CULTURAL SUICIDE

Last we had filed a despatch on the tradition of loan waivers in ancient civilisations. We talked about the evidence on the ground in the shape of the Hammurabi Tablets and the Rosetta Stone...The physical relics are not just so many zeroes at a Sotheby auction, but are authentic indicators of the evolution of human thought- the natural progression- the Gangotri of Ideas that must be remembered if we want peace on Earth and goodwill towards men... 

Today we walk through visuals of a recurring tragedy that refuses to graduate into farce: destruction of heritage:

Mushil Hasan, Deputy Director of the National Museum of Iraq sits in despair after the April 2003 US attack on the Museum

Euphrates! Tigris! Here we come!

Why do soldiers do it all over? Why do they rape, loot, marauder the way it happens? It’s not good to generalise, maybe they don't, but here we see American soldiers supervise the scraping of gold from the walls of Baghdad Museum strictly for commerce:

US soldiers supervise the scraping of gold

Our Goan Mami quizzes us: What is the most sublime sacrifice that can be performed by a human being- it’s laying down your life, extinguishing your Self- for the sake of your fellow-beings- for Society! And pray at whose door have we generously laid this supreme sacrifice? Jawans, that is soldiers- who are among the least educated sections of Society!

Granted Mami, but what do you say to the following statements made by a true-blue Ivy League Political Science degree holder, who presided over the abovesaid misdeeds, outdoing the Afghan Taliban?

“Stuff happens…freedom is untidy” …and here is a sample of bright American wit:

One vase too many...

” … it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it twenty times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases?” (Laughter) Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”

-Remarks made by Donald Rumsfield, two time Defense Secretary of the United States…By the way the Americans ostensibly went to unearth Weapons of Mass Destruction, which were nowhere in sight! The blow was dealt at the very fount of human civilisation, that is Babylon..

There are wheels within wheels in the sordid story. Coinciding with the plunder of the Iraqi relics, lobbies of artifact collectors and antique sellers began pleading with the US Government to midwife abandonment of Iraqi antique export safeguards. In fact three Cultural Advisers to the White House resigned in protest against these intentions! It's about money, honey, as the Americans say...

Tablets bearing catalogue marking of Baghdad 

Museum put up for sale by antique sellers.

On the other hand, notwithstanding his Islamic badge, Saddam Hussein owned up the Babylonian heritage. He called himself the son of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylonia, “and had the legend ‘To King Nebuchadnezzar in the reign of Saddam Hussein’ inscribed on bricks inserted into the walls of the ancient city of Babylon during a reconstruction project he initiated..”

Public knowledge of the artifacts is so hazy, Assange and Friends are still wondering what happened to the original Hammurabi Code- it was always in French custody, at Louvre. Had it fallen in American hands, you can imagine what they would have taken it for! Representation of Hammurabi's..... ahem...this is a family blog..beg your pardon..

Left: Gold plaque, now in New York

Right: Safe at Louvre Museum, Paris:

Hammurabi's Code on a basalt stele (pillar) dates back to 1772 BC and is easily the most priceless Mesopotamian artifact, bearing as it does the earliest recorded human law code, including eye-for-eye-tooth-for-tooth. As we wrote in the last post on debt-relief, there is a reference to cancellation of farmers' debts on the exhibit...

And heyyy...,we don’t spare our own heritage too:

Al-Omari mosque in Deraa dating to 1090 AD destroyed by ISIS forces in April 2014.

The larger Bamiyan Buddha before and after. The three Buddhas representing Gandhar Style date to 500 AD and are located on the famous Silk Route

And the Cake goes to…Bamiyan! Islamist scholars maintained that the religion does not support such acts, even Gen. Musharraf came out strongly against the boorish behaviour of Taliban. Chandmari at Bamiyan has been a favourite past time throughout history. According to …ahem..Wikipedia:

“In 1221 with the advent of Genghis Khan a terrible disaster befell Bamiyan (monastery) nevertheless, the statues were spared. Later, the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, tried to use heavy artillery to destroy the statues. Another attempt to destroy the Bamiyan statues was made by the 18th century Persian king Nader Afshar, directing cannon fire at them.” Poor statues!  The task was finally wrapped up by the Taliban in 2007.

