There are several striking differences between the Laskari dictionary of Lt Thomas Roebuck[i] and Anthony Vaz’s Vocabulary Of Nautical Terms[ii]. The most important perhaps is that Roebuck was attempting to make the case that ‘Laskari’ was, if not a language, then certainly a dialect in its own right, created out of the merging of many different languages – Arabic, Portuguese, English, Bengali, Malay, Malayalam, Tamil, Kachhi and so on (although a few Marathi words figure in his dictionary I cannot remember any specifically Konkani terms). But Vaz does not anywhere acknowledge or use the term ‘Laskari’ –  the very word ‘lascar’ does not figure in his book. This is probably because this word had, by the late nineteenth century, acquired pejorative racial connotations: as a seaman himself Vaz would have been acutely aware of these overtones. Such indeed was the stigma attached to the word ‘lascar’ that it more or less fell out of usage after the Second World War.

Throughout his dictionary Vaz insists that the language of Indian seamen is Hindustani, except for the ‘technical names’ which, he asserts ‘are all Arabic in their origin’. In this he was mistaken: many of the words for the rigging, masts, sails etc. came from other languages, especially Portuguese. For example, the Laskari word for ‘mizzen-sail’ was trikat which comes from the Portuguese traquete. Similarly, taliyamar, the Laskari word for ‘cutwater’ came directly from the Portuguese talhamar. There are innumerable such examples.[iii]

Vaz was not an etymologist of course, but even then it remains something of a puzzle that he should have been unaware of the Portuguese influences on the nautical vocabulary of the Indian subcontinent.

Unlike Roebuck, Vaz was in the first instance, a seaman and one interesting aspect of his dictionary is that its organization is dictated by practical, rather than lexical considerations. In effect the book is a compendium of the commands that are necessary to the operation of a sailship, and they are divided according to certain tasks: for example ‘Launching of the Ship’, ‘Making Sails When Fine Daylight’; ‘Bracing Yards in Calm When Wind Not Steady’, ‘Setting and Taking Studding Sails When Fine Steady Breeze.’

The reader may be interested here to look at some of the commands and their glosses. Here are a few:

From ‘Launching of the Ship’:

- All Hands clean clothes on board – sab admee saf kupray payno

- Cock well the anchor                                    – lungur cock well karo

- Take in the ballast                             – leelum layo

 

From ‘Setting Trying Sails and Spreading the Awnings’:

- Clew up the royal, gallant sail and top sails, fore and aft – stringee tubber, subber gabee agul pitchel

- All your clewline, buntline and leechline close up – chop stringee buntline seesee door cheekar

 

From ‘Bracing Yards About in Calm When Wind Not Steady’

- Square the main yard – Yam burra purwan

- Haul out the spanker – tan bar ghoosee

 

From ‘Setting and Taking in Studding Sails When Fine Steady Breeze’

- Topmen aloft – Panjrawala oopur jao

- Set the fore top gallant studding sail – hankar trinket subber dustoor

 

Today the English commands are no more comprehensible than their translations. This is of course because every sailship was, in a sense, a vast, floating dictionary, with thousands of named parts – every rope, gasket, leech and pin had its own name. With the vanishing of wind-powered merchant vessels, this entire apparatus (of words as well of things) has more or less disappeared from the face of the earth.

But the Laskari language has not vanished without trace. On subcontinental ships – and I mean naval vessels as well as cargo ships – words like ‘serang’ and ‘tindal’ are still very much in use. For all I know the words may still be in use in other parts of the Indian Ocean – for example, east Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere.

Earlier this year, in Goa, I had the good fortune to meet a man who had actually used the Laskari language:

 

Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the first man to complete a solo, non-stop circumnavigation of the world in a sailboat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sir Robin began his sailing career in a merchant shipping company in pre-Independence India: he told me that he remembered using Laskari terms like agil/agul  (fore) and peechil/pitchel (aft). He confirmed to me that those words were pronounced exactly as they are transcribed in Laskari dictionaries (I had wondered whether they might be mis-spellings of agey and peechhey – I suppose they are variants, borrowed perhaps from a Kachhi dialect).

Sir Robin also confirmed that the kasab of Laskari dictionaries referred to ‘a lamplighter’, which was an important function on the ships of his youth. I asked him about the word bhandari which I had thought meant ‘storekeeper’, but he told me that it actually referred to a ship’s cook.

Another Laskari word that I had puzzled over was topaz. Sir Robin confirmed to me that it meant ‘sweeper’ – a strange fate for a word that once referred to Portuguese-Goan artillerymen, who were greatly valued by the subcontinental armies of the 18th century.[iii]

 

 

 

 

---

 

 

[This is a slightly extended version of a piece I wrotein 2010 for the anthology Inside/Out: New Writing from Goa.][i]

 

 

 

 

I have long been fascinated by nautical dictionaries, especially those that relate to Asian seafarers (or ‘lascars’ as they were once known). Elsewhere I have written at some length about  Thomas Roebuck’s magisterial lexicon of the Laskari language (An English And Hindostanee Naval Dictionary), which was first published in Calcutta in 1811: “Born in 1781, Roebuck was a skilled linguist, who had served a rigorous apprenticeship under the famous John Borthwick Gilchrist, author of the first major Hindi-English dictionary. From 1806 to 1809 Roebuck was in Edinburgh assisting Gilchrist to prepare his lexicon. After that, while traveling to Calcutta on the Hon’ble Company Ship Larkins, Roebuck passed his time by compiling his Naval Dictionary … Roebuck did not long survive the publication of his dictionary, dying of a fever in Calcutta at the age of 38. But he did live to see the proof of his work’s usefulness, for in 1813, two years after its first publication, his Dictionary was reprinted by the East India Company’s booksellers in London. In 1882 it was revised and reissued by a missionary called George Small, under the title A Laskari Dictionary Or Anglo-Indian Vocabulary Of Nautical Terms And Phrases In English And Hindustani.[ii] Under that name it continued to circulate well into the 20th century.”[iii]

Roebuck’s was not the only dictionary of this kind to be in circulation in the 19th and early 20th centuries. There were a few others, including one by a Goan (or possibly East Indian) seaman called Antony Vaz.

Vaz was by profession a master sailmaker (‘silmagoor’ in Laskari), employed in the government dockyard in Bombay in the 1870s. But he was also, evidently, a dedicated wordsmith for in 1879 he published a fine compendium called: The Marine Officer’s Hindustani Interpreter Containing A Vocabulary Of Nautical Terms, Directions For Masting, Rigging And Working Ship At Sea, (Bombay Gazette Steam Press, Bombay, 1879).

The preface to this booklet is interesting enough to quote at some length. Vaz writes: ‘Under the favourable auspices of commerce the number of ships visiting the several seaports of India has of late years greatly increased and shipowners, who confine their operations chiefly to this part of the world, have found it profitable to employ Indian crews on their vessels. Against the advantages offered by the employment of these men have to be weighed some petty inconveniences, one of which is felt in conveying orders in the native language with which ships officers are, in a majority of cases, unacquainted. This Book is an humble effort to help those who have not acquired a sufficient knowledge of the vernaculars, in giving the various orders to the seamen, incidental on board a ship…. In getting up the work I have drawn entirely upon my own resources, depending of the knowledge of seamanship acquired by rote during fourteen years service at sea and have therefore to crave the indulgence of the public for any shortcomings they may find therein.

