Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
“Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history
Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she explores the long-standing but now dwindling Jewish community of Kochi
In the warm winter sun of Mattancherry, a district of Kochi in Kerala, I wandered the labyrinthine streets of Jew Town. The main thoroughfare, Synagogue Lane, is lined with shops sporting names such as Shalom, some displaying the Star of David in their windows, and selling Kashmiri shawls, spices and handicrafts. This is the historical heart of India’s Jewish community – though today there are hardly any Jews living here. Kochi (formerly Cochin) has a centuries-long Jewish presence. The date of the earliest arrivals is debated; some say that the first Jews sailed to south India on the ships of King Solomon some 30 centuries ago. Certainly, references to Jewish traders in India have been found in documents dating back to the eighth and ninth centuries AD, kept in a synagogue genizah (storage area) in Cairo. A number of Jews settled in the ancient trading port of Kodungallur (formerly Cranganore) and, from the 14th century, dispersed; many moved to Kochi, around 20 miles to the south. Over the following centuries, European Jews, known in the local Malayalam language as Paredesi (literally, ‘foreigners’), began to arrive in India. Many of them were refugees fleeing the Iberian peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition and following the expulsion of Jews in 1492. Over later centuries, more Jews came from western Europe, as well as from north Africa and the Middle East. At its height, Kochi’s Jewish community numbered around 2,000 members. In the 19th century, though, some began leaving to pursue opportunities in Bombay (now Mumbai), and Calcutta (now Kolkata), and then, from 1948, to live permanently in the newly created state of Israel. The Paradesi Synagogue, built in 1568 by Sephardic Jews, still stands next to Mattancherry Palace. As you enter the courtyard today, you can see that it shares a wall with a Hindu temple. The synagogue remains open for visitors and for worship, and is cared for by the local Indian community. The small but colourful interior features hand-painted 18th-century Chinese floor tiles and grand Belgian chandeliers. It also preserves engraved copper plates from the Hindu ruler of Kodungallur, given to a Jewish leader in around AD 1000. The last major celebration held here was in 2018, when the synagogue marked its 450th anniversary. Some 150 émigré members of the Paradesi Jewish community arrived from their homes across the world to mark the occasion. Generations of family members who had only heard stories of the synagogue came to visit, and to walk the same streets that their ancestors had strolled decades and centuries earlier. The oldest member of India’s Paradesi Jewish community, Sarah Cohen, died a year later, a few days short of her 97th birthday. Her embroidery shop still stands in Mattancherry, and still bears her name. It’s now looked after by Thaha Ibrahim, a Muslim who had known Sarah and her husband for decades. He looked after her in her old age, and was treated by the couple as their son. He carries on her legacy today in the same place she lived, making embroidery following her patterns. The Paradesi Synagogue is the only one out of eight in Kerala that is regularly active. I was told that the current rabbi is from overseas, and that the congregation for the Friday night service is typically made up of émigré Jewish visitors. A portion of the Torah scrolls is read every Shabbat and during religious holidays, retrieved from the silver cases in which the synagogue’s texts are kept. These cases are topped with gold crowns, some of which were gifts from local maharajas. Though Kochi’s long-standing Jewish community has largely gone, their memories and ancient traditions are kept alive still. This column was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on an astonishing Hindu pilgrimage
"We are witnessing the biggest gathering of people in world history," writes historian Michael Wood.
I'm sure, like me, readers have been both gripped and saddened recently by the pictures of India’s Kumbh Mela, the biggest pilgrimage in the world. This year, events moved from elation to tragedy with the loss of life in a stampede on 29 January. With such gigantic crowds at religious gatherings in India, there is always a risk of disaster. Every 12 years, the mela takes place at Prayag (also know as Allahabad) at the junction of the sacred rivers Ganges and Jumna. In 2001, we took our daughters, then aged 10 and 8, staying in a tent with Tamil friends. Some 25 million bathed then on the most auspicious date, and 50 or 60 million over the whole six-week festival. This time it will be a staggering 400 million pilgrims, by far the biggest gathering on the planet in history. Read more | 10 historical turning points for modern India The roots of the mela lie far back in Indian civilisation. Though it only reached its present form in the British period, a Chinese visitor in AD 644 describes a huge gathering of half a million pilgrims here on the “Sands of Charity”, which he was told had “gone on since ancient times”. This may well have been the periodic “great synod” that was recorded by the Greek ambassador Megasthenes in 300 BC. Perhaps earlier still the place is the climax of the sacred circuit defining India in the epic book Mahabharata. This I think tells us something essential about Mother India: from early on it was imagined as a holy land from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. Indian civilisation had many great achievements in science and mathematics, art and architecture, but its essential bent was, in the broadest sense, religious. ‘Hinduism’ as a concept is a western construct, but religion is the ‘ism’ of India. Read more | “Like ancient Greece, India is one of the seedbeds of civilisation” | William Dalrymple on putting India back at the centre of global history The central ritual in the mela is to bathe in the sacred rivers at the most auspicious time. This is a very ancient idea in Indian culture. The junction of the Ganges and the Jumna was evidently seen as an axis mundi, the place of creation, rather like Delphi to the Greeks, or Cusco to the Incas. On top of that, in later times, many different myths and stories have gathered. On the second evening of our stay we made our trip down to the Sangam, the junction of the rivers. We walked along with vast crowds: it seemed like all the peoples of India in their incredible diversity. At the river pilgrims stood waist-deep, hands lifted in prayer to the setting sun, rapt in concentration. On the sand, crowds were camped with their bundles, smoke swirling from cooking fires. Soon we reached the Sangam itself, where the muddy brown current of the Ganges meets the blue of the Jumna. It was a breathtaking scene: the last golden light shimmering on the water; the boats, the flags, the lamps, the music; streamers of sari cloths drying in the wind – crimson, yellow, gold, green, snapping in the breeze. All around us were excited shouts and bright-eyed women coming out in clinging saris, soaked and shivering, pushing back their glossy, black, dripping hair. There we took our holy dip, as the Indians say. Around us were poor people who had done long journeys by train and bus, and even on foot, to be there for that auspicious moment. Afterwards a group of Rajasthanis in white turbans held our hands and patted the kids on the head, thanking them for coming. At moments like this, many thoughts go through your mind. Where will we be when the sacred rivers dry up, when they become seasonal, as the scientists now predict? How true, the ancient perception that these rivers’ glaciers and snow-capped mountains are life-giving presences, which are indeed in a profound sense sacred. Back in our tent that night, as we mulled it all over, our eight-year-old said this: “The Indian people think that rivers are holy, and maybe it’s true, because millions of people came here to do this, who all believe the same thing that rivers are holy... I also think that maybe they are saying that nature is holy and you have got to look after it. Because if it gets polluted, then all the animals die and the creatures die. So they are saying that, I think.” Read more | Where history happened: pilgrimage Looking back now on that magical time, though still sombre after recent events, I guess my daughter’s words touch on the point of any great pilgrimage: the shared experiences in such a splendid natural setting, the age-old rituals and stories, the human solidarity. And our aware- ness of our place on this fragile planet. This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
“Like ancient Greece, India is one of the seedbeds of civilisation” | William Dalrymple on putting India back at the centre of global history
Danny Bird talks to historian William Dalrymple about why we need a greater understanding of how Indian ideas and culture have shaped global history – a story too often obscured by colonial narratives