Diwan-e-khas: indestructible beauty: as it stands today

(http://jaddeyekabir.com/2012/06/29/the-destruction-of-delhi-dalrymple)

And what happened in Delhi in 1857, particularly to the Red Fort, has been ably chronicled by William Dalrymple in Last Mughal. Governor-General Lord Canning had by then turned his back on things Indian. James Fergusson, by whose name the eponymous College goes, was however passionate about preserving this rare heritage., to which Amir Khusrau sang the familiar ode ‘Agar Firdaus bar roo-e zaminast…’

Dalrymple writes:

“All the gilded domes and most of the detachable marble fittings were stripped and sold off by the Prize Agents.  As Fergusson noted “when we took possession of the palace, everyone seems to have looted after the most independent fashion.  Among others, a Captain (afterwards Sir) John Jones [who had blown in the Lahore Gate during the capture of the Fort] tore up a great part, but had the happy idea to get his loot in marble as table tops.  Two of these he brought home and sold to the Government for 500 pounds, and were placed in the India Museum.”…(according to measuringworth.com, founded by Williamson & Officer, Professors of Economics at University of Illinois, the Income Value of that sum is over £ 4,50,000 in 2013) 

“… fragments looted included the rightly celebrated “Orpheus panel” of pietra dura inlay which Shah Jahan had placed behind his Peacock Throne…

“Canning had already given orders to destroy the Delhi walls and defences, but Lawrence managed to get the orders rescinded, arguing that there was insufficient gunpowder in Delhi to blow up several miles of walls…”(http://jaddeyekabir.com/2012/06/29/the-destruction-of-delhi-dalrymple/)

Is there absolutely nothing we can do for these orphaned relics- before all heritage falls to the industry of haters and looters? Sorry, in India Courts have shown indulgence to the vandals, for in these areas, we consider ourselves living in History, and so- how do you try a time-traveller? The mobs are not vandals, they are the 'gau, brahman pratipalak' (*) None else than an Allahabad High Court Judge has upheld his clansmen’s right to ‘right perceived wrongs’, just read the Babri Judgement 2010 -in EPW, not anywhere else, written by Supriya Verma and Jaya Menon of JNU. You'll read that the High Court addresses the fictitious spot as 'Ram-janmabhomi', and the factual mosque, as the 'disputed structure'- so hilarious, were it not tragic..Thus blessed by the High Court, the administration and the ASI establish the existence of  temple over temple over temple on the plot, whereas the reality on the ground is a singular magrib wall. This is the prophetic context of Dushyant Kumar's sher, over which Junior and the writer were scratching their heads:

Ek Kabristan me ghar mil raha hai,
Jisme tehkanon me tehkhane lage hain..

..friend I have at last found an abode in a graveyard, where there are basements within basements..! 

The culturist vandal doth drive us underground..!

There have been well intentioned initiatives such as the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property, UNESCO Declaration of 2003 etc. One of the earliest initiatives was undertaken in 1933 by French activist Raphael Lemkin who formally defined the heinous activities as ‘cultural genocide’. He wrote - “an attack targeting a collectivity can also take the form of systematic and organized destruction of the art and cultural heritage in which the unique genius and achievement of a collectivity are revealed in fields of science, arts and literature. The contribution of any particular collectivity to world culture as a whole, forms the wealth of all of humanity, even while exhibiting unique characteristics (see http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/madrid1933-english.htm)

The least mankind can do is to ensure that each country has a legislation ‘in place’ in accordance with the international conventions. A Standard Operative Procedure has been prescribed in certain affected countries, like shifting, in an emergency, museum pieces to specially constructed vaults which can be maintained by an International Foundation. Should be a key component of Disaster Management plans. Yah!….we know…!...enactment of a law is useless, but at least the law of the land may restrain Defence Secretaries from inviting invading armies to rape the heritage of humankind..