‘Hindustani is the language into which the sentences have been rendered – not literally, but as the natives are accustomed to hear the orders shouted out, in most cases in a contracted form, and the spelling is adopted on the same principle without regard to the Jonesian or any other system. The rendering into the vernacular is not Oordoo or the critical style spoken by the Mahomedans of Delhi or the Deccan Hyderabad, as such translation would be quite out of place on board a ship, from the inability of the men generally to comprehend that style. The technical names of Spars, Yards, the standing and running Rigging, Gears, Sails and words that relate to the manoeuvering and working of ships at sea are all Arabic in their origin.’

 

[This review was published in Kirkus Reviews, 2002] 

 

By The Sea begins with a prospective refugee presenting his passport to an officer at an immigration counter in a British airport.

 

At desks such as these, every day, thousands of supplicants discover whether or not the stories of their lives match the exacting standards of victimhood and oppression that qualify people for the status of refugee. Familiar though this situation is, it is all-too-rarely written about. In Gurnah’s superb rendering the scene is presented in all its bright, terrifying sterility, accurate in all its nuances and details.

 

 

This scene sets in motion an examination of two intertwined lives, both rooted in Zanzibar, the island off the East African coast that was once one of the world’s great entrepots. Saleh Omar is in his sixties and has spent most of his life in Zanzibar, earning a living as a shopkeeper and antique dealer.  Latif Mahmud is a much younger relative who left Africa for Europe at the age of eighteen: he is a poet and teacher, who has made a sort of life for himself in London. Years before, in Zanzibar, Saleh Omar had been instrumental in dispossessing Latif Mahmud and his family of their home. Now, their positions are reversed: it is Saleh Omar who is dispossessed. Meeting in England, the two men discover that they are both implicated in creating the circumstances that have pushed the other into exile; circumstances that are the result of a complex intermeshing of family conflicts, politics and history. Nothing is unambiguous in this story; there are no easy accountings of guilt, blame and responsibility.

By the Sea is also an extended meditation on history, on a lost world of interoceanic cosmpolitanism, on colonialism and the furies that it unleashed. In this it recalls one of the great classics of modern Arabic literature: the Sudanese writer, Tayyib al-Salih’s novel, Season of Migration to the North.

By the Sea is a rich, poignant, truthful novel and it establishes Abdulrazak Gurnah as one of the most important voices of our time.

 

 

 

 

 

In my post of Nov 12, 2012, I wrote about a letter that revealed to me that Benjam Burnham, a character in Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, had a real life counterpart (the letter was actually from one of his descendants). Even stranger, I later found out that my wife had been taught by a member of this family, and that my son had been to school with another. Synchronicity is a mysterious thing…

 

On April 21, this year I received a message about another character in the Ibis Trilogy- Neel Rattan Halder, the Raja of Raskhali and originator of the Ibis Chrestomathy. This message prompted the correspondence that is posted below.

 

Dear Amitav Sir,

It is refreshing, as is always for a regular reader of your blog, to know about your encounter with Mr Mohammad Hossein Mohammadi. What strikes me most profoundly in your article is the fact that the content of Mr Mohammadi’s writings mostly highlight the daily lives of Afghan society, something beyond the widely held stereotype of the country surrounding its wars. It actually reminds me of a lecture by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, titled ‘the danger of a single story’  that I listened online in Youtube. That talk also addressed the futility and limitations imposed by literary or artistic stereotypes. I am not fortunate enough so far to have read one of Mr Mohammdi’s writings but I will definitely make an effort to do so in future.

I wish to mention to you about one more thing. Our last and only communication before this was in October 2011. I am currently pursuing Pediatric residency training in Flushing Hospital, Queens, New York. I came across one article written in Bengali by our family physician and local historian, Shri (Dr) Akshay Kumar Adhaya, which explores the connection between Prankrishna Halder (Neel’s real life shadow) and my hometown,

 

Chinsura on the river Hooghly, which also serves as a source of Neel’s finest cotton dhotis in Sea of Poppies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The article even traces Prankrishna’s connection to Hooghly Collegiate School, where I studied for a decade. I thought the article might interest you. Unfortunately, the article comes only as a hard copy. If you can please tell me how to send you a copy (I could try to scan it if you find it appropriate)  of that article, I shall be extremely grateful.

Naboborsher pronam.

Suhas

 

 

April 23

Dear Suhas

Thanks very much for the link which I will listen to when possible.

What you say about Dr Adhya’s article is very interesting. It would be wonderful if you could scan the article for me – I am traveling now so a hard copy would not reach me anyway.

Thanks and all best

Amitav Ghosh

 

 

April 29

Dear Amitav Sir,

I apologize for the delay in my response. I took some time in scanning Dr Adhya’s article as I got caught up with my On Call schedule. Attached are the pages of the article.

I found it an interesting coincidence that Prankrishna Halder did have a real life nephew named Neel Ratan Halder, who was known to be an exponent of music, contemporary literature and a lover of art.

 

 

My Alma mater, Hooghly Collegiate School, was also probably part of Prankrishna’s real estate in Chinsurah.

 

 

 

 

 

According to unproven local legend, fake currency notes used to be printed in a room that went on to become the classroom for class six.

 Please let me know if you have any inconvenience in viewing the article.

 Thank you so much for your time and your encouragement to write to you.

 much regards,

 Suhas

 

 

This letter was accompanied by a scan of eight pages from Dr. Akshaykumar Adhya’s book Hooghly Chuchurar Nana Katha (Various Facts about Hooghly Chinsurah) volume-1, pages: 128-134 (publisher: Hooghly Sambad, Dr Prasad Das Mallick Road, Hooghly-712103, third reprint; November 2010).

 

 

 

The pages tell the story of one Babu Prankrishna Haldar a rich Bengali who acquired a very large house in the town of Chinsurah (Chuchura) near Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1805 C.E..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The house was built by General Perron, military advisor to Madhoji Scindia, who was returning to Europe. The mansion, which now houses the Hooghly Collegiate School, became famous because of Prankrishna Haldar’s family temple, which was located in the compound. For many years Prankrishna Haldar celebrated Durga Puja in this temple at great expense: these events were advertised in Bengali papers and in the Calcutta Gazette.

In 1827 Samachar Darpan (which is considered by some to be the first printed journal in an Indian language) published an article about Prankrishna Haldar’s generosity, mentioning particularly his donations of medicine to the poor. But Prankrishna Haldar’s liberality was to prove his undoing for his philanthropic ambitions forced him to resort to fraud and forgery. He began to print counterfeit notes in a secret corner of the mansion. Through these means he amassed 60 lakh rupees.

The crime was discovered in 1829 and Prankrishna Haldar was sentenced to imprisonment. He was released in 1836 and died the year after. After his death, the writer Durgacharan Ray observed: ‘Prankrishna enjoyed all the rewards that life offered;  all the sorrows that a man could suffer also fell to his lot.’