Danny Bird: Your book, The Golden Road, addresses the influence of ancient India on the myriad cultures and civilisations of Eurasia. What was it that attracted you to this topic? William Dalrymple: When I first arrived in India, aged 18, I visited the early Buddhist sites at Sanchi and Ajanta [which were at their peak in the first and fifth centuries AD, respectively], and was astonished by them. They were so sophisticated, yet created at a time when in Britain – including Scotland, where I’m from – there were Picts scratching symbols, and an Anglo-Saxon putting up a wobbly church tower. During the same period in India, beautiful murals were being painted in cave temples, and profound philosophies developed. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time on archaeological excavations in Scotland and England. I always thought I’d be an archaeologist, dealing with early history. I’m now on the verge of turning 60, and I think my teenage self would be very surprised to find that I ended up spending most of my adult life writing about the 18th century. That 18-year-old would be very disappointed in the middle-aged version ‘selling out’ to modern history and writing about India, which in my teens was way beyond my horizon. In fact, this is a period about which I’ve written before in From the Holy Mountain, which is set in the same monastic milieu [as Ajanta and Sanchi], though from a Mediterranean vantage. But for the past 20 years I’ve been writing about the East India Company and the Mughals, so this is my first non-Mughal book after two decades of research in that area. It feels very nice to be writing and thinking about a different topic, although there’s also that slight anxiety when you’re dealing with something that you don’t know so well. Read more | “This was a corporation that could topple kings”: William Dalrymple on the East India Company What do you hope readers will gain from reading this book? I wanted to have a very broad, wide-angle focus spanning over 1,000 years. Each of my previous four or five books was a micro-history of a couple of years in a single Indian city. This is a very different book, stretching from 250 BC to AD 1200, over a whole continent. It looks at the way that Indian ideas spread: first, with Buddhism going up through Tibet and central Asia to China, and then Hinduism going to south-east Asia. Notably, the largest Hindu temple in the world is not in India but in Cambodia – Angkor Wat, a Vishnu temple built in the 12th century. When I was halfway through my work on this book, the Berenike Buddha was discovered on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. This extraordinary statue, sculpted around the second century AD, was discovered at an ancient port where Indian traders were landing, highlighting the reach of Indian influence. Today, everyone’s waking up to the fact that India was, for most of history, the richest country in the world. Turning to mathematical numerals and the concept of zero, these came out of India, first to the Arab world, then passed on from there to Europe via the Italian mathematician Fibonacci in the early 13th century. We know these figures today as Arab numerals because we got them from the Arabs, but the Arabs got them from the Indians. Read more | Digital revolution: the evolution of Hindu-Arabic numerals My book makes the point that India is like ancient Greece, in that it’s one of the seedbeds of civilisation – but it has been totally eradicated from our consciousness and our education systems. This is surely a lingering legacy of colonialism and, more specifically, Victorian Indology, which undermined, misrepresented and devalued Indian history, culture, science and knowledge from the period when Thomas Babington Macaulay confidently proclaimed that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”. If India were acknowledged to already have been a powerful, cosmopolitan and profoundly sophisticated civilisation, then what justification would there be for Victorian Britain’s civilising mission? How would you set out to bring civilisation to a part of the world that you recognised has been supremely civilised for thousands of years and which indeed was spreading its influence all over Asia long before the coming of Christianity? What is the ‘Golden Road’ of your book’s title? It’s an idea that is deliberately pitched in contrast with the concept of the Silk Road. My book argues that almost all intercontinental activity and trade during this period occurred by sea, with much less over land. This was primarily because of the hostile land borders separating the Roman world from Persia. One of the fortunate aspects of geography for India was the monsoon winds. These are predictable and regular, reversing directions every six months: they blow cold from the Tibetan Plateau in winter and warm from the south-west in summer. Once the monsoon winds were understood, sailors could travel efficiently from regions such as Kerala, Gujarat and the coast of Sindh to the Red Sea coast of Egypt or the Persian Gulf. Similarly, it was easy to sail across the Bay of Bengal to Thailand, Laos, the Mekong Delta, Cambodia and beyond to China. The ‘Golden Road’ refers to a trade route, mentioned by Strabo and Pliny the Elder around the time of the early Roman empire, that exported luxuries from southern India. Pliny disapproved of the expensive luxuries flowing into Rome at great cost, remarking that India was “the sink of the world’s precious metals”. This lucrative trade route brought significant amounts of Roman gold to India in the early centuries AD. Conversely, my colleague at All Souls College in Oxford, Andrew Wilson, who specialises in the history of the Roman economy, has estimated that possibly as much as one-third of the entire Roman military budget was powered by the customs take on the Red Sea ports. However, events such as the Justinianic Plague [from around AD 541] and raids by nomads such as the Blemmyes on southern Egypt led to the decline of this trade by the seventh century. This had consequences including curbing the arrival of garnets – which were popular in places like the Merovingian kingdoms and Anglo-Saxon England, where they were found at Sutton Hoo – from Rajasthan and Sri Lanka, signalling the end of this trade. You introduce the notion of an ‘Indosphere’. How did ancient India influence the lands and cultures beyond its territory? In India, the decline of its trade with Rome led to a crisis in gold supply. Although India had gold reserves, they hadn’t been fully discovered in the early centuries AD. As a result, Indian traders set off to Suvarnabhumi [a general term for south-east Asia], the ‘Lands of Gold’. This shift led to civilisational transformation in the region. Before that time, south-east Asia had no writing system. Suddenly, everyone there started using the Brahmi script, particularly the Tamil forms. Hinduism and Buddhism took root and produced even more dramatic monuments in that region than in India. The Khmer empire, with its million-strong urban population centred around Angkor Wat, produced the world’s largest Hindu temple. The most sophisticated Buddhist monument was built at in Java. Hindu forms of kingship and literature spread through out the region, and reminders of this influence endure to this day. The name of Thailand’s old capital, Ayutthaya, came from Rama’s kingdom in the Hindu epic Ramayana, for example. And Indonesia’s national airline is named Garuda, after Vishnu’s mount. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/marble-Buddha-body-found-in-2018-and-head-in-2022-d0b59ec-e1731335783128.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="The marble Berenike Buddha, carved around the second century and unearthed in Egypt, is the first Buddha statue found west of Afghanistan (Photo by E Sidebotham and S Poplawski)" title="The marble Berenike Buddha, carved around the second century and unearthed in Egypt, is the first Buddha statue found west of Afghanistan (Photo by E Sidebotham and S Poplawski)" /> The mythical battle of Kurukshetra, fought just north of Delhi, is depicted at Angkor Wat, along with images of Krishna cavorting with consorts and devotees in Mathura [that god’s traditional birthplace]. These ideas, originating from specific areas of India, were sculpted on a vast scale thousands of miles away. This was a fascinating moment in history, when south-east Asia became an extension of the Indian holy land. Even more dramatically, Indian ideas conquered China. In the 660s AD, Wu Zetian took power, becoming the only ‘female emperor’ in Chinese history. This was viewed as a dark period by the patriarchal Confucians. To bolster her power, Empress Wu imported Indian monks who proclaimed her to be the Bodhisattva Maitreya – the long-foretold future Buddha – giving her a divine right to rule, and Buddhism, an Indian faith, became the state religion of China for a time. That did not last, but it brought a massive wave of Indian ideas: literature, cosmology, mathematics and more. Though Chinese civilisation eventually rolled back some of these influences, Buddhism remained a significant presence. To this day, China has more Buddhists than any other country. Who are some of the other figures that you highlight? There’s a motley crew of murderous empresses, Buddhist wizards and tantric magicians. One of the first figures in the book is Saint Thomas – an unexpected presence. According to legend, he travelled the spice route between Berenike and Muziris [on India’s Malabar Coast], arriving in India as part of the Jewish merchant diaspora. He converted Brahmins (the priestly caste), built seven churches and was reputedly martyred in Mylapore [now part of Chennai] in AD 72. Though the legend is recorded in the Acts of Thomas, written around the turn of the third century, early conversion to Christianity in Kerala is documented from the second century, with Indian Christians seeking bishops, patriarchs and relics from Alexandria. One of my favourite figures is Vajrabodhi, a tantric wizard from the Pallava dynasty of Tamil south India – akin to a Buddhist Merlin. In the early eighth century, during a period when Buddhism was competing with Hinduism, Vajrabodhi – with his magical powers and Vajra staff, like a kind of magic wand – was sent on a diplomatic mission to Tang China. Detailed hagiographies describe his journey to Sri Lanka, a centre of tantric Buddhism, and his possible role in the construction of Borobudur, a monumental Buddhist site designed as a spiritual ‘power generator’ reflecting the void and nothingness central