had entrusted Hindustan to the British. He himself had no powers to take any decision. Therefore he has summoned the British Resident, Fraser. The Resident arrived soon thereafter.

The first victim of the riot was a Christian priest – a Hindu covert. Dehlvi says, “….as the sound of the shot rang out, the priest’s soul left for its heavenly abode.” The next to follow was Chamanlal, the emperor’s physician, who too had converted to Christianity. Then came the turn of the Resident.

Months passed. The rebels continued to hold Delhi. “The poor Badshah was always in a state of worry and anxiety and had stopped coming out of his Mahal. He was always sad and teary-eyed.” The Emperor said of the mutineers: ‘These rogues came to ruin my dynasty…..After they leave, the British are going to cut my head off, along with that of my children, and hang it on the Qila merlons.”

After several battles the British finally gained the upper hand and the rebels had to flee. They requested Bahadur Shah Zafar to go with them but he declined. The Emperor left the fort and took refuge in the environs of Humayun’s tomb. The British commander “arrested thirty Timurid princes, including the Badshah’s sons, grandsons and sons-in-law, and murdered them outside the walls of Delhi. He sent their heads to the Emperor.”

I read the book with a heavy heart.

Overall Assessment: Read it if you have an interest in Indian history.

Dastan-e-Ghadar -The Tale of the Mutiny
AUTHOR: ZAHIR DEHLVI
TRANSLATOR: RANA SAFVI
PUBLISHER: PENGUIN
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2017 (Urdu original in 1914 at Lahore)

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“On 12th April 1931, a conference of India’s martyrs was held in Paradise. We know because the proceedings were published in the Lahori Urdu newspaper Vir Bharat the following week.” This brilliant piece of anonymous journalism envisions a full-fledged conference with all the formalities and protocol, and presents an intricate blend of humour and pathos. Khudiram Bose, Ramparshad Bismil, Ishfaqullah, Haribhai Balmukand and Khushi Ram occupy prominent seats. The martyrs of Jallianwala Bagh appear in bloodied outfits. The martyrs of Sholapur are there too. Jatindranath Das as head the reception committee ushers in the much awaited trio of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev. Conches are blown, the gods shower flowers and shouts of ‘Shahidon ki jai’ rend the air. As Jatin Das delivers the welcome address, Jesus Christ arrives. Sardar Bhagat Singh says, “India’s martyrs greet the martyr of Jerusalem.” The Jallianwala martyrs chip in, “Accept our salutation O peaceful shepherd of bloodthirsty sheep.” Jesus announces that “Dyer is today being burnt in hell fire.”

Kama Maclean painstakingly traces the role of revolutionaries in ushering in India’s freedom, unearthing many enigmatic characters who fail to surface in mainstream narratives. In a 1937 book titled The Vanishing Empire, Chamanlal predicted that the British Empire would collapse in ten years. Later he became a Buddhist monk, ‘Bhikshu’ Chamanlal. Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi was fatally stabbed in Kanpur when he intervened to make peace amidst communal riots. Uddham Singh waited 21 years to avenge Jallianwala Bagh finally murdering Michael O Dwyer in London in 1940.

The Hindustan Republican Army sprang up in the 1920s in the United Provinces, later metamorphosed into the HSRA (Hindustan Socialistic Republican Association/Army) and shifted its focus to Lahore. There were invisible linkages between the HSRA and Nau Jawan Bharat Sabha (NJBS) and the Jugantar and Anushilan groups of Bengal.

The revolutionaries were determined to free India from British rule. Their main strategy was to make targeted attacks on powerful people. They attacked a train near Lucknow on 9th August 1925, looted government funds and killed a passenger. For this ‘Kakori Conspiracy’, four men were hanged and five transported for life. On 17th December 1928 Bhagat Singh and Shivram Rajguru shot dead a British policeman J P Saunders at Lahore, and Chandrashekhar Azad killed an Indian constable who gave chase. This was their revenge for the lathi-charge in November that had resulted in the death of Lala Lajpat Rai. They went underground, regrouped in Agra and on 8th April 1929 Bhagat Singh and Batukeswar Dutt threw low intensity bombs and leaflets on the floor of the Legislative Assembly before courting arrest. Soon other co-conspirators were arrested. The trial dragged on for 23 months, and the bravery and brilliance of the revolutionaries captured the imagination of the nation. Interestingly, they had had themselves photographed in studios in anticipation of capital punishment. These pictures made their way to every nook and corner of India in a brilliantly orchestrated campaign, and soon Bhagat Singh was just as popular as Mahatma Gandhi.

