Mohenjo Daro hits the big screen!

Mohenjo Daro is one of the sites associated with the very ancient Indus Valley Civilization, which is roughly contemporaneous with the earliest Mesopotamian civilizations. They had writing but we can't read it. Thus when somebody decided to produce a movie, named Mohenjo Daro, about this long-ago era, they had to make just about everything up.

The news here is that they seem to have done a good job! At least according to AE Larsen, a scholar who runs a historical movie blog An Historian Goes to the Movies . Have a look at the trailer above. It's gorgeous! Oh, yes, Larsen reminds me that the remake of Ben Hur is imminent. It looks good, too.

Edinburgh Companion to the History of Democracy

This reference book, in which I  have an article on "Ancient India," should  be out today.  I won't be  expecting you to be bringing me your copies for autographs -- it's priced at L125/$200!

A taste of Bollywood

I think I've posted this here before, but it is worth repeating.  You may want to turn on the captions.

From the Economist: Anglo-Indians

Anglo-Indians were originally the offspring of British men posted in India with local women. Once upon a time, being half-British was a significant advantage.  Now, not so much.  This article inspired sober thoughts in me, about how a cultural turn can, like personal emigration or war, leave you absurdly isolated, your birth-culture seemingly irrelevant:

DRESSED in a floral tea-dress, at a retirement home for Anglo-Indians in Kolkata, Rita McDonald, who is 85, is a poignant reminder of Britain’s two-century rule over the Indian subcontinent. Like many Anglo-Indians, members of a Eurasian community spawned during the Raj, she eats bacon and eggs for breakfast, speaks precise English and, though she has lived all her life in India, knows little Hindi or Bengali. Yet her home, hung with yellowing photographs of Queen Elizabeth and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, is thick with tales of poverty and loss.

Recent decades have been tough on Anglo-Indians, who are defined by the constitution as Indian citizens of European paternal ancestry. Many can date that ancestry to the 18th- and early 19th-centuries, when British employees of the East India Company tended to come to India without wives, and found local women to fill the gap. Such intermingling became less common after the great mutiny of 1857. Yet its legacy, a class of educated, English-speaking and loyal Eurasians, was crucial to British rule. Anglo-Indians manned the customs, telephone exchanges and railways. Mimicking the grander seclusion of their British masters, they lived apart in purpose-built railway towns, disdaining their Indian colleagues. “All the Indians wanted to be Anglo-Indian,” said Malcolm Booth, an 83-year-old officer of the All India Anglo-Indian Association.

But after the British quit India in 1947 the Anglos lost their privileges. They are still guaranteed two seats in India’s parliament, yet public funding for their schools was stopped in 1961. Few could compete in India’s new, non-discriminatory job market. Many left for Britain, Australia and Canada. The Anglo-Indian population fell from perhaps 500,000 in 1947 to fewer than 150,000 today.

Those who remain fear for their culture. Their youngsters, like many in India’s urban middle-class, are marrying outside the community. They speak Hindi and prefer kulfi to spotted dick. Yet many are also thriving, thanks to rising demand for Anglophones from India’s booming services firms. Brightening, Mrs McDonald remarks that all of her grandchildren remaining in India have found good jobs in call centres. “They’re good, call centres,” she says. “Many people have found jobs there.”

The comments are of interest, too.

Oh, MAN! More stumbling

...over marvelous online resources.

Namely, the Digital South Asia Library, which contains a complete version of the extraordinary A Historical Atlas of South Asia; and just when I had a use for this.

City-state cultures: something I just stumbled across

Looking through my library catalog for material on ancient democracies, I stumbled across a relatively new book by Mogens Herman Hansen, Polis: An Introduction to the Ancient Greek City-State. Hansen is a Danish scholar who for a long time now has been ahead of a major research project meant to systematically investigate the entire phenomenon of Greek polis. The project was designed in part as an antidote to the overwhelming concentration of scholarship on Athens, which city produced almost all of our best sources for city-state life in ancient Greek times. Hansen has produced a number of publications over the years, many of them quite specialized, but Polis is clearly meant as a popular summary of the findings of the project.

This would be a good book if Hansen only discussed the Greek material, but he goes farther. The first section of the book discusses the importance of city-states throughout history, as incubators of many characteristics that we take for granted as modern phenomena:

A general analysis of urbanisation and state formation shows that in world history from antiquity to c.1900 two different types of state have existed: macro-states, with numerous cities included in the territory of each of them, as against regions divided into micro-states each of which consisted of one city and its hinterland. Such a micro-state is what is called a ‘city-state’, and regions divided into city-states form what the Polis Centre has called a ‘city-state culture’. We have succeeded in identifying thirty-seven ‘city-state cultures’, from the Sumerians in Mesopotamia in the third millennium bc to several city-state cultures in West Africa which were only wiped out by the colonial powers a bit over a hundred years ago. In this matter also, nobody has yet tried to get an overall picture of how many and what kind of city-state cultures there have been in the history of the world.

To sum up the results of the researches of the Polis Centre I single out four features. In city-state cultures, including that of ancient Greece, there has been (1) a degree of urbanisation unexampled in major states before the Industrial Revolution, which began in the second half of the eighteenth century; (2) an economy based on trade and centred on the city’s market; (3) a political decision-making process whereby laws and decrees were not always dictated by a monarch, but were often passed by majority votes after a debate in an assembly, which mostly was a selection from among the better-class citizens but sometimes included them all; (4) interaction between city-states, which resulted in the rise of leagues of states and federal states. As a type of state, the federal state grew up within the city-state cultures, and only appeared as a macro-state with the foundation of the USA in 1787–9.