to tantric Buddhism. Another notable individual is the wandering Buddhist monk Xuanzang. He realised that the texts in his monasteries were corrupted and missing advanced tantric and Mahayana Buddhist scriptures, which were unavailable in China. Despite a travel ban imposed by Tang authorities, Xuanzang secretly went to India. There he spent 10 years at Nalanda, a renowned monastery equivalent to the Library of Alexandria with an exceptional educational institution, where he copied many manuscripts. Though some were lost on his return journey in a mishap while crossing the Indus river, he brought back enough to fill the Great Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an, which still stands today. Xuanzang’s generation faced prejudice against Indian learning, which was dismissed as ‘barbarian’ by the Confucian and Taoist elite. Buddhism in China peaked under Empress Wu, who was a spiritual follower of Xuanzang. She entered the imperial harem as the fifth concubine at the age of about 15, around the time Xuanzang returned from India, and the two became allies. Recognising her influence, Xuanzang regarded Wu as a key figure in advancing the Buddhist cause. Thus there was a growing awareness in China of India’s sophistication, driven largely by Buddhists who comprised one of several competing factions at court. How was ancient India’s cultural influence spread? Indian nationalism often promotes the idea of a ‘Greater India’, a concept popular with the current regime. This narrative suggests that the spread of Indian epics and gods throughout south-east Asia was the result of the actions of imperial warriors – an idea that gained traction in the 1930s with the Greater India Society. However, this notion seems unfounded. The spread of Indian culture was more likely driven by merchants and the appeal of Indian ideas, in much the same way as Hellenistic ideas spread to ancient Rome. Indian concepts in mathematics; architectural manuals such as the Shilpa Shastras; and jyotisa – a Sanskrit word encompassing both astronomy and astrology – spread widely. This happened not through conquest but via trade and the movements of Brahmins, who, despite legal restrictions, travelled across the Bay of Bengal. They brought with them ideas of Indian kingship and governance, influencing regions such as the Mekong Delta, Thailand and the Malay Peninsula. You’ve mentioned colonialism already, but are there any other reasons why ancient India’s impact on the history of human civilisation has been overlooked? I do think that the number one reason is colonialism. Britain went to India, conquered it and dismissed it as a barbaric civilisation. And the attitude I mentioned earlier – reflected in Macaulay’s disregard for India’s cultural sophistication – lingered. But in addition, history itself has been split up. The spread of Buddhism, Sanskrit and Arab numerals are treated as separate stories by different academics and museums. China, on the other hand, has done a better job of advancing its version of history, especially the romantic idea of the Silk Road. Read more | The chaotic conquest of India In my view, the Silk Road as an east–west phenomenon didn’t really exist until the Mongols punched an enormous hole through Eurasia, connecting the Mediterranean to the sea off China. This then enabled the likes of Marco Polo to travel with a single passport. Before that, trade was more of a relay, with goods gradually moving from one merchant to the next, sometimes taking 100 years to reach places such as Rome or Antioch from China. The idea of a single, ancient road connecting east and west simply wasn’t based in fact. India, as shown by a new map of the distribution of Roman coin hoards just published by Professor Wilson, was the primary long-distance trading partner of the Roman empire. Rome had only an extremely vague under standing of the location of China. This changed in the 13th century when the Mongols created a hostile border with India, effectively snapping the Golden Road. Then, as Persian intellectuals fled the Mongols and settled in Delhi from around the 13th century onwards, the cultural landscape of India shifted from a Sanskrit-speaking world to a Persianate one. India is on track to become a 21st-century superpower. Is this region predisposed to be a geopolitical and cultural powerhouse? Yes. It’s a great civilisation, with several unique traits. China was largely a single political unit throughout most of its history, though there were periods like the Warring States [c475–221 BC] when it fragmented. India, by contrast, experienced brief moments of unity under the Guptas, Mauryas and Mughals, but mostly remained a cultural unit divided into many small political fragments. When Xuanzang arrived in India, he described it as a region of 70 states bounded by the ocean and the Himalayas. India doesn’t share China’s history of centralisation but has always had a strong sense of itself as a civilisation, a geographical unit and a spiritual centre, as evident in its earliest literature. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/J47ND1web-7dbd217-e1731335656408.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A painting of the monk Xuanzang, who went to India to copy Buddhist texts. Such travellers returning to medieval China increased awareness of India’s sophistication (Photo by The History Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="A painting of the monk Xuanzang, who went to India to copy Buddhist texts. Such travellers returning to medieval China increased awareness of India’s sophistication (Photo by The History Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> India, like Greece, has always been one of the places where humanity’s fundamental questions have been addressed: what are we doing here? Why are we here? How should we live? How do we count? How do we pray? What’s the point of life? Over half of the world’s population today lives in countries that were influenced by Indian religion and philosophy, including China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia and Siberia. Despite this, the European perspective on civilisation overwhelmingly focuses on ancient Greece, overlooking India’s contributions. As far as we do know about India, we tend to know about the Mughals or the British in India. We don’t learn in our schools about the civilisations of ancient India. This book aims to correct that omission, placing India back at the centre of global history. India has almost always been one of the world’s richest areas, alternating with China as the wealthiest. By the end of this century, India is expected to be one of the three largest economies, alongside the US and China. And it’s time we learned this stuff. We need to know this stuff. It’s a whole chapter of high civilisation that colonialism removed from the curriculum – and it’s time to put it back. William Dalrymple is a historian, broadcaster, writer and cultural critic. He is currently a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury, 2024) This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on the rise of a new world order
"The making of our new world began in China just over 40 years ago," writes historian Michael Wood
I’m looking out over the Eastern Mediterranean amid heat waves, migrant crises and the atrocious wars in Gaza and Ukraine. One hundred years ago the British empire was at its height. Fifty years ago we were living under the American hegemony. Now the world order that emerged after the Second World War – economic, political and cultural – is shifting, dissolving like a giant kaleidoscope, and a new picture is taking shape. It’s ‘the great global rebalancing’, as diplomat and think-tanker Samir Puri calls it in his new book, Westlessness. It’s a good pun. The truth is the world has been getting increasingly ‘Westless’ for the last decade or two. The talk now is that although the US is still number one, a new order is arising, with a split between the Global North and Global South where the South no longer believes in the West’s hegemonial narrative and all that goes with it. In Beijing, smart thinkers now speak of US decline and China’s inexorable rise. President Xi Jinping says China’s new strength comes from the inherent greatness of Chinese civilisation, freed now from the Century of Humiliation, which stretched from the Opium Wars to 1949. Even in the movies, China bids to take over the world: no Hollywood film was in the box office top 10 in China in 2023. Read more | Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower? There are, of course, those in Britain who cling to the idea that the old narrative of Western imperialism still has credibility, and even moral force, but it seems to me they have lost the argument now. All empires deploy violence, all are extractive, all endorse cultural and racial supremacy. History has moved on. Till the 18th century the powerhouses of human history were the populous heartlands of humanity: China, India, Persia, Byzantium, Rome and the Muslim world. The rise of our modern world has its roots in what my old tutor Michael Wallace-Hadrill called the ‘Barbarian West’, when successive enlightenments, beginning with Charlemagne, shaped Western culture. After 1492 the balance of power tipped decisively with the discovery and conquest of the New World by small aggressive maritime powers on the western seaboard of Europe. Never before in history had an entire continent been taken over, its peoples killed or enslaved, its natural resources plundered. Since then we have seen what the historian John Roberts termed ‘the triumph of the West’, and new ways of seeing human society. Only 30 years ago Francis Fukuyama even argued we’d reached the ‘end of history’ – that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. I daresay Fukuyama is less idealistic now, given the challenges