PONDICHERRY REVIEW OF BOOKS

One of the most tragic and neglected aspects of medieval historiography of India is the fate of Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina Temples. Sita Ram Goel several years back addressed this issue and indicted the medieval rulers for following a political strategy of destroying Hindu places of worship and the systematic destruction od Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina centres of worship and pilgrimage, he argues was party of the political and imperial ideology stemming from Islamic ideas of conquest and conversion of Darul Harb into Dar ul Islam, from Land of War to Land of Islam. Hence the destruction of Indian religious institutions cannot be view in isolation of the ideological underpinning of the Turkish, Afghan and Mughal rule over India. This interpretation was, of course, attacked by a whole host of historians from Alighr Muslim University, Delhi University and of course, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Is this interpretation a "communal" one or, even if not politically correct have the w...

The Conquest of India by the East India Company, the agrarian changes that came in its wake particularly the transition to commercial agriculture and of course, the introduction of western education and modes of governance changed the historical landscape of India. Concomitant with this very important historical transformation there was another a silent revolution whose social and cultural dimension are the subject of the book under review. The Western world, particularly the United Kingdom, took the lead in the abolition of Slave Trade and the House of Commons formally outlawed Slave trade by British citizens and UK went on very successfully to impose the abolition of Slave Trade by the force of its navy, a subject studied by Christopher Lyod. India was at hand to provide the labor required to run the agrarian economy of the British Empire founded on Sugar and in the case of the USA, Cotton. Emperor Sugar and King Cotton demanded labour on a scale that  the abolition of Slavery m...

One of the many  unfortunate aspects of India's tryst with destiny is that its foundational role as a civilization has been largely ignored by historians who were quick to latch on to the notion of India as a "nation state" and its encounter with China, South east Asia and the rest of mainland Asia has been underplayed. This neglect of India's larger role in Asian history was welcomed by the newly emergent nations of the region in the post World War II epoch, even as the Americans and the French were busy fashioning their own spheres of influence in the region. The plea or construct of Autonomous History meant underplaying the civilizational role of India in bringing the written script, ideas of statecraft and kingship, architectural and iconographic themes into the region. The famous notion of  Indianization  was abandoned and all the states of the region marched to the beat of the nation state. Now it seems the wheel has turned a full...

The book under review is a study of 71 letters received by Nicholaas Ondaatje, a Tamil practitioner of native medicine who was exiled to Cape Town for some act of misdemeanor by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) which capture Ceylon in 1654. Nicholaas was sentenced to spend 10 years on Robben Island and he seems to have worked out a fairly comfortable stay for himself at Cape Town. The judicial order sentencing him has been lost, but some documents of the case has survived and the editor has pieced together a fairly complete picture of the life of this individual in exile. There are few non western sources for the study of the social history of the early eighteenth century and the letters in this book are certainly an important source of documentation. In Pondicherry we have the journal of the  dubash , Ananda Ranga Pillai, a diary which offers insight into the emerging consciousness of individuality and self identity. The family of this Nicholaas Ondaatje was of Tamil origin a...

Sheldon Pollock has waded into far too many controversies in India, and I must say that his interventions have served no purpose whatsoever except to distract people from the seminal contribution he made to the study of Indian Literary Culture and History in his  Language of the Gods in the World of Men.  Unfortunately, Sheldon Pollock has become a highly divisive public figure and his broadsides against India and its politics are not his primary call for attention. He is a distinguished scholar and the book edited by him and Benjamin Elman are important interventions in the study of the histories and pasts of China and India. China and India share a common historical trajectory. Both were highly sophisticated civilizations with a long tradition of scholarship: Mandarin in the case of China and Sanskrit in the case of India. Both were victims of foreign conquest and both civilizations had to deal with questions of political legitimacy, administrative control, protecting the f...

The Madras Literary Society founder in 1817 is one of the oldest Research Institutions in India, and perhaps like St. Mary's Church located in Fort Saint George, which is the oldest Anglican Church outside of England, this society ranks as a pioneering institution. There are references in the Early Chronicles of the East India Company to a House of Curiosities called the Pantheon, perhaps the eponymous road in Egmore preserves that memory.  One of the strategies employed by the western world to enhance the reach of knowledge and gather the information about the world at large was through the establishment of Learned Societies. Charles II was the founder of the Royal Society and the model of having an institution which linked networks of commerce, shipping, military and scientific expeditions was keenly replicated in the territories of the East India Company. Thus Penang, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong all sprouted Royal Societies dedicated to the pursuit of archaeological and h...