Grandpoohbah's Blog

A Broken Piece Of History

2012-01-13T12:32:00.029+05:30

The 30th September Movement (Gerakan 30 September, abbreviated as G30S) was an organization of Indonesian Armed Forces officers who, in the wee hours following the night of September 30 1965, assassinated six top Indonesian Army generals in an abortive coup d'état.

Only Suharto escaped.

Later that morning, G30S declared that it had taken President Sukarno under its protection. Suharto, head of the strategic reserve, mobilized. By the end of the day, the coup attempt had failed in Jakarta. Meanwhile, in central Java there had been an attempt to take over an Army division, as well as several cities. By the time the G30S rebellion was put down, two more senior officers were dead.

In the days and weeks that followed, the Army blamed the coup attempt on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Soon a campaign of mass killing was underway, which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists. Suharto took over; his 32 year tenure was called the New Order. A few years after it finally ended, Transparency International named him 'the most corrupt leader of all time.'

In a New Order propaganda film Pemberontakan G30S PKI (The Sept. 30th PKI Rebellion), during the failed coup the generals were tortured before finally being killed. The generals' faces, it was claimed, were sliced with razors and their eyes were gouged out before their bodies were dumped into a hole. The Army, long cultivated by Western powers, turned on the PKI 'Maoists' with a vengeance.

The Dutch historian W.F. Wertheim says:

It is by no means certain that the leadership of the PKI or members of its central committee played a role of any importance in the preparation and execution of the putsch.

Many believe that it was Suharto who had egged on the G30S indirectly. The 1966 "Cornell report", a preliminary account of the event drawn up by academics Benedict R. O. Anderson and Ruth McVey from Cornell University, reached the conclusion that the coup was the outcome of an internal army affair, stemming from a small clique in a certain division, which attempted to use both Sukarno and the PKI leadership towards its own ends.

In Bali, in the waning days of Sukarno’s regime, conflict had increased between the high-caste capitalist class, and the lower-caste communists pursuing land reform and more equitable harvest-sharing with sharecroppers.

The communists were one of Sukarno's main supporters, and they were using his tottering regime to further their own agenda of taking over by winning the forthcoming elections. Dipa Nusantara Aidit, the Maoist theoretician heading the PKI, presided over a cadre that was the third largest communist organization in the world after the Soviet Union and China.

In the early 1960s, Bali’s first governor, the Sukarno-appointed Anak Agung Bagus Suteja, increased participation of the PKI in the island’s administrative bodies. The son of the last Raja of Jembrana, Anak Agung Bagus Suteja was influenced by socialist ideas from his school years. Dutch colonial authorities imprisoned him in 1948-49, and after Indonesian independence he was appointed governor of Bali by Sukarno, due to his royal lineage as well as his image of being a leftist idealist.

Land was seized unilaterally from the Brahman and Satria landowners, Wesiya or Chinese businessmen were kidnapped and found murdered. In retaliation, landlord-employed thugs destroyed sharecroppers’ crops and razed their huts, and various government offices were mysteriously burned. A slow-burning revolution, at once a civil war and a class war, was underway.

A serious of ominous natural catastrophes struck Bali: rat plagues, insect infestations, crop failures, and finally, the violent eruption of Gunung Agung in 1963.

The mountain exploded during the holiest of Balinese ceremonies, the once-in-a-century Eka Dasa Rudra, a purification rite in which harmony between people and nature is restored in all 11 directions. (The ceremony was forced to be held 10 years earlier than it was due at the behest of Sukarno, apparently to impress a convention of travel agents. Midway through Sukarno's shindig, Gunung Agung began to shower the area with ash and smoke, finally exploding in its most violent eruption in 600 years.)

The earthquake that accompanied the eruption toppled most temples. As molten lava rushed towards them, the Brahman priests prayed frantically, hoping to appease the angry gods, assuring the devotees they had nothing to fear. In the end, thousands of Balinese were killed, hundreds of thousands left homeless, and a layer of hot choking dust lay over the whole island -- a quarter of Bali had been turned into a black lava desert.

Displaced refugees poured into Denpasar and Singaraja where, together with unemployed urban poor, they formed a restive underclass ripe for mobilization by communist cadres, and even more caste-violence broke out.

Following the events of September 30, a tinder-box atmosphere settled over the island. In December 1965, once the anti-communist purges were mostly underway (or over) in Java, Suharto's special forces landed in Bali.

The killings on Bali started in earnest, and soon began to take on the dimensions of genocide.

Devout Balinese, led by the Brahman and the Satriya, murdered anyone suspected to be a godless communist. In the witch hunt, many old scores were settled, and many wealthy businessmen took advantage of the chaos to murder their competitors. It is a cliche that in Java the people had to be egged on to kill the communists; in Bali they had to be restrained. Vigilante groups drawn from families of upper-caste landlords butchered sharecroppers suspected to be PKI. Priests called for sacrifices to satisfy spirits angered by past sacrilege and social disruption. The Balinese Hindu leader, Ida Bagus Oka said "There can be no doubt the enemies of our revolution are also the cruelest enemies of religion, and must be eliminated and destroyed down to the roots."

The “trance of killings” reached a fever pitch in 1966, when entire "impious" clans in villages were being rounded up wholesale and slashed, clubbed, and chopped to death by communal consent. The purge became so indiscriminate that commandos finally had to step in to coordinate -- the military and police, working with civilian authorities, had to make sure only the “right” people were executed.

Anak Agung Bagus Suteja was summoned to Jakarta, he disappeared in the purges without a trace. PKI-head D.N. Aidit lived on the run until he was apprehended and executed. He remained defiant until the very end. Given half-an-hour before being executed, he started to deliver a speech. The passion with which he spoke made his captors very angry -- they were unable to control their rifle triggers. The location of Aidit's remains are unknown.

Between December 1965 and early 1966, an estimated 80,000 Balinese were killed, roughly 5 percent of the island's population at the time, and proportionally more than anywhere else in Indonesia. Based on his fieldwork in Indonesia in the 1970s and 80s, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that people remembered the killings as a "broken piece of history, evoked, on occasion, as an example of what politics brings."

Below, a contemporary 'student documentary' on remembering G30S.

Bali Yatra

2012-01-03T07:36:00.056+05:30

I am at the old Buleleng harbor in Singaraja, a day before the new moon of the month of Kartika (when Diwali is traditionally celebrated in India.)

In the historical Kalinga or Orissa, the subsequent full moon (Kartika Purnima) is celebrated as Bali Yatra -- the day the boats left for Bali. (More here. Above, Bali Yatra 2010 being celebrated at Cuttack's Gadagadia ghat on the Mahanadi river.)

As the sun retreats south throughout September, the northern part of the Indian subcontinent begins to cool off. With this, air increases in density and pressure begins to build up over northern India, while the Indian Ocean and its surrounding atmosphere still hold heat, making the air over the sea lighter. Cold winds start to sweep down from the Himalayas and Indo-Gangetic plain, towards the vast heat-sink of the ocean. This is known as the Northeast or Retreating Monsoon.

The Sadhabas (or Sadhavas) were the ancient mariners of Kalinga. Around Katrika Purnima (late Oct/early Nov), the winds from the Retreating Monsoons would waft their wooden boats over the waves of the Indian Ocean to Nusantara. During Bali Yatra, toy boats are floated in the rivers and beaches of Orissa.

The connection between Kalinga and the spice islands finds mention in Kalidasa's Raghuvamsa. The princess Indumati -- she whose navel is as beautiful as an eddy -- is to choose her own husband from amongst the assembled princes at a swayamvara. Indumati is the sister of the king of Vidharbha, and her old nurse Sunanda chaperones her, explaining the strengths of each suitor. King Hemangada of Kalinga is described as the master of the Indian Ocean, who enjoyed the fruits of trade with the islands therein:

यमात्मनः सद्मनि संनिकृष्टो मन्द्रध्वनित्याजितयामतूर्यः|
प्रासादवातायनदृश्यवीचिः प्रबोधयत्यर्णव एव सुप्तम्॥
yamātmanaḥ sadmani saṁnikṛṣṭo mandradhvanityājitayāmatūryaḥ |
prāsādavātāyanadṛśyavīciḥ prabodhayatyarṇava eva suptam ||

There is a great Ocean in the vicinity of the mansion of this king (of Kalinga) whose waves can be seen from the windows of that mansion… the Ocean-god himself gives watch and bugles with the sounds of his waves to wake up this king...

अनेन सार्धम् विहराम्बुराशेस्तीरेषु तालीवनमर्मरेषु|
द्वीपान्तरानीतलवङ्गपुष्पैरपाकृतस्वेदलवा मरुद्भिः॥
anena sārdham viharāmburāśestīreṣu tālīvanamarmareṣu|
dvīpāntarānītalavaṅgapuṣpairapākṛtasvedalavā marudbhiḥ ||

With such a king you can take pleasure trips in the groves of palm full with the murmur of leaves, on the seashore whereto breezes waft fragrance of clove flowers from far-dispersed islands of the Ocean.

Kalidasa, generally accepted to have written in the 4th century AD, has left vivid pictures of the civilization that reached those far-dispersed islands.

In the Raghuvamsa, Dilipa, the father of Raghu, begets his son through prayer and sacrifice. Once Raghu comes to the throne, he finds his father's vassals restive. Raghu, though young, determines to show them that no disloyalty will be tolerated. He decides on a show of strength in the form of a war-march. Starting from his capital Ayodhya, he first marches eastward to the Bay of Bengal; then to the south along the eastern shore to the tip of the Indian peninsula as far as Kanyakumari; from there, north along the western shore until he comes to the mouth of the Indus and the badlands under the depredations of the Hephthalites (White Huns); then, finally, through the outlying portions of the Himalayan plateau he enters Assam and thence returns to Ayodhya. In the end, Raghu performs a sacrifice declaratory of universal sovereignty, in which he distributes everything he has in his treasury, leaving himself a beggar.

The passages of Canto 4 (in which most of the above action happens) are full of interesting ethnographic observations. After the defeat of the 'Hunas' in Transoxiana:

तत्र हूणावरोधानां भर्तृषु व्यक्तविक्रमम्|
कपोलपाटलादेशि बभूव रघुचेष्टितम्॥
tatra hūṇāvarodhānāṁ bhartṛṣu vyaktavikramam|
kapolapāṭalādeśi babhūva raghuceṣṭitam ||

Raghu's valor expressed itself amongst the husbands of the Huna women, and it became manifest in the scarlet color of their cheeks.

The 6th-century Gothic historian Jordanes wrote that the Western Huns, upon the death of Attila, "disfigured their faces horribly, with deep wounds, so that the gallant warrior should be mourned not with the lamentations and tears of women, but with the blood of men." Similar customs have apparently been observed amongst the Kutrigurs, Turks, Magyars, and Tajiks.

विनयन्ते स्म तद्योधा मधुभिर्विजयश्रमम्|
आस्तीर्णाजिनरत्नासु द्राक्षावलयभूमिषु॥
vinayante sma tadyodhā madhubhirvijayaśramam|
āstīrṇājinaratnāsu drākṣāvalayabhūmiṣu ||

Raghu's soldiers removed their fatigue of victory by means of wine, while sitting on excellent antelope skins spread on the grounds of grape-orchards.

After crossing the River (Oxus?), Raghu and his army encountered the Kambojas, an ancient Indo-Scythian people often mentioned in Indian texts:

काम्बोजाः समरे सोढुं तस्य वीर्यमनीश्वराः|
गजालानपरिक्लिष्टैरक्षोटैः सार्धमानताः॥
kāmbojāḥ samare soḍhuṁ tasya vīryamanīśvarāḥ|
gajālānaparikliṣṭairakṣoṭaiḥ sārdhamānatāḥ ||

Along with the walnut trees that bent their tops unable to withstand the pull and push of the elephants tied to them with halters, the kings of Kamboja, too, bent their heads down before Raghu in token of their submission.

Many centuries later, of course, the name Kamboja would find another home in SE Asia.

Raghu's son is Aja. It is he who Indumati -- she of the banana-stem-like thighs -- garlands at the swayamvara. (It turns out they were two dancers from the heavens who had been cursed to go stay on earth.) The couple are fated to pass away soon (rejoining the celestial dance-halls of Indra) -- a flower from Narada's garland falls to the earth, crushing Indumati, an incident that also survives in the Javanese kakawin Death By Sumanasa Flower. Aja follows his beloved into death, leaving behind a year-old orphan. This is Dasaratha, father of the future avatar Rama.

Interestingly, the marriage ceremonies described in the Raghuvamsa match the traditional marriages of old Javanese texts -- the tying of clothes, the circumambulation of fire seven times, the offerings consigned to the flames in specific order - are the same and occur in the same sequence. See here for more.

Before the 1990s, the earliest direct evidence for contact between India and Indonesia indeed pointed to a start around Kalidasa's time. The evidence consisted of stone and metal inscriptions dating from the fourth and fifth centuries AD, found in West Java and Kalimantan.

Indirect evidence (cloves were known to Pliny The Elder, c. 70 AD), had, though, pointed at an earlier contact.

A few miles east of us is Sembiran. Recent excavation at Sembiran (undertaken by Universitas Udayana and the Indonesian National Research Centre of Archaeology) has established that the significance of this site is a very considerable one for Southeast Asian history.

Sembiran has recently yielded the first securely stratified evidence of Indian trade contact with Indonesia (dated to c. 2000 years ago), during the period of Rouletted Ware manufacture and Roman trade in southern and eastern India, as represented by the famous site of Arikamedu in Tamil Nadu. Neutron activation analysis has showed that the Sembiran specimens of Rouletted Ware have identical pastes to samples from Arikamedu, and certain shards have on them Brahmi or Kharoshthi characters.

I Wayan Ardika and Peter Bellwood have assessed the date range for the Sembiran materials as most likely in the AD 1-200 range, in terms of the chronological overlap between use of the Kharoshthi script and the Rouletted Ware.

From an article "An Indian Trader In Ancient Bali" by Lansing et al:

The site of Sembiran itself was located at the head of a small sheltered bay that no longer exists. Several inscriptions in the Old Balinese and Old Javanese languages were discovered in the vicinity. These inscriptions, written nearly a thousand years later (AD 896-1181), refer to long-distance or seafaring merchants (banyaga; banyaga saking sabrang); a merchant guild (banigrama; Sanskrit vanigrama); a market officer (ser pasar), and other aspects of seaborne trade. Ardika and Bellwood observed that in contemporary East Java the term banigrama is associated with foreign traders, and further that inscription Sembiran C (Old Javanese, 1181 AD) mentions that the term juru kling may be a specific term for Indians or the descendants of Indians. Ardika and Bellwood interpreted these inscriptional finds to indicate that this region of north-eastern Bali was the scene of intense maritime trading activity about 1000 years ago, with archaeological evidence pushing this activity back perhaps a millennium further. At that time, the Sembiran site likely consisted of a settlement located inside a small and shallow bay in the coastline, peopled by native Balinese who were presumably in contact with visiting traders who were able to bring in large amounts of Indian trade pottery sometime between 200 BC and AD 200.

Below, the old Buleleng Harbor of Singaraja, the few miles of coast through where Indian influence seems to have entered Bali in its early history.

Acintya

2011-12-28T04:09:00.083+05:30

Acintya -- "that beyond thought", "inconceivable", or "unimaginable" in Sanskrit -- is the Supreme God of Balinese Hinduism, equivalent to the concept of Brahman. He is the Supreme God in the traditional wayang theater of shadow puppets. Acintya is also called Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa in modern Balinese usage (the term means All-In-One Destiny Controller; it was invented in the 1930s by Christian missionaries to describe the Christian God to the Balinese, but quickly co-opted into popular usage to invoke, instead, the Acintya.)

In many temples on Bali or Lombok, Acintya is symbolized by an empty throne on top of the highest pillar or remotest outcrop (the Padmasana, or "Lotus Throne".)

The empty lotus throne can be seen repeatedly in early Buddhist art, there is a 2nd-century Mathura statue that symbolizes the Buddha as the absent but immanent teacher represented by an empty throne. However, the important distinction seems to be that Acintya, while also represented by an empty-throne, is, unlike the immanent Buddha, transcendent -- He teaches nothing, He corrects nothing, He just Is, outside our sense experience.

Prayers and offerings are not made directly to Acintya, but only to the other manifestations of the deity, i.e. the regular Hindu Trinity and the various dewa.

The Balinese mind, as we shall see, has recoiled from nothingness; so there is a figure like the Sun God with flames or rays erupting from his body, infinity-symbol arrows into the void, in the mandala behind the empty throne.

Acintya and his abode, the padmasana throne, were innovations credited to the immigrant Majapahit monk Nirartha, who led a major Hindu renaissance in Bali in the 16th century.

Nirartha ("Un-Meaning") was a Hindu monk, also called Dwijendra ("Lord of the Twice-Born") or Pedanda Shakti Wawu Rauh ("Newly Arrived Powerful High Priest"), who lived in eastern Java in the district of Blambangan, i.e. just across the Bali Strait. He came to Bali in the 1540s, just as Emperor Akbar was ascending the Mughal throne in India.

In Java, Majapahit authority was in decline; the northern coast, seat of many Muslim communities (made of both foreign merchants and Javanese), was in the process of declaring its independence from the Majapahit yoke, and the times were turbulent. Demak was established as the first Islamic Sultanate on Java. Yogyakarta and Surakarta were fragmenting as the ancien regime unravelled, to be replaced by local warlords declaring themselves as Sultan, turning their attention towards bringing the coasts back under the control of the interior.

As Islam came into Java from the North and the West, Majapahit priests must have watched the 1.5 mile strip of water separating Blambangan from Bali longingly; across the water, Gelgel and other principalities flexing their muscles promised to remain Hindu strongholds even as a new agama religion gained sway in Java.

So, legend says, across the water went Nirartha.

Formal historical facts about Nirartha are hard to find. Merle Ricklefs, formerly affiliated to the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, writes in his History of Modern Indonesia:

The inward-looking tendency of [Mataram Sultan] Agung's empire was in any case clear. He did not move his court to the to the north coast, where trade could be encouraged and supervised, but stayed in Mataram, which has neither access by river to the north coast, nor any ports of its own, and where the sea offers access only to the Goddess of the Southern Ocean's Domain . His wars had devastated the coastal areas to such an extent that the export of Javanese rice was affected, at least in some years. For trade and traders he had only contempt, as he explained to the first VOC ambassador in 1614. The dynasty of Mataram had conquered the coast at enormous cost; the crucial question for the future of the fragile empire was whether the coastal districts could be governed from the interior in such a way as to encourage the prosperity of all. If this could be done, Java would become a unified economic and military force of enormous potential. But events were to show that this was not to be.

Outside Java and Sumatra there were no conquerors to be compared with the kings of Aceh and Mataram ... There were important things happening in many areas, of course, but much of the history of this period in other areas has not been studied of is inadequately documented. The internal history of the Balinese kingdom of Gelgel during its golden age of sixteenth century cannot be reconstructed with confidence. Legends tell of the greatness of King Dalem Baturenggong and his priest Nirartha. Gelgel apparently dominated all of Bali and districts elsewhere from the Eastern Salient of Java to Lombok and Sumbawa, but with the present state of knowledge little more can be said with confidence.

Where SOAS could not help, I turned to Ida Bagus.

We were sipping luwak coffee. (Kopi Luwak is made from the beans of coffee berries which have been eaten by the Palm Civet Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, and then passed out through its digestive tract. In the cat's stomach, enzymes seep into the beans. After the beans have been defecated, they are gathered and roasted, yielding an aromatic coffee with little bitterness -- a Bali special.)

"Dwijendra Danghyang Nirartha Markandeya came from Mahameru in Java, sailing across the ocean on a pumpkin," he says. "One of his master's wives had fallen in love with him. He had to escape the embarrassing attention and keep his life simple." Bagus sighs and looks at the ocean in the middle distance, puffing on his kretek in silence for a while.

"He did not cross the Bali Strait, the Sultan's men always watched it closely, he went around and landed at Singaraja. The pumpkin kept him safe on a long journey. So it a taboo amongst the Brahmans of Bali, who are descended from Danghyang Nirartha, to ever cut or eat a pumpkin."

"The king Dalem Baturenggong heard of him, and invited him to desa Gelgel, to the south."

Danghyang Nirartha brought with him a belief in one Supreme God known as Acintya, and one supreme goal -- moksha -- in life. Moksha is an ancient Hindu concept meaning release from samsara and the suffering involved in being subject to the cycle of repeated death and reincarnation or rebirth; it was developed into the concept of nirvana by Buddhism. Acintya could be worshipped in his many manifestations through offerings of three elements : fire, water and fragrant flowers.

Perversely, in time the prayer and the offerings became inseparable from daily life, necessary in order to ensure the blessing of every venture. Rather than the mystic concepts grafted from Java, it was this preoccupation with offerings -- Bebali -- so dominated the everyday life that the island became known as Bali.

The word bebali is derived from we-walen, which roughly means "that which can be performed." Performed offerings are woven flowers; pagodas of fruit; spun cloth; wayang puppet shows; or dance-dramas.

Following the ouster of Sukarno in the mid-1960s, Pancasila was reinterpreted in the official Indonesian policy on religion to only recognise monotheism. The first of the silas asks for "Belief in the one and only God, (Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa.)" The concept of Acintya helped the Balinese reconcile their religion with the framework of official monotheism. Interestingly, the title of Maha Esa (Mahesha) has traditionally in Hinduism been Shiva's. The Indonesian Buddhists Organization at this time also proposed that there was a single supreme Buddhist deity, Sang Hyang Adi Buddha.

Clifford Geertz, the emeritus anthropologist of cultural symbols, writes:

Bali, where I worked both in another small provincial town, though one rather less drifting and dispirited, and, later, in an upland village of highly skilled musical instruments makers, is of course in many ways similar to Java, with which it shared a common culture to the fifteenth century. But at a deeper level, having continued Hindu while Java was, nominally at least, Islamized, it is quite different. The intricate, obsessive ritual life--Hindu, Buddhist, and Polynesian in about equal proportions--whose development was more or less cut off in Java, leaving its Indic spirit to turn reflective and phenomenological, even quietistic, in the way I have just described, flourished in Bali to reach levels of scale and flamboyance that have startled the world and made the Balinese a much more dramaturgical people with a self to match. What is philosophy in Java is theater in Bali.

As a result, there is in Bali a persistent and systematic attempt to stylize all aspects of personal expression to the point where anything idiosyncratic, anything characteristic of the individual merely because he is who he is physically, psychologically, or biographically, is muted in favor of his assigned place in the continuing and, so it is thought, never-changing pageant that is Balinese life. It is dramatis personae, not actors, that endure; indeed, it is dramatis personae, not actors, that in the proper sense really exist. Physically men come and go, mere incidents in a happenstance history, of no genuine importance even to themselves. But the masks they wear, the stage they occupy, the parts they play, and, most important, the spectacle they mount remain, and comprise not the facade but the substance of things, not least the self. Shakespeare's old-trouper view of the vanity of action in the face of mortality--all the world's a stage and we but poor players, content to strut our hour, and so on--makes no sense here. There is no make-believe; of course players perish, but the play does not, and it is the latter, the performed rather than the performer, that really matters.

... The Balinese have at least a half-dozen major sorts of labels, ascriptive, fixed, and absolute, which one person can apply to another (or, of course, to himself) to place him among his fellows. There are birth-order markers, kinship terms, caste titles, sex indicators, teknonyms, and so on and so forth, each of which consists not of a mere collection of useful tags but a distinct and bounded, internally very complex, terminological system. When one applies one of these designations or titles (or, as is more common, several at once) to someone, one therefore defines him as a determinate point in a fixed pattern, as the temporary occupant of a particular, quite untemporary, cultural locus. To identify someone, yourself or somebody else, in Bali is thus to locate him within the familiar cast of characters--"king," "grandmother," "third-born," "Brahman"--of which the social drama is, like some stock company roadshow piece-- Charley's Aunt or Springtime for Henry --inevitably composed.

Under the auspices of Nirartha's spiritual leadership the six directional Sad Kahyangan temples were built or expanded: Pura Besakih, Pura Batur, Pura Sukawana, Pura Batukaru, Pura Andakasa and Pura Lempuyang, centres of worship for all Hindu Balinese. All have high empty thrones dedicated to Acintya, standing silent as women bear pagodas of fruit and girls sway with bebali below.

At Batukaru, the Western of the the directional temples (dedicated to Mahadewa) the padmasana shrine is at the back, in the far right corner. Acintya is depicted in gold at the top, His back towards the most sacred mountain. The lowest level of the padmasana throne is supported on the back of the cosmic turtle, the Bedawang, which carries the Universe on his back. The two eternal serpents, Nagas Basukih and Anantaboga, lie coiled over the turtle to dampen the earthquakes which arise when it stirs. While the padmasana is now one of many shrines, and probably not the primary one in anything but name, the concept of Nirartha's Acintya of the ultimate liberation, transported from the Indus, to Mathura, to Java, to this remote mountain on Bali, watches forlornly over the present.

From Arun Das Gupta's essay on Rabindranath's voyage to Indonesia:

Rabindranath was looked upon in Bali as a Mahaguru, not in the sense of a university professor but of something reminiscent of the ancient Indian Hindu sage Bharata Guru Agastya. The raja of Karang Asem, who had a philosophic cast of mind, wanted the poet to interpret some passages from the sastra (Balinese religious texts) for him. [Suniti Kumar] Chatterji, with his knowledge of Sanskrit, helped out as much as possible. The raja then surprised his Indian visitors by asking a philosophical question. He asked what, if the worship of gods, the building of temples, the performance of funeral ceremonies and the observance of social codes cannot be the final aim in life, man's ultimate quest should be. Chatterji replied by asking the raja to answer the question himself. Then came the startling reply: 'Dewa Dewa tida apa, Nirvana satu' (Gods and their worship are immaterial, Nirvana is the supreme goal). Tagore was greatly touched and in his poem on Bali referred to this encounter as follows: 'We said the same mantras together, pondered over the same question of Nirvana'.

Before leaving Bali, Tagore was to write in a letter home:

The island is beautiful, the people are very nice, but my mind does not want to make a home here ... In the air of India, in her rivers and fields, in all her nature, I have seen a generosity of the spirit ... I see there a lot of pain, her human habitations are images of misfortune, but overcoming all these, in her skies a voice comes to us crossing the ages, bearing a message of the greatest of liberations. In the lower parts of India there are the shackles of pettiness, the constant hubbub of the inconsequent, and the despair of those that are less; but her upper aspect is a seat of the immense, her invitation an eternal one towards the infinite.

Nirartha lived out his life in Bali teaching and codifying. The Balinese kakawin poem Mayantaka is attributed to him. It is said that Nirartha achieved moksha in Pura Luhur Uluwatu, the last padmasana shrine built by him. The message of moksha -- that awful eternity without labels -- taken in like bitter Java, passed through the Polynesian body of Bali, to yield the fragrant and aromatic bebali.

Below, Pura Luhur Batukaru (also spelt Batukau.)

Income To Which No Tears Are Attached

2011-12-23T06:40:00.071+05:30

A study says that Bali needs at least 516,000 hectares of productive land to feed its population. The island has only 325,000 hectares of fertile land. According to WHO standards, Bali can only sustain a population of about 1 million; 1.6 million would be 'tolerable'; the actual population is 3.32 million. On top, 2.5 million tourists visit every year.

The island's water supply is 4.7 million cubic meters per year, while 5.4 million cubic meters are used annually. The major lakes are falling, in some cases the water level goes down a foot a year. Water levels are trending down in a majority of Bali's rivers, and deep wells are being bored to make up for the loss of surface water. Of course, as ground water is pumped out, sea water from all around the island seeps in. Farmers in south Denpasar can no longer grow crops in the brackish soil, they sell their land to developers building one tourist enclave after another. Bali now has 50,000 hotel rooms; and the hotels have successfully resisted any meaningful water tax.

For a thousand years, Bali had its own traditional pulsed system of irrigation, called the subak. The subak system -- built around water temples whence allocation of water is made by a priest -- is famous among anthropologists and agronomists for its engineering, its social structure, and the guiding hand of religion.

As Bali's 400 rivers and streams issue from the central highland catchment areas, they dig deep channels in the volcanic rock. For a thousand years, farmers have cut tunnels through the rock to feed water into aqueducts, from where bamboo piping carries the water to the top of terraced rice fields. Gravity does the rest, the water flows down from terrace to terrace till it comes to down to the level of the beaches. Sluices or gates on dams are opened or closed to create pulsing -- inundating the seedlings when desired, drying them out when needed. Irrigation tunnels are precision-engineered through rock, running for kilometers at a time, to accurate delivery at the top of the fields; the oldest has inscribed on its walls AD 944 as the year of construction.

Anthropologists have enduringly viewed the rise of central state power as tied to the administration of irrigation. Karl Marx believed that "the prime necessity of an economical and common use of water .... necessitated in the Orient ... the centralizing power of government." When Engels asked him for substantiation, he replied that an "intact example" was Bali.

When the Dutch colonized Bali, they felt that control over irrigation was one of the powers they should inherit from the Balinese royal houses. They also felt that the island should be run profitably. One popular idea in the Netherlands was for the colonial government to own an opium import monopoly, by which it could sell "juice" to the natives at handsome profit, and use some of that profit to run the island.

Opium had been traditionally traded in Bali by the Bugis from Sulawesi, and also the Chinese. The merchants paid a duty to the local rajas who ruled each district in Bali. Around the 1890s, annual agricultural tax revenue in any one raja's domains did not amount to much more than 15,000 dutch guilders (each guilder or dutch florin was about 10 grams of silver.) In comparison, opium revenue for the island was close to 1,000,000 guilders.

The Dutch decided to take control, abolishing independent opium sales, forcing people to buy only from them, in Bali as in Java. The rajas who revolted were mown down with guns.

Henri Hubert van Kol, a Dutch parliamentarian, visited Bali in 1902 with the goal, alongside travel, of reporting back to the Dutch government how to administer the island better. The promotion of opium, by the time van Kol arrived, had done even more damage to the Dutch East Indies than the wars that ended in colonization. He wrote:

On Java alone, 16 million guilders are obtained from 150,000 Chinese and Javanese who could spend that money on better things than poppy juice. The native becomes poorer, and brings his jewelry, clothes and tools to be pawned. He pawns his land and would rather commit a crime than work ...

Most of the addicts were modest users, but under the monopoly opium was more expensive -- when the income of a family was scarcely 100 guilders a year, the total revenue stated by van Kol indicates that most of the users spent their entire income on opium.

H.H. van Kol lobbied strenuously to abolish the opium monopoly and develop tax revenues more along the traditional lines of agricultural land and water taxes, so that the economy of Bali could be based on "income to which no tears are attached."

Eventually his argument prevailed; but when the Dutch colonial state tried to take control of the systems of agriculture, they found to their consternation that the kings enjoyed no power over irrigation.

The princes of Bali had diffuse, overlapping kingdoms whose boundaries were entangled and disputed. Most of the kingdoms straddled watersheds and there was little possibility of controlling water upstream in one watershed without inviting retribution in another. Confounding conventional and Marxist theories, it turned out that the water was actually controlled by temples, not kings.

A subak consists of all the rice terraces irrigated from a single dam. The dams are stacked one below the other down the river canyons. From the dam, a single canal system, usually of a few kilometers' length, carries diverted water to the subak, often with the aid of overhead aqueducts or tunnels.

Individual farmers whose fields are irrigated by a subak form a congregation that then becomes affiliated with the activities of the particular water temple.

The water temple -- pura -- is headed by a Hindu priest, who draws up a calendar of water use -- when the planting season starts, which subak draws water when, and how the pulses of water flow out. Water interacts with the soil in fields as part of a complex agri-biology -- the pulsed cycles impact soil pH, temperature, nutrient circulation, aerobic conditions, micro-organism growth, pest-drowning, weed suppression etc. -- the pura calendar accounts for all these aspects. The system is fragile, even a day's disorder in water-flow will damage a farmer's crop.

Pura congregation-members prepare offerings to the gods, repair and decorate temples, clear small field canals, mend dykes and make repairs to water channels. The head priest of Pura Er Jeruk explained the system to American anthropologist Stephen Lansing thus:

There are 14 subaks all of which meet together as one here. They meet at the Temple Er Jeruk. Every decision, every rule concerning planting seasons and so forth, is always discussed here. Then, after meeting here, decisions are carried down to each subak. The subaks each call all their members together: "In accord with the meeting we held at the Temple Er Jeruk, we must fix our planting dates, beginning on day one through day ten."

For example, first subak Sango plants, then subak Somi, beginning from day ten to day twenty ...

Heeding van Kol's advice, the Dutch had tried to convert Bali into a plantation economy -- a colonial dependency with roads, railways, shipping etc., designed to support the conversion of a subsistence agriculture into cash crops. Of the process of creating this colonial dependency, Lansing writes in The Three Worlds of Bali :

The classical states of Bali were not merely conquered but obliterated: the people killed, the libraries burned, the palaces reduced to rubble. It is all the more remarkable, then, that the cultural and institutional life of Bali. Balinese civilization, in fact was able to survive...The real roots of this civilization lay elsewhere, in intertwining networks of thousands of temples where the power of the myths was guarded, nurtured, studied ...

While the Dutch destroyed what part of Bali they could see -- by abolishing the monarchy and radically remaking the visible culture, the temples tucked away in the paddies endured. Lansing notes that the Dutch did not understand the decentralized system of irrigation, nor the importance of water temples in agricultural production, and they abandoned any attempts to intervene in water management solely allowing the ancient system to transpire. They did install an irrigation bureaucracy, which consisted of collecting rice taxes, performing land surveys, and building irrigation works, yet they remained clueless as to the vital role of water temples in both agriculture and social organization.

Lansing states:

Because the Dutch model of irrigation vastly underestimated the complexity of the sociobiophysical systems involved in rice production, water temples and bureaucracies coexisted without creating technical problems in irrigation control. Most Balinese rice terraces continued to produce two crops per year, as they had before the arrival of the Dutch.

After Indonesia became independent, the new state continued on a path of development based on the bureaucratic capitalism, as designed by the colonizers. This resulted in a disastrous attempt at a Green Revolution.

The Bali Irrigation Project was launched in 1979 by the Asian Development Bank in order to improve the performance of irrigation systems while disregarding the practical role of the pura. All of the new changes contradicted the traditional water management based on ritual and religious cycles. Lansing writes:

The Green Revolution approach assumed that agriculture was a purely technical process and that production would be optimized if everyone planted high-yielding varieties of rice as often as they could. In contrast, Balinese temple priests and farmers argued that the water temples were necessary to coordinate cropping patterns so that there would be enough irrigation water for everyone and to reduce pests by coordinating fallow periods.

If farmers on adjacent fields synchronize their cropping patterns to create a uniform fallow period over a sufficiently large area, rice pests are temporarily deprived of their habitat and their populations can be sharply reduced. Field studies indicate that synchronized harvest/fallow patterns result in pest losses of around 1%, compared to losses upwards of 50% during continual cropping as imposed by the Green Revolution's "Massive Guidance."

While the first few years brought greater harvest, Massive Guidance quickly led to ecological collapse. The lack of crop rotation and natural harvest/fallow cycles resulted in less productive fields. As the pests could not be controlled by fallow fields interrupting their breeding cycles, massive use of pesticides was pushed onto the farmers. The new pesticides killed the good insects that used to eat the bad ones.