There is no longer any city-state culture remaining; the last of them vanished in c.1900. So it is an irony of history that the social,economic and political organisation that characterised the city-state cultures did not disappear when they disappeared, but came to dominate states and societies in the world we have today. In many important respects modern macro-states are more like the ancient city-state cultures than they are like the ancient macro-states.

I like Hansen's analysis, in so far as I've seen it,but one thing really bothers me. The Polis project identified 37 city-state cultures from around the world, most of them pretty obscure and some rather small. The republican city-states of North India around the time of the Buddha and, later, Alexander the Great, are not included. I think the evidence is incontrovertible that there were plenty of republics in North India in the first millennium BC and even later, and that some even fit the Greek definition of democracy -- Greek writers tell us so. Maybe I should write a note to Hansen. I can't see how he missed the ancient Indian republics and I rather think that he didn't. Why, I wonder, did he exclude them?

The dangers of academic history

Sometimes it is amazingly inaccurate. Sometimes it is amazingly corrupt in its values.

I am currently reading about government in ancient India, in particular the views of Kautilya (a kind of Machiavelli figure from the third century BCE). The book I am reading, which I will not name, is the product of an Indian scholar who lectured on this material for decades before writing it down. He sees Kautilya's Arthasastra, a book on how a monarch can create an ideal state, as an actual description of something that really existed, an ancient welfare state. Not only does this scholar think that Kautilya's prescriptions were actually carried out, he has nothing but good to say about Kautilya's ideas.

On taking prescription as reality, here is what he says about preparations for putting out fires:

The master of the house had to keep ready tubs full of water, ladder, leather bags, winnowers, hooks; but besides individual house-owners government saw that at places near crossroads thousands of pitchers filled with water were kept always ready to fight any outbreak of fire. Thus something like modern fire brigades were available at short calls.

Imagine that!

Then there is this policy, which the author finds quite understandable, though in need of some defence.

According to Kautilya, "traders, artisans, musicians, beggars, buffoons, and other idlers who are thieves in effect if not in name shall be restrained from oppression of the country people." It was with this view of protecting the simple village folk that Kautilya provided that no ascetic other than a vanaprastha, no company of other than of local birth, and no guilt of any kind other than local cooperative guild will find entrance in the village; nor shall there be in the village buildings intended for plays or sports, nor in view of procuring money, free labor, commodities, grains and liquids in plenty, shall actors, dancers, singers, drummers, buffoons, and bards make any particular disturbance to the work of the villagers, for helpless villagers are dependent upon their fields. Indirectly these provisions highlight the state's deepest concern for production the villagers even at the cost of depriving mirth, frolics and entertainments available in the cities.

This was written in 1976, the "year zero" of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. I once read a collection of official documents of the revolution, and it sticks in my mind that the official economic plan promised that after years of slave labor the surviving population of Cambodia would eventually, after the revolution was a success, be provided with extra dessert several times a year.

I have nothing against the welfare state that really is a welfare state, but it angers and terrifies me that smart people cannot or will not see the difference between dealing with preventable or predictable problems, and this kind of serfdom.

Image: Kautilya

This is your planet -- Pushkar Fair, Rajasthan, India

Pictures of the great annual camel and livestock fair from The Big Picture.

Problems and disasters -- and a piece on India's democratic achievement

Sometime in the last few years I came to the conclusion that one's life may usefully be divided into two parts, one where you're beset with a few or many problems which just seemed to soak up all of your time. This is most of your life. Then something really bad happens and that's it.

If this is a useful insight, it means you better enjoy the times when you have lots of problems.

Right now is one of those times for me. Not including family commitments that right now are taking up a certain amount of time and energy -- e.g., a trip to the Big Smoke (Toronto) and back in one day--I have got a lot on my plate. Just this week on the scholarly front, I wrote and had an abstract accepted for a major conference (the creative energy for one day used up, admittedly to good purpose), and then got an acceptance of a chapter I proposed for a book on the history of democracy, just as I was finally writing about, rather than reading and rereading material about, 14th century men at arms for my book on Charny's questions. That acceptance qualifies as a problem because the chapter, on ancient India's democracies, must be done by September 30th.

These are problems, you say? Stop whining, Muhlberger, you say; better yet, stop showing off! You have (you might rightly say) three good projects on the burner. And you are on sabbatical.

All too true. I am just concerned that something might get burned, or undercooked, on that stove. From where I sit, there don't seem to be too many working days before September 30th.

Problems, problems. But at the moment, no disasters.

I have to admit that I'm very pleased to be included in this book, which is entitled The Secret History of Democracy. Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows that I am interested in current democratic movements. It may be less obvious that I have tried, generally working with Phil Paine, to see democracy as not something restricted to just a few countries in the modern era. I have a World History of Democracy website, which you are welcome to visit; to get a taste of my particular perspective on world history and democratic history, see the short excerpt of a paper I gave in Delhi in April 2005 that I've put it at the end of this post. There is plenty of room to disagree with me or ask for clarification. That is what the comment section is for.

Imagine the world in 1900.

Informed observers examine the prospects of four important regions over the upcoming century: Germany, China, Russia, and India. Which would be picked as the most likely to succeed? And which has, in retrospect? Restrict the criterion of success to “lowest casualty count,” to my mind a more sensible criterion than per capita GDP. Who comes out ahead?

I think it is inarguable that, even keeping in mind the tragedies of Partition, the consequent wars on the subcontinent, and many other incidents of violence and disorder, that the casualty count has been much lower in India than in the other three. This alone is a significant fact of 20^th century world history. But of equal importance is the explanation for that fact. Indian aspirations for democracy, and Indian implementation of democratic institutions deserve the credit. Again, do the thought experiment. Take away the aspiration, take away the implementation, what would the subcontinent look like today?