(*) apologies to Pu La Deshpande: this is taken from his observation on the Sangh's Fuhrerphilia: "the Sangh seems to think Hitler was a 'gau-brahman-pratipalak Raja'," he'd say..

FINDING MEERA'S TOMB

        History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet                                                        inadequacies of documentation- Patrick Lagrange

We wrote on Meerabai exactly 2 summers ago, extolling the epic economy of words in her bright Bhakti songs (Simpliflying with Meera). We had taken leave not with answers, but with the following questions:

On the basis of records and relics, Lord Buddha or Emperor Ashoka are clearly Historical figures? The same cannot be said about Rama or Krishna? On the basis of written records and gospels, notwithstanding the absence of physical evidence (chodo Turin-wurin) , the Christ appears to be a Historical figure, though many myths naturally surround him, they even surround YF. So also for Prophet Muhammad. Can the same be said for Meerabai or Tulsidas or Surdas? To couch our curiosity in a different manner, could there be a process by which history is authentically propagated on basis of oral or social tradition alone? DD Kosambi tried his hand at drawing inferences about the history of say…culinary practices, from the way ladies use a pestle and grinder in parts of Maharashtra. But that’s like extracting oil from sand, as cowbeltwallahs say (ret me se tel nikalna) . Miniscule output to input ratio. That’s how the efficiency of an engine is defined. There are ways to do that, we are happy to report. But more of it later.

No one wrote like Meera, and as the finger-prints are so distinct, there has to be a distinct entity Meerabai. No ghost can be possessed of those talents. But the larger question remains….Is there a process by which history is authentically recounted on basis of oral or social tradition alone? In the absence of archaeological or documentary evidence?

The ‘literate’ Hindu classes, who write the Nation’s spiritual and social software- mince the 1-2% brahmanical or quasi-brahmanical gentlemen, have no use for objectivity. Consciously or unconsciously, they do not separate History from their own persona. They look upon History as something laaive, wherein they reside, their bounden role being righting past ‘wrongs’. They eat, drink, walk, talk, ooze, History, and urinate fire…

William Dalrymple in his Last Mughal writes with breathless excitement about the treasure houses that our state-controlled Archives are, especially Delhi’s National Archives. Simultaneously he muses how and wherefore this objective evidence was never taken on board by the Hindustanis. Because it’s anathema to their cause naturally….How Dalrymple interprets the archival material is a lesson to be learnt, if we have to tread this soil with sanity, and not let the clear stream of reason lose it's way into the dreary desert sand of prejudice (ha, ha, ha..)

For instance -ki bolchi?...Mrinal Pandey’s role is not even marginal in the whole sequence of events, and according to Dalrymple, Pandey first reared his head in Savarkar’s book “The Indian War of Independence- 1857”. In the absence of a God, Voltaire would rather invent Him, and following the same process, Savarkar manufactured a Brahmin…Pandey…

Dalrymple concludes after going through mountains of physical records, that the uprising was basically precipitated by the aggressive stance of the evangelical Christian Missionaries, who launched a crass campaign deprecating Hindustani culture, forced the British rulers to crack down on the existing Mughal masters, seeking to break their spirit, hoping to engender a wave of conversions….

So then: why do we as a society refuse to- or manage not to- outgrow History? History sort of hot-foots us, stalks us, haunts us, out-paces us, and leaves us mentally deranged. What else can one say of a society where a High Court judge ordains handing over a parcel of land to his own community, because he believes that the public believes that the Almighty was born there…no kidding! Read Justice Sudhir Agarwal’s judgement on the Babri Cases, delivered on 30^th September 2010 (must read EPW article by Professors Supriya Verma and Jaya Menon).