Balinese farmers began pressing the government for a return to irrigation scheduling by the pura, but were taken to task for their religious doggedness and 'conservatism.' In 1983, the US National Science Foundation sponsored Lansing to examine the role of water temples in Balinese irrigation management. Lansing subsequently tried to convey to development officials that the rituals of the water temples were a historically successful system of ecological management that should not be ignored. The Asian Development Bank wrote back:

We do not fully share the expressed concerns of Mr. Lansing. Certainly there is a direct relationship between large areas of fallow land for a considerable period and the population of pests. However, pest control programs carried out efficiently and effectively will control the pest population and allow growing of rice year-round if adequate water resources are available as is done, for example, in certain areas of Central and East Java where farmers grow three rice crops per annum. It should be noted, that there is no development without affecting traditional systems or customs. Everybody can criticize and damage a project, but only a few people can overcome those difficult problems and make the project viable.

In 1987, Lansing collaborated with a computer simulation expert, James Kremer, to calculate the effects of various crop management scenarios. Their model, using historical rainfall data, concluded that the traditional water temple system was far more effective than the government's policy. Around 1991 Jakarta started to back down; development agencies are now encouraging Balinese rice farmers to return to the system that had served them well for over a thousand years. The farmers are inching back to making $600 per year from their rice crops, i.e. subsisting on the iconic $2/day.

In the meantime, of course, tourists have discovered Bali; as mentioned the island now gets 2.5 million visitors a year and boasts of 50,000 hotel rooms. Tourism is the new opium. In the 1990s Australian college-students discovered the drunken-bikini-scene in Kuta, and more recently Liz Gilbert has opened the eyes of American single-white-females to Ubud. Rice farmers are selling out of their land, foreigners are moving in to build "Bali style" bungalows.

Outside Goa Gajah, as we draw into the parking lot an elderly parking attendant waves to Ida Bagus. "My uncle," he explains, "my mother's brother."

"If this were India," I tease him, "you would have hid from your elder that cigarette you are smoking."

"I know," says Ida Bagus. "He is always telling me to quit. My uncle's side is very .... hmm ... holy ... they used to be water-temple priests."

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald titled "Bali skirts the fine line between selling body and soul" says:

We decide over lunch that she's almost certainly a Bulgarian hooker, this girl with the blonde mullet, the full-body tan and the iPod tucked fetchingly into her G-string. With the dreamy-jerky movements of a Sim she dances alone at the centre of the beach-shack restaurant, directing her Mona Lisa smile at the dreadlocked Aussie surfers.

As her toasted pelvis rotates mesmerically, two things strike me. First, that she gives new meaning to the term Bali belly. Second, that as livings go, Bulgarian hooker probably still beats 50-kilogram top-of-the-head load-bearer for $2 a day, like the mother of the taxi driver who brought us to this out-of-the-way Balinese beach ...

"Bali style'', now a sort of global soft porn for design heads. You know the look. Dark satiny timber, broad eaves, simple planes, glancing daylight, walled courts, infinity pools, gauzy hangings, luscious views and frangipani evenings strewn with tiny lights. Far grander than Bali-colloquial, Bali style has shades of Japanese serenity, Polynesian sensuality and cool Moorish seclusion. It does for Bali architecture what Paul Simon did for Zulu music; enriching and teasing it open for Western tastes without diminishing its power.

But this very lusciousness, with its enormous drawing power, is part of the problem. Already, while tourists pad around endless azure pools on emerald lawns fringed with luxuriant tropical planting, Bali beyond the touro-strip is parched and brown.

Locals say it hasn't rained for a year. The lovely golden cattle sit emaciated on picked-bare dirt. Groundwater is depleted, rivers dry or polluted, and lakes seven metres down. Water comes by tanker over roads that are more pothole than asphalt, and then by head - yet the big hotels strenuously oppose any increase in the water tax.

For the moment, Bali continues to rotate its pelvis and smile seductively at its fat white guests. But does it, in quiet moments, wonder at what point hospitality becomes prostitution?

Below, a walk in the rice fields.

I Made Brahma

2011-12-17T03:27:00.140+05:30

Ida Bagus Dalem is driving us around in Bali. He solemnly hands me his card -- it states his name, his mobile phone, his village, and then, in proud red letters, "#1 Troublemaker In Bali."

Bagus is about 40, stocky and muscled, a curlicued dragon-tattoo covering his shoulder and biceps. The tourism food-chain in Bali is complicated, and Bagus is at its bottom; at the top are lenders from Java who finance cars, followed by rich people in Bali who import them, then there are fleet operators who manage them, tourist-agencies who make commission-based retail bookings, and finally the drivers who are paid daily wages. "I am a Brahman", says Bagus. "My whole village is Brahman. I work for a Satriya who runs an agency. A Wesiya leases the car. A Sudra in Kuta imported it. Most of the money you are paying goes to Muslims in Java." He seems happy with this arrangement, an inversion of the traditional Hindu caste-structure. Unusually for Bali, Bagus is single, and lives in his older brother's family compound. His sister-in-law feeds him every day, and his nephews sleep around him on those nights he is not out chasing girls.

We pass artisan villages as we head from Sanur to Ubud; here a clump of houses making silverware, there one carving statues. Prominent signs outside proclaim "I Made Rama", "I Made Budi", "I Made Indra" and so on.

This is not the pride of the sculptor, but a complicated naming system at work.

The European system of given name(s) followed by surname is a relatively recent template. In ancient times up to the middle ages people could be reasonably identified by one name: Aelfred, or Beowulf, or Cicero; you got by just as Socrates. Only by the 16th century did monarchs (Francis I of France, Henry VIII of England) require persons to take surnames. It is likely the change was fueled by increased population and increased mobility -- people were showing up in London or Paris from faraway parts and no one knew which Henri you meant. Leonardo? the one from Vinci near Florence? The Basque from Gama?

The Balinese naming system is different; it consists of rules that indicate gender, clan, birth-order, what their parents expect them to be, and so on. A baby is not named right away at birth -- parents will wait till specific days on the traditional calendar to name a newborn with a Balinese Hindu ritual.

If the child is chronically sick, or otherwise unlucky, it is felt the name was not suitable, and another can be chosen when the child is older. (Sukarno, who had a Javanese aristocratic Muslim father and Balinese Hindu Brahman mother, had to get his name changed from Kusno Sosrodihardjo to Su Karno, or Good Karna, after surviving a childhood illness.)

After marriage, the wife does not take the husband's name.

There is also widespread use of teknonyms -- when your first child is born you lose your birth-name and begin to be called "Father of Shiwa" or "Mother of Shinta". Again, when your grandchild is born, you become "Grandfather of Prayuda" or "Grandmother of Srikandi". Over time, all but a few of your contemporaries forget your birth-name.

As we drive cross- and circum-island (the owner of the agency calls every night to complain about the unexpectedly large number of miles being logged on his leased car), I have long discussions with Bagus about what goes into a Balinese name. Here are (as I understand them, no doubt imperfectly) the Balinese naming templates:

I or Ni signify gender - Male or Female.

The next part is a caste-name. Brahmans have the initial honorific of Ida, and males of the senior-most Brahman clan on Bali are titled Ida Bagus. The women of this clan are called Ida Ayu.

The Satria have caste-names like Anak Agung (male), Anak Agung Ayu or Anak Agung Istri (female); Agung means great or prominent. Putra, or Prince, for a boy, and Putri, or Princess, for a girl, are also used.

Wesiya caste-names are Gusti (meaning prominent-person, or leader, akin to the Sanskrit mahajan), Desak, and so on.

There are no special caste-names the Sudra. Traditionally they only add I for male or Ni for female in front of their names.

The next part of the name signifies birth order. Wayan/Putu/Gede/Nengah are used for the first born baby, Made/Kedek for the second born, Nyoman/Komang for the third born, and Ketut for the fourth born baby. For No. 5, you go back to Wayan, No. 6 could again be Kedek and so on. Obviously, if a couple have children there will be a Wayan, so finding someone called Wayan in Bali is like trying to find a Rama in India.

Subsequently, the name might be personalized with some circumstance of birth. If there was bad weather when the mother gave birth, a male second-born baby might be named I Made Kerug (kerug means thunder). If born on a Sunday, a male first-born baby might be named I Wayan Redite (redite means Sunday). If there are no remarkable circumstances, you name the baby after a deity or cultural concept -- e.g. I Made Wisnu.

More examples -- Ida Ayu Ngurah, meaning Brahman woman, of the most-high Long Life clan, whose personal name is Ngurah, or Gift from Heaven. Anak Agung Rai, meaning a Satriya whose personal name is King. I Gusti Ketut Rajendra, male of the Wesiya caste, fourth born, whose personal name is the Lord of Kings. Ketut Liyer, the fortune-teller from Eat Pray Love ("sometimes to lose balance for love is part of living a balanced life"), has a name that means Fourth Born Bright Light. (See here for a post-fame encounter with Ketut 'liar'.)

All over Bali you see checkered cloth (black-and-white, saffron-and-white) draped over trees or statues, or worn by people in ceremonies. The cloth is called saput poleng -- poleng means two-colored -- and it signifies the deep understanding that overcomes black-and-white thinking. The more enlightened you are, you see that sorrow is part of happiness, learn that a mistake is a path to the truth, understand that nothing is prescriptively bad or good, and accept both laughter and tears as gifts. Poleng is a common "given" name -- 'Gus Made, the most famous painter of the Balinese Pita Maha generation -- his famous tempera Legong Dance is below -- had as his full name Ida Bagus Made Poleng.

Once a child is born, the parents' birth names cease to be used. The teknonym appears; after the birth of their son Poleng, a couple whose names were Pudja and Deblog are now called Father of Poleng and Mother of Poleng.

The circularity after 4 stations -- Wayan to Made to Nyoman to Ketut back to Wayan -- also appears in the naming of generations. The word for great-grandfather -- kumpi -- is the same as that for great-grandson. This identity of generations reveals itself in prayers to the dead. The deceased's contemporaries -- siblings, cousins, friends -- will not pray to him as he is not senior to them. The dead get prayers from three generations below, but not from the fourth generation, i.e. the great-grandchildren; the kumpi are regarded as being cyclically linked back to the same generation, and not junior to the deceased. The 5th generation, i.e. consisting of the great-great-grandchildren, is regarded as senior to the deceased and would also not pray to him.

The Balinese kin group, in some ways similar to the Hindu gotra, is the dadia. We have encountered the Ida Bagus dadia. In the case of the three upper castes, the triwangsa, an illustrious Majapahit immigrant would be the common ancestor. (The Javanese conquerors of Bali in Gajah Mada's time contributed the Brahmans, Satrias and Wesiyas. 93% of the population of Bali, who represent wong Bali, i.e. the original people of Bali as distinct from the colonizing wong Majapahit, are Sudras.) Brahmans are, more specifically, said to be descended from Nirartha, the Javanese priest who came with the Majapahit and codified Balinese Hinduism.

The triwangsa are also referred to as wong jero, which means insiders (they lived inside the fortified walls of the conquerors) and the Sudras are referred to as wong jaba or outsiders (they lived outside the walls, in the country.)

Unlike gotras, however, dadia groups are not exogamous; by preference they are endogamous -- you try to marry within your circle of close kin. The ideal partner is a patriparallel cousin, which, for a male, would be his father's brother's daughter, that is, his first cousin on his father's side. The resources of the bride's family stay within the dadia, preventing fragmentation of scarce land. (In certain cases, you can pay a fine to the local ruler and be allowed to marry outside the dadia, as in the cases of elopement or abduction.)

Note that coupled-cousins are also common, for much the same reasons, within European royalty (list here). Charles Darwin married his first cousin Emma (their grandparents were also cousins), and Albert Einstein married his mother's sister's daughter Elsa, who was also his second cousin from his father's side.

The Sudra in Bali are not untouchable; while they are of lower status, the concept of touch-pollution does not exist. Inter-caste marriage is tolerated, and there always has been a certain amount of caste-mobility. The king of Klungkung, whose ancestors were installed by Gajah Mada, technically changes from being a Brahman to a Satria when he becomes the ruler (though he retains, uniquely among Satria, the title Dalem, see here.) Mixed marriages, however, still result in a change of status, and the rules concerning such status-changes are complex and reflect the power of patriarchy. A high caste triwangsa man may marry a lower caste Sudra woman; continued for three generations, high caste is lost. Till then, the children automatically receive their father's status; the wife enjoys a higher position, changing her title to jero (insider.) A high-caste woman, however, cannot marry a lower-caste man.

Today, modern economies and politics have upended the power structure of caste, but it still manifests itself in language. "For you can not speak the same Balinese language when you talk to a Sudra as you do when you talk to a Brahman like me." says Bagus. "It is a taboo."

There are three caste-contexted dialects of the Balinese language; they are Bali Alus (from halus, decorum; the highest level), Bali Madya (middle level) and Bali Sor (the lowest level). Bali Madya and Bali Sor are spoken in Balinese daily life, and can be used amongst friends or people of the same caste. Bali Alus must be used when talking to someone of a higher caste.

"Have you had your lunch?", in each caste-contexted dialect is:
Bali Alus : Sampun ngrayunang?
Bali Madya : Sampun Ngajeng?
Bali Sor : Sube medaar?

Think of the difference as being that between English greetings based on the tone of familiarity the speaker wishes to strike:
Good Morning, Sir!,
'Morning!, and
How's goes it, dude!
Only, in Bali, the entire language is so stratified, and all speech must follow the caste-context. Even a waiter or a bellboy, if suspected to be a Brahman, would normally be spoken to in High Balinese as a mark of respect for his caste.

When a Sudra meets a Brahman he reflexively bows his head. Pavilions in palaces and houses are tiered to allow people to sit in accordance with their status -- a delicate way to ascertain a person's caste is to ask where they want to sit -- "Oh, I'd prefer downstairs." At meals, the highest-caste-rank person eats first, and it is not polite to leave until he gets up. This makes Ida Bagus Dalem very uncomfortable, to the point he refuses to eat with others.

In India, caste is, theoretically, an outcome of one's karma in previous incarnations; and, practically, it used to denote distance from political power (after becoming Chhatrapati, Shivaji brought Gagabhat of Varanasi to establish his lineage into the Rajput Kshatriya Sisodias.)

In Bali, caste does not have much of a theoretical explanation, but indicates (in ways similar to Aryan peripheries) how much one's Majapahit paternal line has mixed with aboriginal Balinese maternal ones.

As we drive to Singaraja, we pass a number of shops belonging to the Pande clan: Manik Pande's Kris Daggers, Sidarta Pande's Blades. In India, Pande would be a Brahmin surname, but in Bali the Pandes are a hereditary clan, set apart from the caste system. They are the smiths; the most influential among them being blacksmiths: Pande besi. You can learn how to make steel, but you cannot be called a blacksmith; the only way to become a blacksmith is to be born a Pande besi.

In Bali, many clan groups wrote lontars, formal religious charter documents, to codify, and amplify, their right to status greater than mere Sudra. The Pande clan's lontar, called the Prasasti Sira Pande Mpu, offers a history that is vivid and full of the molten-metal-worker's hubris. The Prasasti Sira Pande Mpu outlines a pre-Hindu mythology that describes the creation of Brahma, who appears in elemental Fire -- here, truly, 'I Made Brahma.' Mpu Pradah is proclaimed the first head of Pande clan. The lontar states that the Brahmans obtained their knowledge and power from the Pande, that the Pande are older than the Brahmans, and that they are of greater power and prestige. Pandes are not permitted to obtain holy water from Brahman priests because such priests are the inferior younger-brothers of the Pandes. Pande areas have their own temples and their own pemangku lay priests, who make their own holy water for use only by the Pande people.

The document also includes a declaration of independence, for those skilled clans who had the knowledge-base to refute agama Hindu hegemonies. The lontar contains warnings to other caste-less people, that, rather than follow the triwangsa, they should emulate the Pandes.

In the old days, even Brahmans spoke to those working as smiths in High Balinese. Pandes are also permitted to have 11 tiers on their cremation towers, an honor only accorded to persons of very high caste.

Bagus claims, half-preening and half-sheepish, that young Brahman single men like him are the playboys of Bali, able to catch girls easily; a Sudra girl still dreams of climbing the hierarchy and becoming a Jero, a newly-minted Brahman woman; she will, fantasizes Bagus, offer herself to any young Brahman who beckons with a finger. What about Sudra boys? "Their goal, every weekend," says Bagus solemnly "is to bring a Brahman girl into their arms. That is a very nice target for them."

And what language would be used? He guffaws -- "In bed? Of course the most familiar!"

Below - Bagus takes us into the Uluwatu temple.

Narasinga

2011-12-11T09:03:00.039+05:30

At the highest point in the range of hills above Yogyakarta, where on a clear day you can see the planes forever taking off from Adisucipto, is Candi Ijo -- a 9th century Shaivite temple. Near it has been found, curiously, the only statue of Vishnu's Narasimha (Man-Lion) avatar encountered in Indonesia. The 4th avatar of Vishnu is Narasinga to the Javanese.

We are far down, on Malioboro St in Yogya, crushed within throngs of revelers celebrating, with a carnival, a royal wedding. Sultan Hamengkubuwono X’s fifth (and youngest) daughter, Gusti Kanjeng Ratu Bendara, a hotel management graduate from Switzerland, is getting married to a Sumatran civil servant (who has been elevated to royalty as Prince Yudanegara) at a mosque inside the Palace complex (story here.) President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is in town with the First Lady, and so is everyone else: the procession we are in the midst of was supposed to draw 100,000 souls.

"Too squishy." Mr. M says stoically as we watch, from the head of the parade, the floats set off one by one.

One of the floats is under police protection, perhaps the only one with a religious motif. A cop on a motorcycle is parked abreast of a statue of a fierce Vishnu with a lion's head (i.e. the Man-Lion or Narasimha avatar), attacking the demon-king Hiranyakashipu, who was about to kill his own son Prahlada because he worshipped Vishnu. The demon-king has collapsed, lying across Narasimha's thigh, his head hanging down, his arms hanging helplessly and his legs in the air in aimless struggle. Narasimha is ripping open the demon-king's abdomen with two hands, the entrails dangling.

A quick recap of the story from the Puranas:

In his previous avatar of Varaha (Boar), Vishnu had killed the demon Hiranyaksha whose depredations had become intolerable to mankind.

Hiranyaksha's brother Hiranyakashipu, greatly angered, decided the only fit revenge would be to kill Vishnu (the Protector of the Universe to Hindus.) Since only the most supernatural of powers would do, he believed Brahma, the Creator, might be the sole recourse, if he managed to conduct the right penances. This seemed to work; pleased with Hiranyakashipu's long austerities, Brahma appeared and offered him a boon. Hiranyakashipu wished thusly:

O my lord, O best of the givers of benediction, if you will kindly grant me the benediction I desire, please let me not meet death from any of the living entities created by you. Grant me that I not die within any residence or outside any residence, during the daytime or at night, nor on the ground or in the sky. Grant me that my death not be brought about by any weapon, nor by any human being or animal. Grant me that I not meet death from any entity, living or nonliving created by you. Grant me, further, that I not be killed by any demigod or demon or by any great snake from the lower planets. Since no one can kill you in the battlefield, you have no competitor. Therefore, grant me the benediction that I too may have no rival. Give me sole lordship over all the living entities and presiding deities, and give me all the glories obtained by that position. Furthermore, give me all the mystic powers attained by long austerities and the practice of yoga, for these cannot be lost at any time.

One day while Hiranyakashipu is performing austerities at Mandaracala Mountain, his home is attacked by Indra and the other gods. At this point the divine sage Narada intervenes to protect Hiranyakashipu's consort Kayadu, who he describes as sinless. Narada takes Kayadu into his care and her unborn child (Hiranyakashipu's son) Prahlada, becomes affected by the transcendental mantras of the sage, in utero. As he grows into boyhood, Prahlada is recognized as a devoted follower of Vishnu, first to his father's consternation, then to his livid rage.

Hiranyakashipu attempts to kill the boy; Prahlada is always protected by Vishnu's power. When asked to devote himself only to his father-king, Prahlada refuses to acknowledge his father as the supreme lord of the universe and claims that it is Vishnu who is omnipotent and omnipresent. Hiranyakashipu points to a nearby pillar and asks if 'his Vishnu' is in it:

O most unfortunate Prahlada, you have always described a Supreme Being other than me, a Supreme Being Who is above everything, Who is the controller of everyone, and Who is all-pervading. But where is He? If He is everywhere, then why is He not present before me in this pillar?

Prahlada calmly answers:

He was, He is and He will be. He is in pillars, and He is in the smallest twig.

Hiranyakashipu, unable to control his anger, smashes the pillar with his mace, and sets upon destroying his son. Following a tumultuous sound, Vishnu in the form of a Man-Lion appears from within the pillar, in defence of Prahlada. In order to kill Hiranyakashipu, yet not violate the boon given by Brahma, the form of Narasimha is chosen. Hiranyakashipu can not be killed by human, animal or god. Narasimha is neither -- he is a form of Vishnu incarnate as a part-human, part-animal. He comes upon Hiranyakashipu at twilight (when it is neither day nor night) on the threshold of a courtyard (neither indoors nor out), and puts the demon on his thighs (neither on earth nor in space), using his sharp fingernails (neither animate nor inanimate) as weapons, he disembowels and kills the demon.

At exhibitions of Indonesian art, the sculpture from Candi Ijo (above) is often shown. When at the Met in NY, a wall label extolling the "calmer, gentler spirit" of the Indonesians was placed next to the Narasimha sculpture; perhaps the curators thought a Thai massage was in progress.

At the Candi Ijo, high up in the green hills, there is a mantra written 16 times in the stone in foot-high mandalas: Om Sarva-vinasa, Om Sarva-vinasa (Hail, All-Destroyer) -- presumably invoking Shiva. It is a little odd that the Narasimha statue was found in this location. The vajra in the hands of the carnival Narasimha is also curious.

Below -- the carnival Narasimha. A fuller video of the floats is here.

Tinikidanuphanirayaramayanadakavigalabharadali

2011-12-10T04:57:00.046+05:30

The story of Ravana, from a paraphrase of the Malay/Indonesian Hikayat Seri Rama, compiled by Shellabear and quoted in Rama Legends and Rama Reliefs in Indonesia:

Maharaja Ravana with his ten heads and twenty arms was sent by his father on a ship to Bukit Serandib, because he had behaved very badly. His father was Citra Baha and his mother Raksa Pandi, the daughter of Dati Kavaca. Reaching Serandib he carried out penance in that island. He hung himself down from a tree with his head downwards.

While Adam was living on earth, he saw him hanging there and was requested by the ascetic to speak for him in front of Allah that he should get four kingdoms. As his penance had been crowned with great success he got married. To begin with he entered into matrimony with the princess from the world of spirits, Nila Utama, who bore him, in due course of time, a son, Indera Jata. This prince had three heads and six arms and he was made the king of the kingdom of spirits at the age of twelve.

After that Ravana married the princess of the earth, Puteri Pertivi Devi, who also bore him a son, called Patala Mahirajan. Even he became a king at the age of twelve, on earth. A third marriage was made with the queen of the seas: Ganga Mahadevi. The son from this marriage was Ganga Mahasuri, who became the king of the seas at the age of twelve.

Thus Maharaja Ravana was the lord of all the worlds from the east to west. There were, however, four kingdoms which were not under his rule. The first was Indera Puri, the second Biruhasya Purva, the third Lagur Katagina, and the fourth Ispaha Boga. But, apart from these, there was everything on and in the earth, in the sea and within air, subject to the kind of reksasas, who had a magnificent palace built for him on the Bukit Serandib: Lanka Puri.

From the Hikayat tradition collected by Roorda van Eysinga, again quoted from the same source:

Dasarata the king of Ispaha Boga, the fourth of the kingdoms independent from Ravana, was the son of Dasarata Cakravati. Raman was the son Dasarata, the son of Nabi Adam.

As Maharaja Dasarata was still childless, after many years he tries to liberate himself from this terrible worry by the advice of a holy man. After consulting the sacred books, his advice was as follows, "Sacrifice for three days in the middle of the field."

Accompanied by one thousand disciples, the holy man flew through the air to the palace city of Mandura Pura and carries out a solemn sacrifice, after he has been solemnly fetched. The sacrificial rice was divided up into six balls. From these three balls were given to (Dasarata's first wife) Mandu Dari, and three to (the second wife) Balia Dari. But suddenly a crow, in actual fact an ancestor of Maharaja Ravana, all of a sudden came there and carried away one of the balls meant for Balia dari. In great rage the holy man cursed the crow and said that it would die by the hand of Mandu Dari's son and further whoever eats this rice ball would get a daughter, who would marry that son. The bird then flew to Lanka Puri, and reported to Ravana what had happened. On hearing this Ravana ate the rice.

After some time Mandu Dari gave birth to a son called Seri Rama, whose body color was emerald green and whose face was a beautiful as the full moon. She gave birth to a second son called Laksemana. Balia Dari gives birth to two sons Berdana and Citradana and after that to a daughter Kikuvi Devi. As Maharaja Dasarata once gets very ill with an abcess in the groin region his life was again saved by Balia Dari who sucked out the pus.

Ravana, on hearing about Mandu Dari, immediately leaves for Mandura Pura, disguised as a brahmin. He comes there to a gate with seven locks which, however, opened by itself on his muttering a magic formula and allows him to enter the palace. In the middle of the front coutryard, he sits down and begins to play his lyre. Dasarata, who was sleeping at Mandu Dari's side, was woken by the music, and as he went to the door, he saw a Brahmin in whom he recognized Ravana.

After a short talk, the latter lets Dasarata know that he wants to take Mandu Dari with him. Dasarata refuses in the beginning because of the children, but then finally promises to give her to him. But his wife is not apparently agreeable to this decision because she goes in her palace and scratches off her skin and makes a ball as big an egg from the skin. She puts this on a golden plate and sacrifices it. As a result the ball changes into a green frog. Even this is brought as a sacrifice and finally turns into a beautiful woman, a replica of Mandu Dari. Ravana goes off in great haste with this pseudo Mandu Dari (she is called Mandu Daki from now onwards, since daki = thrown off skin.) Dasarata who is very surprised to see own wife again, since he has seen his guest going away with her, accepts what has happened temporarily.

... After some time Mandu Daki gave birth to a daughter as beautiful as gold. Ravana sends immediately for his brother Maharaja Bibu Sanam, who comes with his pupils to Lanka Puri because he was a famous magician.

The horoscopes are drawn up but with a shake of his head Bibu Sanam relates that whosoever marries this child would kill its father and rule over the four worlds. Ravana was naturally unhappy at this prophecy and wanted to kill the girl immediately, but the mother suggested that it should be put in an iron box, and thrown into the sea and so it happens. The baby is given the breast for the last time, given over to its enang (governess), who then gives it back to Ravana. He gives the child to Bibu Sanam who throws the casket into the sea.

In the meantime the child in the iron casket floated from Lanka Puri to Darvati Purva to Maharesi Kali. One morning the saint was worshipping the sun. While doing do he stood with his navel in the sea, when the casket hit against his legs. After he had finished his prayers, he took it with him to his wife Manuram Devi. To the surprise of both, the whole house is filled with light as soon as the casket is opened and from the breast of Manuram Devi milk flows. It is clear to them that it has been destined by the gods that they become foster parents of this beautiful girl. Then Maharesi Kali plants forty palm trees in a row and says: "he who can cut through all these forty palm trees with one shot, he should marry this girl who was named Sita Devi."

As Sita Devi is twelve years old kings come from all regions to Maharesi Kali in order to fulfil his wager and to win his daughter as their wife. Even Ravana came in his flying chariot and it was like the heaven falling down. Maharesi Kali, however, missed the sons of Dasarata among the princes and did not wish to give Ravana any chance, before these princes were invited. On the advice of his wife, he went to bring Seri Rama and Laksemana and left for Mandura Pura.

AK Ramanujan asks in his essay Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation:

How many Ramayanas? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas , a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been? ...

In several of the later Ramayanas (such as the AdhyatmaRamayana , 16th C.), when Rama is exiled, he does not want Sita to go with him into the forest. Sita argues with him. At first she uses the usual arguments: she is his wife, she should share his sufferings, exile herself in his exile, and so on. When he still resists the idea, she is furious. She bursts out, "Countless Ramayanas have been composed before this. Do you know of one where Sita doesn't go with Rama to the forest?" That clinches the argument, and she goes with him.

In his essay, Ramanujan compares the story of Ahalya in Valmiki's Ramayana against that in the Ramayana of Kampan. The choice is interesting. The beauty of A-halya (the unploughed) is that of land not yet brought under cultivation. Sita's beauty is that of the furrow in new ploughed land. Rama is green as the new crop. His sons Lav (to scythe) and Kush (spear-grass) have strong connection to the furrow. Ahalya lets a stranger into her home because the stranger has taken on the form of her Brahmin husband - but is actually the god Indra. Sita lets a demon cross the 'Lakhsman rekha' of the hut's threshold because the stranger has taken the shape of a Brahmin sage. Both are punished for being object of a stranger's lust.

During their visit to Java in 1927, Tagore and Suniti Chatterjee encountered the tradition that Rama and Sita were siblings (or at least half-siblings.) Tagore found this interesting, and talked with Dutch orientalists, who confirmed that in their opinion the incest myth was the older one, and that it had been rewritten in the Indian tradition but not in the dispersed ones living on in South East Asia. In a letter home Rabindranath wrote:

If this opinion were to be true, I see some huge congruences between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. At the root of both the stories are two marriages. Both the marriages are, according to custom, inadmissible. In Buddhist histories we hear of brother-sister marriages but it is completely against our traditions. On the other side, one woman being married to five brothers at once is also novel and non-traditional. The second congruence is the test-of-arms at the first step of each marriage, even as that test is irrelevant to the purpose of each marriage. The third congruence is that neither bride is born from the womb of a woman -- Sita is the Earth's daughter, discovered in a furrow at the tip of the plough, Draupadi (Krishnaa) is created from a Yajna. The fourth congruence is the grooms in each case being subjected to usurpation of their kingdom and banishment to the forests with their wife. The fifth congruence in both stories is the molestation of the wife by the hands of the enemy, and revenge for the molestation.

Suniti Chatterjee, perhaps the greatest comparative-linguist in modern Bengal, was to cause a furore late in his life by claiming that the Ramayana had its origin in the Buddhist tradition, in the Dasaratha Jataka which was older than the Hindu sources. In an extempore lecture at the Asiatic Society, Kolkata, in January 1976, he contended that Rama was the sister of Sita, whom he married. See here for the Jataka, which carries the motif of Rahul's mother being the Buddha's sister.

And tinikidanuphanirayaramayanadakavigalabharadali? By the fourteenth century, there were already so many Ramayanas that Gadhugina Veera Naranappa (the classical Vijayanagara poet, whose nom-de-plume was Kumaravyasa) chose to write a Mahabharata instead, because he had heard the cosmic serpent who upholds the earth groaning under the burden of all the cacophonous Ramayana poets ( tinikidanu-phaniraya-ramayana-daka-vigala-bharadali)!

Majapahit

2011-12-08T14:12:00.067+05:30

Towards the end of his reign, Kublai Khan of the Mongol Yuan dynasty became vexed with the rising power, influence, and wealth of the Javanese Singhasari empire.

Singhasari had formed an alliance with Champa (the Indianized kingdom of the Cham people, based in what is now Vietnam). Both Singhasari and Champa were worried about Mongol expansion, and raids against neighboring states, such as the raid of Bagan (Pagan) in Burma. In 1280, Kublai Khan sent an emissary to King Kertanegara, demanding submission and tribute to the great Khan. The demand was refused. The next year in 1281, the Khan sent another envoy, demanding the same terms, to be refused again. Eight years later, in 1289, the last envoy Men Shi or Meng-qi (孟琪) was sent; King Kertanegara responded by branding Meng-qi's face with hot iron like a common criminal, cutting off his ears, and sending him packing. The whimpering ambassador returned to China with the answer of the Javanese king written onto his face.

Enraged by this humiliation and the disgrace committed against his envoy and his patience, in late 1292 the great Kublai Khan sent a massive armada of 1,000 war junks in a punitive expedition that would have arrived off the coast of Tuban, Java in early 1293. The officers were the Mongol Shi-bi, the Uyghur Ike Mese, and the Chinese Gaoxing. What kind of ships they used for the campaign is not mentioned in the History of the Yuan, but they were apparently large since smaller boats had to be constructed for entering the rivers of Java.

In the meantime, a coup had befallen Kertanegara. In 1292, Jayakatwang, a vassal king from the Kingdom of Daha (also known as Kediri or Gelang-gelang), prepared his army to conquer Singhasari and kill its king if possible, assisted by Arya Wiraraja, a regent from Sumenep on the island of Madura.

The Daha army attacked Singhasari simultaneously from both north and south. The king only realized the invasion from the north and sent his son-in-law, Nararya Sangramawijaya, famously known as Raden Wijaya, northward to vanquish the rebellion. The northern attack was put at bay, but the southern attackers successfully remained undetected until they reached and sacked the unprepared capital city of Kutaraja. Jayakatwang killed Kertanagara during a tantric ceremony and usurped the throne, bringing an end to the Singhasari kingdom.

Raden Wijaya tried to retake Singhasari but failed. He and three friends Ranggalawe, Sora and Nambi, went into exile under the favor of Nambi's father, the same Arya Wiraraja of Madura, who had by now turned his back on Jayakatwang. With Arya Wiraraja's patronage, Raden Wijaya, pretending to submit to Jayakatwang, won favor from the new monarch of Daha, who granted him permission to open a new settlement north of mount Arjuna (the Tarik forest.) In this wilderness, Raden Wijaya started to clear the jungle for a city. At work, one of the men felt hungry and went to look for food. Lo, there stood a Maja tree with large green fruit. The man broke into the fruit, and immediately said Maja pahit -- bitter Maja. Thus was named the future settlement and empire. The Maja tree is Aegle Marmelos Correa -- close to the Bengal quince also known in India as Bael. (We would encounter bitter Maja in Bali; see this video at around 1:20.)

Meanwhile, in early 1293, the Mongol naval forces arrived on the north coast of Java (near Tuban) and at the mouth of the Brantas River, in order to outflank what they thought was Singhasari. Raden Wijaya found an opportunity -- to use the unsuspecting Mongols in overthrowing Jayakatwang. Leading them to believe Jayakatwang was Kertanegara, Raden Wijaya’s army allied with the Mongols in March of 1293. Battle ensued between the Mongols and the Daha forces in the creek bed of Kali Mas river, a distributary of the Brantas. The Mongols stormed Daha, Jayakatwang surrendered only to be summarily executed.

Raden Wijaya immediately wheeled his troops to launch a surprise attack inside and outside the Mongol army columns, creating chaos and forcing his former allies to withdraw from the island of Java. Panicked, stricken with tropical fevers, the Mongol army found themselves at sea, surrounding coasts controlled by alien hostile peoples. The monsoon sea-winds that could carry them home were ebbing; they would otherwise have had to wait for the next monsoon in hostile waters for the next sea-wind. The scowling horde gave up and their junks headed back to China.

Prince Wijaya, son-in-law of Kertanegara the last Singhasari king, ascended the throne as Kertajasa Jayawardhana, the first king of the great Majapahit Empire, on November 12, 1293.

The spirit of religious tolerance and reconciliation between Buddhist and Hindu subjects was an essential element in the foundation and security of the Majapahit. The 14th century poet sage of the Majapahit, Mpu Tantular, is said to have committed the phrase Bhinnêka Tunggal Ika ("Even in difference , the same kind"; i.e. unity in diversity) to writing for the first time. It is today the motto of the Republic of Indonesia.

Rwâneka dhâtu winuwus Buddha Wiswa,
Bhinnêki rakwa ring apan kena parwanosen,
Mangka ng Jinatwa kalawan Siwatatwa tunggal,
Bhinnêka tunggal ika tan hana dharma mangrwa

It is said that the well-known Buddha and Shiva are two different substances.
Indeed they're different, yet possible to recognise the difference at a glance,
Since the truth of Jina (Buddha) and the truth of Shiva is one.
Indeed different, yet they're the same, there is no duality in Truth.