Also sentenced with Prankrishna Haldar was an associate and relative, Babu Nilmoni Haldar, who had assisted in the forgery. Babu Nilmoni Halder was a cultivated man and a supporter of learning, who had set up a press at a time when Bengali printing was in its infancy. He died in 1837.

Babu Nilmoni Haldar had a son by the name of Neelratan Haldar who became a noted literary figure.

 

He was described by Rajnarayan Bose, the eminent 19^th century writer and philosopher, as a man of impressive physical presence who knew many languages and was a conoisseur of classical music.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neelratan Haldar probably acquired his love of learning from his father, and went on to publish several books on diverse subjects. But he was best known as the editor and publisher of the journal Bangadoot, the first issue of which was published on May 10, 1829. He died in 1855.

 

May 3

Dear Suhas

Thank you very much indeed for this article. It is very interesting.

Would you mind if I posted our correspondence on my blog, along with a few translated excerpts of the article? Please do let me know.

With my best wishes

Amitav

 

 

May 3

Dear Amitav Sir,

I am very happy to know that the article interests you. I am extremely thrilled at the possibility of our correspondence finding its way to your prestigious blog along with the translated excerpts.

Incidentally, I had a conversation with Dr Akshay Adhya over phone this evening, when I mentioned to him about our correspondence. He has expressed that he is excited about your interest in his article.

joyous regards,

Suhas

 

 

May 7

Dear Suhas

Could you please send me the exact references of the journal where the article was published so that I can include it in my post?

Thanks

Amitav

May 8

Dear Amitav Sir,

I am enclosing the cover of the book with my mail.

Interestingly, the cover picture

 

 

features a notable landmark in the outskirts of the town-Susanna Anna Marie tomb, or ‘Saat Saheber Bibir Ghor’. It is a memorial of a lady who is said to have had seven husbands, all of whom had died before her. Her chronicle inspired a short story (later made into a novel) called ‘Susanna’s Seven Husbands’ by Ruskin Bond and was adapted for a major Hindi Commercial Motion Picture ‘Saat Khoon Maaf’ by Vishal Bharadwaj.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I apologize for my delay,

Thanks for your patience and time once again.

Much regards,

Suhas

 

 

 

Dear Suhas

Thanks for your message. I will post the piece today.

Unfortunately the scan was very blurred and I had trouble reading it. However, I have tried to convey the gist of it. I would be glad to post a more detailed translation if you could send me one.

I also could not find a nice image of Prankrishna Haldar’s mansion but I have included a picture of the gate.

Thanks once again for this interesting exchange.

With my best wishes

Amitav

 

[A Google search for 'Prawn Kissin Halder' (the 19th century anglice of 'Prankrishna Haldar') led me to an interesting paper by Rashmila Maity 'From Kidderpore to The Sea of Poppies: A short history of some localities in the novel.' A search for 'Prankrishna Haldar' led to this charming clip on You Tube.]

 

 

 

In my research I’ve come across many stories that have led me to wonder what really happened. This one is about the crew of a German steamer, Barenfels S.S. (which would  be torpedoed and sunk by a British submarine on April 14th, 1944, at Takseraag, Norway, thirty-eight years after the events described below).

This story was published in The Washington Post of May 2, 1906

 

Painted An Elephant Blue

Then the Sacred Brute Died and Lascars were Scared

Besides this Tale, the Steamer Barenfels Brought Snakes and Another Yarn of Sailor and Python

 

New York, May 1, 1906

Fear of a terrible punishment because they covered a sacred white elephant with paint has stirred the fifty-three Lascars in the crew of the steamer Barenfels, which arrived here today. The animal that was the victim of a prank died at sea, as did two other elephants aboard, but it was exposure to cold weather that killed them.

 

 

The Barenfels took aboard the three elephants at Calcutta on March 10.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Each elephant was over six feet high. Bill and Alice were white. The third was called Joe. He was of the ordinary variety.

One afternoon while coming through the Indian Ocean one of the Lascars got a pot of blue paint and went into the forehold, where the elephants were. He beckoned to another Lascar, and this one beckoned to a third. Presently all the Lascars in the ship surrounded the two white elephants salaaming.

 

On the left quarter of one of the elephants the Lascar who led the way painted a rising sun in blue. Then the others fell to and dashed off artistic symbols of a religious nature. The Lascars do not know why they did it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the man in charge of the elephants found the sacred beast outrageously painted he drove the Lascars away and got soapsuds to wash the paint off. Three days later Alice died. Bill followed the next day. Then the Lascars went almost insane with sorrow, and their prayers were loud and fervent.

They laid it to the paint, but it was only a cold draught and pneumonia. The third elephant proved as delicate as the white ones and died the day after Bill did. All three were dropped into the sea.

The Barenfels brought 500 snakes. According to shore talk, one of them, a python, of course, got loose, and, of course this python coiled around a sailor, and just as naturally, the rest of the crew had an awful time killing the python without killing the sailor.

The sailor had his ribs crushed, so the yarn goes, and was put ashore at Port Said. He didn’t leave his card for the officers of the Barenfels to pass over to the marine reporters when the ship got here. Hence his name is unknown.

 

 

 

 

I’ve written about the work of Dr István Perczel, the Hungarian scholar several times on this blog. I posted this before I’d met István, and this shortly after I met him in Goa last year.

István is Professor in the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest. He studies the Christian East from many angles, that of the history of philosophy and theology, of social and political history, and  of Greek and Syriac literacy and of manuscript studies. He has worked extensively on the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus, on Sergius of Reshayna’s Syriac translation thereof, pagan and Christian Neoplatonism, Byzantine heresy, Symeon the New Theologian and Syriac Christianity in India. He has also worked on archives preservation, both digital and material, in India.

István is editor of The Nomocanon of Metropolitan Abdisho of Nisibis: A Facsimile Edition of MS 64 from the Collection of the Church of the East in Thrissur (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Scriptorium, 2005, 2009) and is just in the process of completing a monograph entitled «Origénistes» ou «théosophes»? Histoire doctrinale et politique d’un mouvement des Ve-VIe siècles (Origenists’ or ‘Theosophers’? Doctrinal and Political History of a Movement of the 5th-6th Centuries).

 

On April 15 this year István sent me a link to a video in which he and Dr. Vasco La Salvia, a former student of his, present a very interesting paper on the trans-Arabian Sea trade and the cultural connections that grew out of it.

Some of the ideas István expresses in the video are summarized in a note that was appended to one of his messages:

 

Toward the concept of an Aramaeo-Hellenistic Oikumene

It seems to me that the concept of an “Aramaeo-Hellenistic Oikumene” would be quite an appropriate framework to study the historical religious formations of Eurasia and North Africa. This conceptual tool means a kind of structured trans-area studies to understand religious and cultural history, also relevant for understanding the present-day conflict-ridden situation.

