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Contested Indian History #3: Independence

Once India became independent, there was a desire to document the freedom struggle. To that end, the records of the Indian Historical Records Commission (IHRC) had to be made accessible. But the content was too much – no one historian could go through it all. It had to be a collective activity, and it felt necessary to involve the Indian government, writes Shaan Kashyap in Who Owns History?   President Rajendra Prasad too felt that the “role of history” in nation building was critical, so he full heartedly supported the initiative. Not just the independence struggle but also its “distant and glorious past”. Prasad may have been sincere, but it would set the precedent of what would follow: “The mandate to the professional historians was provided by the speeches of the politicians.” The seeds had been sown – History was not just reporting events; it was meant to serve the present. Back then, that purpose was “nationalizing the past”. The intelligentsia agreed that Nehruvian I...
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Meal-time Hunger and Skipping Meals

As meal-time approaches, we begin to feel hungry. Increasingly so. But why does that feeling go away even if we skip that meal ? Why didn’t the hunger get more and more intense?   The answer lies in endocrinology. I remember seeing almost all the salient points from my then 14 yo daughter’s Biology book; but it is only when you connect all those raw facts that you get the answer.   If we don’t know that, we (wrongly) assume hunger is a signal that keeps rising until we eat. But that’s not how the body work. Yes, it starts at meal-time when the gherlin level spikes. But if the food doesn’t arrive, the gherlin level eventually crashes (but it takes an hour or two for that to happen).   In parallel, without the food intake, your blood glucose level falls. In response, the body releases counter-regulatory hormones – glucagon, cortisol and epinephrine. This glucagon goes to the liver and breaks down the older stores of glycogen in the liver, thereby dumping glucose...
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Contested Indian History #2: British Era

The roots of the contests over history lie in the fact that education systems (world over) teach history. To school kids. Most of whom will never read any history, beyond schoolbooks. And so the government of the day, via its power to set the books of curriculum, gets to decide what is accepted as “the past”. The term “indoctrination” is used by the opposition to describe this phenomenon, explains Shaan Kashyap in Who Owns History?   He gives an example. From the British era. With so many vernacular texts, there were contradictions. So much so that even locals (Bengal, Madras etc) asked the British to help instil some order to the vernacular texts. So they tried. In 1872, Syed Ahmed Khan confronted the North-West Frontier Province government on the matter about the way books presented certain Muslim figures and their actions (including the execution of a Sikh leader). Note that Khan was not challenging the events – he was unhappy about the tone/ presentation of those events t...
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Where is Greece?

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Greece. The cradle of Western civilization. Hellenic culture. Home to Alexander the Great, a man who conquered territories all the way to the Indus. Only as an adult, I wondered how come the Greeks never conquered Europe?   A clue to that came from this map of the ancient city states (and terrain) of Greece from a Tomas Pueyo post . What do you see in that map? “Continental Greece is all mountains!... Now does it make more sense that Greece was a series of city-states? They couldn’t sustain big populations, and they couldn’t connect each city easily.” Based on the technology (transport, communication, military) of that era, it was not possible to unify Greece in such a terrain. It was also why Greece could never conquer Europe – even if they got past the Greek mountains, they’d next face the Alps and mountain ranges of the Balkans. All insurmountable back then.   All this leads you to wonder how Greek influence could ever have spread to Europe. Well, it didn’t. At least, not i...
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Contested Indian History #1: Intro

Shaan Kashyap’s Who Owns History? is an interesting read that goes over the writing of Indian history from a particular angle: “The book is not a history of India – it is the history of how Indians have argued over, contested and even reimagined history itself.” The same point, from a different angle: “It traces the moments when historians stepped the safe confines of universities and found themselves in the public sphere.”   In the polarized India of today, one set believes such contested history is a recent (aka Modi era) phenomenon. Another believes what is happening today is a backlash against the Left’ist version of history from before that. But no, says the book, in India, such clashes pre-date both of the above by a long time! ~~   Yuval Noah Harari said we’re hardwired to love stories and (mis)apply it to everything around us. Including history. We like clean narratives. Good and bad. Nothing grey, nothing messy. As Kashyap puts it: “If people can ch...
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Got Drenched, Caught a Cold

A cold is caused by a virus. We know that. Why then do people catch a cold right after they get drenched in the rain? That happens far too often to be a coincidence. What is going on?   The nose has a lining that traps anything that tries to enter, including that virus, in the mucus. Which is then swept backward to the throat, swallowed (yuck!), reaches the stomach, where the extremely powerful acid (in the stomach) destroys it. A conveyor belt system that never stops.   Cold air slows down that conveyor belt. The tiny cilia hair that sweep mucus beat slower, so the mucus gets thicker. The trapped virus gets to sit there longer, giving it slightly more time to occasionally escape and infect.   Now add rain to the equation. Cold + wet = temperature of the nose is lowered further. The blood vessels in the nose constrict to conserve heat. The now narrowed “pipe” means fewer immune cells arrive in the same time.   To sum it up, when you get drenched, that...
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Bringing About Change

This interview by Martin Wolf (from the Financial Times ) got me thinking. He was talking about how, though capitalism has its problems, we can’t seem to find alternatives. And the irritation with capitalism isn’t a recent phenomenon: “The wild enthusiasm for the idea, ‘if only we get rid of capitalism, everything will be fine’—which was a dominant idea of progressives in the 19th century—has, in my view, been tried and tested to destruction in the 20th. So we can’t go there.” (If you didn’t get it, he is referring to communism).   Of course, that doesn’t mean one just has to live with capitalism the way it is. One can (and should), he says, tweak and improve it. But make changes slowly, he warns. Why slowly? “We have had a lot of experience with truly revolutionary changes in the last couple of centuries, and they have all, without exception, ended in disaster.” Note that Wolf’s point is on the speed of the change in case of revolutions, not the violence. But is it necessary tha...
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