The Majapahit empire reached the height of its power and influence under the hand of the prime minister Gajah Mada. The statues of Harihara above and Prajnaparamita below, from the national museum in Jakarta, are from Majapahit times.

Gajah Mada or Elephant Chief (c. 1290 – c. 1364) was, according to Javanese manuscripts, poems and mythology, the most powerful military leader and mahapatih or prime minister of the Majapahit Empire, credited with bringing the empire to its peak of glory. He took an oath called Sumpah Palapa, in which he vowed not to eat any food containing meat or spices until he had conquered all of the Southeast Asian archipelago of Nusantara for Majapahit. In modern Indonesia, he serves as a national hero and symbol of patriotism.

The Palapa (phal = fruit, a-pal = no meat) oath is found in the text of the Javanese epic Pararaton , which says:

Lamun huwus kalah nusantara isun amukti palapa, lamun kalah ring Gurun, ring Seran, Tañjung Pura, ring Haru, ring Pahang, Dompo, ring Bali, Sunda, Palembang, Tumasik, samana isun amukti palapa.

If it has overcome Nusantara, I (will) let go of the fast. If you beat the Gurun, Ceram, Tanjung Pura, Haru, Pahang, Dompo, Balinese, Sundanese, Palembang, Tumasik, so I (will) let go of the fast.

Gurun is Nusa Penida, an island off Bali.
Seran is today's Ceram, near Ambon in the Moluccas
Tañjung Pura is Kerajaan Tanjungpura, Ketapang, Kalimantan Barat (West.)
Haru is Northern Sumatra (Karo)
Pahang is the third largest state in Malaysia, after Sarawak and Sabah, occupying the huge Pahang River river basin.
Dompo is Sumbawa, an Indonesian island, located in the middle of the Lesser Sunda Islands chain, with Lombok to the west, Flores to the east, and Sumba further to the southeast.
Bali is Bali
Sunda is Sunda
Palembang is the capital city of the South Sumatra province in Indonesia, and one of the oldest cities in Indonesia; it was part of the Sriwijaya empire, the Chinese monk I-Tsing, wrote that he visited Sriwijaya in the year 671 for 6 months.
Tumasik is Singapura or Singapore.

Note the word nusantara in the oath. Nusantara is today an Indonesian word for the Indonesian archipelago. In Javanese, Nusantara literally means "inter-island" (from nusa, "island", antara which in Sanskrit is inter, i.e the periphery which is away from the Javanese core ). Based on the Majapahit concept of state, the monarch had the power over three circles:

Negara Agung, or the Grand State, the core kingdom. This includes the capital and the surrounding area. In the context of the Majapahit empire, this area covers East Java and its surrounding area.

Mancanegara, areas surrounding Negara Agung, i.e. directly influenced by Javanese culture. In the context of Majapahit empire, this includes the entire islands of Java, Madura, and Bali, as well as Lampung and Palembang in South Sumatra.

Nusantara, areas which do not reflect Javanese culture, but are colonies, i.e. they have to pay tribute. In the context of Majapahit empire, this includes the modern territories of Indonesia, Malaysia,Singapore, the Philippines, Brunei, East Timor and southern Thailand.

In the year 1920, Ernest Francois Eugene Douwes Dekker (1879-1950), the Indonesian freedom fighter of Eurasian descent, who took the nom-de-guerre Setiabudi (from the Sanskrit sthita-buddhi, constant-spirit) introduced the name Nusantara in the belief that this didn't contain any words etymologically inherited from Indian languages -- he did not appreciate the origin of 'antara' was Indic. Setiabudi's Nusantara is the first instance of the term appearing after it had been written into the Pararaton manuscript. The definition of Nusantara introduced by Setiabudi is, however, at variance to the 14th century meaning of the term. During the Majapahit era, Nusantara described vassal areas to be brought under submission; Setiabudi didn't want this aggressive connotation, so he defined Nusantara as all the Indonesian regions from Sabang as far as Merauke.

Gajah Mada's origins are obscure; we know he rose through Majapahit ranks to become commander of the Bhayangkara, an elite guard for the royal family. When Rakrian Kuti, one of the officials in Majapahit, rebelled c. 1321 against the Majapahit king Jayanegara, son of Raden Wijaya who ruled 1309-1328, Gajah Mada and the then-prime-minister Arya Tadah helped the king and his family escape the capital city of Trowulan. Later, Gajah Mada helped crush the rebellion and aided the king's return to the capital. Seven years later, Jayanegara was murdered by Rakrian Tanca, the court physcian, one of Rakrian Kuti's aides. Tribhuwana Wijayatunggadewi, Raden Wijaya's daughter, became queen regnant and the third monarch of Majapahit empire, reigning from 1328 to 1350. She appointed Gajah Mada as prime minister. The Elephant Chief pursued a massive expansion of the empire.

Even his closest friends were at first doubtful of his oath, but Gajah Mada kept pursuing his dream to unify Nusantara under the glory of Majapahit. Soon he conquered the surrounding territory of Bedahulu (Bali) and Lombok (1343). He then sent the navy westward to attack the remnants of Sriwijaya in Palembang.

He then conquered the first Islamic sultanate in Southeast Asia, Samudra Pasai, and another state in Svarnadvipa (Sumatra). Gajah Mada also conquered Bintan, Tumasik (Singapore), Melayu (now known as Jambi), and Kalimantan.

It was during Gajah Mada's reign as mahapatih, around the year 1345, that the famous Islamic traveller Ibn Batuta visited Sumatra.

Gajah Mada was not a handsome man -- his statue reveals a prizefighter's face with broken nose and uneven teeth. It is said that during the conquest of Bali he met the love of his life -- a girl named Gunti Ayu Bebet. She turned the great general down, he was too ugly.

When her son reached 16 in 1350, Wijayatunggadewi stepped down and Hayam Wuruk -- the term means Scholar Rooster --- became king. Gajah Mada retained his position as mahapatih under the new king and continued his military campaign by expanding eastward, westward and north. He thus effectively brought the modern Indonesian archipelago under Majapahit control, and his conquests spanned not only the territory of today's Indonesia, but also that of Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and the southern Philippines.

By 1357, the only remaining state refusing to acknowledge Majapahit's hegemony was Sunda, in West Java, bordering the Negara Agung. King Hayam Wuruk intended to marry Pitaloka Citraresmi, a princess of Sunda and the daughter of Sunda's king. Gajah Mada was given the task to go to the Bubat square at the northern part of Trowulan to welcome the princess as she arrived with her father, and escort her to the Majapahit palace. Gajah Mada took this opportunity to demand Sundanese submission under Majapahit rule. The Sundanese King had thought that the royal marriage was a sign of a new alliance between Sunda and Majapahit, and was shocked when Gajah Mada stated that the Princess of Sunda is not to be hailed as the new queen consort of Majapahit, but merely as a concubine. The embarrassment led to hostile words, which quickly became a skirmish and then a full scale rout. The Sundanese king, with all of his guards and the royal party, was butchered by Gajah Mada's troops. The heartbroken princess Citraresmi committed suicide in the midst of the bodies of her clansmen.

Hayam Wuruk was shocked at the tragedy. Majapahit courtiers, ministers and nobles, all blamed Gajah Mada for his recklessness. This kind of brutalitiy was not to the taste of the Scholar Rooster. Gajah Mada was demoted and spent the rest of his days in the estate of Madakaripura in Probolinggo in East Java. He died in obscurity in 1364.

The Scholar Rooster would become Indonesia's greatest gastronome. The Nagarakertagama chronicles the King Hayam Wuruk's expeditions to corners of the empire wrought by Gajah Meda. Each of these dramatic royal expeditions took up to ten months at a time, and mobilized hundreds of troops, palace maids, musicians following the king and the queen on horses, elephants and carriages.

The expeditions were in search of dishes native to each part of the empire. The general menu was:
1. A pre-expedition ceremony with a feast in the palace compound;
2. A welcome banquet featuring local food when passing through each district;
3. Ceremonies in the temples paying tribute to the founder of the Majapahit and other ancestors, followed by more dinners presented by the local villagers;
4. Ceremonial dining with the local villagers, throughout the return voyage back to the capital;
5. A blessing banquet upon returning safe to the palace, featuring a recap of the most interesting dishes encountered in the trip.

Majapahit slowly fell into decline after the death of Hayam Wuruk.

During Indonesia's struggle against colonization, Sukarno often cited Gajah Mada and his oath as an inspiration -- that Indonesians could unite, despite vast territory and various cultures. In 1942, only 230 Indonesians had a tertiary degree. The first state university was established at the end of Japanese occupation, and for the first time native Indonesians could be freely admitted, to Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta. Indonesia's first telecommunication satellite was called Satelit Palapa after Gajah Mada's Nusantara oath. Almost all cities in Indonesia have a street named after Gajah Mada. (In the Sundanese city of Bandung, however, there is not a single Jalan Gajah Mada.)

Below, the Lara Djonggrang restaurant in Jakarta, featuring dishes from Hayam Wuruk's culinary expeditions; its decor, modeled to resemble the atmospherics of an opium den, also tells the story of the thousand statues.

Hamengkubuwono

2011-12-04T11:10:00.078+05:30

Hamengkubuwono is the traditional title of the Sultans of Yogyakarta, and has been so since the ruling royal house was carved out, c. 1755, during succession wars of the Mataram Kingdom and the vast Majapahit Empire. The current Sultan is Hamengkubuwono X. The royal title can be variously interpreted:

Hamangku: pleased to serve the people
Hamengku: protect the people in a just way
Hamengkoni: ready to take the responsibility of a leader
Hamengko: holds on his lap
Buwono: from Bhuvana, Sanskrit for World.

A fuller title is Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono Senopati Sayidin Panatagama Kalifatulah. Senopati means General. Sayid is an honorific title denoting males accepted as descendants of the prophet Muhammad through his grandsons, Hasan ibn Ali and Hussain ibn Ali, sons of the prophet's daughter Fatima Zahra and his son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib. Agama -- 'that which came from the outside' in Sanskrit -- was used to denote the Hindu religion at first, but then became a term for religion in general (Islam, too, came from the outside.) Panatagama means holder of religion, and Kalifa (or Caliph) is Allah's representative on earth.

As a reminder of his subservience to his people, the Hamengkubuwono is required in his own palace to carry only a wooden kris, though others may sport bejeweled blades.

When at times the future seems to elude us we are tempted to look to the past; this is not only visible at the extreme of salafism, you also see it in the middle of Uzbekistan where the future retreats away across desert or mountain, and cults of Timur or Bobur rise from the graveyard to fill the gap. The Sultans of Yogyakarta tried, for much of the last century, to keep alive the ritual of the past. Rabindranath Tagore's visit to Yogyakarta was during the reign of Hamenkubuwono VIII, who is said to have ushered in the Golden Age of courtly dance and drama -- much of the income from the Sultan's vast sugar estates was lavished upon refining the styles and holding regular performances featuring at times hundreds of dancers.

The Sultans continue to be 'folk' monarchs. Their kraton - compound - is low-rise, filled with traditional trees, and is the center of community ritual. Despite the repeated attempts by Saudi Arabia to ban the practice, the birthday of Muhammad is celebrated as a central ritual, the Garebeg Malud or Mawlid (from Eid-e-Milād-un-Nabī.)

From Kingship and Ritual in Yogyakarta:

The Sultanate of Yogyakarta is an Islamic state, though not in the sense that the term is now generally used. The Garebeg Malud is predicated upon a complex set of cultural and religious presuppositions concerning the nature of kingship. These include the equation of kingship and sainthood, the theory of power (kesekten), and dynastic myths linking Yogyakarta with older Javanese states, Muslim prophets, and the Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana. The equation of kingship and sainthood is based on local interpretations of Islamic concepts of revelation and miracles, both of which are viewed from the perspective of the Suﬁ theory of the “Perfect Man.”

Kings, and in post-colonial Indonesia, presidents, are thought by many to be chosen by God and to be endowed with wahyu (Arabic, wahy), “revelation.” Wahy is revelation and the means through which God communicates with his prophets and, according to some Suﬁ traditions, with saints. Javanese understand wahyu as a ﬂash or beam of light that confers a divine appointment on an individual assigning him or her a particular task. While there are many types of wahyu, that of kingship is the most important for understanding the Malud and other elements of the Yogyakarta Kraton ritual system. It provides the basis for the most important royal title Kalifatulah (“the representative of God”.)

The theory of the “Perfect Man” (al-insan al-kamil) is closely associated with the great medieval Spanish mystic philospher Ibn al ‘Arabi (1165–1240). ‘Abdal-Karim al-Jili (d. ca. 1408) who wrote in the tradition of Ibn ‘Arabi, produced the classic work on the Perfect Man, which is studied in Javanese pesantren and exists in an interlinear Arabic/Javanese edition.

The idea of the Kalifah (Caliph) and the Caliphate as a governmental institution have long been among the most intensely contested concepts in Islamic political thought. Patricia Crone and Marin Hinds have shown there is a fundamental tension between personalistic and textual authority in the Islamic tradition which dates to the period immediately following the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

Kings are also believed to have the ability to attain union with God and to be the Perfect Man. While others may also attain union, it is of special signiﬁcance whencoupled with kingship. Union may be attained only for an instant and is referred to as djumbuhing kawula gusti, “the Union of Servant and Lord”. A person who has attained this state has full understanding of the inner (batin) and outer (lahir) aspects of reality and works for the salvation and worldly good of others. In the case of the Sultan this means that blessing is distributed to all of his subjects. Many believe this to be the primary source of the tranquility and prosperity of the state and of agricultural fertility on which it depends.

The Sultans' authority was eroded during the Dutch colonization, to the point where their writ ran only within the kraton wall. The last two Sultans, IX and X, have re-established themselves as proponents of Muslim piety, using the concept of wahyu. Many Muslim reformers consider them both to be supporters of their cause. In the late 1970s mystics often said that Hamengkubuwono IX used his spiritual powers to travel to Mecca for every Friday prayer, and that he appeared simultaneously in numerous Yogyakarta mosques at the same time.

The Javanese term kesekten is derived from the Sanskrit sakti, and is the power associated with Hindu gods or goddesses, particularly Durga. In Muslim Java, it is thought to be co-terminus with the force of nature, and acquired through a combination of tapabrata (vow of asceticism) and semedi (immersive concentration). Power, in the hands of the Sultan, is used to defeat enemies and evil spirits, stop epidemics and prevent pests from harming the rice.

During Malud, or the Prophet's birthday, Hamengkubuwono performs five ritual tasks. First, he attends gamelan performances at the state mosque; second, he grants a royal audience in which he assumes the posture of a mystic; third, he undertakes a procession to the mosque; fourth, he attends there a recitation of the prophet’s biography; finally, a slametan is held for the general public.

The slametan (or selamatan) is the communal feast from Java. The ceremony takes its name from the Javanese word slamet, from Arabic salam, which refers to a peaceful state of equanimity, in which nothing untoward will happen, which is what the host intends for both himself and his guests, for which he petitions for supernatural protection from spirits.

Again, from Kingship and Ritual in Yogyakarta:

In rural Java the Mawlid is celebrated with a slametan called Maludan. The Maludan and the Garebeg Malud have much in common. At both offerings of rice cooked in coconut milk are presented to the spirit of the Prophet Muhammad. Some santri informants explained that this takes the place of the dish of rice and oil believed to have been the Prophet’s favorite. Eating it on the day of the Malud is understood as a sign that one is a true Muslim. It is also a source of blessing and is sold at many food stands on Alon-Alon Utara on the morning of the Malud and at the month long night market that precedes it. Both rituals include prayers calling down blessing on the Prophet and recitation of his biography.

Two myths connect the Garebeg Malud with Demak.

(The Sultanate of Demak was the first Javanese Muslim state located on Java's north coast, at the site of the present day city of Demak. A port fief to the Majapahit kingdom thought to have been founded in the last quarter of the 15th century, it was influenced by Islam brought by Arab and Gujarati traders. Some scholars suggest that the Garebeg Malud/Slametan Maludan pattern derives from the state cult of Demak, and that these state ceremonies were instrumental in the conversion to Islam of rural Java.)

The ﬁrst explains the continuity of the state ceremonies of Demak and Majapahit and hence that of Hinduism and Islam. The second explains some of the duties of Muslim kings and the historical role of the Garebeg Malud as a conversion ritual. Jointly, they provide a basis for understanding the ritual forms and conventional meanings of the Garebeg Malud in Yogyakarta.

The Majapahit/Demak myth is as follows:

The kings of Majapahit [the last Hindu-Javanese kingdom] used to have rituals at which offerings of food were presented to the people. At the time of Demak [the ﬁrst Islamic kingdom] this practice was discontinued and as a result crops were poor and many people went hungry. The Sultan of Demak asked Sunan Kalijaga [one of the nine wali] what he should do about this. Sunan Kalijaga replied that even though he was a Muslim he had a duty to provide for the well being of his people and to teach them Islam. He then instructed the Sultan on how to perform the Slametan in ways which did not violate the tradition of the Prophet and told him to teach it to his subjects.

Hamengkubuwono VIII, whose patronage of dance had led to Rabindranath witnessing enthralling performances, sent his son of 4 to live with a Dutch family; in his youth HB IX was sent to university in Holland. He returned when the old sultan was on his deathbed, and, upon subsequent coronation, said (in Dutch): "Even though I have tasted Western Education, I am still and will always be a Javanese."

In 1942, the Dutch Colonial Government in Indonesia was defeated by an advancing Japanese Imperial Army. Many suggested that Hamengkubuwono IX seek asylum in Australia, but the Sultan refused. He is credited with saving his people from being sent to Burma to become romusha forced-laborers, by persuading the Japanese to allow the building of a water canal (the Kali Mataram).

Immediately after the declaration of Indonesian independence in 1945, Hamengkubuwono IX decided to support the newly formed Republic. The support was immediately recognized by the Central Government, who in quid-pro-quo appointed HB IX to a Life-Governorship of Yogyakarta. After the defeat of Japan, when the Dutch returned to lay claim to Indonesia, Hamengkubuwono IX played a vital role in the resistance. In early 1946, the capital of Indonesia was quietly relocated to Yogyakarta, and during that time the Sultan gave the new government funding, and also lent them his enormous local prestige. When Indonesia first sought a diplomatic solution with the Dutch Government, Hamengkubuwono IX was part of the Indonesian delegation. In December 1948, the Dutch successfully re-occupied Yogyakarta and arrested Sukarno and Hatta, Indonesia's first President and Vice President. Hamengkubuwono IX did not leave his city, continuing to serve as Governor. The Dutch intended to make Yogyakarta the capital of the new Indonesian federal state of Central Java and to appoint the Sultan as head of state, but the Hamengkubuwono refused to cooperate.

In early 1949, Hamengkubuwono IX conceived the idea of a major offensive to be launched against Yogyakarta and the Dutch troops occupying it. General Sudirman, Commander of the Indonesian Army, approved, and chose then-Lieutenant-Colonel Suharto to be the field commander for the offensive. (After they fell out subsequently, Suharto went on to claim it had all been his idea to conduct the offensive.) First, Suharto and Hamengkubuwono started guerilla attacks in villages and towns around Yogyakarta, to make the Dutch move troops outside of town. On March 1, Suharto and his troops launched the 1 March General Offensive. Hamengkubuwono IX allowed his palace to be used as a base. For 6 hours, the Indonesian troops had control of Yogyakarta, before melting away. The Offensive was a great success, inspiring demoralized troops all around the country, and, most importantly, making the United Nations pressure the Dutch to recognize Indonesia's independence.

On 30 June 1949, the retreating Dutch forces handed-over authority over Yogyakarta to Hamengkubuwono IX.

After Indonesia's Independence was recognized, Hamengkubuwono IX served as Minister of Defense and Homeland Security Coordinator (1949–1951 and 1953), Vice Premier (1951), and Minister of Economics (1966-73). He never married, fathering a couple dozen children with four concubines, his eldest son becoming Hamengkubuwono X in 1998.

Loro Jonggrang

2011-11-27T07:34:00.079+05:30

Prambanan, the 9th century temple compound in Central Java, is one of the largest and the most beautiful structures in Southeast Asia, characterized by its tall, pointed spires, the majestic central structures towering nearly 50m above a large complex of 224 individual temples. While it is dedicated to the Hindu Trinity, i.e. expression of God as the Creator (Brahma), the Sustainer (Vishnu) and the Destroyer (Shiva), and while the focal deities in the major temples are, indeed, Mahadewa, Brahma and Wisnu, the temple-complex has locally always been called Candi Loro Jongrang.

Who is Loro Jongrang (aka Roro Jonggrang or Lara Djonggrang, meaning Slender Virgin)? To find out, we have to travel to 9th-century Java, when the sun was setting over 100 years of rule by the Buddhist Shailendra dynasty (under whose patronage Borobudur had been created.) The Hindu Sanjaya dynasty was increasingly assertive, and local rajas were shifting their allegiance from Mahayana Buddhism to Shaivaite Hinduism.

Complicating the power struggle were court-intrigues -- featuring Pramodhawardhani, daughter of the Shailendra king and object-of-desire of the Sanjaya prince Rakai Pikatan. Rakai Pikatan was in contest against Pramodhawardhani's brother Balaputradewa, heir to the Shailendra throne. Pramodhawardhini's role is ambiguous -- she may have tried to ally herself to both sides -- but eventually, intrigue or not, the Mahayana bhairavs (demons) could not help Balaputradeva, the gods of Rakai Pikatan triumphed, ending Shailendra rule in Central Java.

In the popular legend, which took its modern shape in Majapahit times many centuries later, there are two neighboring kingdoms -- Pengging and Boko. Pengging (the Sanjaya kingdom) is prosperous, for it is wisely ruled by its king Prabu Damar Moyo (in addition to histories even legends are written by the winners), and its clever prince Bandung Bondowoso commands a legion of netherworld-spirits. In contrast, the overlord of Boko (the Shailendra principality) is a cruel cannibalistic giant Prabu Boko, supported by another ogre Patih Gupolo. Despite his uncouthness, Prabu Boko has a beautiful daughter -- the 'Slender Virgin' Loro Jonggrang.

Boko is consumed by envy of his neighbor, and so raises taxes and armies for an invasion of Pengging. His forces launch a surprise attack, the ensuring war causes devastation and widespread famine, on both sides.

Prabu Damar Moyo sends his son Bandung Bondowoso to battle. After a furious contest, Boko is killed by the prince's supernatural powers. His assistant, the ogre Patih Gupolo, escapes with the shattered remnants of corps Boko.

The princess is heartbroken.

In short order, the Pengging host arrives to besiege and capture the Boko palace. Striding through the inner halls, prince Bandung Bondowoso comes upon the mourning princess and is mesmerized by her beauty. He proposes that the winning and losing sides be henceforth joined in matrimony. The shotgun (so to speak) pointed at her, Loro Jonggrang agrees, but on two surely-impossible conditions: first, the prince must build a well named Jalatunda; second, he must construct a thousand temples in one night.

Bondowoso immediately starts work on the well, calling upon his spirits and using his supernatural powers, and lo, it is done. She urges him to enter Jalatunda; when he does so, Patih Gupolo pours an avalanche of stones into the well to bury the prince alive. With great effort Bandung Bondowoso escapes. Loro Jongrang blames the no-hopers fighting on under Gupolo, and sweetly asks Bondowoso to fulfill the second condition.

Somewhat suspicious after Act I, the prince enters into meditation and conjures up a host of earth-spirits. They work through the night, and there come into being, one after another as the night wears on, the first 999 temples. Yet Loro Jonggrang has a clever plan. The princess and her maids light a fire in the east, and ask all the villagers to begin pounding rice, an activity traditionally done just before dawn. Fooled into thinking the sun is about to rise, the rooster crows, and the spirits flee back into the netherworld, leaving the last statue of the last temple unfinished.

The prince is furious when he learns of this deception. He leaves the palace, placing a curse on Loro Jonggrang, that her body turn into stone to match her heart. So she herself becomes the final statue of the temple, completing its construction and fulfilling the condition for their marriage. The gods intercede, releasing Loro Djongrang's soul which rises to the heavens.

There are several curious aspects to the legend.

First, the 1000th statue, which the locals revere as Loro Djonggrang, is easily recognizable as being one of Durga Mahishasurmardini. (Her many arms, the buffalo at her feet and the demon she holds by the hair place her distinctly within the framework of Durga, as does the placement of the statue in the Shiva temple next to a statue of Ganesha.)

From A Guide through Netherlands India (1906):

At the further end of the lobby are two images respectively representing Siva (as "Goeroe") the Teacher, and as Kala (the Destroyer Time), and in the central room is a large, but broken image of the same Deity as the principal god (Maha-dewa). In the west room is found an image of Ganesa Son of Siva, and in the north room is the famous eight-armed image of Loro Djonggrang (Durga, the consort of Siva). This image is 6 feet high and the entire ruin is often known, after it, as Tjandi Loro Djonggrang.

There is, however, no explanation of how the stories connect -- how did Loro become associated with Durga? Is it that, casting their eyes around the goddesses of the Hindu pantheon -- Saraswati, Lakshmi, Ganga, Sita, Radhika -- the Javanese could not find a match, the only strong woman being Durga? For Shaktas, the eternal virgin Durga is Adi Shakti (the original power) -- this notion may also have made the identification of Loro with Durga easier. But it remains a stretch; there is nothing of the story of Durga in Loro, and none of Loro in Durga, even if certain facets are claimed to match.

Second, why would this defiant maiden find such lasting worship in the sanctuaries of her opponents? Is it that we all identify with the tragic? Or, perhaps, each of the parties to the underlying conflict got something out of the deification of Loro Jongrang. For the Hindus, through her demands they got a thousand temples, and indeed she metaphorically became one of them. For the Buddhists, it was one of their own, their princess, who went to live in the temple of Shiva.

Or is it that, as some historians suggest, Pramodhawardhini/Loro was actually married to Rakai Pikatan/Bondowoso and helped plot the downfall of her Buddhist brother? There is a very faint nimbus around the head of the Loro Jonggrang statue in Prambanan, and some scholars have suggested reading into it a Buddhist iconography. There has been, from the beginning, confusion about how much Hindu-Buddhist fusion Prambanan actually represents.

From Allen's Indian Mail, "a register of intelligence for British and foreign India, China, and all parts of the East" (1851):

Visited and sketched by Colonel Mackenzie in 1812, and subsequently by Captain G. Baker, whose report to the Government contains facts of some value towards an elucidation of the question. "One of these arises from the circumstance of his having been accompanied by a sepoy, who would seem to have been a Brahman himself, and had resided two years among the Brahmans at Benares. Colonel Mackenzie considered these ruins at Brambanam to be decidedly Bauddhistical; the sepoy, on the contrary, regarded them as Brahmanical, though surpassing in number and style of execution anything of the kind which he had seen in India.

Why an 8-armed Durga? Mahishasurmardini appears quite early in Indian art. The Archaeological Museum in Mathura has on display a 6-armed Kushana period Mahishasurmardini that depicts her pressing down the buffalo with her lower hands. A Nagar plaque from the first century BC depicts a 4-armed Mahishasurmardini, accompanied by a lion. In the Gupta period we see various representations of Mahishasurmardini (2-, 4-, 6-, and at Udayagiri, 12-armed), the spear and trident her most common weapons. At Mahabalipuram (contemporaneous, roughly, with Prambanan), a relief (pictured below) shows the goddess with 8 arms (some on one side have broken off but the symmetry is clear from the other side) riding her lion and subduing with bow-and-arrow a Mesopotamian-looking buffalo-faced asura (as opposed to buffalo asura), a variation also seen at Ellora.

Third, there are actually 1001 statues. An accounting is provided in the book Rāma-legends and Rāma-reliefs in Indonesia. You don't have to be Holmes or Feluda to feel there is something very odd about the extra statue. The Loro legend very specifically builds up to 1000 statues; the temples were planned and executed with enormous precision bearing in mind a cosmic ritual significance; why, then, do we at the end find 1001 statues?

In terms of the disconnect between the Durga and Loro Jongrang traditions, it is of course possible that many of the royal family were models for the statues in temples, and the same statue could be both the royal and the divine, on different planes. In Angkor, Jayavarmana's face melds with that of the Buddha; in Java, here a King appears as Wisnu, there a pretty prince is immortal as a cherub on a panel. So it may not have been as remarkable that the Slender Virgin was the model for a Durga statue, and that in the minds of the audience the statue could be both the princess and the deity without contradiction. An uncle of mine calls every Sean Connery movie 'James Bond'; Hema Malini is forever Basanti Tangewali in rural India. A movie poster image could be Cleopatra, or Liz Taylor, or perhaps simultaneously both?

Finally, much has been made amongst scholars of Shailendra vs Sanjaya, Borobudur vs Prambanan. In practice, of course, both the Hindu and Mahayana traditions are too inclusive for there to remain a real schism in the population of the hinterland around Prambanan. Buddha is an avatar of Vishnu, and the Tara form of Durga is a female Bodhisattva. The conflict between clans (though not religions) was real at one time, and there was a couple whose story got tied up in the wars between their families, people understood that and made the story their own. Even today, lovers will avoid Candi Loro Djongrang; it is a place for breaking up.

Sei Sekonyer

2011-11-25T00:14:00.036+05:30

We stop at various river villages. At Sei Sekonyer, a plaintive sign put up by the Friends Of The National Parks Foundation (FNPF) showing a bulldozer felling trees reads "Stop Destroying Our Land."

The klotok boats are approximately 40’ long, 6' to 7’ wide, with a draft of 3’. Their hulls are built of belian, the Borneo ironwood (Eusideroxylon zwageri.) Unlike in the Sundarbans where the garan mangrove hardwoods are used for building boats, the klotok ironwood comes from deep in the forest, though the upper structures are made of various cheaper local hardwoods. There are two levels of deck, the lower level is less than 4’ high. Powered by small single-cylinder diesel engines, only a few of these boats have a muffler or silencer. They are called klotok because of the noise -- klok tok kelo tok -- the engines make, like bhatbhatia for the motorcycle in India. The small engine can barely push the klotok up against the current at 5 knots.

Our boat has a crew of four. Apart from Padri, Eddie is the pilot, and his mate calls himself Kencan - gold. Kencan is newly-married, and his bride of 3 months Darmin is the cook on the boat. Before she came to the boat, Darmin handled the made-to-order egg-station at the Rimba lodge. As we berth at the Sei Sekonyer, Darmin leaps off nimbly and walks to the village store, emerging later with a packet of instant noodles -- a little afternoon change-of-taste snack for herself? her husband? -- between cooking banana-flour meals for everyone on the boat.

The belian tree grows extremely slowly, taking up to 120 years to reach a foot in trunk-diameter. The decay is equally slow -- and therefore the wood is sought for marine or outdoor use. Stumps of logged belian trees are still around centuries after they were felled. You can apparently find such stumps in Sarawak, and researchers have carbon-dated some stumps to be well over 1000 years old. Belian trees are the oldest members of any rain forest in Borneo; since it will take a few centuries of commitment to grow them in a commercial plantation, belian are invariably selectively logged.

Belian wood is dense, resistant to insects, bacteria, fungi and marine borers. The heartwood is immune to termites; service-lives of up to 100 years in direct soil contact, and more than 20 years for marine work in these tropical waters, have been reported. It is also famed for its ease of working, despite the high density -- the wood planes, bores and turns cleanly, producing smooth, darkly-lustrous surfaces.

A klotok like our's would sell, Eddie says, for 70 million rupiah -- about USD 8000. He points at a sleeker and longer model that passes, with a better engine and brass fittings -- "those can be twice as much."

The river started off lined by Nipa palms, with tall mangrove trees behind. These gave way to Pandanus-lined banks, and forests of sandalwood.

The jackfruit-like Pandan (P. amaryllifolius) fruit are not edible, but the leaves are used in Indonesian cooking to add a distinct aroma to nasi lemak, to kaya (Indonesian jam) preserves, and to desserts. Fresh leaves are typically torn into strips, tied in a knot to facilitate removal after cooking, and placed in the broth while nasi or kari cook. The kewra essence used to flavor drinks, sweets or biriyanis in Indian cuisine is distilled from a type of Pandanus flower.

We see troops of proboscis monkeys at the river's edge, huge noses drooping down the faces of the males; several brilliant blue, red and yellow stork-billed kingfishers, black kites and white-bellied sea eagles soaring overhead, and huge black hornbills high in the forest canopy. We see a rare gharial poking his snout out; as evening draws in, bats emerge overhead.

At night we tie up at the dock of a reforestation depot; the place has a radio, it is 'safer' -- there is illegal logging around and the responsibility of looking after a 4-year old in the jungle has been lying heavy on the crew. It is dark by 6 pm, and by 8 we lie listening to the sounds of the jungle -- frogs, chain-saw crickets, squabbling tribes of macaques, that crocodile-splash at the stern. At 1 am it starts raining hard, by the time the wind dies down it is 4 am, the gibbons are calling out. Then Darmin is up, whisking banana-flour into batter for breakfast pancakes.

Camp Leakey

2011-11-24T06:29:00.032+05:30

Upon his arrival in Britain from Kenya in 1919, the future paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey (whose discoveries at the Olduvai Gorge would establish human evolutionary development in Africa) had notified the British government's register of people with a knowledge of rare languages that he was fluent in Swahili. Several years later, when his finals at Cambridge were due, he asked to be examined in Swahili, and after some hesitation the university agreed. Then, one day, he received two letters; one instructing him to report at a certain time and place for a viva-voce examination in Swahili, and the other asking if, at precisely the same time and place, he might be disposed to examine a candidate in Swahili.

Satisfying as that outcome must have been, Leakey might have been even more gratified to learn that the research station named after him -- not in East Africa but in Borneo, by a German woman of Lithuanian origin studying those most distant of hominids, the Orangutans -- is thriving today. The name was given by Dr. Biruté Galdikas, recognized as a leading authority on orangutans. Prior to her field studies of orangutans, scientists knew little about the species.

Biruté Galdikas met Louis Leakey at UCLA c. 1970. Determined to study and understand the world of the elusive "red" ape, Galdikas convinced Leakey to help orchestrate her endeavor, despite his initial doubts. In 1971, Galdikas arrived in one of the world's few remaining wild places, what is now Taman Nasional Tanjung Puting, in Kalimantan, i.e. Indonesian Borneo. Galdikas was thus the third of a trio of women hand-picked by Leakey to study mankind's nearest relatives, the other great apes, in their natural habitats. (Sometimes referred to as Leakey's Angels, or even The Trimates, the other two were Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzees, and Dian Fossey, who studied mountain gorillas.) Leakey helped Galdikas initially set up her research camp to conduct field study on orangutans in Borneo, and Galdikas went on to further Leakey's legacy by greatly expanding the scientific knowledge of orangutan behavior, habitat and diet.

From Wikipedia:

When she arrived in Borneo, Galdikas settled into a primitive bark and thatch hut, at a site she dubbed Camp Leakey, near the edge of the Java Sea. Once there, she encountered numerous poachers, legions of leeches, and swarms of carnivorous insects. Yet she persevered through many travails, remaining there for over 30 years while becoming an outspoken advocate for orangutans and the preservation of their rainforest habitat, which is rapidly being devastated by loggers, palm oil plantations, gold miners, and unnatural conflagrations.

Galdikas's conservation efforts have extended well beyond advocacy, largely focusing on rehabilitation of the many orphaned orangutans turned over to her for care. Many of these orphans were once illegal pets, before becoming too smart and difficult for their owners to handle. Galdikas's rehabilitation efforts through Orangutan Foundation International (OFI) also include the preservation of rainforest. Although one Canadian author in the late 1990s was critical of the rehabilitation methods, the ongoing birth of new orangutans among the formerly-rehabilitated adult orangutans at Camp Leakey is part of what makes it the longest continual study of a single species.