 Apparently, a restrictive concept of Hellenism^[i] had distorted our view on the influence of Hellenic civilization and this error goes hand in hand with a restrictive conscience of the Eurasian, even North-African, Aramaic heritage. So, just as the concept of the Jewish-Christian heritage is engraved in the minds of people as a concept linked to “Western civilization”, so also its complementary concept, called the “Greco-Roman heritage”, is conceived of as being only another constituent of the mediaeval and modern West. Yet Hellenism, itself being a blend of Oriental and Western elements, is a far more extensive concept than that of the “Roman heritage”. Due to the early constitution of this blend, Hellenism was already a Eurasian phenomenon with a North African constituent when Alexander the Great united the major part of this cultural space into one empire and it remained present in this vast area spreading from the Western Mediterranean to India, and even beyond, until an astonishingly recent age.

The extension of Hellenism almost precisely coincided with the area inhabited by those peoples that had adopted for their writing systems alphabets based on the early Aramaic alphabet (ranging from Latin in the West, through Phoenician, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic to Ethiopic in the South and, in the East, the Indian Brahmi script, from which all the local Indian alphabets were derived). So we may speak about an Aramaeo-Hellenistic Oikumene (ca. 500 BCE-to early modern times). This particular role of the Aramaic  is due to the fact that, from ca. 700 BCE it gradually became the lingua franca of the Middle East, including the ancient Persian Achaimenid Empire. Thus, this framework also includes most organically the emerging concepts of a “Persianate Culture”,^[ii] or of Central Asia as a central area for the cultural evolution of humanity.^[iii]

It was in the cultural space of the Oikumene that Judaism was spreading as a minority diaspora even before the destruction of the Second Temple, and nascent Christianity followed the same paths. Even after the “Constantinian turn” that had transformed the Mediterranean into a Christian Roman Empire, the wider Oikumene persisted with the enduring presence of a strong, active and influential Christian minority, which was instrumental in transmitting not only Christian but also Hellenic lore (including philosophy and science) to its neighbours. In this way, the concept of the Aramaeo-Hellenistic Oikumene also challenges recent visions of linguistically or religiously based “cosmopolises”, those of Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Sanskrit, or Christianity, Islam, Hinduism etc.,^[iv] relativizing these as constituting overlapping and entangled parts of one overarching multilingual and multireligious “cosmopolis”, that of the Oikumene, with a hitherto unrecognized mobility of people and ideas. The concept has not only a geographic but also a cross-disciplinary meaning. It is within the complex fabric of a large cultural space, understood as a wide sphere for trade, migration, mission, the transmission of material and cultural goods and for the mobility of persons and communities that we have to set the religious phenomena characteristic of this area and, especially, the one that is now being called the triad of the “Abrahamic religions”.

 

 

I found the video fascinating for many reasons (and the fact that István refers to the concept of a ‘Ghosh-ian Utopia’, in relation to In An Antique Land,is by no means the most important of them). After viewing the video I wrote the following response to István.

 

April 17, 2013

 

Dear István

Thanks so much for this! The lecture was truly fascinating – and thank you very much for your kind references to me! I was very touched.

In general I am completely in agreement with your perspective, particularly your critique of the ‘civilizational’ view. In the long run, I think it will come to be recognized that the development of the discipline of  ‘history’ in the 19th century European academy profoundly distorted the nature of the relations betweeen Europe and Asia.

However there are a couple of things I’d like to point out.

- You refer to an underlying ‘Hellenistic’ stratum that facilitated Alexander’s advance. I think that this stratum should actually be called ‘Perso-Hellenistic’ because these two culture-areas evolved so closely together. Indeed, it was their mutual interaction/antagonism that constituted the ancient Eurasian world.

- In the same vein, I think Zoroastrianism too is the underlying substratum that ties the Eurasian world together; this too, deserves a larger part in your story – both in terms of culture and religion. I increasingly feel that Zoroastrianism is the key to understanding the cultural exchanges of the ancient world (and of course it very directly underlies the evolution of scripts, which you refer to). In a religious sense too, it contributed so much of what we now think of as the Abrahamic tradition.

- one question: you refer to the word ‘paraya’. I could not quite follow the etymology you suggested. This is a very interesting word in many ways, so I would be grateful if you could tell me a little more about it.

Thanks again for the lecture. I hope all is well with you.

Warmly

Amitav

 

This led to the following correspondence.

 

April 17, 2013

 

Dear Amitav,

Thanks so much! I could not agree more with you on all the points that you have raised.

1. Yes, the civilisational theory seems to be a typical nineteenth-century product of the colonial nation states. We are using it “candidly”, without realising how much it distorts reality on the one hand and how harmful this theory had been, and is still, in furnishing  the ideological underpinning for colonialism and neocolonialism. So I think that if we want to go beyond this and want to “decolonialise knowledge”, we have to get rid of the civilisational theories and offer something more relevant and more equitable than this. For this, among others, we have to understand that Europe had never been a self-sufficient entity, it was part of a world economy and of a world culture much before colonialism and globalisation. The Oikumene, in whatever words we are to describe it, is just a saliant structural entity within this world economy and culture, with some specific features. Definitively, In an Antique Land is the programmatic book for understanding this relationship and its ending with the first Gulf War could not be more symbolical than it is.

2. Perso-Hellenism: I am avoiding this expression because it is tautological. Hellenism itself is not separate from Persianate culture but is largely overlapping with it. What is nowadays called Persianate culture, perhaps the central element in this structural unit, is, in principle, comprehended  in the term Aramaeo-Hellenistic. In the attachment I am sending a short note that I recently wrote about this issue, where I have touched – although quite insufficiently – the question of a “Persianate culture”. Still you may be right that this Persian element should be further emphasised and also that even the concept of “Abrahamic religions” is very distorting from the perspective of cultural history. When we speak about the “transformation of the Classical heritage” in the monotheistic traditions and understand under “Classical” only “Greco-Roman”, excluding Zoroastrian and also Indian, we are, once again, operating a great deformation. I am perfectly aware of the fact that there is much to be clarified here and would be most grateful to you for any further suggestion for a good formulation of this nascent idea.

3. As I told in the lecture, I am suspicious of some obvious etymologising possibilities. Yet, the nature of the Malayalam language is so that it incorporates words borrowed from the trading communities that had ever had business at the Malabar Coast. So, in principle, we should not be surprised to find Greek loanwords in Malayalam (and, incidentally, Tamil). Pazhaya reminds me of the Greek palaios, -a, -on, with identical meaning: “old”, “ancient”. The zha is, in fact, a kind of l sound. Yet, there are only two words whose Greek origin seems to me obvious: pagrep, “copy”, from the Greek apographe, and parasyam, “openness”, “publicity”, even “advertisement”, from the Greek parrhesia, “openness”, “publicity”.

Thanks so much for this conversation!

Warmest regards,

István

 

 

April 21, 2013

Dear István

Thanks very much for this. I am particularly struck by this passage: ‘the civilisational theory seems to be a typical nineteenth-century product of the colonial nation states. We are using it “candidly”, without realising how much it distorts reality on the one hand and how harmful this theory had been, and is still, in furnishing  the ideological underpinning for colonialism and neocolonialism. So I think that if we want to go beyond this and want to “decolonialise knowledge”, we have to get rid of the civilisational theories and offer something more relevant and more equitable than this.’

Your note on the Arameo-Hellenistic Oikumene certainly clarifies your position and I am completely in agreement with you where you say: ‘Yet Hellenism, itself being a blend of Oriental and Western elements, is a far more extensive concept than that of the “Roman heritage”.