democracies face. The making of our new world began in China just over 40 years ago with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform and opening up, which now looks like one of the greatest events in history. China then was still an agricultural civilisation; now, on some readings, it has overtaken the US and is the largest economy with a fifth of the world’s GDP. Read more | Trading blows: Rana Mitter on the US-China Trade War But, to return to Westlessness, Puri’s argument is that in the next era we will no longer see one power dominating; we are seeing now the rise of a multi-polar world. Not that the US is going to fall away any time soon, but the world is becoming multi-centred. Power is moving to China, India, South Africa and Brazil – all members of the BRICS alliance of major developing countries. It was Jim O’Neill, then at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, who came up with the BRICS idea. I remember in 2007 asking him about the rise of India. It was inevitable, he said, that with their huge populations, India and China would rise to the top once they had acquired the technology that the West had once monopolised. The US will remain a great military and economic power for the foreseeable future, but the tectonic plates of history are rumbling. But of course the future pattern of history is conditioned now by the giant elephant in the room, climate change. Every week brings us new evidence that many scientific predictions have underestimated the speed of breakdown and its unforeseen effects. Still nothing really consequential is being done in terms of global action. We are now well into a time of disasters, burning forests and melting glaciers: societal breakdown and species extinction are already upon us. So what the next ‘triumph’ in the history of nation states and civilisations will look like, in the light of this stark existential threat, is a very big question indeed. This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "I wish that there was no need for specialist history months"
Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she questions why we celebrate diverse histories only at particular times in the UK – like Black History Month in October and South Asian Heritage Month in July and August – rather than all year round
South Asian Heritage Month (SAHM) is celebrated each year from 18 July to 17 August, although it is still a relatively new addition to the calendar. Incredibly, 2024 marked only its fourth edition. I well remember its inception. In 2017, the TV documentary My Family, Partition and Me aired on BBC One. One of its strands followed SAHM co-founder Binita Kane as she retraced the journey taken by her father, Bim Bhowmick, from East Pakistan – now Bangladesh – to India in 1947. It was a deeply affecting programme, and a transformative moment for her. Binita had grown up in Wales and had previously known little of her father’s history – the story of his migration across a border, but also of the devastating loss of family members during the partition of British India. After participating in that programme, she made it her mission (alongside her day job as a doctor) to make sure that no one else ever felt cheated of their history. I’ve watched how, in a short space of time since its launch, SAHM has gained momentum, its reach expanding from museums to blue-chip companies and media organisations as staff hold sessions on British south Asian history and culture. It is long overdue. First marked in 1987, UK Black History Month is now well established, particularly in schools. That is not the case for SAHM. It’s not helped by the fact that the designated month runs from mid-July to mid-August – timed to coincide with the anniversary of India’s independence from British colonial rule on 15 August 1947, and the creation of India and Pakistan, but outside the school term. The 2021 census revealed that British Asians are the largest ethnic minority group in Britain. Yet we are only now starting to understand British south Asian history more widely, let alone its complex nature. Rather than one homogeneous subject, it encompasses various south Asian countries, regional histories and socio-economic factors affecting different populations in Britain in different ways over the years. South Asians have had a presence in the UK since as early as 1600. Rozina Visram’s seminal 2002 book Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History tells this longer history, beginning with the early settlers brought to Britain as employees of the East India Company, which was granted a royal charter by Elizabeth I. The first arrivals were mostly servants but also lascars – seamen who came to ports such as Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool and London. Exploring these histories is important. I wish, though, that there were no need for ‘months’. It would be better if British black and south Asian history simply became part of talking about British history. So, when learning about the Suffragette movement, we would hear about the significant contribution of Sophia Duleep Singh (1876–1948). When teaching working-class history, we would share the story of Shapurji Saklatvala, MP for Battersea, who spoke out passionately on behalf of those living in poverty in the interwar years. And when exploring Second World War history we would encounter the story of Noor Inayat Khan, who was sent from London to work as a secret agent with the French resistance before being captured by the Gestapo and executed in September 1944. These are part of wider British history, not only British south Asian history. On her mantlepiece in Manchester, Binita Kane keeps a vial containing soil from east Bengal, where her father was born as a subject of the Raj. He later migrated to Britain, where he worked for many decades as a doctor in the NHS. His story embodies the point that the history of Britain and south Asia is long and intertwined. It is time we better understood this shared history, not least because it helps us comprehend contemporary Britain. And it would be nice if this focus wasn’t limited to just one month each year. This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
War and pieces: 5 games from history that were about much more than fun
Far from idle pursuits, games have transformed the way societies have made sense of life and death, order and conflict for centuries. Kelly Clancy picks five examples that reveal how playtime has often been a serious business
Games are among our most enduring cultural technologies. They persist, in part, because they’re a way for our brains to serve themselves pleasure for free. The Greek historian Herodotus, for instance, wrote about the Lydian people, who reportedly suffered an 18-year famine. He claimed they alternated between eating food one day and playing games the next – play, in other words, lessened the sting of hunger. But games aren’t just fun: they are also essential education. Animals play to practise for the serious demands of adulthood: kittens chase yarn to drill hunting skills, and young kangaroos rough-house to prepare to box their way up the social hierarchy as adults. Read more | Ancient board games: which ones did people play for fun in the past? With the invention of games, humans brought play into the realm of thought, because games exercise various mental functions. Games are especially crucial for developing social skills. Plato believed they were the foundation of civic education, arguing that children who learned to follow game rules would grow up to be law-abiding citizens. And Plato wasn’t alone: scholars across history have lauded games for a range of educational virtues. As a result, people often endowed games with cultural principles they hoped to transmit to future generations. Games are messages from the past, and can reveal the values and beliefs of the people who play them. Senet, ancient Egypt The ancient board game that served as a map for players to pass to the afterlife Senet – likely the ancestor of backgammon – is one of the world’s oldest known board games. It originated in ancient Egypt in around 3100 BC as mammoths still roamed Siberia’s Wrangel Island, hieroglyphic writing was just emerging, and camels were first being domesticated. Senet means ‘passing’, possibly referring to the game’s race-like mechanic: players vied to be the first to move all their pieces across the board by casting sticks or knuckle bones. In the earliest known record of trash talk, a senet player depicted in the tomb of Pepyankh in Egypt brags: “You speak as one weak of tongue, for passing is mine.” Though its origins were secular, senet came, over time, to serve as a map for the soul’s journey after death. It makes several appearances in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of magic spells inscribed inside coffins to help souls successfully navigate the netherworld. Read more | Guidebook to the Ancient Egyptian afterlife Certain squares on the board became associated with landmarks and obstacles in the afterlife. Landing on square 27, denoted with the hieroglyphic for the ‘waters of chaos’, sent players back to 15, ‘the house of rebirth’. Before exiting the board, pieces had to land on 26, ‘the house of happiness’ – the mummification chamber. Mummification was thought to help souls recognise their corpses, the doorway to the afterlife. Although it was prohibitively expensive for many Egyptians, personal senet boards, found buried in many graves, were another way a soul might recognise its former body. As such, senet democratised access to the immortal realm, serving as an accessible map of life after death. The Mesoamerican ballgame, the Americas A dangerous, sometimes fatal, ball game that may have helped rulers avoid conflict More of a family of games than an individual sport, the Mesoamerican ballgame – as it’s