From a year 2000 NY Times interview with Dr. Galdikas:

Q. Give us a report on the state of the world's orangutans?

A. They are poised on the edge of extinction. It's that simple. We're still seeing orangutans in the forest; they are coming into captivity in enormous numbers. You just know that there can't be that many left in the wild.

Q. How did the orangutans come to be so threatened?

A. The main factor was that until 1988, Indonesia had a forestry minister who was a real forester. In 1988, he was replaced by a forestry minister who was an agriculturist, a promoter of plantations. That signaled a shift in government policy from selective logging to clear-cutting of the forest. For orangutans, clear-cutting is a policy of extinction. If you selectively log, some animals will survive. But with clear-cutting, the habitat is gone. If that weren't enough, in 1997, there were these horrendous fires that devastated the forests.

Moreover, the last three years have been a period of intense political upheaval: an economic crisis, ethnic strife, student riots, President Suharto's resignation. After President Suharto stepped down in 1998, there was a vacuum of power in the center. Once people in the provinces understood that, some felt they could do whatever they wanted. And what some of them wanted to do was log the forest. So throughout Indonesia, places that had, more or less, been protected, became besieged.

At first, only local loggers came in. When nobody stopped them, the bigger commercial loggers followed. Suddenly, there were no more protected parks.

Q. Is this true too in Kalimantan, Borneo, where you have your research station?

A. Yes, though in the National Park where I work, we're doing what we can. We're trying to set up patrols of local men to go out with park rangers so that when they come across illegal loggers, they don't feel totally intimidated. We're working with the Indonesian government to set up new wildlife reserves at expired logging concessions. And of course, we're doing what we always have: saving wild-born orangutans who've been captured by humans.

Another NY Times article, this one penned by Biruté Galdikas herself articulating her mission, is here. She has written several books about her years with orangutans, such as Reflections Of Eden.

An IMAX movie, titled Born To Be Wild, shows scenes from Camp Leakey, especially of baby orphan orangutans being hand-reared and then referalized. A trailer can be seen here.

Today, Camp Leakey is a collection of a dozen wooden buildings, where researchers from Indonesian and Western universities and local Dayak staff work on rearing orangutan babies, re-introducing them to the rainforest, and studying the populations that remain in the wild.

From the blog of a contemporary researcher:

"Misha's got a rat!" I yell to Tim in my astonishment. The young ape bites off the rat's head and swings it by the tail like a stuffed toy.

Orangutans rarely eat meat, and in this case Misha seems motivated more by curiosity than by appetite. She also occupies herself with the orangutan version of playing house, making a simple nest and practicing the skills of independent living she'll need when Marissa, her mother, one day turns her attention to a newborn.

The pioneering work of Biruté Galdikas suggests that orangutans bear offspring only once every eight years on average—an extremely long interval among mammals.

After a mother gives birth, her baby will cling to her for several years, rarely venturing away from her side, and continue to nurse for about six years. A juvenile sibling may stay with its mother for a few years, as does Emy with mother Ely and her infant.

Emy is learning how to fend for herself since, unlike human mothers, orangutans normally do not provide food for their offspring beyond lactation.

One of my research goals is to try to determine why these periods of juvenile dependency last so long.

On another continent, Dian Fossey, Dr. Galdikas' fellow-Angel, was found murdered in the bedroom of her cabin in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda on Boxing Day, 1985. The last entry in her diary read:

When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.

Fossey's skull had been split by a panga, a kind of machete widely used by poachers; from forensic analysis of the scene, she had been in the act of loading her handgun, but had apparently picked the wrong type of ammunition during the struggle. Fossey's will stated that all her money (including proceeds from the film version of Gorillas in the Mist) should go to finance anti-poaching patrols. However, her mother Kitty Price challenged the will, and won.

The final words of Louis Leakey's book Adam's Ancestors read:

We know from the study of evolution that, again and again, various branches of animal stock have become over-specialized, and that over-specialization has led to their extinction. Present-day Homo sapiens is in many physical respects still very unspecialized− ... But in one thing man, as we know him today, is over-specialized. His brain power is very over-specialized compared to the rest of his physical make-up, and it may well be that this over-specialization will lead, just as surely, to his extinction.

Heart of Darkness

2011-11-23T05:04:00.032+05:30

We branch off into the Sekonyer river from the main trunk of the Kumai. This is Dayak country.

The Dayak are the native people of Borneo. The term covers over 200 hill-dwelling and river-dwelling ethnic subgroups, each with its own dialect, customs, laws, territory and culture but many common traits. Dayak languages are categorised as part of the Austronesian languages in Asia. The Dayak were animist in belief; however many have converted to Islam, and some embraced evangelical Christianity more recently. According to Wikipedia, estimates for the Dayak population range from 2 to 4 million.

The Dayak indigenous religion has been given the name Kaharingan, and may be said to be a form of animism. For official purposes, it is categorized as a form of Hinduism in Indonesia. Nevertheless, these generalizations fail to convey the distinctiveness, meaningfulness, richness and depth of Dayak religion, myth and teachings. Underlying the world-view is an account of the creation and re-creation of this middle-earth where the Dayak dwell, arising out of a cosmic battle in the beginning of time between a primal couple, a male and female bird/dragon (serpent). Representations of this primal couple are amongst the most pervasive motifs of Dayak art.

(The United Nations University has a video showing the life of the Borneo forest-Dayaks here.)

Our immediate destination, the Tanjung Puting National Park, is many hours upstream, so we settle down to talk as the klotok furrows upriver. Padri, our guide, tells me by way of introduction that he is a 'riot orphan'; his parents were decapitated around 1999 in the violence between 'Muslims' (settlers from Madura or Java, as well as those Dayaks in towns and river villages who have convered to Islam) and 'Christians' (Dayaks who are nominally Christian but who span proto-Hindu or animist practices, typically inhabiting the interior of the island.)

Padri calls himself Dayak Melayu. The "Malay" Dayak live in West Kalimantan along the coast, and also in the islands of the Karimata Strait. They are the Dayaks that have converted to Islam. The languages of the Dayak Melayu consist of Tapitn, Banana', Kayung, Delang, Semitau, Suhaid, Mentebah-Suruk dialects, and so on. Their arts and culture have been influenced by Islam, yet activities associated with birth, marriage, burial, building a house, planting crop -- all still involve traditional animistic beliefs. The dukun (shaman) of the Dayak Melayu remain influential in traditional medicine, and are called upon to give advice on when you plan your daughter's marriage or choose a name for your grandson.

Padri recounts how, as a young boy, he received the trunk of his father's body, hack-marks from mandau all over the gaping torso.

Along with a younger brother and a small sister, he was brought up by an uncle. His bewilderment turned into a determination to make something of himself, to learn English, which he now speaks well. Apart from freelancing as a tourguide, he is going to the local community college in Panglakan Bun, and has taken some coursework in IT. He is trying to decide whether to go to college in Java to major in computer science, or to stay in Borneo and build an Orangutan-tours business.

From The Inventory of Conflict And Environment:

The Madurese first arrived in West Kalimantan in the 1930's, but the numbers increased during the 1970's. This was the result of the Indonesian government's transmigration plan, which encouraged people to leave more populated islands such as Madura and Java for low populated islands such as Kalimantan. Little consideration was given to the indigenous Dayaks. As the rainforest was cut down and replaced by palm oil and coconut plantations, the indigenous tribes found themselves at the bottom of a complex hierarchy of different groups, unable to continue their traditional patterns of agriculture and slow to adapt new types of employment. (Economist, 1997) The Christian Dayaks now share the low end of the economic ladder with the Madurese. There are currently about 100,000 Madurese in various parts of Kalimantan and two million Dayaks from at least ten separate tribes.

The Dayaks feel that the Madurese have taken their land. The cultural conflict between the two groups has also been a source of the unrest. More importantly are Dayak demands for greater land rights and representation in government. Many analysts see the burning of three plantations in recent years as evidence of the Dayak's growing resentment of the government's appropriation of traditional land, and the forced selling of Dayak land at below market price. (Djalal, 1997) It is an accumulation of several conflicts. There of course is a cultural gap, but mainly it is the dissatisfaction in how Dayak land has been taken away illegally. One Dayak claimed that "the people in Kalimantan were harmonious until the bad people from East Java came." (Reuters, 1997)

Between 1996 and 1999, as the regime of General Suharto collapsed and violence broke out all over Indonesia, Richard Lloyd Parry, a British foreign correspondent, forayed into some of the worst strife. His account, titled In The Time Of Madness — "a book about violence, and about being afraid" — tries to make sense of what happened in Java, Borneo and East Timor. Here are some snippets from his conversations with a Dutch Capuchin missionary amongst the Dayaks:

Since the trouble at the pop concert, Dayaks all over West Kalimantan had been preparing. When the fighting began in December they had had only sharpened bamboo poles and a few hunting rifles. A month later they had metal heads for the spears, and newly forged mandau, the traditional hacking machete ... Father Kristof passed an album of photographs which showed the Menjalin Dayaks preparing for battle. They had feathers tied to their heads with red ribbons, and ribbons on their spears ... The kamang tariu is the spirit which possesses the Dayaks in time of war. When it is present, it provides physical protection and immunity from thirst and fatigue, but it has a powerful appetite of its own. 'The kamang tariu drinks blood, it has to be fed blood,' said the pastor. 'There were Dayaks in Pontianak who could not go to war, but who were possessed.' Their friends had to cut the throat of a chicken and give it to them, to feed the spirit.'

I asked what happened when the Dayaks returned from an attack on a village.

'They brought back bags of heads. The heart, they eat directly. The idea is that it should still be fresh. A fresh heart has different power from lungs, and lungs are different from stomachs. Even the blood. From children to old people to babies, no exception at all. Four thousand of them, all beheaded with mandau. Yes, it is remarkable ...

I blinked and said, 'Father, as a priest, how do you see all this?'

'It's difficult to say in two or three words, but to understand you have to go back sixteen years to when I arrived here. Compared to then, all the Dayaks are now Christian. They go to war with a cross. They've all bought rosaries. They are not killers.' And then, in English, 'It's very difficult to explain. ...

'Dayaks have two sets of rules and teachings -- the ones of their ancestors, and the rules and regulations set by the government. But when they are under pressure and need to express what they are feeling in the face of that pressure, they have no choice. They have to go by the ancestral book.

Finally Father Kristof said, 'When we love people ...' then stopped, then started again. 'If a son commits a murder and goes to prison, the mother always loves him. She says, "My son is a good boy still." I don't say that what has happened here is good. You have to understand the position of the Dayak people now. They are ignored by the government. They have no political role. No one in key positions, no people of influence in the army. They are under pressure and they have no economic power. All they have is land, land that has been theirs for thousands of years. Now the government appropriates land for transmigration. The timber companies come, other commercial concerns. The Dayaks become upset, alienated from society. That's what makes them stand up for their rights. They are ...' - he struggled for the right word, back in English again now - ' ... natural people. They are in conflict with a tribe that has totally different traditions.'

Tagore the idealist of cultural essence, Conrad the sensibilist of the tragic - yet, poking in the ashes of history, the barbarians rising only after here Wenlock Wood lost to logging, there the Uricon dammed.

Pangkalan Bun

2011-11-18T04:56:00.006+05:30

Neither of the two small airlines that have scheduled service to Pangkalan Bun seems to have any organized way to buy tickets; eventually, armed with wads of rupiah, we queue at the counter outside the domestic terminal of Soekarno-Hatta.

Two cheerfully cavalier eighteen-year-olds attempt to write up paper tickets. Outside, when a gust of wind makes a sandwich-board fall to the ground with a crack, the entire counter staff disappear under their desks in reflex. I have a sense of foreboding.

The airline we are taking has been decertified in the EU due to alleged poor maintenance, and recently one of their turbo-props crashed into a rice field after in-flight engine failure on a similar route. The other airline is reputed worse. There are ferries from the north coast of Java to the south coast of Kalimantan, but they take a day, and are, if anything less confidence-inspiring (the Senopati Nusantara sank with 600 on-board in 2006 while crossing from Kumai to Semarang.)

In the event, we board an aged but functional 737 (from the cabin fittings, a discard from Canadian Airlines, which ceased to function c. 2001), feeling cheated of drama. Our fellow-passengers are returning home to Kalimantan laden with the best Jakarta has to offer -- enormous buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, or trays of glazed Dunkins Donuts. Buffeted by chop, we fly north into towering cumuli stacked over the Java Sea.

An hour later, we come into Iskandar PKN airport, a tail wind driving sheets of rain onto the tarmac. The ground staff show up with a pallet of umbrellas, unfurling one for each of us just in time as we disembark -- no aerobridge, no problem. Masses of dark clouds start from the tops of the trees and cover the sky, the wipers of the old Toyota taxi slap time to the driver's pop and we set off to find our hotel. The town is spread out, a series of low rise compounds along roads cut into the jungle, many occupied by the army, red cockerels strutting on the brigade insignias on green-painted walls, the street dividers immaculate in black-and-white.

These parts are under severe petrol rationing; mile long lines of cars and trucks have formed outside every pump. Most people have left their vehicles parked overnight in line, hoping to get an allocation when the station opens in the morning.

The hotel is called the Blue Kecubung -- the blue amethyst. The term can refer both to a trumpet-shaped flower, and to the mineral. Since the flower belongs to the Datura family, and all parts of the plant, particularly the seeds, are poisonous, we are hoping it is the gem that the hotel aspires to live up to.

Deep at night a ferocious thunderstorm unleashes even more rain. I wake from the doors and windows shaking up a fearsome racket, the a/c unit mounted outside threatening to be torn off the wall by the mauling gale. By morning it has blown itself off, and the school across the street is noisy with the drums of military children marching into assembly.

We get a ride to Kumai. The waterfront is dotted with 3-storey boxlike buildings with no doors and no windows. They turn out to be swallow nesting-houses, a big business.

Bird's nest soup is a delicacy in Chinese cuisine. A few species of cave swifts are renowned for building the saliva nests used to produce the texture of this soup. When dissolved in water, the saliva from the nests turns gelatinous. These nests could well be the most expensive animal products consumed by humans, the choicest types selling for USD 10000 a kilo in Hong Kong, a bowl's-worth from the more common varieties easily going for USD 30-100.

From the blurb accompanying the sales pitch of a Bird's nest vendor:

Birds nest has been regarded as highly nutritional as wild ginseng for thousand of years. It is a very valuable natural tonic due to its health promoting qualities. Birds nest is made from Swiftlets in the world; three species produced Edible-nest. Some of these Swiftlets are feeding on sea-products, while some feeding on flying insects or worms from the wild jungle. Birds nest is rich in protein with a slight present of calcium and iron. The protein contents in Edible-nest are more easily absorbs by human body. Research has found that birds nests help to strengthen our body resistance against diseases. It is one of the best tonics for all age groups due to its high nutritive value to human body. If taken regularly, it can help to improve blood circulation, relieve coughing, asthma and maintain good complexion.

Birds nest is expensive because its supply is low and collection work is tedious. It is the nest built from the saliva of male esculent swift after feeding on insects. The salivary gland is particularly developed in the male esculent swift and it produces large amounts of sticky saliva like that of silk. The male would build a nest on steep cliffs and deep caverns near the sea which becomes edible birds nest after solidifying. The female would lay and hatch her eggs in it.

Edible birds nest can be divided into 3 types -- Bashi Cave Nest, imperial/house birds nest (i.e. White birds nest), and hairy birds nest (i.e. Black birds nest). Bashi Cave Nest is the most nutritious and the most expensive.

We learn from Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke that at the time of the Opium Wars, junks from Hainan stopped at Great Nicobar to pick up nests collected by local tribes:

This was when the Serang revealed to us that the island was not new to him; in his youth, while working on a Hainanese junk, he had come here many times. It was called Great Nicobar and it was by no means a deserted wilderness; on the far side of the mountain, down by the water, there were some surprisingly rich villages.
How so? we said.
He pointed at the sky, where flocks of swift-flying birds were wheeling and soaring. See those birds, he said, the islanders call them hinlene; they revere them because they are the source of their wealth. Those creatures look insignificant but they make something that is of immense value. What?
Nests. People pay a lot of money for their nests.
You can imagine the effect this had on us three Hindusthanis! Your grandfather and Jodu and I all thought the Serang was making gadhas out of us.
Where in the world would people pay to buy birds’ nests? we said. China, he said. In China they boil and eat them. Like daal? Yes. Except that in China, it’s the most expensive food of all.
This seemed incredible to us, so we turned to Ah Fatt: could this possibly be true?
Yes, he said, if these were the nests that were called ‘yan wo’ in Canton, then they were indeed of great value, as good a currency as any that existed in eastern waters – depending on their quality they were worth their weight in either silver or gold. A single chest of nests could fetch the equivalent of eight troy pounds of gold in Canton.
Our first thought was that we were rich, and that all we had to do was to find the nests and scoop them up. But Serang Ali quickly put us right. The birds nested in enormous caverns, he said, and each cave belonged to a village. If we walked in and helped ourselves we would never leave the island alive. Before doing anything we would have to seek out a village headman – omjah karruh they called them there – to ask permission, arrange a proper division of the proceeds and so on.

(So much for Tagore's view of Europe as the origin of the pestilence of mercantilism. It seems the subaltern can source, and the habildar haggle.)

In Borneo, the gathering of nests used to be centered around the lime caverns of Gomantong and Niah. As the Chinese become prosperous, demand is soaring, and purpose-built nesting-houses are sprouting up in coastal towns that border the jungle, since the birds flock in such places. This has become an extraordinary industry, and local towns have been completely transformed by the activity. The nests are mostly exported to Hong Kong, which has become the centre of the world trade, and from there they are retailed to mainland China. It has been estimated that swallow nests now account for 0.5% of Indonesia's GDP. A vibrant counterfeiting industry has also sprung up side by side, so it is apparently prudent to ask to see the nest before it is cooked for you.

It is mid morning as we climb into our klotok. Past the nesting houses, past the docks, past the chimney of the power plant rising out of the jungle, where the Sekonyer river empties into the Kumai.

Borobudur

2011-11-16T06:41:00.005+05:30

In July 1927, Rabindranath Tagore sailed from Chennai towards Bali and Java, several distinguished traveling companions in tow. One of them, the linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, wrote an account titled Dwipamay Bharat (“An India Made of Islands”; the name Indonesia in fact deriving from the Latin Indus for the lands around that river, and the Greek nesos, meaning island ). We also have the poet's own account in Java Jatrir Patra (The Letters of a Traveller to Java, original in Bengali here), collected in the volume Jatri (Traveler). He returned in October 1927, taking a boat to Kolkata from Penang. This was a time when crossing the Bay of Bengal by steamship took a week.

Rabindranath was Asia's first Nobel laureate, and as such a guest of distinction for local potentates wherever he went. Barring a few discordant moments, the tour was solemnly highbrow, made up with visits to Borobudur in Java, with discourses on the Mahabharata with the Raja of Gianyar in Bali, and such. Rabindranath lectured extensively, cut ribbons on roads and bridges (one named after him), and managed to compose only 18 poems or songs in the 18 weeks he was traveling away from India -- the most attenuated production of his adult life. From Rabindranath's own account, he was distracted and exhausted by his packed tour schedule (he was 66 years old at this time.)

In undertaking the trip, Rabindranath Tagore's immediate purpose was to raise funds for Visva Bharati, his perennially impoverished ashram and multiversity at Shantiniketan. He was met with a generous response, especially from the expatriate Indian communities, though what they got in the lectures was, as was usual from Tagore, political and social criticism "at $700 a scold." Rabindranath's trip had been financed by Marwari businessmen like Ghanashyamdas Birla and Narayandas Bijoria, who were interested in reviving India's links with influential people in Southeast Asia through the prise of Indian high culture.

Rabindranath himself evinces the same motive, though in a more latent way. His letters are filled with anguish about the exercise of European (Dutch) power over the East Indies, thoughts on why India in modern times is not able to exercise such power over the world, and also what the right form the proper exercise of power might take.

য়ুরোপ সর্বদেশ সর্বকালকে-যে স্পর্শ করেছে সে তার কোন্‌ সত্য দ্বারা? তার বিজ্ঞান সেই সত্য। তার যে-বিজ্ঞান মানুষের সমস্ত জ্ঞানের ক্ষেত্রকে অধিকার করে কর্মের ক্ষেত্রে জয়ী হয়েছে সে একাট বিপুল শক্তি। এইখানে তার চাওয়ার অন্ত নেই, তার পাওয়াও সেই পরিমাণে। গত বছর য়ুরোপ থেকে আসবার সময় একটি জর্মন যুবকের সঙ্গে আমার আলাপ হয়। তিনি তাঁর অল্পবয়সের স্ত্রীকে সঙ্গে নিয়ে ভারতবর্ষে আসছিলেন। মধ্যভারতের আরণ্য প্রদেশে যে-সব জাতি প্রায় অজ্ঞাতভাবে আছে দুবৎসর তাদের মধ্যে বাস করে তাদের রীতিনীতি তন্ন তন্ন করে জানতে চান। এরই জন্যে তাঁরা দুজনে প্রাণ পণ করতে কুণ্ঠিত হন নি। মানুষসম্বন্ধে মানুষকে আরো জানতে হবে, সেই আরো জানা বর্বর জাতির সীমার কাছে এসেও থামে না। সমস্ত জ্ঞাতব্য বিষয়কে এইরকম সংঘবদ্ধ করে জানা, ব্যূহবদ্ধ করে সংগ্রহ করা, জানবার সাধনায় মনকে সম্পূর্ণ মোহমুক্ত করা, এতে করে মানুষ যে কত প্রকাণ্ড বড়ো হয়েছে য়ুরোপে গেলে তা বুঝতে পারা যায়। এই শক্তি দ্বারা পৃথিবীকে য়ুরোপ মানুষের পৃথিবী করে সৃষ্টি করে তুলছে। যেখানে মানুষের পক্ষে যা-কিছু বাধা আছে তা দূর করবার জন্যে সে যে-শক্তি প্রয়োগ করছে তাকে যদি আমরা সামনে মূর্তিমান করে দেখতে পেতুম তা হলে তার বিরাট রূপে অভিভূত হতে হত।

এইখানে য়ুরোপের প্রকাশ যেমন বড়ো, যাকে নিয়ে সকল মানুষ গর্ব করতে পারে, তেমনি তার এমন একটা দিক আছে যেখানে তার প্রকাশ আচ্ছন্ন। উপনিষদে আছে, যে-সাধকেরা সিদ্ধিলাভ করেছেন—তে সর্বগং সর্বতঃ প্রাপ্য ধীরা যুক্তাত্মানঃ সর্বমেবা-বিশন্তি; তাঁরা সর্বগামী সত্যকে সকল দিক থেকে লাভ করে যুক্তাত্মভাবে সমস্তের মধ্যে প্রবেশ করেন। সত্য সর্বগামী বলেই মানুষকে সকলের মধ্যে প্রবেশাধিকার দেয়। বিজ্ঞান বিশ্বপ্রকৃতির মধ্যে মানুষের প্রবেশপথ খুলে দিচ্ছে; কিন্তু আজ সেই য়ুরোপে এমন একটি সত্যের অভাব ঘটেছে যাতে মানুষের মধ্যে মানুষের প্রবেশ অবরুদ্ধ করে। অন্তরের দিকে য়ুরোপ মানুষের পক্ষে একটা বিশ্বব্যাপী বিপদ হয়ে উঠল। এইখানে বিপদ তার নিজেরও। ...

এই পৃথিবীতে মানুষ যদি একেবারে মরে তবে সে এইজন্যেই মরবে—সে সত্যকে জেনেছিল কিন্তু সত্যের ব্যবহার জানে নি। সে দেবতার শক্তি পেয়েছিল, দেবত্ব পায় নি। বর্তমান যুগে মানুষের মধ্যে সেই দেবতার শক্তি দেখা দিয়েছে য়ুরোপে। কিন্তু সেই শক্তি কি মানুষকে মারবার জন্যেই দেখা দিল? গত য়ুরোপের যুদ্ধে এই প্রশ্নটাই ভয়ংকর মূর্তিতে প্রকাশ পেয়েছে। য়ুরোপের বাইরে সর্বত্রই য়ুরোপ বিভীষিকা হয়ে উঠেছে, তার প্রমাণ আজ এশিয়া আফ্রিকা জুড়ে। য়ুরোপ আপন বিজ্ঞান নিয়ে আমাদের মধ্যে আসে নি, এসেছে আপন কামনা নিয়ে। তাই এশিয়ার হৃদয়ের মধ্যে য়ুরোপের প্রকাশ অবরুদ্ধ।

জাভায় যাত্রাকালে এই-সমস্ত তর্ক আমার মাথায় কেন এল জিজ্ঞাসা করতে পার। এর কারণ হচ্ছে এই যে, ভারতবর্ষের বিদ্যা একদিন ভারতবর্ষের বাইরে গিয়েছিল। কিন্তু সেই বাইরের লোক তাকে স্বীকার করেছে। তিব্বত মঙ্গোলিয়া মালয়দ্বীপসকলে ভারতবর্ষ জ্ঞানধর্ম বিস্তার করেছিল, মানুষের সঙ্গে মানুষের আন্তরিক সত্যসম্বন্ধের পথ দিয়ে। ভারতবর্ষের সেই সর্বত্র-প্রবেশের ইতিহাসের চিহ্ন দেখবার জন্যে আজ আমরা তীর্থযাত্রা করেছি। সেই সঙ্গে এই কথাও দেখবার আছে, সেদিনকার ভারতবর্ষের বাণী শুষ্কতা প্রচার করে নি। মানুষের ভিতরকার ঐশ্বর্যকে সকল দিকে উদ্‌‌বোধিত করেছিল,—স্থাপত্যে ভাস্কর্যে চিত্রে সংগীতে সাহিত্যে। তারই চিহ্ন মরুভূমে অরণ্যে পর্বতে দ্বীপে দ্বীপান্তরে, দুর্গম স্থানে, দুঃসাধ্য কল্পনায়। সন্ন্যাসীর যে-মন্ত্র মানুষকে রিক্ত করে নগ্ন করে, মানুষের যৌবনকে পঙ্গু করে, মানবচিত্তবৃত্তিকে নানাদিকে খর্ব করে, এ সে মন্ত্র নয়। এ জরাজীর্ণ কৃশপ্রাণ বৃদ্ধের বাণী নয়, এর মধ্যে পরিপূর্ণপ্রাণ বীর্যবান যৌবনের প্রভাব।

Through what Truth has Europe has touched all places and all times? That Truth is her Science. Her Science, which has occupied all the domains of Knowledge and thence won in all the domains of Action, is an enormous power. In this way, there is no end to her Wanting, and her Getting is in the same proportion. Last year when returning from Europe I became acquainted with a young man from Germany. He was coming to India with his young wife. For two years, he would be spending time amongst the tribes who live unknown to the outside world in the forests of Central India, and look in every nook and cranny of their customs. To this end, the couple are not shy to risk their lives. Man must learn more about Man, that learning does not stop at the boundary of barbarian tribes. To organize and learn all that can be learnt, to encircle and collect, to free minds from all other infatuations in the pusuit of Knowledge -- when one goes to Europe one realizes how enormous Man has become in being able to do these. Through this power Europe has made the World into a World of Man. If we were to be able to visualize the Power that has been applied to remove all the obstacles that confront Man, we would be overwhelmed by the enormity of that Manifestation.

In this aspect the light that Europe shines is enormous, something that every Man can be proud of; but there is another aspect in which Europe's light is occluded. The Upanishads say - The Seekers who have Found, enter the all-encompassing Truth in an union of the soul with Everything. Truth goes everywhere, in so going lets Man the right to enter thence. Science has let Man into World-Nature, but today in Europe there is the lack of a Truth that hinders Man enter inside Man. From the standpoint of Interiority, Europe has become an world-encompassing menace to Man. And in this she is a menace too, to herself ... If Man becomes extinct from this world, he will become so because he knew the Truth, but not how to rightly use the Truth. He got the power of the Gods, not Godliness. In the present age the power of the Gods has appeared in Europe; but did that power appear only to the end of taking human lives? In the last war, this question arose in a frightening form. Outside Europe, Europe has become a horror, the proof of this today lies all across Asia and Africa. Europe has not come amongst us with her Science, she has come with her Desire. Thus, Europe's entry into Asia's heart is blocked.

You may ask why all these questions came to my mind before embarking for Java. The reason is, India's learning had in one age gone outside India. And that learning was accepted by the peoples outside. In Tibet, in Mongolia, in the islands of Malaya -- India had spread the Dharma of Knowledge, through a path of heartfelt connection of Man and Man and Truth. Today we are embarking on a pilgrimage to see the signs of the history of that all-enveloping entry of India. And, at the same time, it is to be seen that the Idea India propagated in that day was not one of barrenness. India had inspired the inner bounty of Man -- in architecture, sculpture, art, music and literature. The signs of that inspiration remain in deserts, in forests, in mountains, in island upon far-flung island, in remote places and in impossible imaginings. This inspiration was not the ascetic's mantra that empties Man and strips him naked; that cripples his Youth, that diminishes in many ways his natural self and wishfulness. This was not a message of an age-worn shrunken-hearted old man, in this message was the influence of a tremendous youthfulness, full of life and of virility.

Upon encountering the Inner Bounty of Man in Java, though, Tagore had to admit that he did not care for the architecture of Borobudur: it seemed to him to have no proportion or integral form, being merely a hodge-podge of Buddhist lore and iconography. He revised his initial aversion over the weeks and months; later, he was inspired to even write a poem titled “Borobudur”.

In the poem (Bengali original here), he starts:

That dawn, too, the sun had risen thus in the sky --
The forest murmured in greeting below.
Craving a touch of the blue mist, above
The mountains had seemed an image dreamt by the earth.

At the edge of the coconut woods, some king
meditative-eyed, had sat alone
Exuberant had arisen an endless desire, his own
prayer mantra to send to the end of all time.
From what courage had this wish come?

He continues (I paraphrase): Blending with the surrounding forests and farmland -- a great text inscribed in the stone -- to be read with joy by all people in all ages. The island holds the inscription to its heart, the mountain raises it to the skies, the farmer sows and reaps rice by the river. Through all the changes in the world and through the shadow-play of time, the text in stone sounds the same mantra: “I thus take resort to the Buddha”.

Today, uncomprehending hordes come to trample up and down the stone. Greedy, seeking only to possess, always dissatisfied, hearts withered with pride -- they come, pointlessly, only to watch and to take, their hands empty of offering. The earth trembles beneath the joyless rush of their ever-speeding desire, their headlong hunt for the trophy, across this road and that, ultimately reaching nowhere, the flame of their all-devouring hunger demanding as sacrificial offering infinite accomplishment and endless accumulation. The day will come when the only way to become free again will be to come back in humble pilgrimage to this bank of silent stone, and raise to the heavens across the span of endless time that same undying mantra of love: "I thus take resort to the Budhha."

All India Poetess Conference

2011-04-12T00:01:00.009+05:30

Fifty two Indian poetesses have descended onto Tashkent. Our Indian-operated hotel, the Park Turon, serves a subcontinental lunch-buffet redolent of curry; the poetesses' tourbus is parked outside, they are put up elsewhere but come to the Turon every day for lunch.

Mr. M disappears under a scrum of Aunties. When he re-emerges, cheeks and pockets bulging with candy, his eyes are glazed and he is lobbed from table to table; his nose is tweaked, his cheeks are pecked and many blurry pictures of his restless person are taken.

The poetesses seem to all be, to use that 'cosmopolitan' put-down, regional; that is, they hail from small towns and write in various vernacular languages. They seem to me to have joined the All India Poetess Conference for the same reasons people join organizations like Lions Club or Linked In all the world over: to belong, to be seen to belong, to meet interesting or interested people, to fight boredom, to see if they can learn that or this. The AIPC has organized seminars in Mauritius and in Thailand in the past; this year they are in Tashkent. The attendees fund themselves (a few seem to have small travel grants), so the locations are determined by affordability to the middle-classes of small-town India, as well as relevance to their views of themselves. In that sense, "Babur's homeland" is the near-abroad.

Some bios of the poetesses, from their web-site:

DIKSHA GAJBHIYE (Maharashtra)
Born on 17-08-1985 at Jabalpur, Completing MBBS from Seth G.S. Medical College Mumbai. Hobbies:reading, writing, music. Several articles published in college magazine. Honorary Member AIPC.

ARTY S. KALE (Maharashtra)
Born on 17-06-1971, B.Sc., Running Computer Training Institute at Nashik. Hobbies: Poetry Writing. Life Member AIPC.

DR. SANDHYA P. MERIA (Gujarat)
Born on 8-01-1974 at Gandhidham, University Topper in M.A., Ph.D. in Hindi, Lecturer Government College, Daman. Published Poems & Articles & Research Papers, First in State Level Debate & First in Dance, Drama, Saree–Show in University, Running Beauty Parlor, Painting & Boutique.

H. SAVITHRI DEVI (Karnataka)
Born on 16-02-1958 at Bangalore , M.A. 1988. Manager, The Bangalore City Co-Op. Bank Ltd., Interested in Reading, Writing Poems, Photography, Badminton & Listening Music. Honorary Member of AIPC.

DR. PRABHA KUMARI (Bihar)
Born on 21-04-1963 at Munger. M.A. 1983 Ph.D. 1989, HOD Economics, Sultan Ganj College, Bhagalpur ,Published Several books Akhiri Amanat, Toota Pani Choota, Ek Kiran Aur, Bhool Gai Chidia ...

and

RAGHUNATHAN T. M. (Our Helper)
Born on 10-06-1951, B.A. , Superintendent in EPFO. Knowing English, Hindi &Malayalam. Interested in Photography , Traveling & Reading (Lives at Kozhikode)

Teachers of the humanities in small-town colleges; a doctor here whose mother was an activist-poetess; a bank-manager there who writes couplets; a heavyweight 'national' poetess who was "nominated" into this group; a number of empty-nesters who write genuinely-sentimental bad poems chaining non-sequiturs. I wander around rescuing Mr. M from too-sweet gulab-jamuns and too-spicy samosas. Someone is reciting from a book:

पशमीने का हो चाहे रेशम का हो
कोई मरता नहीं है कफन के लिए
मेरे घर में अंधेरा कोई गम नहीं
एक दिया चाहिए बस जेहन के लिए

Pashmine ka ho chahe resham ka ho
Koi marta naheen hai kafan ke liye
Mere ghar mein andhera koi gham naheen
Ek diya chahiye bas jehan ke liye

Whether it be pashmina or whether silk
No one dies because they want a grand shroud
My house is dark, but I do not mind
Give me but one earthern-lamp of understanding.

In the middle of the mayhem, Dr. Lari Azad, Founder, is holding court. The Uzbek waiter of the Park Turon had sidled up to me with some questions on Tibetan medicine in Dharamsala. (Uzbekistan is going through a Tibetan medicine -- herbal and spiritual -- craze. We met Uzbeks who have flown to Bangalore, Sikkim and Dharamsala to get Tibetan medicines for ailments ranging from cancer to the evil eye; in fact, Uzbek Air flies twice a week to Amritsar from Tashkent to divert the Dharamsala traffic away from Delhi.) Telling the waiter the parathas are getting cold, Dr. Azad grabs hold of my hands affably. We sit and chat, hand in hand, two men in the middle of a sea of sentimental poetesses.

Dr. Azad was raised in Jajmau, a district town close to Kanpur; he immediately perks up on learning I have studied in Kanpur - "arre ji dekho dekho! it is a small world or what?"