In June 1929 in Lahore Jail the revolutionaries commenced a hunger strike in protest against the differential treatment meted out to Indian and European prisoners. On 13th September Jatindranath Das passed away after 63 days of fasting. Subhas Chandra Bose (on behalf of the Bengal Congress) arranged to repatriate his body to Calcutta, and all along the way it was hailed by wailing crowds.

Jock Scott, Lahore’s Senior Superintendent of Police (who had been the original target of the Saunders assassination) soon packed his bags and sailed for England. The California-based based Ghadar Party threatened that if Bhagat Singh was executed, they would assassinate the incoming Viceroy even before he landed in India.

The HSRA bombed the Viceroy’s train on 23 December 1929 as it approached Delhi but Lord Irwin escaped unhurt. In April 1930 the daring Chittagong Armoury Raid by the Bengal revolutionaries masterminded by Surya Sen rattled the British. However, the young militants were out-numbered and died fighting.

Azad managed to remain incognito until he was killed in a shootout with the police at Allahabad on 27th February 1931. British intelligence noted that the Allahabad Provincial Congress Committee “took an active interest in the cremation of Azad’s body.” Motilal Nehru had died only two weeks earlier and revolutionary memoirs recounted that Azad had taken part in the funeral procession in disguise. It came to light later that Motilal had communicated with and funded Azad. In fact the revolutionaries usually relied on Congress members for financial backing and legal defence.

Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged on 23rd March 1931. It is one of the classic ironies of Indian history that Bhagat Singh, although shunned by Gandhi and neglected by historians, was omnipresent in visual culture. Though originally a turbaned Sikh, his ‘hat portrait’ was firmly imprinted on the Indian psyche, never to be erased.

In Bengal on 14th December 1931, teenagers Shanti Ghosh and Suniti Choudhury shot dead a British magistrate, and expressed disappointment when they received only jail sentences.

HSRA members had multiple aliases. David Petrie (who later headed the MI5) was convinced that Balraj, Chief of the HSRA, was Bhagat Singh but decades later Shiv Verma, a surviving member of the inner circle, disclosed that Balraj was Azad.

The book has a chapter on the secret life of Durga Devi, widow of HSRA leader Bhagwati Charan Vohra. The latter had died in a bomb-making accident on 28th May 1930. Durga had masqueraded as Bhagat Singh’s wife to facilitate his escape from Lahore in December 1928. On 8th October 1930 she took part in a daring shooting attempt on Lamington Road, Mumbai, leaving her infant son with Babarao Savarkar, brother of V D Savarkar.

Overall Assessment: The best part of the book is the exhaustive array of photographs and pictures.

A Revolutionary History of Interwar India
AUTHOR: Kama Maclean
PUBLISHER: PENGUIN BOOKS
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2016

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

Well, I thought I knew their story – until I read this masterpiece and found out how little I knew. The Exodus story is something you can’t help knowing, how Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, how they wandered in the desert and finally reached the Promised Land. You needed faith to believe the story but I had believed it anyway, at least most of it, excepting of course the more fanciful parts, like the parting of the Red Sea and the encounter with God on Mount Sinai. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple of Solomon in 587 BCE. Cyrus of Persia liberated the Jews and enabled the rebuilding of the temple. Jesus was a Jew. The Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70CE and scattered the Jews in all directions. All this I knew. I also knew that my home state, Kerala, had a Jewish community from times immemorial – and after the birth of Israel many of them migrated. Like everyone else, I knew about the Holocaust. And well, the Qumran scrolls or Dead Sea Scrolls as they are called. (I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I’d learnt about the Spanish Inquisition in my schooldays but had forgotten what it was all about.)