For one, we have this megalomania about our civilisation. George Bush (Jr.) thought India’s PM was Indira Gandhi, when in fact she had departed for the nether regions decades back. (He could name the Taiwan President) We were appalled not with the dumbness of a would-be President, but with the fact that India was not on the top of the mind of the world’s strongest human being (after Rajinikanth, that is). The megalomania is facilitated by the absence of physical moorings on the ground. Archaeological evidence for existence of a person is anyway not there in case of Hindu traditions because we do not inter our dead or bury relics like Buddha’s tooth. Muslim chronology is supported by tombs, Buddhist buttressed by holy relics and inscriptions in stone, but a non-existent Hindu King can merrily reside in the bosom of romantics, interpolated for aeons. The lack of history’s milestones enhances the possibility of our Hero’s survival, and he can safely be placed in any era!

DD Kosambi grappled with the issues. He stumbled into ancient history or Indology “fell as it were, through the roof”. This is what he writes in his celebrated work Adventures into the Unknown:

To teach myself statistics, I decided to take up some practical problems from the very beginning…” Examples from the field of education failed, him and so he crossed over to a statistical study of punch-marked coins. Attempting to unravel the chronology of coins, he  was constrained to learn Sanskrit. Then, as part of his continuing research on statistics, he embarked upon a study of Bhratrihari’s epigrams (subhashitas) and ran aground, as there were bewildering contradictions in his philosophies as professed in different texts. He goes on to say:

“My countrymen eked out doubtful sources with an exuberant imagination and what L. Renou has called ‘logique imperturbable’. One reads of the revival of Nationalism and Hinduism under Chandragupta II, of whom nothing is known with certainty. Indian nationalism is a phenomenon of the bourgeois age, not to be imagined before the development of provincial languages..”

However, being a Marxian, his task was simpler than that of a literary sleuth like CVB  (sort of Macroeconomics vs. Micro). We quote him again:

One of two positions had to be taken. Either India has no history at all, or some better definition of history was needed. The latter I derived from the study of Karl Marx, who himself expressed the former view. History is the development in chronological order of successive changes in the means and relations of production…Indian history has to be written without the episodes that fill the history books of other countries. But what were the relevant sources? Granted that the plough is more important than a dynasty, when and where was the tool first introduced? What class took the surplus produced thereby? Archaeology provided some data, but I could get a great deal more from the peasants. Field work in philology and social anthropology had to be combined with archaeology in the field as distinguished from the site archaeology of a ‘dig’…Tracing a local god through village tradition gives a priceless clue to ancient migrations, primitive tracks, early trade routes and the merger of cattle breeding tribesmen with food gatherers which led to firm agricultural settlement….Field investigation continues to give new and useful results…

Well, DDK could escape with those lachchedar words, but when it comes to pronouncing on a dazzling comet which streaked across our literary and spiritual skies, one can’t just hide behind Karl Marx’s back and say booo..(he, he, he, sorry..)

Yes, there is a sort of literary planchette which can tell a lot about people or events from words and words, it is called Vyas Parampara, and we shall write about it by this weekend in the next post, for the 1000 word limit set by Missus has been breached by us!

* George Bush: it really happened in 1999 when he was Governor of Texas and was being ragged by journalists, who asked him to name the heads of state of Taiwan, Pakistan, India and Chechnya

 * About Meera bhajans: Celebrated singers who have lent voice to Meera bhajans are MS Subbulakshmi, Lata Mangeshkar and Vani Jayaram, and music directors who have set them to music, Pt. Hridaynath Mangeshkar (Lata Mangeshkar) and Pt. Ravi Shankar (Vani Jayaram). Lamenting on his life's major regrets Pt. Ravi Shankar counts his act of touching Meera's bhajans as one of them- no one can recreate the Balasaheb-Lata magic, he said. Deadly axis, I sayyyy...

 * Supriya Verma and Jaya Menon, of JNU's Archaeology deptt. were independent academicians observing the digging operations.  They filed affidavits with evidence stating that the ASI created fake pillar bases etc. etc., to create evidence of the alleged temple, which affidavits the Hon Court refused to take on record on technical grounds. Some relics were also suspected to be planted at the site by  so-called Rambhaktas.