Browsing the AIPC website, I find the following note by Lari Azad on "Decorum", i.e. how he wishes to be treated as Founder:

AIPC DECORUM
(To be strictly observed by the Office Bearers & all Members)
1-For AIPC, our Founder is sacrosanct & most venerable.
2-Founder’s presence is must in Inaugural, Felicitation & Valedictory Sessions.
3-Founder & Chairperson will always be received & seen off at Stations by Secretary General & Convener & other Vice Chairs & Deputy Secretaries.
4-Founder & Chair will always be escorted on Dais by both Secretary General & Convener themselves.
5-If a bouquet, garland or memento etc. is presented to Founder & Chair, it must not be less than that of Chief Guest or anyone.
6-Always in any case, at everywhere, Founder’s version will be considered as last verdict.
7-No member should be allowed to ask little things from the Founder or Chair directly.
8-All the Office Bearers should always stand to pay the respect at the entry of Founder & Chair.
9-All the AIPC members must talk & behave decently with all decorum while interecting with the Founder& Chair i.e. with ‘Sir’ & ‘Madam’.
10-All the present Hon’ble Gent Patrons will be given warm welcome & high honor.
11-Don’t make a call directly to Founder. Never call on his Private Cell No. If ever you call, use only 2 office Numbers.

We sit and catch up on our respective lives. They had been to Samarkand by tourbus a few days ago. Dr. Azad wants to know "what there is to see in Bukhara and Khiva?" As the 'guardian' of these poetesses, he fusses over them like a peacock shepherding peahens. He wants to make sure they, as 'sensitive persons', see 'inspirational parts of the world'; but there are also enough diabetics and heart patients in the company to warrant staying close to a hospital. In any case, the trip to Samarkand has knocked the stuffing out of many members. I console him saying if they have seen the Registan, they have seen the most grand sight in all Uzbekistan. Azad seems relieved; they can then proceed with wrapping up the lovefest, and go home. He recites softly:

जो सुख अपने चौबारा
न बलख नि बुखारा

Jo sukh apne chaubara
Na Balkh ni Bukhara.

Than own-shop no place dearer
Not Balkh, nor Bukhara.

Death In Tashkent

2011-04-11T00:20:00.007+05:30

Lal Bahadur Srivastava 'Shastri' (1904-66) was the 2^nd (not counting the 13-day tenure of acting-PM Gulzarilal Nanda) prime minister of India, succeeding 18 years of uncontested premiership by Jawaharlal Nehru.

During Shastri's tenure as PM, the second Indo-Pak war started, and ended, in September 1965 with a UN-mandated ceasefire. From a book on the war:

Considered a dove in foreign affairs, humble, meek, assailed by Ms Vijay Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru's celebrated sister, as a "prisoner of indecision", Lal Bahadur Shastri was the least likely Indian leader to cope with a determined Pakistan's well-organized military bid to take over Kashmir. Yet Ayub Khan took no chances. He tested Shastri's guts through a calculated and controlled Pak offensive in the Runn of Kutch early in the 1965 summer. Shastri bought peace by entering into an agreement with Pakistan over the Runn issue rather than confronting it head on. Pakistan could not think of a more opportune moment to strike and annex Kashmir. President Ayub Khan recognized the opportunity and decided to act.

Taken by surprise, the Indian forces were nearly cut off in Kashmir; but Ayub Khan had mis-assessed his adversary. Pushed to the wall, Shastri, "the little big man" of the war, ordered Indian armored corps to counterattack in the Punjab instead of trying to relieve pressure in Kashmir. Within weeks, Indian tanks were at the outskirts of Lahore, the complexion of the war had changed completely, and Pakistan, reeling under the stab deep into its heartland, was suing for peace. The war ended after 21 days with India left holding some Pakistani territory.

After the declaration of ceasefire, Shastri and Ayub Khan attended a summit in Tashkent stage-managed by the Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin. On 10 January 1966, Shastri and Khan signed the Tashkent Declaration. The next day, Shastri, who had suffered two heart attacks earlier, died supposedly of another, at 1:32 am.

Shastri’s wife and some family members have claimed he was poisoned by the cook of Indian ambassador in Moscow, who was responsible for preparing his meal in Tashkent, in cahoots with the Uzbek butler. Sunil Shastri, then 16, remembers the body had turned blue in the chest, abdomen, and back, when it finally arrived in Delhi.

There were many loose ends. The butler, Akhmed Sattarov, was arrested on the same night, but later absolved of charges. The cook, Mohammed Jan, later emigrated to Pakistan. Shastri's personal doctor, RN Chugh, who had been taken to Tashkent and had been among the first to rush to the Prime Minister's aid, died in a road accident after returning to India; his family died in another.

Shastri is one of the few heads of government to have died in office overseas. Incredibly, no post-mortem was performed.

In 2009, Anuj Dhar, author of CIA's Eye on South Asia and India's answer to the X-Files, asked the Indian Prime Minister's Office (PMO) under a Right to Information plea that Shastri's cause of death be made public. The PMO refused to oblige, claiming this would lead to harming of foreign relations, cause disruption in the country and cause breach of parliamentary privileges. The PMO did reveal that it had in its possession one document related to Shastri's death, but, in a ham-handedness typical of Indian bureaucracy, refused to declassify it.

It has been said that Nehruvian era did not die with Jawaharlal -- it died with Shastri.

The Tashkent declaration restored the status quo ante bellum, evoking much criticism from many quarters, particularly in the Indian armed forces. The Indian army had won many strategic areas in Pakistan, after the loss of many lives, and now had to vacate these positions at the strokes of the Tashkent pens. In the declaration, there was no mention of a no-war pact with Pakistan, nor any need to stop the ongoing proxy war in Kashmir being carried out by the Pakistani army.

Kosygin was keen that the summit be a grand success, enhancing his image in the Afro-Asian world. Embroiled in Vietnam, alternating between showering abuse at Shastri's government for criticizing US policy towards Hanoi, and trying to please both India and Pakistan, US President Lyndon Johnson managed merely to have the US bitterly hated in both countries. By 1966, the US could only watch, from the audience, the drama playing out in Central Asia.

(The Associated Press also quoted an unnamed Soviet official as saying after the India-Pakistan pact was signed, "Now we will take our team to Vietnam and maybe something will come out of it." The Soviets were clearly cocky with what had been engineered by Kosygin.)

The Pakistani President Ayub Khan was adamant in his demand of the lost territories; China was threatening to get involved if the war resulted in strategic territorial gains by India. Only the Indian Premier was hesitant in agreeing to restoration of boundaries immediately, taking into account the sentiments and sacrifices of the army. He was also doubtful, from past experience, about the sincerity of Pakistan in adhering to the terms of the agreement. Kosygin started intensely pressuring Shastri, threatening him with the possibility of UN sanctions, withholding of Russian military supplies, and recognition of Chinese claims to being a party to the conflict. Shastri broke.

Hajipir Pass and Tithwal are two border posts that have always been in the minds of Indian veterans of 1965. India had wrested these posts after taking horrific casualties. Many soldiers wept, and vowed not to leave despite Shastri's acceptance of their return to Pakistan. (Here is the Kishenganga river separating the Indian and Pakistani positions in the Tithwal sector; the Indian position is to the left; the river had had to be forded under intense enemy fire.)

One vivid account of events in Tashkent is given in India, The Critical Years by veteran Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar, who was part of the traveling press corps to Tashkent.

Nayar writes Shastri had had a hectic day, holding talks with Kosygin and his officials, and hadn't been able to sleep very much. "That evening," writes Nayar, "I met by chance his personal physician Dr R.N. Chugh, who accompanied him. I asked him how Shastri was standing the strain. He looked up to the sky and said: 'Everything is in the hands of God'."

Nayar proceeds to recollect the fateful night. Since he was to travel in the official airplane early next morning to Delhi via Kabul, Nayar retired at 11 pm. "I must have been dozing when someone knocked at my door and said: 'Your prime minister is dying.' A Russian lady was waking up all the journalists." A group of journalists then sped to Mr Shastri's dacha from the hotel. On arriving, Kuldip Nayar found a grief-stricken Kosygin standing on the verandah. "He could not speak and only lifted his hands to indicate Shastri was no more." When Nayar went in, he found Dr Chugh being questioned by a group of Soviet doctors through an interpreter. In the next room Shastri's body lay still on his bed. The journalists emptied the flower vases in the room and spread them on the body. Nayar also noticed an overturned thermos-flask on a dressing-table, some 10 feet away from Shastri's bed, and wondered whether the prime minister had struggled to get get water. "His slippers were neatly placed near the bed; it meant that he walked barefoot up to the dressing table in the carpeted room," Nayar writes.

Nayar pieces together the timeline - how Lal Bahadur Shastri reached the dacha around 10pm after a reception, chatted with his personal staff and asked his staff member Ramnath to bring him food "which was prepared in the dacha by the Russians". "In the kitchen there was a Soviet cook helped by two ladies - both from the Russian intelligence department - and they tasted everything, including water, before it was served to Mr Shastri," Nayar writes. As Shastri ate a frugal spinach-and-aloo meal, he received a call from a PA in New Delhi and sought the reaction to the Tashkent agreement on the streets. Then he spoke to his family in New Delhi. He asked his eldest daughter Kusum, how she found the pact. "She replied, 'We have not liked it'," writes Kuldip Nayar. "He asked 'what about her mother?' She too had not liked the declaration, was the reply given." A crestfallen Shastri, according to Nayar, then remarked: "If my own family has not liked it, what will the outsiders say?"

The prime minister's wife did not come on the line to talk to him despite many requests, because she was aghast at what had been conceded (a contention that is disputed by many of his surviving family members.) This upset Shastri greatly. "He began pacing up and down the room... For one who had had two heart attacks earlier, the telephone conversation and the walking must have been a strain," Nayar writes. Around 1.30 am, his personal assistant Sahai, according to Nayar, saw Shastri at his door, asking with difficulty, "Where is the doctor?" The staff went to fetch Dr Chugh, while Indian security men helped Mr Shastri walk back to his room. "If it was a heart attack - myocardiac infarction, and obstruction of blood supply to the heart muscles, as the Soviet doctors said later - this walk," writes Kuldip Nayar, "must have been fatal."

Nayar writes - presumably from an eyewitness account by Sahai - that Shastri began coughing "rockingly", touched his chest and became unconscious. Dr Chugh arrived soon after, felt the prime minister's pulse, gave an injection into the heart, tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but to no avail. Some more Soviet doctors arrived. They found Shastri dead. The time of the death was recorded as 1.32 am.

Talk about foul play began as soon as the body arrived in Delhi. Nayar says the prime minister's wife asked him why Mr Shastri's body had turned blue. He told her that when "bodies are embalmed" they turn blue. Mrs Shastri was not convinced. She asked about "certain cuts" on Mr Shastri's body. Nayar told her he hadn't seen any. "Apparently, she and others in the family suspected foul play," Nayar writes.

In 2001, Nayar made a final disclosure on Rediff.com.

Late that night, Ayub Khan came to the dacha. He prayed. He told me, "If this man had lived, there was a possibility of India and Pakistan coming together to live in peace."

India honoured the Tashkent accord. But Pakistan never implemented it.

In five-years' time, hostilities would break out again, culminating in a Pakistani surrender at the Fall of Dhaka.

Here's the Soviet propaganda clip about the Tashkent meeting and declaration. It has no mention of what preceded it, a brutal but short war in which thousands of lives were lost. The clip shows Shastri wandering around the tourist points of Tashkent trying to look interested; it also neglects to mention that in a few hours, the Indian PM would be dead.

The Aryan Peshwa

2011-04-09T04:34:00.050+05:30

Between the decline of Tsarist administration in Russian Turkestan (a 1910 report identifies monumental mismanagement), and the formation of the Uzbek SSR in 1924, Tashkent was an ambiguous place, where many of those on periphery plotted or perished. Not only did M.N. Roy (see post below) frequent the Indusky Duma (India House) on Lavmentev Road, the city was also the 'threshing field' of the veterans of the global Indian anti-colonial network, such as Raja Mahendra Pratap (head of the Provisional Government of India in exile), his war minister (M. Basheer), interior minister (Obeidullah Sindhi), and foreign secretary (P. T. Pillai); as well as leftist swadeshis like Abani Mukherjee.

(Goga, the son of Abani Mukherjee, has claimed his father and Netaji Subhas Bose were prisoners in adjacent cells in Siberia; and that Netaji had assumed the name ‘Khilsai Malang’ there; the conspiracy theory, investigated inconclusively by my father's childhood friend Justice Manoj Mukherjee, runs that the Japanese had pushed Netaji into Russian territory across Manchuria in 1945, and that he died in one of Stalin's gulags at the instigation of Nehru and Attlee, neither of whom wanted a 'fascist' takeover of Delhi.)

In 1932, Mahendra Pratap was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the first 'native' Indian to enter the ranks of nominees. (Annie Besant had preceded him by a year; Mahatma Gandhi would follow in 1937; none of them actually won the prize, and in fact in 1932 the Peace prize was not awarded at all.)

Mahendra Pratap was born in a line of Jat princelings in western Uttar Pradesh in 1886. Adopted into the line of succession of Mursan state (approximately Hathras today), and marrying into the royal family of Jhind, he was seen as a betrayer of his class for his socially progressive views (he made it a point to dine with 'untouchables'), his politics (sent to Calcutta, he hung out with the Bengali revolutionaries like Bipin Chandra Pal rather than the British colonial governing class), as well as his profligacy (he donated the family seat, as well as five villages, towards the establishment of a technical university to address the 'knowledge gap' between Britain and India.)

Fearful of attracting the wrath of the colonial state against all of Mursan, his clan seems to have found a way to get him to leave India. He traveled to Europe, and was befriended immediately by the Bengali revolutionaries in Zurich and Berlin, through them meeting the Kaiser in Germany and Lenin in Russia. In 1915, Mahendra Pratap founded the first Provisional Government of India, in exile in Afghanistan. During WW I, those hoping for a victory of the Central Powers hailed Raja Mahendra Pratap the Aryan Peshwa, waiting in the wings to descend to Delhi from Kabul as soon as circumstances might permit. (Below, the first Provisional Indian Government-In-Exile.)

Here is Mahendra Pratap's account of meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm II:

The Indian Committee with about hundred Indian members was the only Indian representative body at Berlin in those days and Mr. V. Chattopadhyaya, a brother of Madam Sarojini Naidu, was the most active figure of the Indian Committee. He was the man who brought me from Switzerland to Berlin and he was constantly visiting me at the hotel.

It was in February 1915 that I went over the frontier of Switzerland and entered Germany. It is difficult to depict the state of my mind when i jumped into the unknown. What was I doing, how would I fare and what could be the result of this adventure was too early to guess. I took a small room at the Continental Hotel, Berlin. Why a small room? If I could decide that i was already a colleague of the German warriors I would have gladly accepted the Imperial hospitality of the German Reich. But I had not decided. I considered myself still studying the war situation. It was no secret. I had not run away from my country. I had applied for a British passport to study the war situation in Europe. I was still thinking that if things did not go to my satisfaction I could return back to Switzerland, and in such a case I could not conscientiously accept the hospitality of the Germans. I was, therefore, living as economically as possible. The Germans, however, were lavishly entertaining me. Banquet after banquet followed. To my astonishment our views coordinated and I soon found that we were in the same boat.

The day that I was taken to see the Kaiser was the red day of that boisterous life. Even today the picture of that day appears fresh in my memory. I very well remember how the news was brought to me that His Excellency Mr. Zimmerman had brought a car to fetch me to the Imperial residence. I went with him to the Kaiser at the Tiergarten Palace. As soon as our car stopped, a man came up to attend on us. We were shown in. Mr. Zimmerman looked into a looking glass and made his mustaches a bit more straight-up in a right Kaiser fashion. As we entered the big hall I saw a stately figure standing all alone in the middle. As I went forward, followed by Mr. Zimmerman, that figure in the middle of the hall took a couple of steps forward.

He was the Kaiser himself and we cordially shook bands. It was interesting for me to hear from His Majesty's own lips that he was interested in a prophecy which foretold the end of the British Empire in India. Kaiser seemed to know some details of my family. He spoke of my relation with H.H. the Maharaja of Jhind and said that the Sikh States occupied a very strategic position in the middle of the Punjab. When I took leave of the Kaiser after a very friendly conversation of over 20 minutes and I was on the point of leaving the hall, the Kaiser shouted and said, “Give my greetings to the Amir of Afghanistan”. My Indian friends explained to me later that the Kaiser was specially coached for every interview that he granted, and that before my visit to the Kaiser he was already informed about a few facts of my life and my family. In any case it was marvelous that the Kaiser could speak as he did about things Indian.

In 1919, the Aryan Peshwa traveled to Moscow:

I stayed at the palatial building of the former sugar-king. Moulana Barkatullah could establish his head quarters at this place. He was in very good relations with the Russian Foreign Office. When there was scarcity of food in the city, we were right royally feasted. My Indian friends who had started on this journey with me from Berlin could also come and gather here. One evening we received a phone-call from the Soviet Foreign Office. I was told that someone was coming and that I should hand over my pamphlets to the man. This I did. Next morning was the day when I with my friends were to meet Comrade Lenin at the Kremlin. Prof. Vosnesensky took us to the ancient Imperial Palace of Moscow. We passed through the guards. We went upstairs. We entered a big room with a big table at which was sitting the famous Red Leader Comrade Lenin. I being at the head of the party entered first and proceeded towards the figure sitting right before me. To my astonishment the man or the hero stood up suddenly, went to a corner and fetched a small chair and put the chair near his office chair. And as I arrived by his side he asked me to sit down. For a moment I thought in my mind, where to sit, asking myself, should I sit on this small chair brought by Mr. Lenin himself or should I sit on one of the huge easy chairs covered with Morocco leather. I decided to sit on that small chair and sat down, while my friends, Moulana Barkatullah and others, took their seats on richly upholstered chairs.

Comrade Lenin asked me, in what language was he to address me -- English, French, German or Russian? I told him that we should better speak in English. And I presented to him my book on the Religion of Love. To my astonishment he said that he had already read it. Quickly arguing in my mind, I could see that the pamphlets demanded by the Foreign Office a day earlier were meant for Lenin himself. Mr. Lenin said that my book was “Tolstoyism". I presented to him also my plan of having notes repayable not in gold or silver but in more necessary commodities such as wheat, rice, butter, oil, coal, etc. We had quite a long conversation.

Lt. Col FM Bailey, the British spy in Turkestan, has a jaundiced view of Mahendra Pratap in his Mission to Tashkent:

He was, to put it mildly, an eccentric; his chief mania a hatred of the British Government. He once proposed a scheme for the reorganization of the world with the scarcely novel idea of peace based on justice. In this scheme the whole of Asia was to be a self governing country under the name of Buddha.

Heaven forfend indeed. (In any case, Raja Mahendra Pratap's son and heir Prem Pratap was to marry an English girl, Georgina. The marriage did not last, she returned to the UK leaving behind a son and daughter in India.)

Holed up in Kagan near Bukhara, in 1920 FM Bailey found himself in the same hotel as Mahendra Pratap. An interesting encounter followed. Here is Bailey again:

... we went to our room in the hotel. I passed Mahendra Pratap who was sitting on a bench in the garden ... That he was considered a man of importance was evidenced by the continual succession of messages and visitors he received. Several times in the afternoon he received a message brought by Afghan cavalry soldiers in uniform. These men were much smarter and better turned out than the soldiers I subsequently saw on several occasions both at Kabul and at Torkham, the Afghan frontier post on the Khyber.

I wished to have a talk with Mahendra Pratap and intended, when he was alone, to go boldly to him.

As luck would have it, one day Mahendra Pratap himself wandered into Bailey's room, looking for an envelope. Bailey asked if he was the great Indian Prince. Yes, I am, said Raja Pratap. An amicable conversation ensued (at this point Bailey was in disguise as an official in the service of the Soviets.)

He said that the one aim of his life had been to unite Hindus and Mussulmans against the English, and had wished to give all he possessed to found a college where members of these two religions could be taught together for this purpose, but the law prevented him from disposing of his property in this way and depriving his heirs.

He disagreed with the revolutionary policy of Lenin, as he had explained to the Bolshevik leader in several personal interviews; Lenin aimed at the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' and the extinction of the upper classes. Mahendra Pratap thought that the system by which an upper class was selfish, worked only for its own advantage, and used the proletariat for its own ends, was wrong. But you must have an intelligent upper class that should work for the benefit of the proletariat and not only for itself. This, I said, sounded to me idealistic, and difficult to work in practice, though many of the upper classes in many countries were actually filled with and carried out these and similar ideas. He said that that might be so, but the movement was slow and much more should be done. The Amir of Bokhara was refusing to see him, pleading illness, and he intended to return to Afghanistan where he expected a fresh war with the British would break out soon. In that event he would try to get the Hindus of India to unite with the Mussulmans in a rebellion which would support the Afghan armies by causing internal trouble in India. If he saw no prospects of this he would go to China to study Buddhism and Confucianism.

... I asked him about British rule in India. Was it really very bad? It was not very bad and most individual officers, among whom he used to have many friends, were honest. More honest on the whole than Indians. 'If you take ten British officials you will find only two or three will take bribes, but among Indians the number would be five or six.'

Traveling multiple times to Japan between the two Wars, Mahendra Pratap was at first feted as a Head of State. Gradually, another Provisional Government of India, one more amenable to Japanese goals, emerged as the Aarzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind under Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, and the star of the Aryan Peshwa waned:

... when war broke out on the 8th of December of [1941], Japan started its own Indian organization. I could not agree with the Japanese plans and I was ordered to sit quiet at our center, on the 6th of March, 1942. Then started my forced quiet life. In 1945 when war came to an end, I thought I would have now complete liberty to leave Japan and do as I thought fit. But it was not to be so. On 14th of September 1945, I was arrested and locked up as a war criminal under the orders of the occupying army. For full five months I was in prison under the American guards. It is a chapter by itself. I was in Japan and yet out of Japan because, I was in American custody.

In February 1946, when I came out of the prison I tried my best to get home in India. It took five months more to get the required permission. During these days, I lived in an uncertainty. The Japanese currency that I had was worthless. Japanese money had lost its value. Inflation was ruling. I was invited, still, by some Japanese friends to lunches and meetings, but thrice I got ill due to bad food. I had to sell some of my things to buy my daily needs. It is true we got some rationed articles very cheap, but my money in hand was not sufficient for even rationed articles. Fruits of my garden were yet to come. Under these circumstances, one day in July 1946, came the news that I was allowed to return home, not as an Indian but as a stateless person, a man without a country.

The lives of the members of the various Indian governments in exile is parodied in this song from Patanga (1949), which shows a Indian National Army officer from Dehradun living it up in Rangoon (which had fallen to the Japanese in March 1942), even as he professes to miss his dear wife back home. 'Wish you were her(e).' Oh dear.

"The World's Worst Daughter"?

2011-03-30T05:22:00.001+05:30

Across from the airport in Ferghana is a large banner featuring a young Uzbek woman, superimposed on a composite background of stock images -- tractors, dams, cotton fields, a school chemistry lab, a mosque. This is Gulnora Karimova, the First Daughter of Uzbekistan, whose father has given her a monopoly on, among other businesses (this according to Craig Murray), the printing of banners. Karimov himself apparently extracts a 10% cut of the world's largest open pit Muruntau gold mine (whose reserves at 6 million ounces of gold are worth about USD 8 billion), and takes delivery of the same as ingots air-freighted to his vaults in Rothschild bank in Switzerland; for everything else, the first dibs go to Gulnora. In hushed tones, they say she sits on top of the state/mafia nexus.

From Wiki:

According to US diplomats in Uzbekistan, Karimova "bullied her way into gaining a slice of virtually every lucrative business" in the country and is viewed as a "robber baron". Granted diplomatic status by her father, Gulnara lives much of the time in Geneva, where her holding company, Zeromax, is registered. Gulnara denies claims that she owns Zeromax. And no evidence is still available to confirm that she actually owned that Company or had any connection to it. Karimova was claimed to control Uzdunrobita, Uzbekistan's national mobile telephone network, as well as the country's healthcare, and media sectors. However since June 2007 Uzdunrobita’s 100% stake belongs to Mobile Telesystems OJSC (NYSE: MBT), the largest mobile phone operator in Russia and the CIS. It is said that she has financial interests worth $600 million in retail, nightclubs, and tourism which is denied by Gulnora who attributes these belongings to her family members and friends In December 2009, the Swiss magazine "Bilan" in its list of the richest people in Switzerland assessed Gulnora Karimova to be one of the ten richest women in the country.

The businessmen and proto-capitalists of Ferghana, like the owner of the Yodgorlik factory, have the look people who have made their peace with authorities, and are indeed connected well to the government. Foreign cars are charged 100% import tax, and in any case Yusufjon Mamayusupov's USD 80000 Benz (see Clouds Asleep on Silk, below) represents a lifetime's salary for the average Uzbek. Wealth attracts scrutiny, and demands either to contribute to, or become a part of, the mafia state.

Here is a story about those who fall foul of the state/mafia nexus:

[The Adilovs] "were known in Kokand as wealthy, noble and respected family. Rakhimzhon Adilov was holding the managerial positions in law enforcement bodies of Uzbekistan. His wife Rakhbarkhon Adilova was running a small shop that step by step turned into the chain stores. Their two daughters – Iroda and Mukhaye – were no less successful: Iroda graduated from Frunze polytechnic institute and worked at Kokand meat factory. Mukhaye finished teacher’s college in Kokand; she also married rich businessman from Pakistan.

The wealth of Adilov’s family produced jealousy and willingness to expropriate their property. In the opinion of Adilov’s, the important fact was that the Interior Ministry supervisor for Ferghana Oblast Shukur Ruzmatov wanted to marry Mukhaye, but was denied. The serious problems still had to be faced later.

According to Iroda, in 1994 the Kokand meat factory became the joint stock company. It was defined that 25% of shares must be bought by foreign investors, 25% must be offered at the market, 25% must be owned by staff, 25% must be owned by supplier companies.

While staff members gained 25% of stocks, the rest 75% were sold to influential mafia boss Ibragim Tazhibaev. In 1997 the CEO of the meat factory was fired because "he paid low dividends". Iroda was offered to take over this position but she said "no". One year later the meat plant was already headed by Ibragim Tazhbaev that, according to Adilova, "immediately started fraud operations, also replacing all highly qualified experts by his relatives, having no idea about the job".

Later on Tazhbaev proposed Iroda to attract Pakistani businessman as the foreign investor. As a result, in 2000 Ali Shah Izhad Akhmad Ali Shah – the husband of Mukhaye – bought Tazhibaev’s stake for $150 000; Mukhaye even offered one million sum as the security deposit, which became the reason of the conflict.

Receiving one million, Tazhibaev changed his mind and did not return the security deposit. After interference of Pakistan’s Ambassador, Tazhibaev returned money but fired Iroda. Iroda started addressing the complaints to various agencies and filed a suit. In response, Tazhibaev decided to get rid of Adilova.

"On October 31, 2003 my 13-year old son was kidnapped. Friends of Tazhibaev threatened to kill him, forcing me to "sell" my stocks to Tazhbaev and sign the resignation letter", said Iroda Adilova. She wrote an application but got no response from police. Iroda started writing about the despotism of police structures in the Ferghana valley. Later on the family learned from Sultan Tashpulatov that police received "instruction from above" to "expropriate the property and imprison all family members".

Mukhaye was arrested in 2006.

Mukhaye Adilova said that during 27 days in row she was being tortured and raped by the law enforcement officers, "blessed" by top authorities.

"In pre-trial detention center 5-6 men were raping me every day. I was injected something (the doctor said it was heroin) so that I could stay up. I got pregnant, but had miscarriage", Mukhaye Adilova shared.

It has to be mentioned that the relatives of Mukhaye were never allowed to see her in the detention center. They put best efforts to take her out. They sold most of their assets and gave money to the investigator Alisher Khuzhamkulov and Shukur Ruzmatov, the "supervisor" for Ferghana Oblast. However, these efforts were useless.

Desperate Iroda Adila wrote complaints, where she informed that Asma Sultanova “was illegally importing gold sand from Chechnya to Uzbekistan”, about mafia between Tazhbaev and Kokand’s security officers and Shukur Ruzmatova, “the patron” for criminal business in the Ferghana Oblast.

Later on Iroda and Rakhbarkhon became the target of number of honeytrap situations, organized by Asma Sultanova under the patronage of local law enforcement and judicial structures. As a result, they were sentenced to 8 and 6 years of prison respectively on the following charges: false testimony, false information, blackmailing and other. Nazhot, the younger son of the Adilov’s family, was outside of Uzbekistan. Upon his return home in 2008, he was sentenced to 6 years of jail under trumped-up case.

Craig Murray reports meeting Gulnora for the first time at a British Embassy cultural event in honor of the Queen's birthday. She is 'low-makeup', girlishly hanging on to the UK Ambassador's every word; a provincial Uzbek governor, drunk, having no idea she is Karimov's daughter, approaches the devotchka demanding she translate for him, clearly thinking this leggy beauty is an assistant of some sort. She giggles, asking Murray coyly if she might make a good translator. The lout is led away gently, never to be heard of again.

In a cable sent by the US Embassy in Tashkent to Washington (released by Wikileaks), it was claimed Gulnora Karimova is the single-most hated person in Uzbekistan:

Most Uzbeks see Karimova as a greedy, power hungry individual who uses her father to crush business people or anyone else who stands in her way. Even with the press campaign to improve her image, Gulnora is continuing to do business, pressuring and shutting down competitors. This charm offensive will not likely make her more popular; she remains the single most hated person in the country.

As part of the makeover, she recorded a music video. Reviewing this opus, The Guardian wrote in a piece titled "Princess Of The Uzbeks":

Martial arts black belt, Harvard graduate, jewellery designer, businesswoman. Her father may be a brutal dictator, but the official list of Gulnara Karimova's achievements is as long as your arm. Now the glamorous daughter of the president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, has added a new talent to the list with the release of her first music video. Unutma Meni (Don't Forget Me) features the 33-year-old brunette under the stage name GooGoosha - apparently her father's name for her - cavorting in a cartoon wonderland where she travels to a secluded castle and a tropical island in a limousine that floats through the air.

Commentators say the video - showing repeatedly on Uzbekistan's domestic equivalent of MTV - is part of a campaign to promote Ms Karimova as a potential successor to her father, whose term of office finishes at the end of next year.

Despite the stumbling block of promoting a woman as leader in a traditional Muslim society, Ms Karimova is thought to be the only person who can protect the assets of her father's family and cronies.

However, critics suggest the new song will do little to raise her appeal. "This is exactly comparable to the emperor Nero playing his harp and everyone having to cheer," said Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who was sacked after exposing the Karimov regime's torture of political opponents.

The video is below. Here is Gulnora's website peddling her own line of designer jewelry; and here is the cloying (paid for by Gulnora's PR) interview in Forbes magazine.

Hadith in Bukhara

2011-03-29T00:28:00.041+05:30

Narrated 'Aisha:

Some of the wives of the Prophet asked him, "Who amongst us will be the first to follow you (i.e. die after you)?" He said, "Whoever has the longest hand." So they started measuring their hands with a stick and Sauda's hand turned out to be the longest. When Zainab bint Jahsh died first of all (during the caliphate of 'Umar), we came to know that the long hand was a symbol of practicing charity, so she was the first to follow the Prophet and she used to love to practice charity.

(Sauda died later during the caliphate of Muawiya).

A hadith is a Mohammedan anecdote. There are estimated to be 10000 hadiths counting minor variations; each has a matn (text) and sanad (attribution; often in chains -- so and so heard so and so claim they heard Muhammad proclaim thus) Together, they describe the normative custom of Muhammad or the early Muslim community, and thus underpin the sunnah. Muhammad al-Bukhari, the 'original' Imam Bukhari (810-870 AD), is the scholar best known for authoring a hadith collection (the Sahih al-Bukhari), one that Sunni Muslims regard as the most authentic of such compilations. In Bukhara, the oldest monument left standing by Genghis Khan is the tomb of Ismail Samani; right across from it, the Karimov regime has constructed a concrete monument to Imam Bukhari in the shape of an opened Quran enclosing a hadith library.

Many years ago, as part of a theological discussion with taxi drivers in Cairo, I was asked "Who this man is?"

- His book is in every Muslim's house!
- He's not Arab!
- In fact a Russian!
- Like Salahuddin ibn Ayyubi (i.e. Saladin.)
- Hey, hey, Salahuddin was Kurdish, not Russian.
- I meant a non-Arab.
- But go on, guess, who this man is?

Muhammad al-Bukhari's father Ismail was a student of leading scholars of the day Hammad ibn Zaid and Imam Malik. Ismail al-Bukhari died when Muhammad was quite young. He did, though, leave his son enough wealth for financial independence and a life of scholarship. It is said that the boy was blind in childhood, but cured by his mother's tremendous capacity for prayer, which reached the prophet Abraham in the high heavens. When Muhammad al-Bukhari did gain sight, he exhibited for the rest of his life a photographic memory -- perhaps an allegory for the zeal of the recently-converted.

According to his own account, he began to attend the lectures of the local scholars around the age of ten. At the time, al-Dakhili was the foremost lecturer in Bukhara, and in one lecture on the Quran al-Dakhili read a hadith with the sanad “Sufyan from Abu al-Zubair from Ibrahim.” al-Bukhari told the lecturer that he was mistaken, and that the correct chain was al-Zubair ibn Adi from Ibrahim; because al-Zubair had never recorded hadith from Ibrahim. Al-Dakhili went to check his original, and had to admit his mistake to the ten-year-old.

At sixteen, he left Bukhara with his mother to perform the Haj. After the pilgrimage, he stayed on in Mecca and Medina, using these places as bases to visit other Arab cities in search of hadith scholars and carriers of chains of transmission. He writes:

I visited al-Sham (Syria-Palestine), Masr (Egypt) and al-Jazeera (i.e. the 'island', viz. the Arabian Peninsula) twice. Four times I went to Basra. I stayed in the Hijaz for six years. And I do not know how many times I visited Kufa and Baghdad along with the scholars of hadith.

Al-Bukhari is supposed to have eventually recorded hadith from 1,080 scholars, which he cross-checked, de-duplicated, edited for clarity and eventually wrote down in his magnum opus. It is claimed he heard over 300,000 hadiths, and included about 7,000 in the Sahih, including variations; there are about 2600 unique stories in that number, the rest vary in minor detail or attribution.

Ibn Hajr al-Asqalani wrote in his Hady-al-Sari (introduction) to the Fath al-Bari (an exegesis of the Sahih al-Bukhari) that al-Bukhari’s sources are divided into five categories:

The first category is those scholars who narrated hadith from the Tabieen (Followers), one generation removed from the Companions of Muhammad.

The second category of scholars is those people of the same generation as the first category, who did not have the fortune of receiving hadith from trustworthy Followers, but who nonetheless have some credibility because they were reciting words spoken in their own time.

Al-Bukhari places highest trust in the first two categories.

The third category is the “intermediate” trust category. These scholars did not meet any of the Followers but they received hadith from the leading scholars of the generation immediately following that of the Followers.

The fourth category consists of scholars in al-Bukhari’s own time. From these people, he used to record hadith that he did not hear directly from their teachers (who were also al-Bukhari’s teachers) or the hadith that he did not find with anybody else.

The fifth category is those people who were younger in stature or age than al-Bukhari whom he recorded from due to some benefit in their narrations, a category that includes al-Khwarezmi. By accepting material from those sources, al-Bukhari was applying the litmus of Waki' ibn al-Jarraah:

A person does not become a real scholar until he records from those older than him, those of the same age and those younger than him.

Some say that the word Bukhara derives from Vihara, the Buddhist monasteries of learning which apparently dotted the area much as they did Bihar. Another claims that the origin of the name is in a Chinese garden -- Bahar-e-Chin -- in the area. It could also be derived from the Sogdian βuxārak (Place of Good Fortune). By the 9th century, the Buddhist/Chinese/Sogdian influences were fading, the generation of Imam Bukhari shows Arab cultural consolidation; al-Bukhari himself seems to be the quintessential autodidact from the periphery who fortifies his arrival to the center with a virulent orthodoxy. He writes:

I don’t see any difference between praying Salah behind a Jahmi or a Rafidhi and a Christian or a Jew. They (i.e. the Jahmiyyah or Rāfida) are not to be greeted, nor are they to be visited, nor are they to be married, nor is their testimony to be accepted, nor are their sacrifices to be eaten.