This book was an eye-opener. It brought to mind just as many questions as answers. If the Israelites found Egypt so abhorrent, why did they keep going back there? “The very first time that ‘Israel’ appears on any historical artefact is on the famous late thirteenth century BCE triumphal inscription of Pharaoh Merneptah, son of Rameses II.” The inscription claimed that Israel had been routed. This lends credence to the belief that Rameses II is the Pharaoh of the Exodus. And the Exodus probably did happen, though no evidence has been found till date.

Egyptian sources claim that when Sennacherib’s Assyrian army surrounded Jerusalem in 715 BCE it was an army under the Nubian pharaoh that broke the siege. Very plausible, says Simon Schama. So Egypt wasn’t a permanent enemy after all.

In the 6th century BCE Jews were settled in many parts of Egypt. In Elephantine, the capital of the Pathros region, they even had a temple. They kept the Sabbath, made animal sacrifices and circumcised their sons. Surviving documents related to marriage and divorce reveal interesting facts. While Israelite men had unilateral rights to divorce their wives, in Egypt Jewish women were also entitled to initiate the separation. Tragedy truck in 410 BCE when the temple was destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again. By the middle of the fourth century BCE, before the coming of Alexander, the Elephantine colony had ceased to exist. However, a century later Jewish settlements had popped up all over Egypt, especially at Alexandria and Thebes.

The Hebrew Bible was written over three centuries – eighth to fifth BCE. While it proclaims monotheism and an exclusive bond with Yehowah, it chronicles a saga of betrayals, transgressions, atrocities, disasters and defeats. “David’s best-loved son, Absalom, is killed in a particularly horrifying way while in rebellion against his father. Solomon’s imperially aggrandizing kingdom lasts not even one generation after his death. King Manasseh institutes the horror of child sacrifice by fire. The Egyptians are always at one gate and the Mesopotamian empires at the other.”

The Song of the Sea has much in common with the Phoenician epic of the storm god Baal’s conquest of the sea. Ecclesiastes is a ‘Wisdom Book’ that owes something to Persian-Babylonian proverbial literature. It was the Hellenistic Jewish world that invented the synagogue. ‘Holocaust’ was the Greek word for ritual cremation of whole animals. Only Greeks and Jews made fire sacrifices of whole animals.

Judaism was imposed at the point of the sword (and the circumciser’s knife) on neighbouring peoples like Itureans and Idumeans. In the first century BCE the Roman general Pompey marched through the Temple, tearing aside the curtain veil and entering the Holy of Holies, where only the high priest was admitted. But he spared the temple, as Alexander had done centuries ago. Eventually Vespasian would destroy it.

The mass social upheaval in the towns and villages of Palestine, the coming of Jesus and his crucifixion, the exaltation of Christianity as the state religion of Rome, the birth of Islam, the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, the Crusades, the persecution of Jews by Christians in various parts of Europe, and the horrors of the Inquisition are set out in explicit detail. One is left feeling sorry for the Jews, although the author recounts the atrocities committed by the Jews as well.

There is much that would evoke shock and/or surprise. Here are some examples:

• Judaism and Zoroastrianism had shared purity obsessions,including a belief in the uncleanness of menstruation.
• Peter the apostle refused to share a table with the uncircumcised.
• The Prophet Muhammad first commanded the Believers to pray in the direction of Jerusalem. It was only when the Jews of Yathrib rejected his beliefs that he switched the orientation to Makkah.
• Christians were forbidden by Canon Law to lend money at interest. So it wasn’t just the Jews and Muslims who had this prohibition!
• Much of the heart of Westminster Abbey comes from the estate of Licoricia the Jewess and her husband, David of Oxford. The Crown had appropriated the estate in the thirteenth century. Soon thereafter the Jews of England were all sent packing. This happened in France, Germany, Spain and Portugal. By the time Columbus had set out to discover America in 1492, Spain had been wiped clean of its Jewish population and five years later Portugal followed suit.!
• When Vasco da Gama returned in triumph after his India expedition he brought to Portugal back not only spices and animals but also a Polish Jew. I wonder what became of the poor man in a country that had evicted all its Jews!

The book has a sequel. I intend to read it soon.

Overall Assessment: A labour of love.

The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BC – 1492 AD
AUTHOR: SIMON SCHAMA
PUBLISHER: VINTAGE
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2014

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Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.