Reading and watching Chetan Bhagat (part 2)

We went and watched 3 Idiots. It is a honest-to-goodness feel-good melodrama that leaves no emotion in the human mindscape un-visited. It was also hilarious at times. Indian movies are like chaat; evey movie (dish) will contain every emotion (taste).

I also don't get why the hero has to have superhuman physical prowess, Einstein's smarts and Gandhian nobility all in the same movie; among others, it also has the problem of seriously lengthening the movie since each quality takes about an hour to demonstrate. I am fairly certain the book (Five Point Someone) doesn't do this, now I have to go and confirm. Anyway, dinging it for the bad habits of the genre is not being fair to it. Adjusted for the genre, it is certainly one of the better movies I have seen recently. Every Indian who went to an Engineering college (either willingly or forced by some circumstance) will connect with it in many many ways.

- R. Balaji

Readings in history (part 4 - Harappans and Aryans)

One of the things that has drawn me to history recently, is really the curiosity about who we (Indians) are as a people and where we came from. Yes, it sounds like a cliched middle-age crisis driven thing, but it is real enough.

I went back to reading John Keay's book, especially the first few chapters that deal with Indian pre-history. Turns out, we only have two major sources to understand our history in the 3000-5000 years before Christ. One is the Sanskrit literary and religious compendium in the form of the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Brahmanas and the two great epics . The other is the Indus Valley civilization which is one of the three great civilizations from that era (the Egyptian and Sumerian being the other two).

First the Harappans - as Keay calls the folks from the Indus valley civilization. Harappans did not build towering monuments like the Egyptian pyramids. They however built arguably more egalitarian structures (i.e. not monuments for kings' after-life built by slave-laborers) of bricks so advanced that when they were excavated in the 1920's, the presiding archaeologist thought they were merely 200 years old. They also may have invented the proverbial wheel and spread their civilization over an area that spreads more than 600 km.

The thing is, even though these two societies (Harappans and Aryans) lived roughly in the same geographical area there is no link between the two. It is clear that the Harappans did not write the Vedas. The Aryans' arrival in India post-dates the last of the Harappans by at least a few hundred years. Further the Harappan writings look like anything but Sanskrit.

You might have heard that the Harappans' script has been defying proper deciphering by epigraphists. There are two theories on it - the initial hypothesis of links to Aramaic and Iravadam Mahadevan's more recent theory that it is indeed linked to the Tamil-Brahmi script.

As for the Aryans, it is remarkable that we know about a society primarily from their literary and spiritual work and not traditional sources of historians such as inscriptions recording actual events. Unless of course you believe that the events in the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharatha actually happened in some form. Interestingly enough, John Keay seems to suggest exactly that. He even dates the Great Bharatha war at around 1000 BC. Looking at these epics from a purely historical view, Keay however seems to oversimplify them. For instance he condenses all of Ramayana into a single statement that its goal was to institutionalize dynasty based monarchical system in North India (as opposed to the clan-based societies that existed around that time). I was disappointed that he did not delve into the content of the stories to reason about the people who wrote them. Whether the events in Mahabharatha and Ramayana happened or not, the stories at the least give hints to the kind of values that must have existed around that time. The great sacrifice of Bheeshma, and the sense of filial duty and nobility of Rama and Bharatha to just mention a couple of examples. Not to mention the complex interplay of characters and their motivations in the Mahabharatha. May be it is not aligned with the historian's method to do this kind of reasoning.

Keay writes amazingly well and I have yet to see another book that so concisely, dispassionately and readably narrates Indian history, albeit in a cold-blooded western way.

- R. Balaji

Reading and watching Chetan Bhagat

My head was beginning to hurt reading too many improving books - as P. G. Wodehouse would have called them - and it was time for some lighter fare. A neighbor of mine recommended Chetan Bhagat; apparently he is what twenty-somethings are reading these days. So I decided to reconnect with my younger self and read his latest book, the hugely entertaining Two States.

Within 5 pages I was transported to my college years; Bhagat's simple no-nonsense style and acerbic bluntness fit the gen X (or is it Y?) narrator's sensibilities like a glove. Well it better, since it is semi-autobiographical. It is the love story of a boy and a girl whose families in a certain way represent opposing ends of the Indian cultural spectrum; a live-life-to-the-full Punjabi family on one side and a serious geeky Tamil Brahmin family on the other. Cross-cultural weddings are ripe with humorous possibilities and Bhagat takes full advantage. The book works equally well as a satire (of the corporate world, north and south Indian stereotypes) and as a family relationship drama. It is also probably the best service to national integration since Bharathiyar's "Sindhu nadhiyin ..". If these two families can get along, surely anyone in India can with anyone else (like for e.g. Andhraites with Telengana-ites; sigh) .

It is a screenplay ready to be made into a movie and I can't wait to see how the movie will do in Tamilnadu. Bhagat holds nothing back in his digs on all-things Tamil (or more loosely South Indian). He needs every word of the apology he makes in advance in the preface: "you only take digs at people you care for"; he is married to a South Indian and I suppose he has a certain right.

Apparently this is not even Chetan Bhagat's best book. I hear good things about his earlier book - Five Point Someone, a film version of which (3 Idiots) has recently released and is a big hit. I have not seen it yet. Another one is One Night at a Call Centre (film version "Hello").