The Jahmis in this context are the school of Mutalizah, who accepted many of the teachings of Jahm ibn Safwan. From Wikipedia:

Muʿtazilah is an Islamic school of speculative theology that flourished in the cities of Basra and Baghdad, both in present-day Iraq, during the 8th–10th centuries. The adherents of the Mu'tazili school are best known for their having asserted that, because of the perfect unity and eternal nature of God, the Qur'an must therefore have been created, as it could not be co-eternal with God. From this premise, the Mu'tazili school of Kalam proceeded to posit that the injunctions of God are accessible to rational thought and inquiry: because knowledge is derived from reason, reason is the "final arbiter" in distinguishing right from wrong. It follows, in Mu'tazili reasoning, that "sacred precedent" is not an effective means of determining what is just, as what is obligatory in religion is only obligatory "by virtue of reason."

Rafidhi, or Deserters, is a term is used by Sunni extremists to refer to Shias, who do not recognize Abu Bakr (and his successors) as legitimate caliphs of the Muslims.

Narrated Abu Huraira:

Abraham did not tell a lie except on three occasions. Twice for the Sake of Allah when he said, "I am sick," and he said, "(I have not done this but) the big idol has done it." The (third was) that while Abraham and Sarah (his wife) were going (on a journey) they passed by (the territory of) a tyrant. Someone said to the tyrant, "This man (i.e. Abraham) is accompanied by a very charming lady." So, he sent for Abraham and asked him about Sarah saying, "Who is this lady?" Abraham said, "She is my sister." Abraham went to Sarah and said, "O Sarah! There are no believers on the surface of the earth except you and I. This man asked me about you and I have told him that you are my sister, so don't contradict my statement." The tyrant then called Sarah and when she went to him, he tried to take hold of her with his hand, but (his hand got stiff and) he was confounded. He asked Sarah. "Pray to Allah for me, and I shall not harm you." So Sarah asked Allah to cure him and he got cured. He tried to take hold of her for the second time, but (his hand got as stiff as or stiffer than before and) was more confounded. He again requested Sarah, "Pray to Allah for me, and I will not harm you." Sarah asked Allah again and he became alright. He then called one of his guards (who had brought her) and said, "You have not brought me a human being but have brought me a devil." The tyrant then gave Hajar as a girl-servant to Sarah. Sarah came back (to Abraham) while he was praying. Abraham, gesturing with his hand, asked, "What has happened?" She replied, "Allah has spoiled the evil plot of the infidel (or immoral person) and gave me Hajar for service." (Abu Huraira then addressed his listeners saying, "That (Hajar) was your mother, O Bani Ma-is-Sama (i.e. the Arabs, the descendants of Ishmael, Hajar's son)."

A searchable compilation of hadiths can be found here.

The Odyssey of M.N. Roy

2011-03-21T05:27:00.016+05:30

The Uzbek authorities have erected gay green-painted tin facades in front of the old mohalla of Sibzar in Tashkent, lest the lot of the working-classes detract attention from the nearby spanking Khast-Imam complex. Enter through that little gate cut in the fence, and you will find yourself in the haunts of Manabendra Nath Roy -- radical of Calcutta, insurrectionist of Palo Alto, founder of the Communist Parties of Mexico and India -- sent by Lenin from Moscow to Tashkent in 1920 with two trainloads of armaments to set up a school for training Indian revolutionary cadres dedicated to overthrowing the British government in an Eastern repeat of the October revolution.

M.N. Roy was born as Narendra Nath Bhattacharya near Kolkata in 1886. His father was a village temple priest, and while as a boy he got a smattering of Sanskrit in the village educational system, M.N. Roy had no formal education and was basically self-taught. Radicalized early by Aurobindo Ghose (Sri Aurobindo) and Jatindranath Mukherjee (Bagha Jatin), he joined the Bengali revolutionaries committed to overthrowing the British Raj.

Shortly after the breakout of World War I in September 1914, Indian-independence seekers recognized that splits in the ranks of Europeans no longer afforded the 'sahibs' an united front against the aspirations of the colonies, and that the Austro-German confederation could be engaged to neutralize the advantages of the use of modern arms that the British colonial state possessed over the ragtag revolutionaries of India. An International Pro-India Committee was formed at Zurich; it merged into the Indian Independence Party, led by Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (Chatto, Sarojini Naidu's brother). Advised by Berlin, the German Ambassador Johann von Bernstorff in Washington arranged with Franz von Papen, his military attaché (as well as future Nazi boss and German Chancellor), to send arms consignments from California to secret dropoff locations on coast of Orissa. The Indians were to pay for these arms -- the Bengali revolutionaries under Bagha Jatin and Rashbehari Bose started raising the money by conducting a series of robberies. Jatin relocated to a hideout in Orissa near the Balasore coast; and, in April 1915, sent Narendra Bhattacharya to Batavia, to make a deal with the German authorities concerning the supply of arms.

Narendra traveled under many names -- Charles A. Martin, Hari Singh, Mr. White, D. Garcia, Dr. Mahmud, Mr. Banerjee. Through the German Consul in Batavia, Narendra met the brother of Karl Helfferich, secretary of the treasury for the German empire, who assured him that cargoes of arms and ammunition were already on their way "to assist the Indians in a revolution", but not much more in terms of specifics. He then seems to have traveled to Shanghai, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, and America in search of armed assistance for the Indian revolution. Traveling to Japan as Mr White, Narendra met Rashbehari Bose in Tokyo, as well as the exiled Chinese President Dr Sun Yat-Sen, who helped arrange that he would receive ammunition supplies from two Chinese governors near the Assam border that would be paid for by German sources. With this brief, Narendra went to China; the German Ambassador in Peking arranged a passport in the name of Father Charles Martin so that he could go to the United States ostensibly to study theology at Notre Dame University.

Meanwhile, the Indo-German plot leaked out via Czech spies in the USA. In 1915, Emanuel Viktor Voska had organized ethnic Czechs in the USA into a network of counter-espionage. The Czechs, presumed to be German supporters, were involved in spying on German and Austrian diplomats, and had succeeded in infiltrating German members of the plot; it has been claimed that had E. V. Voska not interfered in history, nobody would have heard about Mahatma Gandhi and the father of the Indian nation would have been Bagha Jatin. Voska learnt of the arms-acquisition through his network and, as pro-American, pro-British and anti-German, he spoke of it to Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the future president of Czekoslovakia. Masarayk calculated that betraying the Indian cause would help the Czech cause; he informed the Americans, the Americans informed the British, and Bagha Jatin died in a hail of police gunfire in Orissa in September 1915.

In June 1916, his original mission overtaken by events, dogged by revelations from the Czech agents, Narendra arrived in San Francisco, the local newspapers declaring that "a dangerous Hindu revolutionary, German spy, lands in USA." He seems to have made his way undetected to Stanford University, where he was sheltered by Professor Dhanagopal Mukherjee, the younger brother of Jadugopal Mukherjee, Bagha Jatin's successor in Bengal. Dhanagopal changed Narendra's name, introducing him to Dr. David Jordan, Stanford's progressive president, as Manabendra Nath Roy.

At Dr. Jordan's house, Roy met his future bride, Evelyn Trent. A few months later, they were married in New York, living in the house of Lala Lajpat Rai, studying Marxism in the public library.

In 1917 America declared war on Germany; Indian revolutionaries were immediately suspect as possible German spies. The Roys fled to Mexico with an introductory letter from Dr. Jordan. As Mexico toyed with a German alliance (with a goal of recovering lost territories should the Kaiser win) M.N. Roy met Mexico's President Caranza, leading Mexican intellectuals, as well as the 'rebels' under Pancho Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south. Delivering lectures and writing articles, M.N. Roy learned to speak Spanish, French, and German, gathering great influence and becoming a sort of unofficial adviser to the Mexican left. In December 1917, Roy founded the Socialist Party Conference, which was eventually renamed the Communist Party of Mexico, the first communist party outside Russia, after the October revolution.

In Mexico, the Roys gave shelter to a penniless Mikhail Borodin, one of the founding members of the Bolshevik party and then Comintern agent. On the basis of a grateful Borodin’s report, Lenin invited M.N.Roy to the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow during the summer of 1920. Upon arrival, Lenin personally received Roy with great warmth; Roy quickly entered the inner circle of Comintern, one of the few to challenge Lenin with success -- he argued for changes to Lenin’s Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions. Roy served as a member of the Comintern's Presidium for eight years, and at one point was a member of the Presidium, the Political Secretariat, the Executive Committee, and the World Congress.

Lenin's dream was another Bolshevik revolution in the East — especially India and China. M.N. Roy was to be an architect. Sent to Tashkent to prepare the soil for uprisings, in October 1920, M.N. Roy formed the Communist Party of India in exile -- reaching out to his erstwhile Bengali revolutionary colleagues who, at this juncture, were oscillating between armed revolt (personified by Chittaranjan Das) and Gandhi’s novel program of satyagraha. The latter won; Chittaranjan Das resigned his presidency of the Indian National Congress at the Gaya session after losing a motion to Gandhi's faction. Das then founded the Swaraj Party (with Motilal Nehru) and the banner of violent force to uproot colonialism was carried on by his lieutenants like Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

Leading a Comintern delegation appointed by Stalin to develop agrarian revolution in China, M.N. Roy reached Canton in 1927. Disagreements between the CCP leaders, as well as with his former friend Borodin, coupled with Chiang Kai-Shek's ruthless suppression the Communists, led to a fiasco. Roy returned to Moscow where factions supporting Trotsky and Lenin's ADC Zinoviev were busy fighting with Stalin.

Stalin refused to meet Roy on his return from China. Seeing the purges coming, Roy escaped to Berlin with Bukharin’s help. His helper himself was purged, and forced to confess in the most famous of Stalin's show trials:

The monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable especially in the new stage of struggle of the USSR. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may the great might of the USSR become clear to all.

Bukharin's last note to Stalin before his execution was to be a plaintive "Koba, why do you need me to die?"

In December 1929, the CPSU announced Roy’s expulsion from the Comintern. M.N. Roy returned to India, arriving in Bombay under one of his old noms-de-guerre, Dr. Mahmud, around 1930. He immediately contacted Subhash Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru was to write of M.N. Roy:

There was a great deal of difference between us, and yet I felt attracted towards him... I was attracted to him by his remarkable intellectual capacity.

In July 1931, M.N. Roy was captured by the British, who had not forgotten the events of 1915, and who were further delighted to be able to humiliate and degrade one of the proteges of the great Lenin. (The great General Strike was a fresh memory.) M.N. Roy was tried on charges of sedition, sentenced to 12 years (which, on appeal, was reduced to 6 years hard labor), and placed in the Kanpur Jail. An international campaign to secure a commutation drew the support of Albert Einstein and Roger Nash Baldwin (a founder of the ACLU.) Released in November 1936 in broken health, Roy, invited by Nehru, went to Allahabad for recovery. Defying the Comintern order to boycott the Indian Congress, there he urged Indian communists to join forces with the Congress. Nehru, in his presidential address at Faizpur session of the Congress in 1936, greeted the presence of Roy as

one who, though young, is an old and well-tried soldier in India’s fight for freedom. Comrade M.N. Roy has just come to us after a long and most distressing period in prison, but though shaken up in body, he comes with a fresh mind and heart, eager to take part in that old struggle that knows no end till it ends in success.

Gandhi was less charitable; upon hearing Roy's thoughts on the primacy of an agrarian social revolution over the sort of brahmin-baniya led national one that the Congress was espousing, Gandhi bitingly advised Roy to stay out of Indian politics, and just "render mute service to cause of Indian freedom." Kris Manjapra writes in his book M.N. Roy - Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism:

If Gandhi's Swaraj politics envisioned territorialisation of the Indian nation-body, there was another powerful trajectory of Indian anti-colonialism that originated in Bengal, and asserted that autonomy could best be established through deterritorial practices of travel, coalition building and modernist cultural promiscuity.

When World War II broke out, M.N. Roy had come the full circle with respect to Germany; despite his incarceration by the British, he supported the Allied Powers and vigorously joined the war effort because he considered the declining imperialism a lesser evil to the rising fascism, which he felt would be a menace to mankind.

Roy's main critique of Gandhi was that he and his inner circle imposed their tactics from above on the rank and file, and that their organizational legacy would mostly be an "authoritarian dictatorial" high-command, a position that recalled his experience of the inner working of the Comintern. He was also unhappy with Gandhi's opposition to the Allied War effort. Roy broke definitively with the Bengal politicians with his opposition to Subhas Bose's involvement with Hitler's Nazis, and his bitter warnings "that the evil of fascism knows no boundaries". His long-time associates like Jiban Lal Chatterjee (whose swadeshi gang had robbed my grandparents of their life's savings in 1930) broke with him after his criticism of Bose and Gandhi.

(Interestingly, there is a historical footnote to the thread of armed revolution that informed much of M.N. Roy's odyssey. Chief Justice P.B. Chakrabarty of Calcutta High Court, who had also served as the acting Governor of West Bengal in India, wrote a letter addressed to the publisher of R.C. Majumdar's book A History of Bengal:

In the preface of the book Dr. Majumdar has written that he could not accept the thesis that Indian independence was brought about solely, or predominantly, by the non-violent civil disobedience movement of Gandhi. When I was the acting Governor, Lord Atlee, who had given us independence by withdrawing the British rule from India, spent two days in the Governor's palace at Calcutta during his tour of India. At that time I had a prolonged discussion with him regarding the real factors that had led the British to quit India. My direct question to him was that since Gandhi's "Quit India" movement had tapered off quite some time ago and in 1947 no such new compelling situation had arisen that would necessitate a hasty British departure, why did they have to leave? In his reply Atlee cited several reasons, the principal among them being the erosion of loyalty to the British Crown among the Indian army and navy personnel as a result of the military activities of Netaji. Toward the end of our discussion I asked Atlee what was the extent of Gandhi's influence upon the British decision to quit India. Hearing this question, Atlee's lips became twisted in a sarcastic smile as he slowly chewed out the word, "m-i-n-i-m-a-l!")

In his later years, M.N. Roy was an influential voice in the process of drafting the Indian Constituent Assembly, in favor of decentralization, a federal basis to state power, and the recognition of the rights of the minority communities and the regions. M.N. Roy had by this time moved beyond Marxism; he called himself a radical humanist and sketched out a social activist position from the political center, in doing so attracting the ire of both the Hindu Right and the transnational Left. Recently, the International Communist League wrote:

M.N. Roy’s most lasting contribution to “Communism” was his attempt to reconcile it with bourgeois nationalism. His “non-doctrinaire” approach to communist theory, so admired by many academic pseudo-Marxists today, consisted in pushing proletarian subordination to the bourgeoisie in the colonial world. As noted above, this was anything but a new approach, owing much to the Narodniks and SRs. Its results in China in 1925-27 were horrific and counterrevolutionary. And we also note, with the benefit of more hindsight than Lenin and Trotsky had, that the results of bourgeois nationalism in power in the former colonies in the last half of the 20th century and today have similarly been horrific and counterrevolutionary.

Throughout the Indian subcontinent, from Kashmir to Jaffna, the imperialist-dependent capitalist rulers have built upon the fratricidal divisions inherited from imperialism, promoting social backwardness of every kind and practicing state-sponsored communalist slaughter of minority peoples. Real national and social liberation of the working class and oppressed Third World masses cannot be accomplished under the rule of the neocolonial bourgeoisie, as Trotsky explained in putting forward the program of permanent revolution. The first condition for the proletariat being able to carry out its revolutionary role is the scrupulous safeguarding of its class independence from the bourgeoisie.

The Jana Sangh writes:

The idea of the proletarian revolution as distinct from nationalism came to India and was exhibiting itself in unprecedented strikes. Nationalism was confined to the bourgeois. Their government "would not be less oppressive than the foreigner. Self-determination for India merely encourages the idea of bourgeois nationalism".

The prejudice in the system was self-evident. Roy's antinationalism or anti-Hinduism, must have been so intense that he overlooked the fact that proletarian revolution was little else but the replacement of British with Russian rule, of London with Moscow.

In recent years, M.N. Roy's radical humanism seems to have found the most resonance with Bertrand Russell-style rationalists. One of them, reviewing Ramendra Nath's "M.N. Roy’s New Humanism and Materialism" writes:

[The author] places Roy’s ideas in the context of the history of materialist philosophy, including a tantalizingly brief mention of Lokayat or Charvaka, an ancient Indian school of materialist thought. While Roy opposed the glorification of India’s so-called spiritual heritage, he favored a rational and critical study of ancient Indian philosophy. He thought it might do for India what the rediscovery of ancient Greek thought did for Europe in the Renaissance.

Roy’s version of materialism was an ethical philosophy. He believed that human beings have the power to make free and rational choices, and that they have a duty to do this without debasing themselves before imaginary supernatural beings.

Dr. Ramendra explains how Roy’s thought differed from Marxian materialism. According to Roy, Marxian determinism did not allow for human freedom and it neglected ethics. Like Bertrand Russell, Roy perceived there is no logical connection between Marx’s philosophical materialism (there is no supernatural reality) and his historical materialism (everything in history has economic causes).

...

I would particularly recommend the essay, “Why I Am Not a Hindu,” to North American humanists. We North American humanists sometimes think of Indian philosophy in terms of swamis and yogis, and to give them the benefit of the doubt which we do not extend to the Christian religion. Dr. Ramendra’s book on M.N. Roy reminds us that there is another tradition in Indian philosophy, one which it would behoove us to learn about.

Below, an extract from The Brahmin In the Comintern, a 2007 French documentary on M.N. Roy.

From Mexico to Russia, Germany, India, Vladimir Leo goes in search of a great adventurer-philosopher-revolutionary of Bengal: MN Roy. In the countries he visited, his memory seems to have almost completely vanished today, despite the important political role he could play. Founder of a communist party in Mexico for Zapata, leader of the Communist International in the early years of Soviet Russia, anti-Stalinist and anti-Nazi activist in Germany pre-war politician, philosopher and atheist in India independence, the official histories of these countries have preferred to delete the trace. Was it too loose? Was it too lonely? Vladimir Leon chronicles the life of this singular and modest hero who crossed all major milestones of our twentieth century. For this, he takes us on three continents, filming carefully the world as it is, echoing the story of this turbulent political past. In meetings of witnesses, direct or indirect, takes shape the fantastic geographical and philosophical trajectory of MN Roy, if humanly fragile, so farsighted.

Dr. Salim: The difficulty was that he could not stick to one particular ideology ... that was his failure.
Vladimir Leo: It's a failure?
Dr. Salim: Yes, it was a failure.

LE BRAHMANE DU KOMINTERN [extrait]

The Chaucer of the Turks

2011-03-11T00:29:00.056+05:30

Izzat bermas naqdu diram borlig'i,
Kim bo'ldi tama'din kishining xorlig'i.

He who has lowered himself for gain,
Wealth can never raise up again.

Mir Ali-Sher Beg Herawi "Nava'i" (Nawa'i, Navoi, or Navoiy; the takhallus meaning, roughly, melodious lamenter) lived from 1441 to 1501, i.e. he was a contemporary of Kabir. Nava'i is credited with the creation of Turkish literature. Chaucer, living at a time when the languages of culture and commerce were French and Latin, and also thriving as an insider in a world that discoursed in those languages (he was at various times valet to Edward III, Comptroller of the Port of London, and secret envoy of Richard II), had created a new medium -- of writing in the vernacular of the common folk of taverns and bath-houses, a medium that we now call Middle English. So, too, Nava'i, consummate Timurid courtier and classmate of the Sultan, abjured the dominant Farsi and Arabic languages to write in the everyday Chagatai Turkish of Turkestani bazaar and the mohalla. Contemporary Uzbek, the successor language to Chagatai Turkish, considers him to be a founding infuence (the comparison to Chaucer is due to Bernard Lewis). After Amir Timur and Bobur Mirza, few historical figures are endowed with as much official prestige as Nava'i in today's Uzbekistan: cities, universities, roads, bus-stations named after him abound all over the land. (You may also encounter him in Rushdie's novel about the Enchantress of Florence.)

I'm not Khusrau, nor wise Nizami,
Not the Sheikh of poets today - Jami.
But in my humility say:
In their famous walking paths let
Nizami's victorious mind run.
He won - Byrd, Ganja and Rum;
In the Hindvi tongue Khusrau can,
Conquer entire Hindustan;
Let all Iran sing Jami,
In Arabia, "Jami" beat the timpani
But the Turks! all tribes, of any country, all
Turks conquered me alone ...
Wherever there was a Turk,
Under the banner of Turkic words
I volunteered to be always ready.
And this tale of grief and separation,
Passion and torment, in spite of adversity,
I set out in the tongue of the Turk.

Nava'i's testament to Chagatai Turkish is his 1499 essay Muhakamat al-Lughatayn (Judgment between the Two Languages). Nava'i starts by saying there are four main languages, "each having many arms and branches": Arabic, Hindi, Turkish and Persian. As a godfearing mussulman, he does not want to say anything against Arabic: "Of all languages, Arabic possesses the most eloquence and grandeur, and there is no one who thinks or claims differently." As for Hindi, he dismisses it, saying it sounds like "the scratching of a broken pen", and when written it looks like the "footprints of crows". That leaves Turkish and Persian, the two languages spoken throughout Khorasan and Mawarannahr:

The beginner, upon encountering difficulty in composing, shuns Turkish and changes to an easier road (i.e., Persian). After this has happened several times it becomes habit; and after it has become habit the poet finds it difficult to abandon the habit in order to venture down a more difficult road. Later, other beginners, noting the conduct and the compositions of those who have preceded them, do not consider it proper to stray off that road. The result is that they too write their poems in Persian.

It is natural for a beginner to wish his works to be known to others. He wishes to submit them to scholars. But these are Persian-speakers who are not acquainted with Turkish, and this thought makes the poet shrink. Thus he is drawn to the use of Persian. He establishes relations with others and becomes one of them. This is how the present situation has come to be.

But, Nava'i says, in spite of obstacles and snares, poets of Turkish origin must strive to write in Turkish, they will surely experience the discovery of the splendors of their native tongue:

It is unfortunately true that the greater superiority, profundity and breadth of Turkish as compared to Persian as a medium for poetry has not been realized by everyone... In the early days of my youth I began to perceive a few jewels from the inkwell of my mouth. These jewels had not yet become a string of verse, but jewels from the sea of consciousness which were worthy of being placed on a string of verse began to reach shore, thanks to the nature of the diver.

Then I reached the age of comprehension and God (whose praises I recite and who be extolled!) instilled in me sensitivity and attentiveness and a desire for the unique. I realized the necessity of giving thought to Turkish words. The world which came into view was more sublime than 18,000 worlds, and its adorned sky, which I came to know, was higher than nine skies. There I found a treasury of superiority and excellence in which the pearls were more lustrous than the stars. I entered the rose garden. Its roses were more splendid than the stars of heaven, its hallowed ground was untouched by hand or foot, and its myriad wonders were safe from the touch of other hands.

Timur's son Shahrukh had, under the influence of the Persian 'slave girl' Goharshad, forsaken the Turkic homelands of Transoxiana to set himself up as first the governor, and then the ruler, of Khorasan. His capital was Herat; and the dominant culture in Herat throughout the first half of the 15th century was that of Persia. Shahrukh officers, as well many leading citizens, were Turks; but they were Turks bowled over by the splendid achievements of Persian civilization, there for all to see in the form of art, architecture, calligraphy, poetry, speech, courtliness and custom. The Turks, still only a century of two away from the rough and tumble of the steppe, were mesmerized by the radiance of Persia.

In this environment Nava'i was born. His father, Ghiyāth ud-Din Kichkina ("the Little"), served as a high-ranking officer in the palace of Shahrukh Mirza; his mother was governess to the royal princes. This cohort included Ulugh Beg (till he was prized away by Timur from the softening influences of Herat, to the tough life of campaigns on the saddle befitting a future monarch), and more importantly Sultan-Husayn Mirza (also known as Husain Baiqara), the future sultan of Khorasan, who was Nava'i's classmate at school. Babur describes Nava'i admiringly as a writer of Chagatai (in which language the Baburnama is also written), and also somewhat dismissively as a sidekick 'beg' of Sultan-Husayn. Nava'i's family came from a long line of Bakhshis, originally scribes and heralds of the Mongols, who joined the Timurid courts as finance officials. When Kichkina died, Shahrukh's son Bayshunghur's son Babur ibn-Bayshunghur became Nava'i's guardian. His life, therefore, was one of the highest privilege; he was taught by Jami, and when his fellow-student Sultan-Husayn became the king, he was appointed to the innermost circle.

Kamol et kasbkim, olam uyidin.
Senga farz o'lmagay g'amnok chiqmoq.

The only way to decrease one's sufferings
Is to increase one's understanding.

Agar naf'din bo'lsa mahzan yiroq,
Aning la'lidin xora ko'p yaxshiroq.

Better the cobble that paves the way
Than a gem locked away from the light of day.

Oz-oz o'rganib dono bo'lur,
Qatra-qatra yig'ilib daryo bo'lur.

Learning is knowledge acquired in small portions,
As drops make the rivers that flow to the oceans.

Also:

Do people get pleasure without offense?
How does the candle light taking not pains?
A tulip-egg stuck in soil becomes a full bloom,
A worm was like silk having gone to its doom.
As the small tulip egg, have you got any zeal,
Are not you kind as the worm full in silk?

Seek from others the knowledge they own,
Never rely on thy powers alone.

Spurn the company of those whose talk is vain,
But give ear to the wise again and again.

A hard-earned coin is better by far
Than unearned riches bestowed by the Shah.

Reading some of Nava'i's epigrammatic verse, I was made to think of Kabir's dohas. Kabir lived from 1440 to 1518, as much an outsider as Nava'i was an insider. Abandoned as an infant, he was found and raised by Niru, a muslim weaver living in Varanasi. One morning, as the bhakti saint Ramananda walked to the Ganges for his dawn bath, the little Kabir sleeping huddled on the ghat reached out and involuntarily grabbed the saint's feet, who called out "Ram, Ram" in response. Thus did Kabir get a guru.

Raat gawaayo soy kar, diwas gawaaya khai.
Heera janam amol tha, kaori badle jay.

The nights were lost in sleeping, in eating were lost the days
This priceless diamond life, slowly into a cowrie decays

Jeevat samjhe jeevat bujhe, Jeevat he karo aas
Jeevat karam ki fansi aa kaati, Mue mukti ki aas

Alive one sees, Alive knows, crave ye for salvation when still alive
Alive ye didn't cut loose bondage, yet hope for liberation on death?

Kabira garv na keejiye, uncha dekh aavaas
Kaal paron bhuin letna, uper jamsi ghaas

Says Kabir: Be not proud and vain, looking at your high mansion
Tomorrow you'll be laid in earth, grass growing thereon

Kabir did not become a sadhu, nor did he ever abandon worldly life, choosing to live in the world, householder and mystic, weaver and poet. Lately, with the growth in the ranks of doctoral students combing though archives for their dissertations, it has not been easy for the great to entirely retain their lustre. It is getting some attention that the symbol of the coarse woolen cloak that wraps the Sufi is often in contrast with the economic status of the Sufi shaykh himself. In her book the Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Annemarie Schimmel (German orientalist, Harvard professor, and Sitara-e-Imitiaz awardee in Pakistan) asks "how so many people who preached poverty as their pride became wealthy landlords and fitted perfectly into the feudal system, amassing wealth laid at their feet by poor, ignorant followers"?

In the Baburnama, Babur writes thus of Sultan-Husayn Mirza's wazirs:

One was Majdu'd-din Muhammad, son of Khwaja Pir Ahmad of Khwaf, the one man of Shahrukh Mirza's Finance-office. In SI. Husain Mlrza's Finance-office there was not at first proper order or method ; waste and extravagance resulted; the peasant did not prosper, and the soldier was not satisfied. Once while Majdu'd-din Muhammad was still parwanchi and styled Mirak (Little Mir), it became a matter of importance to the Mirza to have some money; when he asked the Finance-officials for it, they said none had been collected and that there was none. Majdu'd-din Muhammad must have heard this and have smiled, for the Mirza asked him why he smiled; privacy was made and he told Mirza what was in his mind.

Said he, "If the honoured Mirza will pledge himself to strengthen my hands by not opposing my orders, it shall so be before long that the country shall prosper, the peasant be content, the soldier well-off, and the Treasury full." The Mirza for his part gave the pledge desired, put Majdu'd-din Muhammad in authority throughout Khurasan, and entrusted all public business to him. He in his turn by using all possible diligence and effort, before long had made soldier and peasant grateful and content, filled the Treasury to abundance, and made the districts habitable and cultivated. He did all this however in face of opposition from the begs and men high in place, all being led by 'Ali-sher Beg (i.e. Nava'i), all out of temper with what Majdu'd-din Muhammad had effected. By their effort and evil suggestion he was arrested and dismissed.

The opposition made by Nava'i to reform so clearly to his patron's gain, and to his patron's courtiers' loss, begs the question, "What was the source of his own income? " It has been observed that Nava'i "through high positions occupied in the government of his country, had acquired a large fortune", and Nava'i clearly took a dim view of the "rights" of the cultivator. The Soviets must not have read the Baburnama too closely, since the city of Kermine in central Uzbekistan was renamed after the socialist hero Navoiy in 1958. Today, more appropriately, it is a free industrial economic zone.

Here is an extract from Chaucer's The Summoner's Tale. A friar is taken by the angel to Hell, to get a view of what pains lay there. He does not see a single friar in the place, and is perplexed -- are all the learned men full of grace?

In al the place saugh he nat a frere;
Of oother folk he saugh ynowe in wo.
Unto this angel spak the frere tho:
Now, sire, quod he, han freres swich a grace
That noon of hem shal come to this place?
Yis, quod this aungel, many a millioun! "
And unto sathanas he ladde hym doun.
--And now hath sathanas,--seith he,--a tayl
Brodder than of a carryk is the sayl.
Hold up thy tayl, thou sathanas!--quod he;
--shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se
Where is the nest of freres in this place!--
And er that half a furlong wey of space,
Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve,
Out of the develes ers ther gonne dryve
Twenty thousand freres on a route,
And thurghout helle swarmed al aboute,
And comen agayn as faste as they may gon,
And in his ers they crepten everychon.
He clapte his tayl agayn and lay ful stille.

Translation from wikipedia:

In all the place he saw not a friar;
Of other folk he saw enough in woe.
Unto this angel spoke the friar thus:
"Now sir", said he, "Have friars such a grace
That none of them come to this place?"
Yes", said the angel, "many a million!"
And unto Satan the angel led him down.
"And now Satan has", he said, "a tail,
Broader than a galleon's sail.
Hold up your tail, Satan!" said he.
"Show forth your arse, and let the friar see
Where the nest of friars is in this place!"
And before half a furlong of space
Just as bees swarm out from a hive
Out of the devil's arse there were driven
Twenty thousand friars on a rout,
And throughout hell swarmed all about,
And came again as fast as they could go
And every one crept into his arse,
He shut his tail again and lay very still.

Below, Nava'i's verse set to music. The first part of the Soviet propaganda biopic is here.

Alamout

2011-03-09T03:21:00.019+05:30

About 20 years ago, Amin Maalouf, Lebanon's answer to Umberto Eco, wrote a curious novel titled Samarkand, which can be described as historical fiction set in the Khorasan and Mawarannahr of the 11th-century.

Reviewing the book in the Independent, Ahmed Rashid (of Taliban fame) remarked that Maalouf had "written an extraordinary book, describing the lives and times of people who have never appeared in fiction before and are unlikely to do so again."

The major characters are (adapted from an anonymous author, posting on soc.culture.iran):

The Grand Vizier for the Seljuk dynasty, Nizam al-Mulk, representing a very intelligent and intricate officialdom that will try to lure, in war as well as in peace, every intellectual and religious figure to strengthen the power of the central state;

Hasan Sabbah, founder of the Assassins - Hashashines, otherwise known as the Ismailite order;

and Omar Khayyam, poet, astronomer, and mathematician, an intellectual that will "flirt" with both men, but never come to terms with either of them.

The Nizam, keen to strengthen his authority, will establish a secret police, will try to lure Omar to take the position of chief Intelligence officer, the Sahib Khabar.

Omar, finding no rational reason for the politics of death and all that revolves around it, will introduce to Nizam a friend, a religious student, a Talib 'Ilm, he met in a motel, on his way to Ispahan. The friend, Hasan Sabbah, becomes chief of Nizam's Mukhabarat, intelligence services.

Hasan is a member of the secret emissaries trained in the Fatimid courts in Cairo and Alexandria to undermine a waning Abbasid authority, only held in power by their mentors in Persia, the Seljuks. Hasan will establish the most formidable - in terms of organization - secret society that literally terrorized the East in the middle ages. The "old man of the mountains", as the Crusaders later dubbed him, will establish his fortress in Alamout, North West of Iran, and work on undermining his ex-mentor's, the Ata, father, -- Nizam al-Mulk - authority. The Assassins - from Assas, foundation, and not Hashish as commonly known - were Nizam's bete noire.

Omar, the disenchanted intellectual, will plunge into his own soul searching, and the world of his beloved Jahan, with his cup and his Rubaiyat, and will play the role of a pacifist in a Jahan - world - plugged by the politics of the sword and the logic of death. Omar will never forgive himself for introducing Hasan to Nizam.

Here is a parable about these three characters:

Three friends were on a promenade in the high planes of Persia. Suddenly, a panther, with all the ferocity of the world in it, appears to them.

The panther observed the three men for some time then ran to them. The first was the oldest, the richest, the most powerful. He cried,' I am the master of these dwellings, I will never allow this beast to wreck havoc these lands which belong to me.' He had two hunting dogs, he let them attack the panther, they could only bite it, and it as such became more vigorous; it consumed them, attacked their master and ripped his entrails out. Such was the end of Nizam al-Mulk.

The second said, 'I am a man of knowledge, everyone honors me and respects me, why should I let my fate be decided between dogs and panther?' He turned his back and ran away, least concerned with the outcome of the combat. He had since erred from cave to cave, and hut to hut, convinced that the beast was constantly tracing his steps. Such was the fate of Omar Khayyam.

The third was a man of belief. He advanced towards the panther, and with open hands, a dominating glance and an eloquent mouth. 'Ahlan wa Sahlan, You are most welcome in these lands, he said. My companions were richer than I, you had them deprived, they were the proudest, you disgraced them.' The beast listened, seduced... He knew how to approach it. Since then, no panther could come near, men took their distance.

When the times of hardship came to pass, none could stop his course, none could run away from him, some were able to take advantage (of this chaos). Better than none, Hasan Ben Sabbah knew how to domesticate the ferocity of the world. All around him he sowed fear to end up in his reduced Alamout fort, a miniscule space of sorrow.

Omar Khayyam and Euclid's 5th

2011-03-06T07:00:00.007+05:30

You are at a point P. From P, walk a mile South, then a mile West, and then a mile North. How far are you now from P?

Most school children will say “1 mile!”, visualizing the motion as being on three sides of a square. The correct answer, of course, is that 'it depends.' Consider the North Pole. Going a mile South from the Pole brings you on the 89.99^o N latitude, each point of which is located a mile South from the North Pole. Walking straight West, you stay on the same parallel, and therefore at the same distance from the Pole. If you turn and move back a mile north, you will be back at the Pole, i.e. your distance from P would be 0 in this case. In other words, the answer depends on the curvature "omega" of the space you want to find the solution in; the omega value for flat space is 1, that for spherical space greater than 1, and that for hyperbolic space less than 1.