However, I do think that to use the term ‘Hellenism’ without reference to its Persian/Asian dimensions only reiterates the ‘civilizational’ misconceptions that underlie it. To me Arameo-Hellenism also seems like a limiting term in that it doesn’t reference the wider Asian context. Surely there must be a better term for this Oikumene?

Thank you for this exchange. I think it might be of interest to others, so I wonder if it would be okay with you if I posted it on my blog (along with your note on the Oikumene)? Let me know (and no problem at all if you prefer not to).

Very best

Amitav

 

 

April 23, 2013

Dear Amitav,

Thank you for your prompt reactions! First of all, it is a great honour for me if our conversation becomes public through your blog. There is nothing definitive in my ideas about the Oikumene  – except for the idea that, by all means, we have to think about this subject – so every critical remark is most welcome. Your blog may trigger such remarks, which might be helpful for an eventual reformulation of the idea.

However, please allow me to defend the idea and my formulation thereof as long as it is defendable. Were it to prove undefendable, I would gladly abandon it.

My idea of an Aramaeo-Hellenistic Oikumene is born, as it should be clear, from a revolt against what I would call the nationalism of the West, which loves to recognise itself as the heir of the Greeks and the Romans, so to say, the unique heir to the Greco-Roman civilisation, so-called, which marked the beginning of a development that was going to be superior to all the other “civilisations”, not to speak about the “uncivilised” peoples who were just awaiting to become “civilised” by the West (and allowing themselves to be exploited in exchange). Against this view I claim that:

1. the Roman empire, uniting the Mediterranean, was part of a world economy of material and cultural goods. Without being part of this economy it could not have survived. Changes that affected the Roman empire were global changes, which led to similar effects elsewhere as well in this world economy.

2. It is useful to distinguish, within this world economy, more or less united structural elements but these elements are to be discerned on the basis of longue durée structures, compared to which the existence of the political states, be they long-lasting empires as the Roman or the Chinese empires, is ephemeral. Such an entity is the Oikumene, named by a Greek term meaning “inhabited land”. This is a space uniting almost all Europe and a good part of Asia as well as North- and East-Africa, where there was a strong presence of the “Hellenic heritage”, far beyond the limits of the Roman empire. This is observable in trade relations, the transmission of literature, culture, philosophy, science etc. So in this space we can speak about a Hellenic heritage.

3. However, this Greek culture could exert such a fascination on Asian and African peoples only because it was neither a Western, nor a European phenomenon. Itself was a syncretistic culture from the very outset and such authors as Plato were explicitly claiming that all the Greek lore was coming from the Orient. The Greeks were so successful in inspiring other peoples only because their culture was so receptive and open toward the Orient.

4. Hellenism is a restricted term used in European historiography. It denotes the political and cultural space created by Alexander’s conquests. So the Hellenistic period starts in 323 BC, with the death of Alexander the Great, and ends in 31 BC, when in the battle of Actium Octavius conquered Antonius who was acting as the last Hellenistic ruler of Egypt with his consort Cleopatra, the Ptolemaid queen, who committed suicide in the year 30. However, all this is seen uniquely from the point of view of a linear western periodisation, which uses Hellenism as denoting a politico-historical era, only to prepare the Roman period. It is being claimed that during this period a Hellenistic culture, being a blend of Greek and Oriental cultures was formed. So even what we traditionally call Hellenism is conceived as a blend of Greek, Persian, Egyptian, Syrian, Indian etc. cultures.

5. Contrary to this I would claim that behind the striking success of Alexander’s campaigns there was a structural and cultural unity of the entire space that he occupied. Macedonia was just the strongest military power within this united space. So Alexander’s phalanxes were moving on known land inhabited by peoples with whom they were able to communicate. After his conquest Alexander ordered the intermarriage of his soldiers with Persian women and was keen on establishing a blended ruling elite in the conquered lands, thus recognising an inherent structural and cultural unity. In this sense Hellenism was not a new blend in which hitherto isolated “cultures” merged but had been for long the essence of the cultural space that gained an ephemeral political unity under Alexander. He did not initiate anything radically new, he just gave a pregnant historical expression to something that had been there and that was to remain there even after the collapse of his empire.  So Hellenism is just as Persian and Egyptian, and even Indian, in its origin as it is Greek, it is just as Asian and African as it is European. However, if we have a better term for this than Hellenism, let us use this better term.

6. Much before Alexander’s campaigns, even much before any Greek influence in the Middle East, this space was delineated by the adoption of syllabic/phonetic alphabets, all based on the ancient Aramaic script, Aramaic being used as lingua franca, administrative and diplomatic language, in subsequent empires, including the Babylonian and the Achaimenid Persian empires. This type of script is clearly distinguishable from ideogrammatic scripts used in ancient Egypt, in the Harappa cultures and in the cultures dominated by the Chinese model. I think it is important to observe this fact but I do not know what precisely this means for our studies. We have to think much on the translatability effects such a common use of a scriptic structure is capable to trigger. My feeling is that it was easy to translate trade agreements but also philosophy, historiography, science etc. from one language using this kind of script to another. It would be interesting to compare this work of translation to the one that was going on between cultures of such a script, such as India, and those of the ideogrammatic structure, such as China.

7. However, these are just nascent thoughts and any correction, refutation etc. is most welcome.

Warm regards,

István

 

April 26, 2013

Dear Istvan

Thanks very much for spelling out your ideas in this illuminating way. Your arguments are of enormous importance, and deserve to reach a wide audience, not just of specialists but also others.

But I would like to underline this passage: ‘Hellenism is just as Persian and Egyptian, and even Indian, in its origin as it is Greek, it is just as Asian and African as it is European. However, if we have a better term for this than Hellenism, let us use this better term.’

In my view it is really important to think of a ‘better term’ for what you are trying to get at. I hate to keep harping on what is essentially a problem of nomenclature – yet I do think that it matters a great deal, especially where it concerns pedagogy.

I am attaching a draft of the post – do have a look, and please feel free to change and add!

I feel privileged to have participated (a little) in this exchange!

Warmest best

Amitav

 

April 26, 2013

Dear Amitav,

How could I object to this text? It is just a faithful rendering of our conversation. As I told you, I am honoured that you are interested in these ideas and all your challenges are well taken.

I also must admit that I see a certain privileged role in what is Hellenic/Hellenistic, while I would like to go beyond the “Greco-Roman heritage”. After all, nobody else than Alexander united much of this space ephemerally and left an indelible trace on the entire area, being remembered by so many peoples in so many languages. It was late antique Greek philosophy (most probably quite extensively influenced by the Upanishads and Buddhist philosophy), which spread through all the cultural milieus. Perhaps it would be good to speak only about an Oikumene. However, this would be distorting. Oikumene means “inhabited land” – this concept is wider than the entity we are speaking about. It has a Syriac equivalent: ‘amarta, meaning the entire inhabited earth and I am sure that its equivalents can be found in all the languages.

