May 2012

I wrote about Dr István Perczel, of the Central European University in Budapest, in my post of April 9, 2012 (‘Hungarian Scholar Finds Bonanza in Kerala Archive’ – here is a link to his website ‘Project for Preserving the Manuscripts of the Syrian Christians in India’).

Recently an unexpected opportunity arose to meet István Perczel: he was in Goa with a team of archivists who are hoping to digitize Goa’s state archives. These archives have accumulated over five centuries and contain priceless materials, covering subjects that range from botany to the politics of the Mughal empire. Its earliest holdings go back to the 1490s, decades before the Mughals came to India. István describes these archives as one of the most important in the world.

Also on the team was Fr Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk who runs the Hill Centre in Minneapolis Michigan. This library has already digitized over a hundred thousand manuscripts from church archives around the world. Among these manuscripts are many from the churches of Syria – a very fortunate thing, since some of these churches may not survive the civil war.

It was fascinating to meet these remarkable scholars and to hear of their work. Here is a picture of István Perczel (right) and Fr Columba (left);

and another of their team.

[From left to right, István Perczel, Uday Balakrishnan, Fr Ignatius Payyapilly, archivist of the Syro-Malabar Major Archbishopric in Ernakulam, and Fr Columba; pictures courtesy István Perczel].

Later István wrote:

Concerning In an Antique Land I would also like to tell how fascinating I find the two-sided description of your anthropological research: you went to Lataifah/Nashawy (or the villages indicated by these pseudonyms) to study the fellaheen and they, in exchange, were doing their own anthropological research on the doktór al-Hindi. The Syriac and Malayalam material that one can find in Kerala testifies to a similar interaction. While the Europeans arrived in India, discovered the Indians and made anthropological, geographic etc. descriptions, apparently the Indians did the same: for them this was the opportunity to discover Europe and the Europeans. Several Syrian Christian priests mounted the Portuguese ships in order to travel to Europe and see the lands there. The first one, somebody called in European sources Joseph the Indian, did so as early as in 1500. He traveled to Europe on a ship of Pedro Alvares Cabral and somewhere in Europe he was interviewed, his answers constituting the first source for the Europeans about the customs of the Indian Christians. Then he went back to his land and, apparently, became one of the staunchest opponents of Westernization and Latinization (Antony Vallavanthara, India in 1500: The Narratives of Joseph the Indian, Gorgias Press, 2010). In Cambridge, the Buchanan collection, there is a miscellaneous Indian manuscript (MS Cambridge Oo.1.29) containing an astronomical-geographical treatise written in India in Syriac, datable to the 1570s, which describes Europe giving the distances between London and Paris, Seville and Rome etc. in parasangs, the Persian measure of distance. It also describes Japan and China, clearly relying on the data received from European travelers and missionaries. The same manuscript also contains a note with a text describing the odd European habit of burning heretics (in this case, Protestants) at the stakes and ends with this sentence: “This is very hard, one feels pain even to speak about it.” Definitively, burning heretics is worse than burning the dead bodies and some sixteenth-century Indians had noticed this.

He also sent me some of his articles. They are all fascinating, because they reveal a world of fluid connections, going back many centuries, when priests traveled freely between the Malabar Coast, the Middle East and southern Europe.

Perhaps the most interesting of the articles is Classical Syriac As A Modern Lingua Franca in South India between 1600 and 2006 (Aram, 21 (2009) 289-321) which demonstrates that Syriac, an ancient language descended from Middle Aramaic, was once a link language in the Indian subcontinent (it is written in a very beautiful script, derived from Aramaic, and a precursor of Arabic).

The true revelation of the piece is that Syriac was in use in India until very recently. ‘As far as literature is concerned, we witness an incredible blossoming of Syriac literature beginning with the sixteenth century, still very vigorous in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, declining only at the end of the same century. However, notwithstanding this decline, the latest Syriac manuscript that I have seen and photographed in Kerala is dated to 2005 and was written by Chorepiscopa Curian Kaniamparambil, the great Malankara malpan, that is, malfono – Doctor, of the Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church, now 101, containing a devotional poem called Thousand Stanzas, a poem written in a simple and crystalline Syriac, which I find very beautiful and enjoyable, of definite literary quality. Father Curian Kaniamparampil has also rendered into verse the Gospel of St. Matthew, and has written many other works in Syriac.’ (p. 7)

Later he adds: ‘Father Kaniamparambil, now 94, learned Syriac as an autodidact when he was thirteen. Apparently he had a very great talent for this language, so much so that subsequently he began to write liturgical poetry. He also made many translations for the Jacobite West Syriac liturgy into Malayalam, used in his church…’ (19).

It strikes me as very unfortunate that this remarkable writer  is so little known in India.