- Balaji

Readings in history (part 3 - a couple more books)

Thought I will briefly mention a couple of other books on history.

A few years ago, when I was in the US, I read India - A history by John Keay. If you're looking for a comprehensive & readable account albeit from a western eye, you could try this. I remember being vaguely irritated by his dispassionate treatment at times; a plundering Mahmud Ghazni would receive the same level of respect as Raja Raja Chola or Akbar from his very academic view of history.

A remarkable part of the book is the chart in the Introduction that shows the percentage of territory controlled by various dynasties in the last 2000 years. A pretty neat way to summarize and picture Indian history.

Another book I read in 2007 is No God but God by Reza Aslan which is a history of Islam. Events in the last decade had piqued my curiosity on Islam (to put it mildly) like I am sure many around the world. It was quite educational and an easy read. The chapter on Sufi Islam struck me as interesting and surprising - Sufiism is a mystic tradition of Islam whose practitioners talk about almost a romantic love of God - not unlike Hinduism's own Andal and Meera. Modern day Islam however seems to look at Sufiism with a disapproving eye. You might have heard of Rumi, a well-known Sufi poet who has attracted a lot of attention in the west. I sampled some of his writings a couple of which reminded me of The Gita's central motto ("Karmanye..."). It is always interesting to see common ground between religions. The books also takes great pains to depict how Islam has been this multi-faceted religion through history while it may not appear that way in modern times.

- R. Balaji

Readings in history (part 2 - languages)

Thanks for all the comments - inspires me to keep going.

More highlights follow from Sastri's book and some from other sources including a friend of mine I will call RG (who is well versed in these matters and has been educating me a little).

First, it would be good to clarify the linguistic hierarchy as widely agreed upon. Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada are part of the same language family (Dravidian languages) rooted by the theoretical language proto-Dravidian. Tamil is the oldest as we all know. Telugu and Kannada branched off earlier and Malayalam was the last one to branch off from Tamil (around 9th century AD). i.e. it is the closest language to tamil. Telugu and Kannada countries were ruled by kings who patronized Sanskrit as the religious language and those languages have come to borrow heavily from Sanskrit. That is to say, while they are not Indo-European (like Sanskrit and its north Indian derivatives), Telugu and Kannada are much more influenced by Sanskrit . Clearly political history influences language history.

An interesting member of the Dravidian family, as some of you may have heard of is Brahui, a language spoken in what is now Baluchistan (parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan). A remote Dravidian language island in an ocean of Indo-European? There are a couple of theories on how this came about. One is that Dravidian speakers (and hence Dravidians?) occupied all of the subcontinent until the wave of Aryanization swept through all of north India somehow leaving a small island of Dravidian speakers. Another theory maintains the more prevalent view that Dravidians did not occupy north India; some of them just migrated to Baluchistan later. The Aryan/Dravidian debate as I mentioned earlier is a juicy one which I hope to return to at some point.

Anyway, coming back to the main thread, Sanskrit had been the language of high culture throughout South India while commoners spoke the regional languages. Tamil developed the "literary idiom" first. The earliest known Tamil literature is what we call the Sangam literature which is placed in 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The Sangam literature itself says that this was the 3rd Sangam and there were 2 other Sangams earlier which ran for a total of 9999 years. This is considered a big exaggeration. Surely Tamil literature is not 12,000 years old; but if Tamil evolved to a point where beautiful poetry following complex metres was written in 1st century AD, the language must have existed for a few hundred years before that in more rudimentary forms (this my own guess). But few hazard guessing a date.

Telugu and Kannada literature start showing up in the latter half of the 1st millennium AD with the bulk of it in the 2nd millennium. If we use the dates when the languages developed the literary muscle, then Telugu and Kannada are younger than Tamil by almost 1000 years. Malayalam is even younger*.

Other interesting titbits.
- Sanskrit was never written down for a long time and primarily stayed alive as an oral tradition as a way to carry the Vedas forward.
- Languages and scripts are "orthogonal'" . i.e. When we talk about a language's history, we talk about it independent of its scripts. There are often multiple scripts developed at various points for the same language. For e.g., Sanskrit was written in a script called Grantha in South India. Tamil had another script called Vattezhuthu. The current script for Sanskrit and many other north Indian languages is as you might know Devanagari.
- From a religious perspective, the source of Hinduism as we know lies in the Vedas and Upanishads (some consider the Upanishads as part of the Vedas) and the puranas most of which are dated in the BCs. However Buddhism and Jainism made a strong push that almost pushed Hinduism out of India. You might remember Amartya Sen's characterization of India as a Buddhist/Jain country until the 5th century AD. Then Hinduism makes a big revival after the 5th century AD. And as many of you might know, the saints who are credited for Hinduism's modern revival (if you can call 1500 years old as modern) are Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva who were proponents of the Advaita, Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita Hindu philosophies respectively. All three of them notably hailed from South India; they  wrote their philosophies in Sanskrit.

That's all for now.

- R. Balaji

P.S.
* The discussion of the age of these South Indian languages reminded me of the debate going on right now in India where folks in Andhra have applied to the central government to give Telugu classical language status. There was some recent court finding that went against this. Apparently Tamil and Kannada have been given this status already. I forget what benefits this status provides.