If we continue thinking about this, perhaps we would find a better term…

Warm regards,

István

 

April 28, 2013

Dear István

I can understand why you see a privileged role for Hellenism in the ecumene given the present state of knowledge. But I think we have to remember that this knowledge was largely produced within the European/Western academy and it systematically privileges certain elements of the past over the other. There is an interesting example of this in your last message, when you say: ‘After all, nobody else than Alexander united much of this space ephemerally and left an indelible trace on the entire area, being remembered by so many peoples in so many languages.’ But the conquests of Cyrus the Great were just as extensive as Alexander’s and he united an even larger swathe of territory. Similarly Darius did succeed in conquering Thrace and Macedonia, and Xerxes did seize most of Greece. Even if these victories were ephemeral, it is still true that the Persians’ sway over Greece lasted longer than Alexander’s hold over Asia. The fact that we privilege Alexander’s role over that of the Persians is in my view a remnant of the way that historical knowledge was constructed at a certain time. Even in terms of philosophical and cultural influence there is a systematic devaluation of the role of the Persians – many of their ideas were eventually absorbed by the Abrahamic religions, which then suppressed, as it were, the genealogy of those ideas.

The Greeks were fortunate in that they had very powerful heirs to celebrate their role in history; the Persians were not equally fortunate in this regard – and this, I think, is what has shaped the world’s view of their relationship with each other.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the history of the writing of history has profoundly skewed our understanding of the past. Now as we move away from the earlier assumptions a very different picture is emerging – your own research is part of this corrective process, which is what makes it so exciting. Where the processes will lead we do not know, but just consider that even a decade ago your idea of a Graeco-Persian ecumene would have been dismissed out of hand (for example E.R. Dodds’ in his ‘Greeks and the Irrational’ assumed that the non-western was by definition ‘irrational’).

In that sense I feel that the very logic of your own argument will eventually push you towards finding some other, broader rubric for this ecumene – this is why I feel you must  leave yourself open to other possibilities.

Thanks again for this exchange.

Very best

Amitav

 

 

April 29, 2013

Dear Amitav,

Thank you for this and I am very happy to continue this discussion. I am sure something important would come out of it.

I would be happy to say “Greco-Persian” if this were to contribute to clarification. However, then, what about the Egyptian, the Nubian, the Ethiopic, the Sogdian, the Indian constituents of this economico-cultural world? Persian is a very important element, which is even more lasting than it seems to be. Under Islam, the Umayyads and the Abbassids represented two very different cultural trends. As the Umayyads were based in Damascus and their great achievement was the conquest of Byzantine territories besides the conquest of Mesopotamia and Iran, they continued – to an astonishing degree – a Roman heritage, while the Abbassids, based in Baghdad and revolting against the Umayyads, continued an eminently Persian tradition. Recently, I had to write an essay for a volume entitled Medieval Narrative Sources, on the Eastern Christian narrative/historiographic literature. While doing the research for this, I noticed with no little surprise that those Syrian and Arabic Christian chroniclers who lived in the former Roman territory are sympathetic to the Umayyads and hostile to the Abbassids. while those who lived in former Persian territory are the opposite: sympathetic – in a discerning way according to personal acts – to the Abbassids but rather hostile in a general manner to the Umayyads.

Be this as it may, we are speaking about a huge area linked together by two major arteries: the Silk Road on the north and the Trans-Arabian Sea-Indian Ocean-Gulf of Bengal sailing route, which could be called the Southern Silk Road and which also links in Africa. It is within this larger ecumene that I am trying to distinguish a non-insulated, non-self relying, non independent structural unit, which I try to call the Hellenistic Oikumene. In the last analysis this might prove futile, too, because China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia are just as parts of this system as is Central Asia or India.

Empires there were. There were also the subsequent nomadic empires, the Huns, the Avars, the Turkic empires preceding the Mongolians. This is also an integral part of the Oikumene. I may be illusioned attributing a symbolic importance to Alexander’s empire and, then, the Diadochus states, which lasted until quite late, something like 300 years in Egypt for example. However, they are vividly remembered. The Syrian Christians dated their manucripts according to the era of “the blessed Greeks” starting in 311 BC. When Alexander Csoma de Körös, the Hungarian traveler who made the first Tibetan-English dictionary (1784-1842) entered Ladakh and was asked who he was, he responded that he was Iskender bey, from the Rum country and the Tibetans understood, because they knew the name Iskender and they knew where Rum was in the West. 

All this is not to say that we could not find a better word than “Hellenistic”, but just to say that Greco-Persian is too restrictive. It reminds me of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, where Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Serbs, Ruthens and other nations felt oppressed while the Hungarians were celebrating their revolution of 1848-49 and their subsequent emancipation. It was to a great extent their refusal of sharing the rights they had obtained, which had finally led to the dismantling of the Monarchy.

That much for now and I am awaiting your reply!

Warm regards,

István

 

April 29, 2013

Dear István

Thanks once again for your reply. I am in complete agreement with you – I think both ‘Hellenistic’ and ‘Graeco-Persian’ are too restrictive. Indeed they derive from exactly that ‘civilizational’ perspective that you rightly question. Let us hope that a better terminology will soon be found.

It’s been a great pleasure to have this exchange with you – thank you for so generously sharing your enormous erudition. I am so looking forward to reading more of your work!

With my warmest good wishes

Amitav

 

 

[This review was published in the The Washington Post on June 4, 2006]

 

John Updike: Terrorist: A Novel

Alfred A. Knopf, June 2006, 310 pp., $25.00.

 

John Updike’s new novel is set in a New Jersey mill town that has fallen on hard times. Once home to energetic white immigrants from Eastern Europe, this city, New Prospect, has decayed to the point where “those who occupy the inner city now are brown, by and large, in its many shades.”

Brown-ness and its discontents are central to the novel and Updike is acutely aware of the many tints and gradations of this colour. The novel’s principal character, the nineteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Malloy, is from the lighter end of the spectrum being the product of a short-lived union between a red-haired Irish-American, Beth, and an Egyptian exchange student whose ‘ancestors had been baked since the time of Pharaohs in the hot muddy fields of the overflowing Nile.’ Although Ahmad’s colour is darker than ‘the freckled, blotchy pink of his red-haired mother’, it is paler than his father’s, whose skin is described as being ‘perfectly matte, like a cloth that’s been dipped, olive-beige with a pinch of soot or tar in it’. Ahmad is, in fact, ‘dun, a low-lustre shade lighter than beige’. It would seem that the lack of a lustrous complexion has played no small part in giving Ahmad a sense of miscegenation, putting him at odds with the world around him: he is embarrassed by the mismatch of his dun skin with his mother’s freckled pinkness, which ‘seems unnaturally white, like a leper’s.’

Ahmad’s own preference is for ‘darker skins, cocoa and caramel and chocolate…’ – and these tastes are well served by his inner-city high school which is, as a confluence of muddy hues, the match of any tropical delta. At school Ahmad’s gaze is drawn most often to one particular redoubt of brown-ness – Joryleen, an African-American with a ‘smooth brown body, darker than caramel but paler than chocolate’. Although his interest is amply reciprocated, Ahmad gives Joryleen no encouragement, having been warned by his mentor in Islam that ‘women are animals easily led’. Besides, Joryleen already has a boyfriend, Tylenol, who is not just of a very precise shade of brown – ‘the color of walnut furniture-stain while it’s still sitting up wet on the wood’ – but is also a football player and a gymnast. Tylenol is contemptuous of Ahmad: “Black Muslims I don’t diss, but you not black, you not anything.”