Rupert Arrowsmith is an art historian and author  of Global Modernism: Early Twentieth Century Art and Literature in Tokyo, Shanghai, Calcutta, Bombay and London (I reviewed the book on this site on 21/07/2011;  see also this earlier post on the Goan painter Angelo da Fonseca). Recently Rupert mentioned to me that a prominently displayed Buddha statue in the British Museum was brought to England from Burma by Capt Frederick Marryat. This caught my interest because Capt Marryat (1792-1848) was a pioneering writer of sea stories and I read him with much interest as a boy. I asked Rupert for more details and he sent me this:

One of the artworks I spoke about at the inaugural Irrawaddy Literary Festival in Yangon (February 4-6, 2013) was the large, very exquisite Buddha-image from Burma that now sits opposite the entrance to the Asian galleries on the second floor of the British Museum.  It is an extraordinarily subtle piece (much better than the Greek rubbish downstairs in the Elgin Room), made using the inconceivably complex hollow lacquer method.

The sculpture hasn’t always sat opposite the entrance of the Asian galleries, oh no.  Would you believe that when the Museum acquired it in 1826, they positioned it halfway up the main staircase between two stuffed giraffes?  One struggles to imagine a more barbarous act.

And this is where the word acquire in my first paragraph ought to come in for a bit of scrutiny.  It sounds official, doesn’t it?  It sounds legitimate.  It sounds legal.  Of course this is what the museums of Europe want you to think: who today can think of an institution more respectable than that of the great European museum?

But this Buddha-image was not bought from anyone in Burma, nor was permission ever given for its removal.  It was swiped during the anarchy following the British invasion of Lower Burma between 1824 and 1825.

The person who swiped it, and then handed it on to the British Museum, was Frederick Marryat, a high-ranking naval officer who later became the author of popular sea stories.  The sculpture can only have occupied a monastery or temple, and it is unimaginable in the context of Burmese Buddhism that its pious custodians would have let it go without a fight.  We shall never know what mayhem Marryat let slip on its behalf along with the dogs of war, for on his deathbed he instructed his daughter carefully to burn any and all papers, letters and journals in his possession relating to the war in Burma.

The word acquire, then, very often just means armed robbery with violence.

The Buddha-image wasn’t the only souvenir of Burma Marryat brought back with him from the war of 1824-5.  He is now thought to have acquired more than 120 artifacts, including an important royal carriage.  He later wanted to donate all of this to the British Museum in exchange for a lifetime position on the board of trustees, but the Museum said no.  They didn’t say no because they were worried that there had been something unethical about Marryat’s methods.  In a typically British twist to the story, they said it because they thought he was the wrong class, and would probably lower the tone of the boardroom.

Though I tend to agree with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s idea that it is intellectually healthful to have objects from diverse regions displayed in various parts of the world, rather too many objects that have been cut loose from their original contexts seem to have been brought to rest in Europe.  With an artifact whose acquisition was as murky as that of this Buddha-image, the solution is obvious: give it back.

Oy good sir,

As a lover of Naipaul and a London-born Trinbagonian, I think your article on Naipaul is note-perfect. I had to write immediately to tell you so. It bears mentioning that despite my name, I am neither Muslim nor Indo-Trini. In fact, being half Nigerian, am definitely Black, and find on paper Naipaul is racist, sometimes acutely so. He is condescending toward his root culture and particularly unforgiving of his African characters and I love him still. His fiction is truth. And truth hurts.

Let me share my childhood Naipaul nugget: I moved (back) to England for a few months the year I turned ten, already a Naipaul enthusiast. The scene: 1989. East Indians had overtaken the better London restaurants (thank the Lord) and the English though grateful, were nationally bemoaning the influx of straight haired darkies (don’t wince).

I was in school in Kent, one of two foreign students that term. I remember being struck by how ignorant my classmates were of my part of the world. These people who were the reason we spoke English. I felt insulted every time someone called me ‘Jamaican’. I knew their moors, their enchanted woods and terraced houses, I knew of Bath and Cornwall, of Shakespeare, of Dickens and Jane Austen, of Churchill and Enid Blyton and the bastards had never heard of us. I was outraged. I wanted to hand out copies of Miguel Street.

The other foreign student was a mute (by choice and culture shock) East Indian boy. I thought I had more in common with him than the English, because coming from Trinidad, I am a lover of roti and channa is channa not chickpeas. I knew Divali, Phagwa, and Eid as well I knew Christmas, but the boy refused to talk to me. I knew then that these things (these things which were in no way connected) were signs: I must write and give voice to our people as Naipaul did, so that my peers would be properly illumined.