widely known – likely arose around 3,700 years ago in what’s now Mexico. It remained vital for millennia among the Olmec, Maya and Aztec people. Some experts suggest it helped maintain and cohere those cultures because they used it as a proxy for war. Players from opposing teams worked to keep a heavy rubber ball in the air, sometimes using sticks but most often using their hips. Points were scored by bringing the ball to the opposite end of the court, and lost if it hit the ground twice before it could be returned to the other team. A player automatically won the game for their team if they put the ball through one of the prohibitively tall hoops that lined the court. The ball weighed up to four kilograms, so players were frequently bruised and bloodied despite wearing heavy padding. Spanish accounts note players dying after the ball hit them in the head or stomach. Injuries weren’t the only danger: in some cases, play involved ritual sacrifice, and losing teams were decapitated. Read more | Q&A: Why and how did the Aztecs practise human sacrifice? In the Mayan creation myth Popul Vuh, human heroes play against the gods of the underworld, signifying the battle between life and death. However, the game had more than symbolic significance. Players were often important political figures, and their gaming victories may have legitimised their rise to power. Ancient Olmec art is best known for its colossal basalt heads, which are thought to be portraits of kings equipped in the regalia of ball players. Remarkably, the game may have been partly responsible for the rise and maintenance of these complex societies because it offered leaders a more peaceful way to settle disputes than costly and destructive wars. Ball courts were particularly prevalent in hotly contested areas with many border disputes. Other pre-Columbian American games, like chunkey and lacrosse, are also thought to have been peaceful ways to resolve conflicts. Indeed, some scholars argue that lacrosse was vital for maintaining peace among the Six Nations of the Iroquois. Chess, India An Indian stroke of genius honed the minds of medieval princes and early computers alike Chess is the most popular board game in history, originating in sixth-century India as a battle simulation game. In its earliest incarnation, it was known as chaturanga, or ‘four-limbed’, referring to four ancient divisions of the Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry. As the game percolated west, these pieces became the pawns, knights, bishops, and rooks familiar to European players. What was once a vizier piece came to be replaced by a more dynamic queen, influenced by the rise of powerful queens in Europe. Persian players would exclaim Shāh Māt (‘the king is helpless’), which, adopted into English, became ‘checkmate’. Chess is the first known game in which different pieces possess different powers, like the military regiments on which they were modelled. Writers have long celebrated chess for honing its players’ strategic skills and clarifying their thinking. Read more | From chess to hula hoops: the top 10 toys from history The game featured heavily in ‘mirrors for princes’, a genre of books on manners popular in India, Persia and Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Playing chess was like looking into a mirror, revealing players’ strengths and weaknesses to themselves. The 10th-century Abbasid scholar al-Masudi detailed how chess was used to train military strategy and mathematics. In fact, chess is so heavily associated with intellect that early computer pioneers took it up as a training ground for developing artificial intelligence. In 1950, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, claimed that chess was an ideal problem for computers because it was discrete, and “generally considered to require ‘thinking’ for skilful play”. In their quest to teach machines to play chess and other games, researchers pioneered countless computing innovations and laid the groundwork for the striking capabilities of today’s machine learning systems. The philosopher’s game, Europe The medieval mathematical board game that reflected shifting views of the universe Beginning around the 11th century, rithmomachia, or ‘the philosopher’s game’, became central to higher education in Europe. The game was thought to represent, in aesthetic form, the formal number theory of Greek polymath Pythagoras. It was a favourite pastime of monks, because church leaders believed it had an enlightening quality. Ovid hailed it as “the leaf, flower and fruit of Arithmetic, and its glory, laud and honour”. Thomas More had the virtuous citizens of his 16th-century book Utopia play the edifying game of rithmomachia instead of morally corrosive games such as dice. Rithmomachia is similar to chess, and its different pieces move according to distinct rules. Like chess, players vie to capture opponent’s pieces. Unlike chess, each rithmomachia piece is inscribed with a number that dictates where and how pieces must be positioned to capture other pieces. For a ‘proper’ victory, the winner must arrange several of their pieces on their opponent’s side of the board in a mathematical progression – 2-4-8, for example. Pythagoras, who founded a mathematics cult that held a grip on European scholarship for more than a thousand years, proclaimed that “all is number”. Unfortunately, Pythagoras did not believe in all numbers: he instead held that rational numbers – whole numbers such as 1, 2, 3, and simple fractions such as 1/2 – were the foundation of the universe. Read more | Digital revolution: the evolution of Hindu-Arabic numerals His cult so esteemed rational numbers that they tried to cover up the existence of irrational numbers (non-repeating decimals, including pi) – reportedly assassinating the Greek philosopher Hippasus, who had stumbled on their existence. This myopic focus on rational numbers set back European scholarship by hundreds of years. Yet by the 17th century, new techniques borrowed from India and Persia had reinvigorated European mathematics, and rithmomachia’s popularity waned as Pythagoras’s ideas fell out of favour. Kriegsspiel, Europe The war games that allowed strategists to devise miniature melees to plot a conflict’s outcome Kriegsspiel, or ‘war game’, changed the face of modern Europe. Starting in the 18th century, German military strategists tinkered with chess – which was itself an abstraction of war – to create a more realistic military planning tool. Inspired by the success of the scientific method in so many other fields at the time, they hoped to recast war as a science. Using the game they devised, Kriegsspiel, new strategies could be tested and workshopped. Designers first expanded the chess board to thousands of squares, colour-coded to represent different terrains. Eventually, as map-making technology improved, the game was played on scaled maps of actual battlefields, which allowed officers to plan their real campaigns in minute detail. Each turn represented two minutes of warfare, and wooden block troops were constrained to move a realistic distance in that time. Umpires consulted casualty tables based on actual battle data to predict each simulated action’s effects. Dice throws randomised the damage from each ersatz attack. The result was a remarkably accurate prediction engine, which German officers used to cohere the first German empire in the late 19th century. General Karl Kraft, one of the most eminent strategists of that era, wrote: “The ability to quickly arrive at decisions and the cheerful assumption of responsibility which characterised our officers in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 was in no small measure due to the war games.” Read more | La débâcle! The aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War General Helmuth von Moltke, meanwhile, used Kriegsspiel to rethink traditional wisdom, too: its bird’s-eye view, for instance, inspired him to abandon column-and-line troop formations, which made soldiers easy targets, in favour of unstructured formations. Today, most major militaries still use some form of game simulation in their training and planning. The pacifist writer HG Wells published a simple tabletop war game, called Little Wars, in 1913 in the hope that playing at war and witnessing its horrors in miniature would inoculate people against it. Little Wars gave rise to a new family of tabletop war games, eventually evolving into Dungeons and Dragons and countless popular role-playing video games. War games have also informed modern policy. Every outcome of Proud Prophet, a nuclear war simulation game played by top US officials in 1983, was so harrowing that the exercise convinced the Ronald Reagan administration to open arms control negotiations with the Soviets. Read more | 8 of the best historical board games for history lovers Kelly Clancy is a neuroscientist, physicist and author of Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World (Allen Lane, 2024) This article was first published in the July 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Diya Gupta explores the emotional responses of Indian soldiers and civilians to the Second World War
Around 2.5 million Indian soldiers fought in the Second World War. Behind this staggering number lies a complex web of emotional experiences – and Diya Gupta unpicks that tangled web in her new book, India in the Second World War: An Emotional History. Diya speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about how both Indian soldiers and civilians back home felt about the war, and how the conflict impacted on their lives. View Green Video on the source website
“The nation is a very novel idea, and imposing it on millions of people is hard work” | Joya Chatterji on south Asia in the 20th century