What can wandering around the Pole possibly have to do with Uzbekistan? The connection is in the person of a mathematician who probably has more bars, wines, dance clubs, gentlemen's clubs or oases of dissolution named after him than any other man (or woman) of science – Omar Khayyam. Born in Nishapur in Khorasan (now Iran) in year 1048, Omar Khayyam lived in his childhood in Balkh, and was educated in Samarkand. His discomfort with Euclidean Geometry grew during a 10-year stay in Bukhara. Eventually, he published a famous treatment of the problem -- Sharh ma ashkala min musadarat kitab Uqlidis (Explanations of the Difficulties in the Postulates of Euclid.)

Euclid derived much of his geometry from five postulates:

1. A straight line may be drawn between any two points.
2. A straight line may be extended indefinitely.
3. A circle may be drawn with any given radius at an arbitrary center.
4. All right angles are equal.
5. If a straight line crossing two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles.

The Fifth postulate refers to the diagram above. If the sum of two angles 1 and 2, formed by a line C crossing two lines A and B, add up to less than two right angles then lines A and B will meet somewhere on the side of angles 1 and 2 if continued indefinitely.

Compared to the first four, the Fifth postulate immediately looks elaborate and contrived. Euclid himself possibly had mixed feelings about it, as he did not make use of it until Theorem 29. The postulate looks more like another Theorem than a basic truth. It was attacked almost from the beginning. Over the centuries, many mathematicians attempted to take away the Fifth, but all ended up making some assumption or the other that inherently implied the Fifth postulate. Proclus Diadochos, who lived around 450 (i.e. 700 years after Euclid) mentions Ptolemy's attempts in the second century to prove the postulate, and demonstrates that Ptolemy had unwittingly assumed (what in later years became known as Playfair's Axiom) that through a point only one straight line can be drawn parallel to a given straight line, which is just another way of stating the Fifth postulate. Proclus left a proof of his own, but the latter rested on the assumption that parallel lines are always a bounded distance apart, and this assumption can also be shown to be equivalent to the Fifth postulate.

The great Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965-1039) of Basra, during the middle-ages called the Second Ptolemy in Europe, made an attempt at proving the parallel postulate using a proof-by-contradiction. He, too, alas, needed Playfair's Axiom. What was missing from these attempts was the recognition that Euclid's postulates fix only one kind of geometry; if you start relaxing them, you can get many more, often far lovelier, and at least as consistent.

Euclid's postulates had been based on our intuition about geometric objects on flat planes. For example, mathematicians had assumed that the second postulate, viz. “A straight line may be extended indefinitely”, also meant that straight lines were infinitely long. How about a “straight” line of latitude or longitude on the surface of a sphere, say a great circle? Circles can be extended indefinitely since they have no ends; going in circles means exactly this: doing something with no end in sight. However, circles (and great circles) are of finite extent – they can be extended indefinitely, round and round, and Euclid's postulate is not violated if they are not, as a result, of infinite length. The spherical-polar solution to the 1-mile-walk problem shows that there is a perfectly reasonable triangle with two right angles at the base and a nonzero angle at the top, i.e. a triangle whose angles sum up to more than 180^o.

Omar Khayyam made the first attempt at formulating a non-Euclidean postulate as an alternative to the parallel postulate and he was the first to consider the cases of elliptical geometry and hyperbolic geometry. The Khayyam-Saccheri quadrilateral was also first considered by him. Khayyam, and Saccheri 700 years later, recognized that three possibilities arose from omitting Euclid's Fifth; if two perpendiculars to one line cross another line, a choice of the orientation of the last line can make the internal angles where it meets the two perpendiculars equal (it is then parallel to the first line). If those equal internal angles are right angles, we get Euclid's Fifth; otherwise, they must be either acute or obtuse.

These cases anticipate the non-Euclidean geometries of Gauss, Bolyai, Lobchevsky and Riemann. Omar Khayyam did not get that far; he eventually persuaded himself that the acute and obtuse cases lead to contradiction, but not without a tacit assumption equivalent to the Fifth to get there. It took till the 19th century for mathematicians to start diving into those alternatives Omar Khayyam had listed but recoiled from, and discovering the logically consistent geometries which result. In 1823, then 21-year-old budding Hungaro-Romanian mathematician Janos Bolyai wrote to his father: "Out of nothing I have created a new universe"; by which he meant that starting from the first four postulates, by relaxing the Fifth, he had developed a geometry that, although quite unusual, did not lead to any logical contradiction. Bolyai Sr. consulted with Gauss. In a letter of 1824 Gauss wrote:

The assumption that (in a triangle) the sum of the three angles is less than 180^o leads to a curious geometry, quite different from ours, but thoroughly consistent, which I have developed to my entire satisfaction.

In 1829, Nikolai Lobachevsky published an account of acute geometry in an obscure Russian journal in Kazan. (His work remained largely unrecognized for many years, though before his death Lobachevsky did get a citation from the Tsar's government, for a new way he had developed for processing wool!) Lobachevsky and Bolyai built their geometries on the assumption that through a point not on the line there exist more than one parallel to the line. Riemann's geometry, on the other hand, (among other things) models a space where there are no parallel lines -- the great circles on the surface of a sphere always meet at the poles. The General Theory of Relativity famously uses Riemannian geometry to model curvatures in space-time due to the effects of gravity; inertial particles follow the geodesics of Riemannian space.

Omar Khayyam developed parts of the general binomial theorem, many centuries before Pascal. He writes:

From the Indians one has methods for obtaining square and cube roots, methods which are based on knowledge of individual cases, namely the knowledge of the squares of the nine digits 1², 2², 3² (etc.) and their respective products, i.e. 2 × 3 etc. We have written a treatise on the proof of the validity of those methods and that they satisfy the conditions. In addition we have increased their types, namely in the form of the determination of the fourth, fifth, sixth roots up to any desired degree. No one preceded us in this and those proofs are purely arithmetic.

Khayyam was also able to solve certain types of cubic equations using conic sections. See here for an interesting illustration.

Given this oeuvre in mathematics (to say nothing about his contributions to philosophy and the politics of pacifism), it is almost a pity that Omar Khayyam is remembered mostly for his verse:

Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise 
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies; 
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies; 
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument 
About it and about: but evermore 
Came out of the same Door as in I went.

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in the Nothing all Things end in — Yes —
Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what
Thou shalt be — Nothing — Thou shalt not be less.

And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky, 
Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die, 
Lift not thy hands to It for help - for It 
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, 
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit 
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

The Ambassador's Bellydancer

2011-03-05T13:37:00.005+05:30

This is Nadira Alieva, a stripper from Jizzakh who is now married to the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.

After the demise of the USSR, her family had fallen upon hard times. The parents had been actors, and in the newly-commercializing society there was no money for the arts. The father took to drugs, and then drug-running. Defying odds, Nadira won a place at the university. She moved to the capital, and found working as a nightclub lap-dancer and prostitute was more lucrative than other alternatives. One night, as she performed in a club, the British ambassador walked in.

Craig Murray, "our man in Tashkent", had plenty of problems of his own. He had gone native, i.e. had become more interested in representing Uzbek people to London than the other way round. He specifically drew attention to fabricated 'intelligence' obtained under torture by Karimov's government, lapped up by the CIA and then fed to the MI6. Summoned to London several times and told 'not to put such things in writing', he persisted in criticising the British government for its tacit endorsement of torture as a means of attaining 'dross'. (His public attacks on the government’s hypocrisy eventually led to his sacking.) While fighting Messrs. Straw, Blair, Rumsfeld, Bush and Karimov, Murray was also having a mid-life crisis of sorts -- he left his wife and family for the hooker from the nightclub, and soon various embassies in Tashkent were having to make space on the guest list for the British Ambassador's bellydancer. Here is the story from her perspective, and here is a video of her telling a part of it.

Craig Murray's tale is better known. His Murder in Samarkand is full of fascinating insider-detail on the complicity of the Blair and Bush governments to torture. The tawdry theme is now too well known to recount except in summary -- aggrandizement of the Islamist Threat enabled each government to pick the pockets of its citizens. Karimov pulled in people randomly, tortured them till they confessed to anything that would play well in the NYT or the Times, and this information was convenient for Bush, Cheney, Blair and Co. in raising 'threat levels' to yellow/orange/red and stampeding their under-informed electorates into rubberstamping no-bid contracts for Blackwater et al.

Murray describes attending one of the trials in Uzbekistan, in which people suspected of Islamist leanings (or those who had just fallen foul of someone in power) had crimes real or imagined pinned on them. A jeweller had been robbed at gunpoint. Six 'Islamists' were on trial for the crime, in spite of the fact that two of them had been in jail at the time of the crime. Three men, the jeweller said, had tied him up and shot at him before robbing him. When the defence inquired why there were no bullet holes at the scene, he weakly claimed that the shots had gone out through the window. The judge presiding at the trial understood the prosecution's case was not going too well:

He interrupted the defence lawyer with a sharp rebuke and then instructed the defendants to stand while he harangued them … He said they represented evil in society. They were thieves and murderers who sought to undermine Uzbekistan's independence and democracy. Their list of crimes was long, and it would be better if they admitted their guilt. He concluded he was astonished that they had found the time to commit so many crimes when they had to stop to pray five times a day. He evidently considered this a hilarious sally and guffawed loudly, as did the prosecutor, rapporteur and various other cronies. But I swear I noticed a few narrowed eyes among the militiamen …

Eventually, the jeweller was asked to identify which three of the six defendants had robbed him. He peered uncertainly at the benches – plainly he had no idea. Pressed by the defence, he managed to identify – and the odds against this must be very high – entirely the wrong three out of six. This made the judge very angry.

'You are mistaken, you old fool!' he bellowed.

The judge then read out the names of the three who were charged with this particular crime and asked them to stand.

'Are these the men?' he asked the terrified jeweller, who stammered his assent.

'Let the record show they were positively identified by the victim.'

If the defendents were lucky, their spines would be broken by gunshots (families picking the bodies for last rites would need to pay for the bullets expended, a holdover Soviet practice). If they were unlucky, well, here is a very graphic photo (from Craig Murray's archives) of the remains of Muzafar Avazov, who was boiled alive by Uzbek police at the notorious Jaslyk prison in Qaraqalpaqstan. From Wikipedia:

Medical examiners found severe burns on Avazov's legs, buttocks, lower back and arms, covering 60-70% of his body, which they believed to be the result of immersion in boiling water. Eyewitnesses also report a "large, bloody wound on the back of the head, heavy bruising on the forehead and side of the neck, and that his hands had no fingernails."

It seems Avazov's crime was to insist on the right to prayer. From a news article:

Uzbek authorities, including numerous police officers, brought the body of Muzafar Avazov, to the family home at about 3:30 p.m. on August 8. Police cars surrounded the area and checked visitors who approached the house, preventing some from entering. When the burial occurred at 6:00 p.m. that evening, police closed the road to traffic. Authorities from the office of General Prosecutor Rashidjon Kodirov reportedly threatened the family not to talk to the media or give interviews to others about the circumstances surrounding Avazov's death. In May 2002, Human Rights Watch received reports that prison authorities had beaten Muzafar Avazov and put him in a punishment cell for stating that nothing could stop him from performing his prayers.

Below is the first part (of 3) of Craig Murray talking about torture by the Uzbek regime of Karimov:

Tien Shan And Pamir Alay

2011-03-04T09:30:00.005+05:30

The Pamir mountains – Roof of the World – are geologically young, the result of the Indian sub-continent pushing up against Asia. The Pamir-Alay ridge separates the other Pamir regions from the Tien Shan. Its six districts - Alai, Hissar, Zarafshan, Turkestan and Karategin - contain more than a hundred peaks over 5000m, thousands of glaciers (that number shrinking rapidly), many lakes and even more unexplored valleys. The southern slopes of the range drain into the Vakhsh River which becomes the Oxus or Amu Darya; the northern parts contribute snow melt to the streams coming down the Tien Shan to give rise to the Jaxartes or Syr Darya.

The Tien Shan, the Celestial Mountains of the Chinese, sweep across Western Kyrgyzstan and Eastern China, its northern and far western ranges located in Kazakhstan, the south-western extremity joining up with the Pamir-Alay in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. It is bordered to the north by the Ili valley, and to the south by the Ferghana depression. The Tien Shan's highest summit is Pik Pobeda, 7439m, discovered in 1943, the most northern of 7000-ers. Not far rises Khan Tengri, the Lord of the Skies, 7010m including glacial cap. (The Pamir schematic is from here.)

We set our alarms for 4 am. Nosir looms out of the fog, as ever ready to load our bags heavy with dried fruit. We bump our way to AZN. It is good that we arrive early, the flight time has been advanced by 30 minutes from what we had found on the web-site. Mr. M sleepily makes friends with a bevy of Uzbek children, they go off to look at several Tupolevs and Yaks on the tarmac. Astonishingly, our transport is an immaculate 757 – no broken seats, no cracks in the windows – she will proceed to Moscow after dropping us off in Tashkent. As we take off, the sun is rising over the mountains, flooding Ferghana with light.

Al-Margilani

2011-03-02T10:03:00.015+05:30

The most famous son of Margilan is Burhanuddin al-Margilani (alternatively, al-Marghinani), who lived between 1152 and 1197, and wrote one of the most authoritative guides to personal law in Islam.

The term mazhab in Urdu refers to a Muslim school of religious law, or fiqh. In the first 150 years of Islam, there were many such schools, and the sahabah or companions of the Prophet more often than not came up with their own schools in matters of interpretation. Practices coalesced over time; the early jurisprudential schools of Damascus, Kufa, Basra, and Medina combined into the Maliki mazhab (today followed in N Africa); other Iraqi schools were consolidated into the Hanafi mazhab (this became the dominant school in the Indian subcontinent as well as in Central Asia.) The Shafi'i (Egypt, E Africa, SE Asia), Hanbali (Arabia), Zahiri and Jariri schools were established later, though the latter two eventually died out. The mazhab are not different enough to be called sects (they have lived in harmony for the most part), so the term religious-school must suffice. Sufis usually do not submit to mazhab but follow the legal directives of their tariqas or orders.

Al-Margilani wrote perhaps the most authoritative guide to Hanafi law. The work is titled Al-Hidaya (the Gift), referring to guidance from Allah (as in the Quran), and is the basis for Anglo-Islamic personal law in India and Pakistan.

To use female nakedness in illustrating the Hidaya, a hadith says "Allah does not accept the salah (prayer) of an adult woman except with a scarf."

Elaborating on female attire during prayer, Umm Salamah, one of the wives of Muhammad, had said "A woman should pray in a shift that reaches down and covers the top of her feet.”

But what about the feet themselves? Islamic scholars have differed regarding the permissibility of women's naked feet: are they allowed in prayer, not allowed during prayer, or neither, or both? The major opinions have been:

1. That the feet are nakedness
This is based on implication from the hadith,
"When a girl reaches puberty, it is not appropriate that any of her should be seen, excepting her face, and her hands upto the wrists."
When Muhammad was asked what women should do with the ends of their garments (which then were apparently about calf-high) he said, 'They should extend them a span.' Umm Salamah said, 'Then, their feet will be uncovered!' He said, 'Then, they should extend them a cubit, not exceeding that.'
This opinion was presented as the mazhab of Abu Hanifah by the early scholar al-Quduri. Feet are also considered nakedness by the Maliki and Shafi'i Imams.

2. That they are not nakedness
This is al-Margilani's argument, and it is based on two points:
i. If the establishment of the nakedness is by the saying of Allah, in the Quran "And let them not show their beauty, except that of it which is apparent," then the foot is not customarily a location of beauty (it may be for a minority, but regulations are set according to the general rule.) Also Allah has said "And let them not strike their feet in order to make known that adornment which they are hiding," i.e. the ringing of anklets, and this conveys that the feet themselves are of the beauty which is apparent. Commenting on this verse, Ayisha, another of Muhammad's wives and perhaps his favorite, said, "And let them not show their beauty except that of it which is apparent, the toe-ring, a silver ring which is placed on the toes."

ii. If the establishment is by the Prophet's saying, "The woman is to be covered," along with it being established that some of her body is excluded due to hardship of avoiding exposure, then, by analogy, it should necessitate that the feet also be excluded, due to the corroboration of hardship. This is because she would be put to hardship by her foot showing when she walked barefoot, or with shoes, for she may not always find socks with which to cover them. Along with this, al-Marghilani felt desire is not aroused by looking at the foot such as is aroused by looking at the face, and so if the face is not considered naked for purposes of prayer, in spite of the plentiful arousal of desire, then the foot is more appropriate to remain uncovered in view of the hardship associated with covering it.

3. That they are nakedness outside prayer, but not in prayer.
Ibn Taymiyyah, the Hanbali, favored this opinion. He says:
Umm Salamah said, 'A woman should pray in an ample garment which covers the tops of her feet,' and so when she makes sajdah, the bottoms of her feet may show." The feet are not nakedness in prayer, and she is not required to cover them, but they are nakedness for the purposes of looking and touching, so it is not permissible for strange men to look at or touch her feet.

Due to al-Margilani's interpretation, women in the Indian subcontinent and in Central Asia are exempted from wearing socks while praying.

More finer points of interpretive differences can be seen here. Below: lives in Andijon and Margilan.

Halva In Andijon

2011-02-22T14:33:00.013+05:30

The clear evening settles into a chill, breezy night. Andijon feels like Agra in its older parts, especially in a certain disorder. There is of course the Yangi-Bozor (new market) area, and several boulevarded parks that feel like postcards from somewhere else; but here and there a mosque with a crush of crowds, or a side lane intractable with cars, returns the illusion of having been here before.

We find our hotel, a two-story establishment of Soviet vintage slung on a broad street. It is past 9 pm when we reach our rooms. There is an enormous iron boiler in the bathroom, beside an equally enormous shallow porcelain tub that would easily hold six people (with neither drain-plug nor shower-curtain –- we wonder how they imagine it is to be used), and fifty-year-old furniture whose velvet upholstery is now threadbare. Some louts are holding a birthday party in the basement 'bar', desultory pop music comes thumping up through the floor.

In-spite of a red neon PECTORAHT sign outside, waxing and waning apparently in time to the beat emanating from the basement, the kitchen is closed. Tired from a long day, everyone swigs pomegranate juice bought in Kuva, and then goes directly to bed; only, Mr. M wants to have something proper to eat, and will not be consoled with raisins or milk. "I is hongrie", he says plaintively. We bundle up -- it is probably just below freezing outside -- and set off in search of food.

The night porter is unlikely to be much over 20. He has already tried to sell me a highly suspect USB key for internet access, suggested I contact him directly for discounts on future stays, and told me his wife is studying to be a doctor in Andijon (they plan to emigrate to the UK after she graduates). He says with a certain schadenfreude that there is no obvious place to eat nearby, but we can always try walking to the doner-stands near the bus station: "up the street, turn left, right for a mile, under the bridge, hard left where three lanes come together" and so on.

There's always that disorientation of wandering around in a strange city at night. Mr. M, at the intersection of being three years old, tired, hungry, as well as cold, wants to be carried; he will not consent to walking even the distance between two of the dim street-lamps. We head for buildings with clusters of light; a mile passes, we are belied every time as the lights resolve to grimy garages prising wheels off vans, or kiosks recharging cell phone sim cards. Most of the town has headed home by now; as Mr. M gets heavier by the minute, we punctuate our search for a place to eat with stops in the lee of shuttered shops. At the farthest arc of our journey to Uzbekistan, I am lost at last.

The lanes shrink in width. In one corner shop, men are making halva below a naked bulb. The process seems unchanged from that described in Sadriddin Aini's reminiscence of his boyhood, The Sands Of Oxus:

At the far end of the building was a line of cooking fires, and on each fire sat a cooking pot, tilted forward. Syrup was boiling in some of these pots, and in others soapwort was being whipped into a foam with a handful of twigs bound together, called a chelchub. At the end of the row of cooking-fires was a level pot in which oil was boiling. One man was pouring flour that had been browned, a little at a time, into one of the large tilted pots, and two others were mixing this syrup with wooden paddles. As the flour blended in they kept on shoveling up the resulting batter, turning it over, and slamming it back down. A tall, dark, middle-aged man with a long beard was giving orders to everybody and showing them what to do.

At the other end of the building was a broad, high sufa and on it was a large wooden tray, a good two yards across, surrounded by a layer of sheepskins. At the edge of the sufa by the tray was a bin of flour.

The halva-maker scooped out some flour with a large metal shovel and spread it out on the tray. Then he went back to the pot where flour and syrup were being mixed and checked to see how it was going. When the flour had blended in and the mixture looked like bread dough, the master told his workers, "That's enough, bring it out!"

The workers began shoveling out the syrupy dough onto the wooden tray.

The master, evidently free of his most demanding work, looked at us and asked "What do you want?"

My brother greeted him and handed over the tanga. "Father sent us for a qabza of halva."

"Fine," the master said, "but we've already send the halva we made this morning to the bazaar. So just watch for a while and we'll give you some fresh halva when it is ready."

The syrupy dough was spread out over the flat tray. All the men working at the pots washed their hands up to the elbows and squatted down on the skins around the tray. The master also sat down at their head. One young worker remained standing by the flour bin with a big metal shovel. The halva-makers took the dough in their hands and kneaded it into a long snake, joining the ends to form a ring; then, bending over the tray, they kneaded the ring into a a broad, flat layer that reached right up to the edge. Then the young man with the shovel sprinkled flour on it, and the kneaders folded the halva into half to make two layers. Then they kneaded it again until it covered the tray as it had the first time, the young man spread more flour on it, and the kneaders folded it in half again to make a compact mass of four layers.

The halva-makers continued in this fashion, so the the third time there were eight layers, the fourth time sixteen, the fifth time thirty-two, the sixth time sixty-four, the seventh time one hundred and twenty-eight, the eighth time two hundred and fifty-six, the ninth time five hundred and twelve, the tenth time one thousand and twenty-four, and so on till twenty five folds had been completed, and the layers of the cake, seen end-on, were as thin as threads in a skein. "That's enough," the master told his workers.

Mr. M is very hungry by now. I try to buy some halva. It takes more time than would seem warranted, to explain our desire to get 5000 soums-worth. The usto shakes his head -- Not for Sale. "Biz bermaymiz."

I am not sure what the problem is.

"I am willing to pay what you want!"
He shakes his head.
"Ne prodetsya?" I try fractured Russian from the phrasebook.
"Tolʹko na zavtra." Only for tomorrow.
Why not some today?
"Uhadit!" Go away, don't bother us! "Razve ya ne govoryu ya ne budu prodavat?"

We have to leave. Mr. M's eyes well with tears, but he is gravely stoic. We walk away, the company of halva-makers get up from their kneading to stare at us departing. I tell Mr. M the halva was for someone else. Perhaps an order, for a wedding.

At long last, one clump of lights turns out to be the bus-stand. There is a restaurant. We stumble in, Mr. M's lips blue from the cold. It seems to be a Turkish-run Mediterranean restaurant, a clean well-lighted place, several dozen patrons eating pizza or drinking beer. The apron'd waiter waves us to a table with a flourish. A line of toque'd cooks are making doner kebabs, shaving shawerma or grilling vegetables. A manager bustles up - 'Warm milk for the child?' Even before we are done connecting culturally with the staff via Amitabh Bachchan, piping hot french fries, crisp salads, and pita with hummus, have all arrived at the table. Mr. M's hands are shaking as he shoves food into his mouth with two little fists.

Anda Jonim Qoldi Mening

2011-02-12T01:28:00.054+05:30

We sit on a tapchan in a chaikhana at the center of Andijon, eating potato-samosas in the sun, talking about the Kyrgyz-Uzbek conflict that has displaced a hundred thousand ethnic Uzbeks across the border. Osh lies scarcely 35 miles to the SE across the low hills we see in the middle distance. Talk turns to expatriation. Ferghana also exports her sons; millions find work away from the densely populated Valley in other cities of Uzbekistan, and also in Kazakhstan, in Russia, or beyond. Here someone's friend works as a waiter in a Tokyo restaurant, there someone's brother is a cabbie in Sydney.

The exile's anthem is Anda Jonim Qoldi Mening (Over There Remains This Soul of Mine), a play on Andijonim (My Andijon), and sung from the perspective of that most famous of exported sons, Babur Mirza. The lyrics are by the contemporary poet Latif, incorporating some verse originally penned by Babur himself (source text here). The verse of Babur's segment follows the meter of the complex syllable-length-based aruz system, the rest of the song is based on the more common barmaq. Aruz is a Persian-Arab prosodic meter based on alternate long and short syllables; it is ill suited to Turkic languages, you can see from the Chagatai original the different feel of Babur's verse compared to the contemporary Uzbek words.

After his descent into the plains of India, Babur never saw his beloved Andijon again. In 1528-29, towards the end of his days (he was 45 years old), Babur ordered a great festival, or tamasha. Nobles gathered from different regions of his empire, along with anyone who could claim descent from Timur or Genghis Khan. Groups of peasants from Ferghana who had befriended and aided the fugitive Babur before he was an emperor, were invited and given places of honor. He gave away gifts in a final accounting, almost emptying out his treasury (after his death his soliders were asked to return a third of their pay); by this time, he was coughing blood, bleeding from his ears, and smoking hashish to bear the pain.

Humayun (then about 20), fearing the succession might be tampered with, rushed back to Agra, but fell seriously ill on arrival. Babur is said to have circled the sick-bed, praying to God to take his life instead of his son's. Tradition says that following this prayer, every day Humayun got a little better, and Babur became more and more ill with a fever. Babur Mirza died at age 47 in 1531, his last words apparently being to Humayun, "Do nothing against your brothers, even though they might deserve it."

Babur was first buried in Agra; when Sher Shah temporarily defeated Humayun, the remains were banished to Kabul courtesy of the Suris. Some years ago, Uzbek delegations dug up earth from both the graves, and reburied the clods on a hillside overlooking Andijon, behind a little monument that now houses a small museum, a statue of a pensive Babur at the front.

Anda Jonim Qoldi Mening was recorded by Sherali Jurayev, a well-known Uzbek singer. You can see him below singing the song -- in two parts -- to a gathering of Uzbek bigwigs (who can presumably identify with Babur Mirza's confession of 'many hundred black deeds.') The book he flips seems to be the English hardcover edition of Wheeler M. Thackston's Baburnama. Karimov found some lyrics in Jurayev's other works objectionable, and the singer's hobnobbing with the activist British Ambassador Craig Murray did not go down well; these have apparently earned Jurayev a ban from Uzbek radio and TV, but he is still said to be able to perform in private.

Anda Jonim Qoldi Mening

Padarimni yutib ketgan
Jarda jonim qoldi mening
Qalbim torin tortib chertgan
Jarda jonim qoldi mening
Qalam birlan shamshir tutgan
Jarda jonim qoldi mening

Shaboblikda shabgir eigan
Jarda jonim qoldi mening
Anda jonim olib qolg'on
Andijonim qoldi mening

Nodirimsan Andijonim
Qalbim hargiz tark etmayin
Habibimsan Andijonim
Yoddin hargiz trak etmayin

Ilhomchisan Andijonim shirin
Hargiz tark etmayin
Andan onim boqiy etgan
Andijonim qoldi mening

Bobir-i-man fatva bergan
Yurtim hargiz tark etmayin
Andan onim boqiy etgan
Andijonim qoldi mening.

Bog'ishamol nasib etgan
kuygan dilim zor aylabon.
Riolikni rafiq bilgan
Raqiblar ozor aylabon.

Diyorimda muqumlikni
zamonam dushman aylabon
Furqatiga ehtimolim
Afg'onga istiqbol aylabon
Farzandini mehmon eigan
Andijonim qoldi mening

by Babur:

Har yong'aki azm estam
yonimda borur mexhat
Har soriki yuzlansam
O'trumda kelur qayg'y.
Yuz jabry sitam ko'rgan
Ming mexnaty g'am ko'rgan.
Osoyishe kam ko'rgan
Mendek yana bir bormy?
Tole' o'qi jonimg'a baloliq bo'ldi
O'z yerni qo'yib
Hind sori yuzlandim
Yo Rab, netayin,
ne yuz qaroliq bo'ldi.

In the ravine that swallowed my father
Over there remains this soul of mine
With the friend who plucked the strings of my heart,
Over there remains this soul of mine.
In the place where the pen is wielded like a sword
Over there remains this soul of mine.

In my youth they attacked by night, but
Over there remains this soul of mine
There they made me heartless; but
In my Andijon remains this soul of mine.

You are my precious, my Andijon,
May my heart never leave you.
You are my beloved, my Andijon,
May your memory never leave me.

You are my inspiration, Andijon my sweet,
May I never leave you.
Away from you my moments stretch out forever
In my Andijon remains this soul of mine.

As Babur-mine beseeched
May I never lose my homeland
Away from you my moments stretch out forever
In my Andijon remains this soul of mine.

My burning heart, which has had the fortune
to visit Bog'ishamol, suffers bitterly,
I have been a friend to the learned,
And a havoc-raising enemy for my opponents.

Long life in my own land
My times antagonised
And a future of separation
Brought me to the Afghan
You treat your own son as a guest, but
In my Andijon remains this soul of mine.

by Babur:

Whatever course I resolve upon,
trouble travels at my side.
Whichever direction I turn
I run into heartache.
I have seen a hundred burdens
A thousand troubles and woes.
I have seen so little peace
Is there any other one like me?
Destiny's arrow has become my soul's calamity.
Putting my homeland behind me,
I turned my face toward Hind.
Oh, Lord, why did I do it? How many
Hundred black deeds have there been.

Clouds Asleep On Silk

2011-02-10T00:11:00.007+05:30

Ikat is a Malay-Indonesian term for cloth which is patterned by dyeing the threads before they have been woven. Ikat techniques seem to have evolved independently in Bali, India, Japan and Uzbekistan. Ancient Sogdians, Bactrians, and Khorezmians were already taking silk-worm-raising techniques from China and producing dyed cloth. Phyllis Ackerman, the doyenne of Persian Art (and founder, c. 1925, of the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology) had suggested, based on the Turkic word atacha for ikat in Iran, as well as the strong tradition of striped textiles in Central Asia, that this region is actually the point of origin for the ikat resist-dye kind of weaving. The Uzbek term for ikat is abrband, literally "cloud-tying". Fabric made using silk for warp and cotton thread for weft is called adras; but cloth that has pure silk for both warp and weft is called atlas.

Of the various kinds of ikat, the Japanese is the most restrained - often only indigo and white, in simple patterns. In India and Bali, the warp and weft can be both dyed; this results in exuberant floral patterns with two axes of symmetry, but the palettes typically consist of only two colors -- background and foreground. The Uzbek ikat uses dyed thread in only one direction, the weft being made of plain thread. This results in one axis of symmetry, i.e. the patterns are linear or arrow-shaped; but, compared to India, in Uzbek ikat many more colors are simultaneously used; the effect is that of a child's water-color box -- why leave any hue out?

One of the legends says the great Alexander came to the area in order to find the 120-year-old master who produced the silk atlas called hariri (gentle). In return, the master asked that Alexander's soldiers build a wall around his village; thus was founded Alexandria Eschate -- the farthest of towns named after the general -- now known as Khujand. Another legend (recounted by Timur with a belly-laugh) says that when he arrived, Alexander was given lunch by the quaking villagers. "What is the name of this place?" the general barked in Greek. The locals thought he was demanding the names of the dishes presented, so they promptly answered murgh i non (chicken and naan). Alexander scowled and wrote down Margilon on his map.

Under communism, all labor belonged to the State. Whatever people earned was defined as an entitlement to a share of the State’s productivity. No one was supposed to have personal property or his own income. Even simple skullcaps had to be bought from a State factory, they could not be made at home. After independence, people started looking for ways to be individuals again, and it became necessary to be more forcefully Uzbek. Ikat was part of this re-discovery.

We are going to the Yodgorlik (“Memento”) Silk Factory of Margilon. When Yusufjon Mamayusupov decided to buy the old Soviet silkworks, his friends were incredulous. Why did he want that creaking pile of labor-intensive un-equipment? Why not buy a modern mill for artificial rayon or viscose?

One of the ikat masters Fazlitdin Dadajonov says about the first years of trying to re-establish the industry: “... we went for six years without a single sale. Many people had mostly forgotten about ikat, and didn’t value the amount of work that went into it. But I started to give ikat, and clothing made from it, to dancers and musicians performing at weddings and parties. Tourists started to ask where the beautiful fabric came from, and business started. Before too long, the local customers came, too.”

Mamayusupov is too modest to say he is doing well, but there is a new 500-series Mercedes Benz parked in the compound. The factory is half-closed on this Saturday, he enquires after us to make sure guests are not inconvenienced.

The vats where the silkworm pupae are boiled alive (if they emerge as moths they will wreck the cocoon) are operated by women. Spinning the fiber into yarn is also womens' work. The chizmachi (pattern designer) is a man, and so is the kukchi (master dyer), who sits athwart a ledge between bubbling pots of dye. Three abrbandchis, who tie bunches of thread according to the design, are working to Uzbek pop belted out of a stereo with flashing lights. The women who weave are the youngest -- there are postcards of Shah Rukh Khan on several looms -- and the factory employs many relatives. We chat with Surayyo, who is taking a tea-break from weaving a blue-and-white khan-atlas -- the best atlas, suited for a king. Her aunt works in the sheening department; two cousins spin thread. Neighboring looms clack-clack on, a woman carrying a kettle comes in to pour a cup for Surayyo. It seems a low-stress atmosphere, no one is supervising these women or appearing to extract work -- they gossip and laugh and drink tea between snatches of focused treading on the looms. The ikat pattern appears inch by inch, clouds asleep on silk.

The businessmen and proto-capitalists of Ferghana have the look of people who have made their peace with authorities, and are indeed connected well to the government. Foreign cars are charged 100% import tax, and so a USD 150,000 vehicle represents several lifetimes' salary for the average Uzbek. In the USSR, you were supposed to be able to tell the nomenklatura from their propensity for Marlboro; and while status symbols are now more likely to be Italian shoes or Swiss watches, there is a red packet of American cigarettes poking out from Mamayusupov's leather-jacket pocket. He has the air of a paterfamilias; the women bob and simper as he walks past, but he seems to have no power over the dye-master, who looks vacantly at the mid-distance, unmoving from his ledge, not appearing to acknowledge the owner as he passes.

From a news story on the Uzbek silk industry:

For one month a year, from morning to night, Dilorom Nishanova grows silkworms, a painstaking and exhausting job. She has been doing it since she was 8.

Uzbekistan's authoritarian government insists child labor is banned, but Nishanova, now 15, hasn't heard about it. She and her siblings, aged 9 to 17, think it's perfectly natural to be helping their father grow silkworms, as well as cotton and wheat.

"We just help our parents," she said, her braided dark hair covered with a traditional Muslim scarf. "That's what children have to do, right?"

Her father, Adkham, a bony 42-year-old, farms four hectares (10 acres) of loamy land. In early May, he said, an officials from a state-owned nursery handed him two 30-gram (one-ounce) boxes of silkworm eggs to be nurtured into some 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of cocoons. Within four weeks of hatching, silkworms grow to 10,000 times their original, poppy-seed size. Their creamy stomachs turn greenish from their exclusive diet of mulberry leaves, and they need constant attention. "They're as helpless as newborn babies," Dilorom said. They feed seven times a day and die if their meal is an hour late. Dead ones must be removed promptly lest they infect the others swarming among the fresh mulberry twigs that Dilorom has risen at dawn to gather. Sensitive to light, noise and breeze, the silkworms grow up in a humid barn next to the family's dilapidated adobe house. Their munching sounds like the patter of raindrops.

Silk-growing nations such as South Korea and Japan have switched to less labor-intensive mulberry bushes and mechanized leaf harvest. But Uzbek authorities prefer to "follow the old school where big mulberry trees are utilized for feeding silkworms," says Hisham Greiss, a Chicago-based independent expert on silk farming.

