Viswanathan K's Thoughts

By 1816, slavery was illegal in America. Though, on the ground, it still existed to varying degrees in various places. (White) America now had a “problem”, write Natalia Cintra and Tosin Durodola. What if the free blacks instigated or inspired slave uprisings? Other whites asked why free blacks should even be in America – if they weren’t slaves, they didn’t serve any purpose…   Their “solution”? “Literally deport free black Americans and freed slaves to a settlement they hoped to create in the African motherland.” That then is the origin story for Liberia, a country on the Atlantic coast of Africa, a country/colony where “race, racism, and anti-black slavery meet yet another type of forced movement: deportation”. By 1819, this was institutionalized to the point that America was deporting the people found in illegal slave ships to Liberia, regardless of their origin. ~~   Now you could say that was all horrifying, no doubt, but it was so long back. Why rake it up...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...