Actually, since the age of eleven, Ahmad has been a regular at the local mosque. Having abandoned the family when Ahmad was a baby, his father has played no part in this choice. A free-thinking Bohemian and amateur artist, his mother has let her son choose his own path and it has led him into the hands of the mosque’s Imam, one Shaikh Rashid, who is descended from ‘generations of heavily swathed Yemeni warriors’. The heavy swathing has spared the Shaikh’s ancestors a baking of the kind that fell to the lot of Ahmad’s forefathers, in Egypt: his complexion is ‘waxy white’. This hue may also account for the cadences of Rashid’s English, which are curiously like those of the predatory Cambridge Arabists of another era. Vaguely effeminate in appearance, he tells Ahmad that he is a ‘beautiful tutee’ and frequently coos the words ‘dear boy’.

Ahmad’s speech has a different but equally curious timbre. Although he is a native-born American and has never left the United States, he speaks as if he had learnt English at a madrasa run by the Taliban: “I of course do not hate all Americans,” he says. “But the American way is the way of infidels. It is headed for a terrible doom.” The accent may explain why Ahmad has no friends, despite being bright, polite and quite good looking in his ‘flawless’ dun pelt. His isolation, in any event, is complete, and it is the source of both his religious and his suicidal impulses: when he thinks of Allah, ‘alone in all the starry space’ he burns with ‘this yearning to join God, to alleviate his loneliness.’ His naïve but deeply-felt religiosity makes him an easy tool for the cynical Shaikh Rashid, who steers him in the direction of a terrorist cell that is plotting to blow up the Holland Tunnel. It falls to a teacher at Central High, Jack Levy, a non-observant Jew, to make a last-minute attempt to pull Ahmad back from the edge.

 

Updike once wrote: “in the strange egalitarian world of the Novel a man must earn our interest by virtue of his … authentic sentiments.’ [1]

Authenticity is, to my mind, a tall order for any novelist – mere plausibility would be enough. But there is nothing plausible about the characters of this book: only two of them are half-way believable, and they are Jack Levy and Ahmad’s Irish-American mother. It is no accident perhaps that neither of them is brown.

Updike has clearly been at some pains to familiarize himself with Islam: not only has he read the Qur’an carefully, he has also delved into Orientalist scholarship on the subject. The novel features many quotations from the Qur’an, in Arabic, with all the scholarly paraphernalia of diacritical marks etc.. Yet the end result is that Updike is unable to cut his brown characters loose from texts, scriptures and ideologies. As for his belief that elaborate descriptions of skin colour are a form of insight, it is not wholly without merit for it does ar least serve to occasionally enliven the prose.

The flow of The Terrorist is constantly punctuated with riffs and diatribes on the state of contemporary America, national security, foreign policy, popular culture, technology and so on. Shaikh Rashid, Ahmad, and even the Secretary of Homeland Security are given their say. Yet, their harangues are always delivered in a slightly satirical key, as if none of it really mattered. When the terrorists’ arguments are answered at all, it is usually in a register of sardonic and grudging nationalism, by conjuring images of a past and future America: no one takes the trouble to defend secular forms of justice or government as an aspect of the modern world’s shared heritage. More puzzling still, no one makes any claims on behalf of that secular realm of expression that permits the practice of such arts as fiction itself. With innumerable lives at stake, when Jack Levy finds himself faced with the task of giving Ahmad a reason to live and let live, he says: “Hey, come on, we’re all Americans here. That’s the idea, didn’t they tell you that at Central High? Irish-Americans, African-Americans, Jewish-Americans; there are even Arab-Americans”’. Not a word about humanity, family, friendship, sport, poetry, love, laughter: it is as if a belief in American multiculturalism is the only good reason a human being could have for staying alive. Why indeed do the billions of non-Americans who walk this earth refrain from blowing themselves up? I suspect that Updike really cannot see that they have any good reason not to.

 

Amitav Ghosh

 

 

 

 

I first visited Venice in the summer of 1981 (when I should have been working on my thesis).

 

 

 

 

 

 

One day I got lost in the city’s winding lanes and stumbed upon a ‘festa’ – in this instance it was an open-air party, in a quarter that was not much frequented by tourists. An accordion was playing and many couples, young and old, were dancing in the bright sunlight. On one side, chess games were under way, on tables that had been set up along a canal. There was food too, and wine, and passers-by was invited to join in.

It was a wonderful event, welcoming and joyful, and I was astonished when I learnt that it had been organized by L’Unità, the official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party. It was impossible to think of such an event being hosted by Gonoshokti, the organ of the CPM, which was then ruling my home state of West Bengal.

That festa is still one of my most vivid memories of Venice. I was reminded of it last week when I went to visit a group of Venetian readers who have been reading In An Antique Land (I included some of their responses to the book in my post of April 9).

 

The group is called Circolo ARCI Franca Trentin Baratto: it takes its name from Franca Trentin Baratto a political activist who was a partisan during the Second World War. Later she taught French at a university in Venice. The reading circle is a part of a wider body called ARCI (pronounced ‘archie’) which is descended from the SOCIETÀ OPERAIE DI MUTUO SOCCORSO (Working Class Societies of Mutual Help) founded in the second half of the nineteenth century.

 

 

 

 

 

My Italian translator, Anna Nadotti explains that ‘Mutuality, justice, freedom were their main issues.  And from the beginning education campaigns were one of their main activities – they especially promoted literacy for the working class, male and women. In the early 1900s,  CIRCOLI  and  CASE DEL POPOLO (former SOCIETA’ OPERAIE) were places where to meet, discuss, learn writing and reading, organize antiwar battles, and later support to soldiers and their families.Politically they espoused a mix of Mazzini’s ideals, of anarchism and socialism. Fascism accused them of subversiveness and outlawed them. Never mind if the members had bought or built such places,  “liretta su liretta” as they used to say, meaning that they had saved money (lira) to have their own ‘circle’ and ‘house’.  Only after the war could they function freely, and in 1956 they were united in the ARCI ( ASSOCIAZIONE RICREATIVA CULTURALE ITALIANA ). Democracy and antifascism, antiracism and sustainable development being their banners. Culture, sport, music, theatre their  activities, but also part of the movement, from ’68 to Seattle and Genova. They are active in the slowfood movement and in bio-agriculture.’

 

 

The group meets in a room that was given to them by one of their founder-members, Anita Mezzalira.  I was taken there by an old friend, Marina Scalori, who is a teacher, trade union activist and an enthusiastic reader.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slivia Marri introduced me and served as the translator for the event.

 

 

 

Later she sent me this copy of her introduction.

Dear Amitav,

we are greatly honoured and deeply touched by your visit.

You collect stories and drive them through time and space until they become part of our story.

Thanks to you we have strengthened our feeling that it’s necessary to defend the human factor at any cost. The rest, as a famous rabbi said about the essence of Thora, is but a commentary.