Speaking of this year's season, Dilorom recalled: "We worked hard, had to miss some classes. Just like many other kids in school."

For the farmers and their children, "silk farming opens an annual cycle of forced labor and abuse by authorities," said Ganikhon Mamatkhonov, a rights activist who investigated numerous cases of abuse of Uzbek farmers. The risks these advocates run are considerable. Months after Mamatkhonov spoke to the AP in May, 2009, he was jailed for five years on bribery charges --one of dozens of government critics imprisoned in recent years. (Mamatkhonov's colleagues say he was framed.)

In 2009, the Uzbek Ipagi monopoly sold cocoons for about $6 a kilogram ($2.70 a pound)-- or almost eight times what it paid the farmers, and even that money isn't guaranteed, say the farmers, who complain that payment can be delayed for months, even years.

Uzbek Ipagi, the state-run monopoly, exports Uzbek silk to China, India, South Korea and Western Europe. Some stays in Uzbekistan to be woven into scarves or rugs at small factories and mainly sold to tourists. They rarely reach Western stores. "I never saw any silk garment with a tag 'Made in Uzbekistan'" in U.S. stores, silk expert Greiss said.

Ikat making in Central Asia was the most vibrant in the second half of the 19th century, tracking the growth of urban societies from Kabul to Bukhara and the growing purchasing power of the sarts. A couple of years ago, the Victoria and Albert museum held an exhibition of Uzbek ikats from this time. Practitioners of Margilon are struggling to recreate some of the colors and patterns.

Fazlitdin Dadajonov says: “There is a deep, serious color between blue and black that our ancestors used. I am still trying to make it.”

Al-Ferghani

2011-02-08T00:01:00.001+05:30

Near the old governor's mansion of Ferghana is a leafy park dedicated to Ahmad al-Ferghani (c. 830 CE), polymath philosopher (and lamentable engineer), known to Europe as Alfraganus.

Throughout the 'middle' ages, the lands across the Oxus had given birth to a significant number of men of ideas -- the various Als of Khwarizm, Birun, Bukhara, Chach, Ghujdawan, Ferghana and Margilon -- and they have been collectively called The Pleiades of Transoxiana. In the Indian system of astronomy, the seven sisters of the Pleiades are called the Krttika (Murugan, raised by the sisters, is thus Kartikeya); the Sanskrit word means 'The Cutters', and is the root for all things critical, i.e. those in the house of Krttika aim to penetrate underlying causes.

Like many of the 9^th century philosophers of Mawarannahr (literally, the areas beyond the nahr Oxus or Amu Darya), al-Ferghani was a Tajik-speaker whose ancestors were likely forcibly converted from Zoroastrian, Hindu or Buddhist faiths after Arab conquest. He came to be one of the members of the team of astronomers at the court of Caliph al-Mamun of Baghdad who calculated the diameter of the Earth using measurements of the meridian arc length. His Kitab al-Fusul Ikhtisar al-Majisti (Book of Chapters Summarizing The Almagest), written c. 833, was a translation (and emendation) of Ptolemy's greatest work, updated from al-Ferghani's own calculations and enlarged in places with his own opinions where different from the Ptolemaic.

From a paper on al-Ferghani's works:

The Greeks divided the spherical earth into 360 degrees, but differing sources gave different information about the length of a degree. We know today that the correct measurement is about 111 kilometers per degree at the equator. In the third century BCE, the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes, the director of the library in Alexandria, came up with the remarkably accurate calculation of 110 kilometers (59.5 nautical miles) per degree; in the second century BCE, the great Alexandrian geographer, Ptolemy calculated the length of a degree to be 93 kilometers (50.3 nautical miles). Alfraganus calculated it and decided that the value should be 111 kilometers (56⅔ nautical miles). In this case, his value was more accurate than Ptolemy's.

Al-Ferghani's Kitab was translated into Latin in the 12^th century and remained very popular in Europe till past the time of Dante (1265-1321). The Divine Comedy borrows in many places from Alfraganus, Dante had clearly studied it closely.

Alfraganus states that the heaven of fixed stars moves from west to east about one degree of arc every century. Dante says the stars had moved 1/12 of a degree between the time Beatrice was born to the time he first met her, and thus she would have been 100/12 or just over 8 years old at the time of their first acquaintance.

The constellation of the Southern Cross, as prominent in the Southern sky as Orion is in the Northern one, is circumpolar south of 34 degrees S latitude and visible thence every night of the year. April to June, viewers south of the Tropic of Cancer (currently 23.438 degrees N latitude) can glimpse the Southern Cross rising just barely above the southern horizon. Once the Cross had been easier to see from the Northern Hemisphere. The Ancient Greeks knew its four stars (they counted them among the constellation Centaurus), and the Cross certainly appeared in the sky of the Middle-East around the time of Jesus of Nazareth. The slow precession of the Earth’s axis has carried Cross southward, and its stars haven’t appeared north of the Tropic of Cancer for more than a thousand years. However, Ptolemy knew the constellation, as well as its drift in the heavens, and al-Ferghani updating Ptolemy figured that by his time in the 9^th century CE, they would be somewhere over the South Western ocean, or over a terra incognita far, far beyond Africa. Dante the poet decided this unknown land was Purgatory, and there he placed the 4-starred Cruz described by al-Ferghani.

(When Dante and Beatrice finally ascend from Purgatory on the far side of the world, they see four brilliant stars which the Divine Comedy says represent the four principal virtues -- Justice, Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance -- and which hold out the symbol of redemption to the sinner:

“To the right hand I turn’d and fix’d my mind
On the other pole attentive where I saw
Four stars ne’er seen before save by the ken
Of our first parents. Heaven of their rays
Seem’d joyous. Oh thou northern site, bereft
Indeed, and widow’d, since of these deprived ...”

From The Divine Comedy, Canto I in the Vision of Purgatory.)

During his last voyage to 'India' in 1501–1502, Amerigo Vespucci and Gonçalo Coelho sailed south along the coast of South America to the bay of Rio de Janeiro. If his own account is to be believed, Vespucci subsequently reached the latitude of Patagonia, though this seems doubtful since he does not mention the broad estuary of the Rio de la Plata. Anyway, Vespucci had gone far enough south to see the Southern Cross; when he saw the stars in the sky as described by al-Ferghani, he is said to have exclaimed "Ah! We've arrived at Dante's Purgatory!"

On his return to Lisbon, Vespucci wrote in a letter to the Medici that the land masses he had explored had been much larger than the India described by Ptolemy and Marco Polo, and therefore must be a new world.

Christopher Columbus also knew his al-Ferghani, and put forth arguments based on the circumference of the sphere that were derived from al-Ferghani's Kitab. In 1490, most scholars accepted Ptolemy's claim the terrestrial landmass (for Europeans of the time, comprising Eurasia and Africa) occupied 180 degrees of the sphere, leaving 180 degrees of water. Columbus, keen to attract funding for his voyages, went about finding a number that would support a lower distance. Petrus Cardinal Aliacensis, in his Imago Mundi and Cosmographiae Tractatus, following Marinus of Tyre (Ptolemy's guru), had put the landmass at 225 degrees, leaving 135 degrees of water. The good Cardinal (b. 1351) , however, had known nothing of Marco Polo's description of the enormous east-west span of Asia. Columbus subtracted 28 degrees to account for the breadth of Cathay, and another 30 degrees to allow for Cipangu (Japan) being, as reported, some distance off the coast of Cathay. A further 9 degrees could be deducted if one left from the Canary Islands -- this left 68 degrees to be traversed.

But how much to a degree? The good thing about standards, it is said, is that there are so many to choose from. Columbus declared one degree represented a shorter distance on the earth's surface than was commonly held -- he (mis)read the writings of al-Ferghani as if the distances had been calculated in Italian miles (1,238 meters). Accepting the length of a degree to be 56⅔ miles he therefore reckoned the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was not as vast as feared:

According to a note in his own hand in his copy of "Imago Mundi," Columbus navigated by the erroneous calculations of the 9th century Arabian astronomer Alfraganus. Using Alfraganus' value of 56 and 2/3 land miles per equatorial degree, Columbus assumed that he had only to sail approximately 2,500 miles westward from the Canary Islands in order to reach the Orient. Columbus asserted that his voyages had confirmed the cosmography of "Imago Mundi" and the calculations of Alfraganus. Columbus himself thought that he was navigating according to Alfraganus' value and he wrote: "Observe that in sailing often from Lisbon southward to Guinea, I carefully measured the course ... and in agreement with Alfragan I found that each degree answered to 56 and 2/3 miles. So that we may rely upon this measure."

What Columbus had not realized was that al-Ferghani had used the much longer Arabic mile (about 1,830 meters); also, the correct longitudinal distance between the Canary Islands and Japan is 165 degrees. This makes the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan about 20,000 km -- no ship in the 15^th century could carry enough food and fresh water for such a journey. Most European sailors and navigators had concluded, correctly, that sailors undertaking a westward voyage from Europe to Asia non-stop would die of thirst or starvation long before reaching their destination.

The monarchs of Spain, however, having settled an expensive war of succession with Portugal, and desperate for a competitive edge over other European countries in the trade with India, decided to gamble on Columbus' theory. Fortunately for Columbus and his crew, there was something in the middle; the span of the Caribbean islands from Puerto Rico to the Bahamas are 50-60 degrees away from Europe, more-or-less within the bounds of the 3500 miles his ships had been provisioned for! As the 16^th century developed, a route to the Americas, rather than to Asia, gave Spain an overseas empire; Columbus, of course, died convinced that his calculations had been correct, and that he had indeed found India.

There were cases where wrong calculations were not so serendipitous. According to ibn Taghribirdi, that gossiper on 3000 people, the great Caliph Jafar al-Mutawakkil had entrusted two sons of Musa ibn Shakir with the digging of a canal to be named al-Ja'fari. The canal was to run through the new city al-Mutawakkil had built near Samarra on the Tigris (and named al-Ja'fariyya after himself.) The sons delegated the work to al-Ferghani, who was not much of an engineer, and miscalculated (or tried to take a shortcut, some of the terrain being rocky and hard to dig), making the beginning of the canal deeper than the rest. In the end, water could run through the length of the canal only when the Tigris was running high. News of this angered the Caliph, and the two brothers were saved from severe punishment only by the gracious acquiescence of Sind ibn Ali, the celebrated Indian colleague of al-Khwarizmi who had created the first star tables known to the Muslim world, to become a co-conspirator and vouch for the correctness of al-Ferghani's calculations (in the process risking his own neck.) However, another serendipitous event -- the estranged son of the Caliph got his father assassinated by a Turkish solider -- saved both al-Ferghani and ibn Ali from almost certain death.

The crater Alfraganus on the moon is named after al-Ferghani.

We get ready to leave Ferghana town, intending to head towards Andijon, synonymous in the last few years with the worst massacre since Tienanmen of a body of protesters by their own government. (A brief backgrounder below.) Our new driver is Timur. He was in Andijon the day prisoners were sprung from its notorious jail. "People were dancing and cooking plov on the streets," he recounts laconically, "they all thought Karimov was gone." The next night, he woke up at 2 am to the rumble of trucks. All night long, from behind the curtains of his apartment across the street from the government hospital of Fergana, he watched bodies wrapped in white sheets being carried in to the morgue by masked men. Tanks had sealed off his street.

Jerome

2011-02-05T13:40:00.008+05:30

Ferghana town, the pastel-washed, chinara-lined administrative center of Ferghana Valley, started as a Russian colonial entity, founded in 1876 to garrison the Tsar's forces. At first it was called New Margilon, and only Russians (i.e. European subjects of the Tsar) were allowed to live within town, the natives of the Valley just permitted to approach the perimeter to sell produce. In 1910, as part of the paroxysms that followed Russia's defeat to Japan in the far-eastern krai, the town was renamed Skobelev, after old goz zanli (bloody-eyes), whose cannons and night-raids had secured the Valley for Russia. Prosperous sarts were eventually allowed to build houses in Skobelev; gradually a class of Armenian and Jewish merchants also moved in. After the Bolshevik re-conquest of the area in 1924, the name was changed to Ferghana (Farg'ona).

Two thousand years ago, this is where the first interactions between Indo-European and Chinese states had taken place, between the Bactrian descendants of Alexander and the Han empire. Sima Qian (130 BC), the Grand Historian of the Han empire, writes of the inhabitants of Ferghana-region as Da Yuan, or the Great Ionians. A local myth recounts how a king went to the lake (much of the valley was marshland before being drained for agriculture) and saw a mermaid; he built her a palace, hence Pari-khona (Far-ghona), or the Fairy's House. Many a passing soldier has since helped himself to a local pari.

We are staying at an odd place -- in what looks like a full-fledged resort with a dozen modern, semi-detached condo-style buildings surrounding a lavish pool, bar, and entertainment center (complete with 24-hour Russian pop on big-screen-TV.) All this gated, behind high walls, in the midst of acres of sculpted gardens of rosebush. We are the only guests, apart from a Malaysian-Indian gentleman and his Uzbek office-ladies.

I step out into the street. All roads lead radially to the center -- deliberately laid out so that the civilians could flee in to the garrison should the surrounding natives ever rise in rebellion. A little way down is an internet cafe. Sadeq, who is hanging out, gives me a quick briefing. There are two of these resort-hotels in town, both controlled (under the fronts of joint-ventures with the Uzbek government) by drug-mafia laundering their money through real-estate. The southern Valley has become the largest trans-shipment area for Afghan heroin on its way to Russia and Europe. The Kyrgyz officials from Osh, the Uzbek ones from Farg'ona, the Tajiks from Isfara are all either drug-lords themselves or in the pay of these people -- Sadeq even thinks the American military has elements who collude in escorting opium out of Afghanistan. He is getting excited: "Did you see today's story? Zia Massoud was caught in Dubai with 52 million US dollars in cash! In an Afghan Airlines plane! And the Americans let him go! Bakiev's brother passed 25 tons of heroin through Osh every year! People over there" he gestures over the hills to the south, "pay 10 million soum (i.e. about USD 5,000) to just be the transportation officer for the district! And you can make that back just passing one truck through your area." A friend comes out and speaks to Sadeq in Uzbek.

From a paper by Ramtanu Maitra:

Afghanistan’s opium production was 350 tons in 1986, and 4,581 tons by 1999. Following the occupation of Afghanistan by the US and NATO forces, opium production rose to 8,200 tons in 2007. The opium began to flow across the Tajik-Afghan border, and then along the mainly uncontrolled and mountainous Khorog-Osh-Andijan road (the “Opium Highway ”).

High-quality heroin can be purchased in Afghanistan for USD 500 a kilo. Its price increases to USD 2,000 in Tajikistan, USD $4,000 in Osh or Ferghana, and USD 8,000 in Bishkek. By the time it reaches Moscow, it is USD 50,000 a kilo. A suitcase full of heroin smuggled from Afghanistan to Russia thus carries a margin of a million dollars.

In the morning over breakfast, we chat to Jerome Fernandez, the Malaysian-Indian gentleman we saw last night. He was born in Kerala, but has spent most of life in Kelantan. After a career in secondary education culminating in head-mastership and union-leadership of provincial schools, he is currently affiliated with Education International, a global federation of national teachers' unions. He is in Ferghana to conduct a workshop to help local teachers' union bosses cope with the dislocations brought to the education system by the collapse of the USSR.

The 'market' for education in the valley is shifting to private schools. These, as everywhere else, teach what is valuable in the global economy -- Korean language, double-entry book-keeping, or digital multimedia editing. The state-education system of Soviet vintage knows no way of meeting the demands of the market. Between delivering students for cotton-harvesting every autumn, the teachers are mired in antiquated syllabi of national heroes and notional reckoning, the most common medium of instruction being a stick. Jerome's backers, who would like healthy unions in all countries, and whose members also give money for the liberal end of 'capability development' in this part of the world, want him to deliver a blunt message -- adapt or die. If they do not change, he is to tell them, the private sector will step in, and the way of life for unionized teachers will go the way of Ionian medicine. Jerome is finding the going tough -- the first day of the workshop, he says, degenerated into chaos, the union members venting their anger about 'democracy' and 'free-market'. In Ferghana, life under the Soviets was tolerable, you knew where you stood, bread and soup were abundant, and while you did not get electricity all the time, your power never got cut off for merely failing to pay the bill.

The 30-odd workshop attendees have gathered again today, continuing their 'off-site' at the resort conference center. They are all senior teachers, headmasters or union leaders in the state school-system, and dressed very formally. Their 3-piece-suits, watches on fob chains, and long overcoats make them look like sombre state-councillors. About one in five is a woman, and about a third look Russian to me. This morning, the education minister of Ferghana is to kick off the proceedings. The group stands in a circle, in the sun outside the breakfast lounge; the minister speaks gruffly in Uzbek, and shakes hands with Jerome. The day will start with group-therapy -- everyone will write down on a card what his/her biggest problems are; then they will break up in groups to discuss and consolidate. Jerome's Uzbek assistants, two girls in their 20's who are also sharply dressed in business suits, hand out cards, markers, rolls of chart paper. The groups set off looking like kindergartners given all the ingredients for a nice-morning of making mud-pies.

Jerome looks at them in despair. "A very tough situation here," he says. "I don't think these folks will make it. "

Jerome is in Uzbekistan after several years in Aceh, helping rebuild the education infrastructure there after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. He shakes his head recounting its horrors. "You would try talk to children, who had lost their families and houses, who would answer all your questions but never once look up at you. If you did look at the faces, the eyes were vacant, month after month. We tried everything -- fostering, presents, trips -- but those children never again smiled." He looks fondly at Mr. M rampaging around. "That is why, when I see a child laughing and playing, I am grateful to God."

From a Malaysian interview:

"DON’T trust anyone!" This is not Jerome Fernandez’s life’s motto but it has been his mantra for the past three years.

It is not a policy Fernandez is comfortable with. But this guiding principle, he said, is what has kept his head above water, so to speak, in Banda Aceh since 2005 when he was picked by an international body to spearhead a mega post-tsunami rehabilitation and reconstruction project. As project coordinator for Brussels-based Education International (EI), Fernandez is tasked with rebuilding schools, providing livelihood programmes, training new teachers to replace the 700 who died in the Boxing Day 2004 disaster as well as re-train those who survived. On top of this, he is also involved in a trauma counselling programme for survivors.

In a country where corruption is high, many foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) had closed shop, downsized their projects or passed on their programmes to local NGOs or government-linked agencies, frustrated by the bureaucracy and delaying tactics and instances of "under-table donations".

"When I landed there, the place was in total chaos. On top of that, everyone wanted to make money out of the tragedy," said the 61-year-old retired headmaster. "‘Can I trust him? Will he cheat me?’ were all I could think of," he said in a recent interview in Petaling Jaya. It was a surprise to the many who knew him when he got the job. This is because overseeing the construction of 35 schools was his main task – something alien to this educator from Kuala Krai, Kelantan, who admittedly can’t even hammer a nail without hurting himself. "But, my employers said they needed to be absolutely sure that they could have a trustworthy person handling the money from donors," said the father of three. He said it was EI Asia-Pacific Regional chief coordinator Aloysius Mathews, for whom Fernandez had conducted educational programmes in Thailand, Bangladesh and other Third World countries, who made him the offer. "I received a call one night and was shocked at being offered such a project. I was confused and spent some time staring at the map of Aceh," said Fernandez, who minored in Geography and majored in English at the Sultan Ismail Teachers Training College in Kota Baru. However, he was more fearful of what his wife would say. "I was least expecting her to give me the green light but she said: ‘If you think you can do it and you want to go, then go for it!’

"I went to Aceh on May 11, 2005. I had to look for about 30 schools which had been ravished, train 1,000 teachers, find 338 teachers to train them as trauma counsellors and 4,000 children to give scholarships to. "I thought, oh God! I am all alone here. How am I going to do it? I don’t speak the language, I am a foreigner … where am I going to get all these information from?" Fernandez said these are pertinent questions as there was no complete data available – attributed to poor filing practices and the tsunami itself which destroyed the documents. "However, after about two months, I managed to gather the information from the community and obtained some help from the rehabilitation and reconstruction body (BBR), a department set up by the government to oversee the reconstruction of Banda Aceh."

To compound his problems, there were "turf wars" between the various NGOs. "Each has millions of euros to spare and needed projects so they would be upset if I encroached on their turf." On top of all these, there were dubious characters barging into his office and demanding contracts to build schools. Some dropped names of powerful local politicians, while others used veiled threats by saying they were with GAM, the Free Aceh Movement rebels who laid down their arms after the tsunami. In times like these, Fernandez, who got by speaking Bahasa Malaysia, would refer them to the BRR or claim the decision was not his but the government’s.

As far as getting staff he could trust, he preferred to surround himself with the fairer sex. "I felt I could trust women more," said Fernandez, whose office staff are all women.

He also credits his survival in Banda Aceh to taking a no-nonsense approach to his work. "There are no second chances for those who try to cheat me or those who do sub-standard work. I sack them on the spot," he said, adding that in this way, word goes around and everyone pull up their socks and "hopefully diminish any sinister thoughts". "We advertised in the papers for contractors and 32 companies applied. But I did not approve even one of them. "I do not trust them! They come for the money and not to help," he said. Ultimately, he got in touch with Yayasan Kita Peduli, an NGO headed by former Indonesian ambassadors and recruited contractors from their database. "That way," he said, "they cannot cheat me, because if they do so, they will have to answer to the ambassadors and the government.

"Anyway the foundation needs a lot of foreign aid, so it will ensure that the contractors do their work," he said, adding that at the end of the day, he still supervises their work with the help of engineers and surveyors. Living alone next to a graveyard and without the comforts of home (hot water and irregular power supply) is a humbling experience for Fernandez, who regards himself as a good cook. Alas, his new electric cooker blew up after a power surge. "It just makes you appreciate what you have back home."

However, the cracks are beginning to show. From facing Indonesian rebels and receiving threatening calls from contractors who were passed for projects, deadline pressures, being home sick and even finding a snake in the bathroom, it was inevitable that the ophidiophobic (fear of snakes) Fernandez would pick up his smoking habit – 25 years after he quit!

He has since completed 30 schools. With 75% of the funds from Oxfam Netherlands, and the balance from EI, he has a lot to account for, but his backers are happy.

Usmanov's Ustakhona

2011-02-03T00:01:00.001+05:30

Natalya's grandfather was a Qajar-dynasty royal from Iran. When Reza Shah, a former gunnery-sergeant of the Persian Cossaks, embarked upon a coup in 1921, this Qajar named Ali had had to flee across the Murghab to Central Asia due to mysterious animosities with the nouvelle regime. (The emergence of Reza Shah 'Pahlavi' was assisted by the British government, which wished to halt the Bolsheviks' penetration of Iran due to the threat it posed to the British colonial possession of India.) Eventually, Ali settled in Ferghana, marrying a Siberian woman just after the time of Lenin, and thus obtaining Soviet subjecthood. His son became an Aliyev, in his turn marrying a girl born of German WWII prisoners of war. Natalya, then, is quarter Iranian, quarter Siberian-Russian, and half Austro-German. She talks about her Siberian granny who brought her up; as well as her Qajar grandpa, who would mysteriously disappear for months, apparently walking to Iran with the aid of Turcoman smugglers even to his 60s, as part of futile attempts to recover family properties. In Ferghana, they think of Natalya as the Russian girl who speaks Uzbek like a native; she knows not only all the basement dives for dancing and drinking in the conservative Valley, but also all the cosmopolitan, mixed-ethnic, 'cool' people in the towns. Talking nineteen-to-the-dozen, she is taking us to the usta-khona (i.e. workshop, usta in Uzbek is 'master' and khona is of course 'room') of a Tatar with a Tajik name -- Rustom (Rustam) Usmanov.

Rustom Usmanov was the formidable art director of the Soviet-era ceramic collective; since independence, he has set up his own workshop. His reputation as a "top guy" precedes him -- he is a member of the Art Academy of Uzbekistan (i.e. well-connected in Tashkent), and a winner of the UNESCO Award of Excellence for his blue Rishton ceramic work. Usmanov's work is displayed in the Hermitage, and much sought after in the ateliers of Santa Fe (a place he visits once every year.) In consequence, we are not sure what to expect: post-modern studio, or official-showcase? In the event, Abdul-Malek pulls up on a broad street lined with one-story brick-front row houses, all lace and chintz, wrought-iron gates with clumps of marigold loudly proclaiming an abundance of little old ladies. We step in through the front door, Usmanova comes bustling up, greeting Natalya with obvious warmth. We are taken past simple rooms into the backyard, where several kilns, overgrown potato-patches, and persimmon trees compete for space with racks of unfinished and semi-finished pottery. A pigeon coos from its crooked cote nailed to the neighbor's yard.

The usta is busy laying out a pattern over brown paper. It seems a lot of his work consists of custom orders -- here someone has asked for a design of leaping fishes from a fountain to be copied onto jars, the draughtsman's immediate problem lying in accounting for the differences in curvature and perspective. Usmanov gravely shows two alternatives on brown drafting paper to Mr. M -- one with fat fish that will look better when viewed from an angle, the other with slim fish that appear proportionate only if one is head on. He holds the pieces up, turns them this way and that. Mr. M, still at an age seduced by surfeit, chooses the fat fish. "I think so, too", says the master, happily, afterwards reaching into a drawer for the consultant's fee -- a little majolica bell for Mr. M.

The most striking part of the workshop is its feel, if not quite that of a library, at least that of a printing-press, or book-binder's. Designs and materials lie scattered, and racks of yet-to-be-fired pots stack up against the walls. Brushes and palettes of bright colors lie on the tables; cupboards overflow with apothecary-jars of minerals. Here a half-painted tile, there a glob of paint fired to see what it will look like. Usmanov's children got decent professional educations, and his grandchildren now can get any privilege this society can provide; but his real gift to them has been that of creation -- everyone in the household can turn clay on the wheel, or transfer a pattern from card to cup. The 10-year-old who turns out a fluted bowl for us also hangs around listening intently as the elders talk about design and manufacturability. His path may well be that of a teacher, accountant, doctor or geologist, but all his life he will be able to dream of soft clay taking shape under his fingers.

At the end of the 14th century, Timur gave orders to send a few Samarkand masters to Rishton. Their assignment was to steal the trade secrets of the traditional blue-and-white Chinese cobalt porcelain. Unfortunately, there were no kaolin clay deposits in Ferghana, so the potters had to come up with an alternative that would please Timur.

Fortunately, a workaround to kaolin had been known in Iran and Arabia for centuries -- the invention of a white pottery glaze suitable for painted decoration, by the addition of an oxide of tin to the slip of a lead glaze, had enabled Middle-Eastern potters (who had no kaolin) to produce ceramics with the look-and-feel of Chinese porcelain at a fraction of the price.

The Moors took this technique of tin-glazed earthenware to Al-Andalus, where the art of metallic glazes was, well, tinkered with, and developed further. The name majolica for this kind of tin-glazed pottery comes from a garbled version of the island of Majorca, which was a trans-shipment point for earthenware sent to Italy from Aragon in Spain.

The techniques took further hold in Italy; the name faience or faïence in English – for tin-glazed pottery on a delicate pale buff body – comes from Faenza in Italy. Later in the 17th and 18th centuries, similar techniques would spread to Holland (delft) and Germany (dresden or meissen), where alternative clay-mixtures were also engineered.

The Uzbeks in the time of Timur developed techniques to use local reddish clays to produce a faience covered with white glaze and dark blue painting, beguilingly called chini in Uzbekistan, though technically it is majolica rather than (Chinese) porcelain.

In Ferghana, the glazes developed into something really peculiar. In the foothills of the Tien Shan there grows a plant named gulyob. It lookes somewhat like sagebrush. In autumn the plant is picked and burnt. From potash-containing ashes of the herb, dye-makers extract the main component of glazes, ishkor (a resonance with the subcontinental term kshar, alkali.)

The clay of Rishton is a brownish-red khoki surkh. The local potters consider their clay to be so good as not to require any preparation or processing. Other clays come from various nearby places: red from Chimion, yellow from Uchkurgan, a fire-resistant white friable clay from Angren. The necessary components for glazes are also abundant in the mountains or by the streams: quartz or ok gosh from Soh or Gurumsaray, white sand or ok kum from Shibrona. A dark-blue glaze results from adding lead (obtained from traders in Kokand) into ishkor, while adding copper imparts a light-blue color. From the slopes of the Pamir Alay range they extract manganese, or magl, necessary for the dark lilac and brown colors. Ferruterous clay -- jusha or malgash -- rich with ferrous and chrome oxides, make up yellow glazes. The most common colors of the Rishton palette - turquoise and ultramarine - come from lojuvard, the rock lapis extracted in the mountains of Badakhshan. You have to wonder about eating off this stuff. The earthernware of Central Asia was classified into platters (or lagaan, for the plov), bowls (or kosa for the shorpa), and jugs (or kuza, for liquids; this last similar phonetically to the kuja water-jugs of Bengal; the study of languages is filled with surprises.) Rishton pottery developed a distinctive vocabulary of color and decoration around these staple consumables.

The Soviet era nearly destroyed the traditional crafts of Ferghana; the policy of forcing craftsmen to work in collective factories churning out large batches of cheap or imitative works, and prohibition from producing individual works, had the effect of making many of the masters quit. After construction in the 1960s of Rishtan Collective Ceramic Factory, which applied modern mass-production technologies and factory-made glazes, the ancient techniques of ishkor majolica started to disappear.

After Uzbek independence, those of the craftsmen still left in collectivized factories started small workshops. There are over 150 such establishments in Rishton today -- some churn out batches of factory-imitation cheaply for everyday consumption by Uzbeks, and others produce more expensive, complex designs for consumption by tourists, private collections, and museums. The cheaper workshops cannot afford to use the traditional glazes, so they daub on industrial paints (produced from heavy metals) bought by the drumload. At the same time, the high-end workshops find their overseas customers demand the intricacy and novelty associated with 'designer' items and so, sadly, what is created with 'authentic' glazes represents the least traditional of designs (it is not clear that Timur needed owl-shaped spoon-rests.) One can only take consolation in arguing that some of this stuff might become tomorrow's tradition.

Meanwhile, Usmanov experiments on with transferring interlocking stars from plane paper to fluted necks. Mahmud Azizov, the kuzagar, turns the wheels. Apprentice (and nephew) Elnur Mursakayev practices a vocabulary of chorbarg (quatrefoil) and bodomgul (almond flower). The children paint tiles, sometimes discussing orders with their elders. One customer asks if a small missing bung from an antique bottle might be re-created; another wants a giant conversation-stopper adorning her new entryway. A letter from an "area-studies" faculty asks if an exhibition of Central Asian pottery might be arranged in New York, to highlight, for a change, some 'positive messages' from the region (the director of the Met has promised to take a personal interest)? Usmanov says getting the pottery out of Rishton intact is still a problem; the local carriers cannot insure expensive pieces, and there is a limit to what can be hand-carried out of Ferghana valley.

At the end of the day's long firing, it is time to open the kiln. Everyone is excited, and gathers to see how the pieces turned out; they emerge one by one, still hot to touch.

Nodira Mohlaroyim

2011-01-29T04:25:00.033+05:30

Uzbekistan's first postage stamp issued after independence was unusual in its choice of subject; one would expect the first issue to feature the flag (as was the case with independent India), and subsequent ones to picture strongmen or founding-fathers. In Uzbekistan's case, it was a 200-year-old Kokandi queen called Nodira Mohlar-oyim (Nadira Makhlar-oiim) -- wife of an usurper, mother of a debauch, power behind the throne for decades, Sufi teacher, and ghazal poetess with 10,000 verses in her bayat. (Cynics will say the philatelic choice is probably due to a series on Arts In The SSRs having been long planned by the Soviets timed for Nodira's bicentennial; the Uzbek authorities taking a path of low resistance in allowing it to be released. The stamps were printed in Moscow.)

The director of the museum on the palace grounds, a stout Uzbek lady in stylish dark-green leather, is telling me all about otins, the women-clerics of Central Asia, who fill a role somewhere between mullah and witch-doctor. She drops her voice and whispers conspiratorially: "If you come at night after the moon has set and before the sun has risen, you might see Nodira-begim kneeling in prayer in that niche." The power supply fails; the museum room plunges into darkness. We turn on cellphone displays and slant around the lighted panes. In a pale blue phosphorescence the framed image of a queen appears on the wall; her features are indistinct but she is wearing an ascetic's dark cape, made of rough wool in this land of silks. In fact, the word sufi, according to one explanation, comes from the Arabic tasawwuf, at the root of which is suf, or wool.

Nodira's husband Umar Khan ascended to throne as the 7th ruler of the Khanate of Kokand in 1811, after engineering the assassination of his brother Alim. He died in 1822, when Nodira was 30. While Madali Khan, the son of Umar and Nodira, was being groomed for rule, Nodira was part regent and part mourner.

O straight cypress, what are your thoughts?
Your promise of rendezvous burnt my soul.

Bound, I pray for pardon,
My aim is your perfection.

You argue with the face of the moon,
O, sun, have you achieved eclipse?

For the wealth-seeker, water of paradise or water of Kaaba,
For me, the pure drops of your tears are enough.

You may not yet read them,
But your fortune-telling on holy sheets was blessed.

More precious than Jamshid's cup in which you could see the world,
O sufi-beggar, your broken glass.

Your lovers died in your sorrow,
But you show not a particle of care.

O sick heart, in separation,
You have not strength to beat.

O, Nodira, you speak about love,
And your condition becomes more and more notorious.

(adapted from a translation by Razia Sultanova)

The folk-culture of Central Asia has retained strong pre-Islamic elements. Wherever you go, large billboards proclaim O'zbekistoni yomon kuzdan asragin! (May God protect Uzbekistan from the evil eye!) In her forthcoming book From Shamanism to Sufism: Women, Islam and Culture in Central Asia, Sultanova discusses how in her opinion Central Asian women kept alive traditional Shamanic Islamic religious culture, especially Sufism (even when all religion was banned under the Soviets), most significantly in Ferghana Valley, which she calls 'the cradle of female Islamic culture.' Another of the celebrated voices from the otins of Ferghana is that of Jahon-otin (1780-1845), whose takhallus or pen-name is Uvaysiy (Jahanotin Uvaisi):

If I ask for the sign of meeting from people who love, they kill me,
If I don’t ask I die.

If I build a shop of love for the suffering people, they kill me,
If I don’t build I die.

Don’t put me to torments of jealousy, O death,
if my beloved is sitting with another,

If I bark unceasing like a dog at his door he kills me,
If I don’t bark I die.

There is no other way but to be patient,
If I want him till the dawn of day.

If I wander like a vagabond hither and thither, he kills me,
If I don’t wander I die.

If I was absent while I was far away,
It was because my beloved said, forbear:

If I go today to see the flower of his face, he kills me,
If I don’t go I die.

He avoids me, intimidates me,
My soul leaves this ephemeral world.

If I stay with this wan face, O strange Uvaysiy, he kills me,
If I don’t stay I die.

(again, adapated from Sultanova.)

The bayats of the classical otins of Ferghana are now what is called ethnomusic -- retreating to the village and the elderly under the onslaught of mp3 pop. An example of the traditional music of the Uzbek Sufi women can be found here.

As for Nodira, her son Madali Khan turned out to be a spectacular debauch even by the standards of the khanates, eventually infuriating the clergy by marrying not only his wife's sister but also her mother. The Emir of Buhkara arrived to deliver Kokand from the despot. Conquering Kokand in 1842, Nasrullah had both Madali Khan and Nodira executed. (The Kokandis soon realized that a homegrown despot was better than one from Bukhara, so within a year the nephew of Umar and Nodira was back on the throne. Such was the patrimony of Khudayar Khan the palace-builder.)