Having lived outside of Trinidad and Tobago for more than half my life, Naipaul’s voice in his early work is quintessentially Trinidadian. As a New Yorker, for years now, when I want to go home I go to Miguel Street,  I visit the Mystic Masseur and remember Hanuman House and grander days. After the Nobel, after gaining popularity for piling on the derision on our parts so successfully, so lovingly, he should have said, this is for you Trinidad.

Thank you,
Hadiza

Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 18

On November 26^th Sisir and his comrades reached Tripoli; and on December 4^th they embarked on a ship that took them to Port Said.

But before they could embark, there ensued one of the strangest episodes in this story. At the centre of it was one of the BAC’s ‘camp-followers’, a sweeper called Jumman. It’s best that Sisir tells the story himself:

Indian soldiers with Armenian widows and orphans*

Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 17

Sisir Sarbadhikari went to the station early to wait for the train that was to carry the Indian POWs out of Ras al-‘Ain. Along with four friends from the Bengal Ambulance Corps, he was able to get a covered wagon. They occupied it at about nine that night.

‘After an hour or so,’ writes Sisir, ‘we heard Yakob’s voice whispering to us from the outside. When we went to him he said that we had to make space for him somehow in our wagon.’ (p.198) We said have you gone mad? How can that be done? To take you into our wagon will be dangerous not just for you but for us too. If the Turks find out they’ll give you such a beating that you may die of it; and who knows what will happen to us? There’ll probably be a court-martial. We can’t do anything like that.’ (pp. 198-9)

‘Orphan refugees, who are hoping to reach some town where there is bread.’ Nat Geog: Volume XXXVI, Number Five, November 1919, p. 410

‘But Yakob was stubborn, he began to weep. He said the blame would be his alone; if the Turks caught him then there was nothing to be done; he would die anyway if he remained in Nisibeen; if he was going to die then he might as well make an attempt to get away. In the end we let him in. It was only the four of us in that wagon– Phoni, Jagdish, Bhola and I. Had there been anyone else we wouldn’t have dared.

‘Although we let him in, we couldn’t of course let him sit on a bench where anybody could see him; he had to be hidden. The only hiding place was under the bench. Here lay the problem. Yakob may have been young but he had a big belly; it was impossible to get him under the bench. In the end Bhola pressed his belly and somehow shoved him in. Yakob’s pants’ buttons popped open and his chest and stomach were grazed and bloody. He remained there that whole night and the next day and night as well. After that he got off at a station; he said he would be all right from there on.’ (p.199)

‘This brother and sister, orphans, were begging for a train-ride to some other town, where there might be bread‘ (Nat. Geog: Volume XXXVI, Number Five, November 1919, p. 404

Shared Sorrows: Indians and Armenians in the prison camps of Ras al-‘Ain, 1916-18 – 16

Aroundthe end of  October 1918, when it was clear that Germany and its allies were facing defeat, the hospital in Ras al-‘Ain was abandoned by the German doctors who had been running it. The Indian POWs and Armenian refugees were left to subsist on the hospital’s remaining stores of food. (p.191)

British and Indian troops were known to be advancing northwards but there was still no sign of them. This created great confusion.

10 October 1918, 2nd Battalion Black Watch (7th Meerut Division) arrive in Beirut after marched 96 miles (154 km) in 8 days from Haifa (Wikimedia)

‘We run into our Armenian colleagues every day,’ writes Sisir. ‘They’re in despair. But what can we do for them? If the British arrive soon, they’ll be safe.’ (p.193)

At the beginning of November 1918, Sisir writes: ‘I’m overjoyed at the thought of going back home, but in the midst of that I am despondent at the thought of the [Armenian] mohajers and their fate. We’ve worked together for so many days; we’ve shared sorrow and joy. 

Armenian refugees (Lib of Congress)

They have become like our own. I wonder, even if the Turks don’t kill them, what will they find when they get home? Who will they return to? Who knows if they even have any homes left!’ (p.194)

On November 17^th, all of a sudden, the POWs were informed that a train would come for them that night. Sisir and his companions went to the station well ahead of time because they were concerned about finding a covered wagon. Sisir explains that this was because Turkish trains ran on firewood, there being a shortage of coal in the country: the engines couldn’t work up much steam: ‘At the slightest incline the engine would wheeze as if it had run out breath, and flames would shoot out of the chimney burning everything nearby.’ (p.198)

Ottoman Soldiers’ train, 1918

This was a hazard in an open wagon, because cinders and flames would be blown back, and would often cause fires.

Sisir recounts that he was once traveling in an open wagon, with one of the Bengal Ambulance Corps’ camp followers, a sweeper by the name of Jumman. A flaming cinder happened to fall on Jumman’s turban and flames shot up from it. Between the two of them they managed to put out the fire, but Jumman said afterwards, ‘lucky that I’m not a Sikh or my hair would have been burnt.’