Joya Chatterji talks to Matt Elton about her book, Shadows at Noon, charting the tumultuous course of south Asia’s 20th-century, including the violence that followed the creation of three new countries after the withdrawal of the British empire, and the legacy of partition
Your book Shadows at Noon covers what you describe as “the South Asian 20th century”. What do you mean by that term? I focus on the area ruled by the former British Raj, formally or informally. I think of there being a kind of united south Asia in which glimmers of the British empire (and the social structures that predated it) could still be made out throughout the latter half of the 20th century – long after the British themselves had left. I’m also keen to push back against the idea that the history of India, Pakistan or Bangladesh can be understood independently of that of the others. They’re too intertwined. It just wasn’t the case that they were all somehow born entirely anew after the partition in 1947 or 1971. In trying to understand the processes by which they were fashioned, and the effort that was put into trying to create new nations and new citizens so apparently different from each other, we can also see much about the parallels and the commonalities. One of the landmark political moments in this history is the 1947 Partition of India. Do you think that it is misunderstood outside south Asia? The level of ignorance is quite astonishing – even in Britain, where you might expect a greater awareness because of its close involvement in the event, not least by British prime minister Clement Attlee and [last Viceroy of India] Lord Louis Mountbatten. Of course, that’s partly because many partition migrants haven’t told their stories, so we’re missing out on a fully layered version of what happened – although this has begun to change. What do you mean when you write that Pakistan was formed almost entirely by refugees? Muhammad Ali Jinnah [Pakistan’s founder and first head of state] was a refugee, as was Liaquat Ali Khan, his right-hand man and Pakistan’s first prime minister. In fact, the core leadership of the Muslim League [the Indian political party campaigning for Muslim interests in the first half of the 20th century] all came from the United Provinces – roughly the region encompassed by the modern Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. So these men, who had such an influence on the creation of Muslim Pakistan, came from this north Indian cultural and literary world. They had a certain idea of how to write, how to comport themselves, and how to carry themselves. They knew Shakespeare and Yeats, and [Indian poets] Mirza Ghalib and Altaf Hussain Hali, and were part of a group dense with culture and education. They quite naturally and seamlessly moved into positions of leadership, and regarded the people of the regions that become Pakistan as a bit earthy, a bit ‘less’ than they were – they were kind of snooty about them. So there was always a tension between the Urdu-speaking elite, who began to control the new Pakistan’s bureaucracy and many private businesses, and provincial political leaders who asked: “Who the hell are you? We’ve been here long before you were.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/07/0231008webready-9f05536.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi meet in 1944 to discuss the independence and partition of India. Three years later, both ideas became reality (Photo by Dinodia/TopFoto)" title="Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi meet in 1944 to discuss the independence and partition of India. Three years later, both ideas became reality (Photo by Dinodia/TopFoto)" /> Pakistan has a very tense origin story. In India, though, the refugee influx did not have quite the same effect because, even though refugee numbers were pretty much the same across the Punjab, what remained of India after partition was so much larger and could therefore more easily absorb all those refugees into the state. Having said that, signs of those divisions and tensions are still evident in India today. In Delhi I live next to an urban village, created when people were squeezed out of areas that were formerly agrarian communities; new refugee settlements had cropped up where they had once farmed. Delhi is a prime refugee city: its language has become Punjabi, even though the school syllabus is in Hindi. We Dilli-wallas [people of Delhi] all understand Punjabi, because that was the language of the refugees. You write that, following partition, people in the new nations had sky-high expectations of their new freedoms. Was there a real sense that this was a time of new opportunity? Absolutely. There were many disparate nationalist movements across south Asia during the early decades of the 20th century – violent, non-violent, religiously inclined, secular – but each one had a utopian element, and a belief that, after independence, everything was going to be just fine for everyone. But when the new states were born, there were absolutely catastrophic conditions. Living through the partition aggravated an already serious problem of poverty because it divided the surplus-food-growing regions, which went to Pakistan, from the rest of India. This deprived Pakistani peasants (as they suddenly had become) of their markets, and Indian consumers of their main staples, wheat and rice. The length and depth of the nationalist tradition meant that the resulting pressure on the political system was enormous. People had really felt that something new was going to be born, that some wonderful dawn was going to break – but of course nothing of the sort ever transpired. All that happened was that one flag came down and another went up. The resulting disillusionment with the state has become a big factor in the emergence of what we could term the politicised public and cynicism towards the state. One of your key arguments is that, despite multi-generational efforts to make inhabitants of these new states feel different from their neighbours, they are more alike than is sometimes allowed for. Can you expand on that? The discourse surrounding the enmity between these states is strong, as is the idea that their fundaments could not be more different – particularly during the years of Nehruvianism [the postcolonial vision of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister 1947–64]. There was a common view among Indians at that time that Indians were secular, and embraced unity and diversity, whereas Pakistan was a religious state. In many ways, that was nonsense: early Pakistan was rather liberal and, before the 1971 partition that created Bangladesh, had a much larger minority non-Muslim population that it had undertaken to protect. But people in India were fed those stories so often and in so many ways that they largely didn’t challenge them. Of course, many people in each country came from ‘the other side’, and remembered people who still lived there. Until their dying day, a refugee might not understand why they suddenly needed a visa to travel to what they regarded as their home. Their personal identity no longer matched with where they were allowed to live. So this is in many ways a very complicated, tragic story. To what extent were the events of 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh inevitable because of the way Pakistan had been formed in 1947? I don’t think that anything in history is inevitable. I certainly don’t think that what happened in 1947 was inevitable. The lines that Cyril Radcliffe [the British lawyer who headed the boundary committees tasked with determining the new borders] drew up to divide India and Pakistan, for instance, were peculiar in themselves. Nobody could have predicted the form that Bangladesh [whose border with India is still marked by Radcliffe’s lines] took, nor its size, nor the fact that it would dominate the population of post-partition Pakistan. But once the cookie started crumbling that way, there was always going to be a problem. The result of partition was that one region of Pakistan [East] spoke a different language – Bengali – from the other, and had a large Hindu minority, plus a weak, porous border with India. It also had a strange relationship with the Muslim League and its Urdu-speaking elite. There was an incursion of Urdu-speaking people into East Pakistan, taking a lot of the plum jobs in the administration, so there was a degree of tension from the start. Some steps were taken to alleviate it, but I think it was always too little, too late. I’m Bengali, so perhaps I’m seeing it too much from the Bangladeshi point of view. But it seems to me that there was a kind of wilful blindness in the administration, unable to acknowledge this majority and the need to respect it, so a day of reckoning was always going to come – and when it did, it came in rivers of blood. I didn’t write about the civil war in the book, because it was so ghastly that I just didn’t have the words to describe it. Pretty much every household in Bangladesh suffered death, lost land to looting, and so on. It was a total war on society, by armed forces run amok – just unbelievably brutal. After the creation of Bangladesh, a second genocide took place, this time against people who did not speak Bengali. They were described, inaccurately, as ‘Urdu-speakers’. Every wave of nation-making has generated a rise of hatred for ‘the enemy within’; in this respect, Bangladesh was no exception. But in other respects it has followed its own path, particularly on ‘development’. After the disastrous famine of 1974–75, and the assassination in 1975 of the first prime minister, Mujibur Rahman, non-government organisations [NGOs] took the lead in developing Bangladeshi society from below. These groups, unlike the planners across the border, don’t hector the poor about what is best for them, and they don’t treat citizens as children. They work instead with village-dwellers who have their