Here, too, we collect and tell stories, real-life stories, sometimes passionate, sometimes dramatic, anyway stories which are our common chant. Sometimes they are close and contemporary, sometimes we must preserve them from being forgotten, sometimes they belong to us or sometimes we try to make them ours even if they come from afar.

Anita Mezzalira (a trade unionist who lived in the first half of the XX century) and Franca Trentin (a partisan, a teacher, a committed woman who lived in the second half of the XX century) lived and worked here in Venice. Their stories were and are part of the lives of a lot of people who tried and still try to achieve dignity, rights and democracy.

We do our best to follow their example, their love for people, their strong belief in everybody’s right to have a decent and just life.

 

 

Your visit touches us because it makes us feel that culture doesn’t belong to academic institutions only, far from common people, but it can reach the elderly who gather in this room to play cards, or the people who live in this lively neighbourhood. You make us feel important as you did with Bomma and maybe we’ll be able to prevent Nabeel from being devoured by the chaos of our world.

Thank you again and, if you accept it, we would like to appoint you member of the Circolo Arci Franca Trentin.   

 

 

 

I was then admitted as a member of the Circle, as proof of which I was issued this card!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was a lovely event, in a hall that was hung with pictures of left icons

 

 

– including a rather unusual picture of Che Guevara (on the left).

[I was to discover later that Il Gazzetino di Venezia had photographed me taking this picture.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was delighted to meet Anita Baseggio, who is 93 years old and an avid reader.

 

 

Her husband was a famous actor, Cesco Bassegio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The members had brought  food,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

including this wonderful tiramisù.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People often talk of all the crises and catastrophes that beset Italy today. Groups like this readers’ circle  serve to remind one of the reasons why, despite all its problems, Italy is so consistently and surprisingly resilient – and has been so for thousands of years!

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my post of April 15 I wrote about the Italian-Somali writer Igiaba Scego:

 

 

‘Like many in Italy Igiaba is deeply concerned about recent attempts to rehabilitate Fascism in public memory.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also posted the text of Igiaba’s recent petition to the President of the Lazio region, protesting against the building of monument to Rodolfo Graziani, a Facist general responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Ethiopia and Somalia. The post included a link to a page where the petition could be signed and I believe many readers responded.

Yesterday  I received this joyful message from Igiaba saying that the President of the Lazio region, Nicola Zingaretti, had announced that funding for the monument would be withdrawn.

 

The Lazio government and the president of our region remove all allusions to Graziani (the butcher of fezzan), both direct and indirect, from the memorial.

We’ve won the first fight. I’m so happy!!!

I want to say thank you again. Your post help our struggle.

We’ve Won this Round, but the Fight Is Not Over!

I Hope in the future to do something more. For examples in schools. Because Italy need memory.

 

Here is a link to an interview where Igiaba discusses the issue and the outcome.

Another correspondent, Ilaria Rigoli, has sent a link to the updated page at Change.org, with the following translation of the text:

Nicola Zingaretti (president of the region Lazio) says no to a monument to commemorate a war criminal and colonialist murderer

Victory
Igiaba Sciego’s campaign on Change.org to ask Nicola Zingaretti to remove the commemorative monument to Rodolfo Graziani, a fascist commander who has been included in the UN’s list of war criminals has been successful: just a few days after the petition was launched and with 13.000 supporters, today Zingaretti has announced his stop to the monument.

Here are Igiaba’s words to the supporters:
In such a difficult moment in the history of our Republic you have sent, with your support and belief, an important message to our country. All together we have avoided our beautiful Italy to become the world’s joke.
I (as you, after all) was deeply unset for that monument to a fascist commander. I coudn’t bear such an insult to my region, my country, and to the republican constitution. From the beginning of this obscenity I was feeling bad and trying in evey way to do something in order to remove or change the destination of the monument. Then, one day I launched this petition on Change.org and in a few days the fight of a little group has become the fight of a whole country.
Now my hope is that this victory will be able to start something good and positive in our country. 

 

Ilaria adds:

Amitav: I also want to thank you for this; I didn’t know anything about Igiaba’s petition until I read about it on your blog. I advertised your post to my network of friends, and I know many of them have signed because of it. Thank you so, so much.

 

It’s nice to know that my post led many people to the petition. I’d like to extend my personal thanks to all who signed it!

Amitav

 

 

Sometimes we stumble upon objects and practices that are separated by immense distances and yet seem to bear a resemblance to each other.

 

For example, in August 2001, I was at this

 

boat race in Kerala.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was the annual

 

 

Nehru Trophy Vallamkali, held near Allapuzha (Alleppey).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many different kinds of boats contest the races, but the best known among them is probably the ‘Snake Boat’ (Chundan Vallam).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was told that the teams are recruited from villages, communities and clubs, and that the passions that are invested in the races are expressive of many kinds of rivalry.

 

 

 

 

 

A few weeks later the same year

 

 

 

I watched

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

this boat race

 

 

 

in Venice, Italy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was the annual Regata Storica which is timed to coincide with the Venice film festival (I happened to be on the jury that year).

 

 

 

There are races for many different categories of boats.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the most popular events is a race between gondolas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The population of the entire Commune of Venice, which is a network of many islands and territories, consists of less than three hundred thousand  people – a tiny figure by contemporary standards. Yet the Commune is home to many communities with intense local loyalties – several of them have even preserved their own distinctive dialects.

 

 

In the past the rivalries between parishes and islands were so fierce that men would fight battles on bridges, either with their fists or with sticks that were known as Canne d’India.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is even a bridge called the Ponte dei Pugni (‘Bridge of Fists).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The boat races were yet another venue for the expression of these rivalries.

 

 

 

 

Some years ago, while traveling in Hong Kong and Guangdong,

 

 

 

 

I heard about the ‘Dragon Boat’ races that are held throughout the region at the time of the Duanwu festival (which is usually in June).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here too the teams are fielded by villages and communities, and the races are contested with great passion.

 

 

 

 

No doubt the resemblances between these races, and the vessels that contest them, are purely coincidental. Yet, I find it interesting that these areas have long histories of connection. Kerala’s connections with China are commemorated in both words and objects. One authoritative Malayalam dictionary[1] has three pages of words that are prefixed with cina and cini .

 

 

The entries number in dozens and include words for many kinds of plants, textiles, food items, flowers, spices, instruments, such as the telescope (Cina-k-kulal) and of course the famous fish nets of Cochin (cina-vala).

 

 

 

 

In Cochin harbour I’ve seen many boats that have reminded me of the Dragon Boats of China and the gondolas of Venice.

 

 

 

 

As for Venice, it was the birthplace and home of Marco Polo, perhaps the most famous traveler ever to visit China. To this day many objects from Guangdong are on display in the city’s palaces and homes.

 

 

 

For example this fine pair of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Nodding Head’ dolls

 

 

which were among the most popular souvenirs produced for foreign visitors in 18th and 19th century Guangzhou.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, all of this could have come about even in the absence of  ‘connected histories’ §. It is increasingly clear that people and places have communicated with each other in many different ways, not all of which involved direct contact.

Even bacteria ‘have elaborate chemical signaling systems that enable them to communicate within and between species.’  And bacteria, after all, are our ancestors.

 

§ This phrase refers to Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s brilliant book Explorations in Connected History.