own ideas about what might help. So my suggestion is that the history of Bangladesh is not (or not only) that of its warring parties. You argue that understanding why states fail to control people is crucial to understanding the history of the state in south Asia, in both the colonial and post-colonial period. Why? The south Asian state has, historically speaking, controlled some people with spectacular cruelty some of the time, and completely failed to manage people at other times. Those choices are interesting. The state, generally speaking, has turned a blind eye to social crimes. It has not attempted to control what happens in the family or in the household, turning a blind eye to men killing or beating their female relatives, or to conditions of bondage or ‘gentle slavery’. The reasons for this were essentially the same during and after colonialism: first, that the state has never had the capacity to tackle the problem, and second, because it is afraid of intruding into dimensions seen as being dictated by religious belief, or local systems of control. So whole aspects of social crime and oppression are seen as the domain of local patriarchs and powerful landowners, rather than central government. What the state is interested in is any potential challenge to the state itself – then it comes down really hard. Insurgency, wherever it has taken place, has been crushed with as much force as possible. In many ways, the authorities in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have used the same baton as the British empire – though in many cases even more violently. You also take a wider, thematic look at South Asia’s past, and one of those themes is food. Why did you focus on that? I chose it because hunger – actually, not just hunger, but starvation – was a potent cause of anti-British sentiment from the late 19th century onward. The famines of the late Victorian era represented the common ground between every nationalist project: everyone believed that sorting out the issue of food was an incredibly important priority. The immediate cause of those famines was usually drought caused by inadequate or untimely rainfall. But the wider cause was over-taxation of the peasantry, and a tax burden that left them no capacity to save in a good year and no means for surviving in years of drought. Famine was widespread but, in the era the book looks at, it fell particularly hard on southern, central and western India. A modest estimate is that some 15 million people died in consequence of a spate of famines between 1886 and 1900. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/07/GettyImages-964859814webready-6ba742a.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Thousands wait for food in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in 1877, during one of a series of famines that killed millions across India. Though drought was a major factor, over-taxation was the wider cause (Photo by A.T.W. Penn/Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images)" title="Thousands wait for food in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in 1877, during one of a series of famines that killed millions across India. Though drought was a major factor, over-taxation was the wider cause (Photo by A.T.W. Penn/Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images)" /> This precariousness of life, the loaded meanings of food, and the many inequities – within society and family – in the doling out of such food, made this a necessary topic in a book of this sort. But I also wanted to look at food in terms of its relationship with caste, which is a subject you have to explore if you want to write about south Asia. It’s striking that the main demands of south Asian people on both sides of the new borders were bread, clothing and a hut. Those were their basic expectations – and, in the main, they got none of them. So I wanted to trace the history behind why food became such a charged issue, and to illuminate the complicated system of ideas around it. In south Asia, food is not just food, but is tied into a tightly woven network of belonging, status pride and revulsion. Finally, I wanted to push back against the widespread oversimplification of the subject. There’s no such thing as an ‘Indian diet’, for instance. The processes of modernity and globalisation make everyone all around the world eat in more diverse ways but, even historically speaking, people in India ate a diverse array of food according to what was available in their environment. So there were lots of concepts surrounding food that I wanted to take apart, because if you don’t understand the topic, you can’t understand why south Asia today is still so peculiar about food, or why there is so much waste in a land of hungry people. Food is a key marker of caste, you see. ‘Interdining’ groups – made up of people from the same caste, or sub-caste, of which there are thousands – believe themselves to share status, and in most cases that they are better than those ‘beneath’ them. Upward mobility is registered through adopting new ‘higher status’ food practices, such as giving up meat. What happens to those of ‘low status’? Well, the book shows that, too. It shows the contradictions in ‘the system’, but does not spare the reader from its most harrowing details. Another aspect of culture you write about is wrestling. What led to your decision to include that sport rather than cricket? I love cricket, but South Asia’s love affair with that sport is well known, and people are probably less aware of the extent to which wrestling has been a South Asian phenomenon. I also wanted to focus on wrestling because – unlike cricket, which began very much as a sport of the elites – it was and remains the pastime of the common person. Even South Asians such as myself, who live in a bubble of books and paintings and films, may be unaware that this obsession even exists. So I hope that when, for instance, readers now watch an Indian movie featuring a big fight scene, they will have an awareness that what they’re watching originates from this historical love of wrestling that’s shared throughout Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Are there other events in this story that readers may not be aware of? One of the types of event that has occurred repeatedly in south Asia is political assassination. My book features a section of images of people who were assassinated – and, let me tell you, it’s very long. From Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 to Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, the sheer number of ‘founding fathers’ and strong leaders who have been killed is astounding, and the theme is even more striking if we consider it from a border-crossing perspective. It’s caused a huge amount of instability. What key myths or misconceptions about the south Asian 20th century would you like your book to correct? The fundamental one is the idea that political projects such as nation making can ever be totally successful. There’s always going to be what I’d call some leakage at the edges, where people question the ideas and values behind these new nations. Even in Britain, with its diverse population from a whole range of backgrounds, we can see how complicated it is. The nation is a very novel idea, historically speaking – and imposing it on millions of people is hard work. Joya Chatterji is emeritus professor in the history of modern south Asia at the University of Cambridge, and author of Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (Bodley Head, 2023) This article was first published in the August 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
“Humans are a marvel of ingenuity, yet we seem to exist in this great pond of primitive terror and paranoia”: Simon Schama on pandemics and vaccines
For centuries, scientists have striven to combat a whole host of infectious diseases. Yet, as Simon Schama explains in his new book, Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations, they have often met with considerable opposition
Q: You write in your new book that you are acutely conscious of being a newcomer to medical and scientific history. What drew you to this subject? It won’t surprise anybody to learn that the pandemic played a large role. I thought: if there’s a moment when nationalism needs to be set aside for the common good, it’s now, when people need to share vaccines. I was quickly disabused, of course, by nations leapfrogging over each other to secure supplies of vaccines in advance. But that disappointing moment led me, via the World Health Organization’s website, to the International Sanitary Conferences held from the mid-19th century, which were the first example of international organisation outside religious institutions, military alliances or peace conferences. On the podcast | Simon Schama discusses how scientific ingenuity and the fear of contagion combined to produce life-saving vaccines This, suddenly, felt very much like the right subject for a book. My wife is a biologist, so I asked her: “Is this ridiculous? Will I perish with a terminal case of imposter syndrome?” But she encouraged me. I think something happens when you’re a really old geezer, too: you either want to escape completely into a hobby – Byzantine coinage in the 11th century, perhaps – or, if you’re like me, you only want to do history with an immediate link to what’s happening right now. The first section of your book focuses on the fight against smallpox. How disruptive was that disease at its peak in Europe? It was extraordinarily contagious and apocalyptically terrifying. It ran amok in crowded urban environments, killing as many as one in three people who contracted it. Plague had been even more frightening in the late Middle Ages and 17th century, but had somewhat retreated by the early 18th century, so people had been lulled into a false sense of security. Within 100 years, fortunately, there was a great breakthrough against smallpox with the first mass inoculation campaign. It seemed such a counterintuitive thing to do: put inside your body the very thing responsible for so many deaths. This benevolent self-poisoning was an astonishing psychological barrier, and it’s still amazing to me that people have eventually come to accept it in such large numbers. What were the key factors in persuading people that inoculation was a good thing? It helped – in Britain, in particular – that the royal family was converted. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople, had survived a terrifying attack of smallpox herself, and had also heard stories of women escaping death from the disease. Her curiosity led her to believe that the process of inoculation – taking pus from a smallpox victim and pre-emptively injecting it into yourself – would save you. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/KFGFYRwebready-399d437.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, seen in a portrait by Godfrey Kneller, advocated inoculation against smallpox, including to the queen Caroline of Ansbach (Photo by GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, seen in a portrait by Godfrey Kneller, advocated inoculation against smallpox, including to the queen Caroline of Ansbach (Photo by GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> She was a born publicist with lots of important social and literary connections and, when she came back to Britain in 1718, she converted Caroline of Ansbach, the Princess of Wales, to her cause. Smallpox was a real worry among the royal dynasties of the time, because it was mowing down princes and empresses around Europe. Then, because the royal family was doing it, the press started reporting what was happening. Read more | Mary Wortley Montagu: the scourge of smallpox There was, of course, committed opposition – particularly from clerics, some of whom preached that inoculation was interfering with God’s judgment. But by the 1720s, the cause had been taken up by various doctors and had become more than a mere fashion. One of the figures in my book is Thomas Nettleton, a doctor in Halifax who inoculated as many people as he could in the area. Crucially, such individuals sent their results to the Royal Society, which collected the data – that struck me as very modern. Your book profiles a series of remarkable individuals such as Mary Wortley Montagu. But are there wider cultural forces at play, too? The 18th century was a very interesting moment in the relationship between science and religion. I think the extent to which the period was non-religious is sometimes overstated, because the rise of evangelical faith was a very important aspect of the century. However, it’s true to say that facing pandemic after pandemic had weakened people’s willingness to be passive in the face of ‘divine judgment’. There was a growing belief that science and human ingenuity might be able to do what God seemed indifferent to or incapable of doing. So this was a real sea-change moment. Read more | "An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in 18th-century Britain You also explore the 19th-century spread of cholera. What was its impact? Cholera was pretty unknown in Europe until the early 19th century so, again, people were unprepared for this horrifying disease. If you caught it, you quickly died a very unpleasant death, losing all of your bodily fluids. One of the paradoxes that runs through my book is the fact that the key aspects of progress that brought power and wealth and happiness to people in Europe and the west – new forms of transport and extensive travel networks – also created the ideal conditions for pathogens to spread and flourish. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/GettyImages-815688322webready-2c68649.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A Court for King Cholera, a cartoon published in Punch in 1852, depicting the kind of conditions where this disease thrived (Photo by Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="A Court for King Cholera, a cartoon published in Punch in 1852, depicting the kind of conditions where this disease thrived (Photo by Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> After London doctor John Snow determined that a water pump dispensing faecally contaminated water in Broad Street (now Broadwick Street, Soho) was the epicentre of a major cholera outbreak in London – and therefore that cholera was a water-borne disease – it seemed that cleaning up water sources would solve the problem. In fact, people in trains or horse-drawn carriages might invisibly soil the upholstery, putting the next person to use the carriage at risk of catching cholera. So the conditions that brought economic prosperity and interconnectedness and commercial progress were also increasing the likelihood of spreading terrifying infectious diseases. It was only when the cholera bacillus was discovered in the 19th century that scientists realised how disastrously and speedily the bacillus itself could travel. One particularly intriguing character in your book is Adrien Proust. How important was his work? Adrien Proust – father of renowned author Marcel – was a doctor who became a key figure at the International Sanitary Conferences. He promoted the idea that it wouldn’t be possible to get to grips with cholera without imposing a lockdown or serious quarantine on particularly vulnerable areas. He believed that some kind of international public health organisation was needed – an idea that sowed the seeds of what later became the World Health Organization. Read more | Victorian medicine: why the 19th century was a time of seismic medical change So he had a far-sighted and benevolent side, but was also classically imperialist and defensive: his primary concern was to prevent cholera coming to western Europe, so he called for a cordon sanitaire against its spread from Asia. One of his specific concerns was about the Hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca. That’s not because it was a Muslim or Asian thing – it wasn’t simple prejudice – but because the Hajj involved hundreds of thousands of people lodging together in tight quarters on small boats with no sanitary provisions, which was a paradise for microbial reproduction. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/GettyImages-1426055410webready-f69806d.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A 19th-century portrait of Adrien Proust. The French epidemiologist’s ideas seeded the creation of the World Health Organization (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)" title="A 19th-century portrait of Adrien Proust. The French epidemiologist’s ideas seeded the creation of the World Health Organization (Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images)" /> There were two huge problems with taking this tack. One was that the British empire was, in the middle of the 19th century, beginning to make a huge amount of money from its Indian enterprise. So the British didn’t want to stop traffic coming through the Suez Canal, and were the last to accept the science about cholera transmission and germ theory. They maintained that it wasn’t a contagious disease, so could be resolved by local disinfection with no need to interrupt the empire’s international trade routes. On the podcast | Humans throughout history have faced a scourge of infectious illnesses. Kyle Harper discusses how diseases have shaped our past The other problem was that the Indian uprising of the late 1850s had a very strong religious element, so the British were, quite rightly, nervous about interrupting the pilgrimage to Mecca, which might light a tinderbox of insurrection that could bring down British imperial presence not just in India but across the region. So the science had to pass a test of political acceptability – as it still does. How much is that relationship between science and politics a recurring theme? One would love to think that science could be accepted as non-ideological, as disinterested in politics, even when it leads to inconveniences such as lockdowns, the shutting down of trade routes and so on. But that’s not the case, even today. You can see the attitude forming in those 19th-century dialogues, in which science was somehow held to be – hence the title of my book, Foreign Bodies – an alien thing: that it belonged to international organisations of elite scientists who might have suspicious motives. At the sad core of my book is this extraordinary paradox: we celebrate and marvel at the extraordinariness of human ingenuity and the speed at which science can achieve practical results, while the most irrational and feverishly prejudiced biases and suspicions about that ingenuity endure. So what enlightened minds of the 18th century thought would happen – that, one day, knowledge itself would be responsible for eliminating sickness and ignorance and poverty – never came about. There seems to be something hardwired into our shared cultures, from one end of the world to the other, that wants to resist that development – to see science as some sort of plot. Another pivotal figure in your book is Waldemar Haffkine. Can you briefly introduce him and his work? Waldemar Haffkine was an extraordinary figure: a Jew from Odessa who, in the second half of the 19th century, was running guns in an attempt to protect the Jewish community from pogroms. Odessa was one of those rare places in the Russian empire in which Jewish people were not trapped in a kind of Fiddler on the Roof world, and could enjoy a secular education. So Haffkine became a student at the new university in Odessa, where he was tutored by another extraordinary figure: the avant-garde microbiology professor Ilya Mechnikov. In 1889, Haffkine joined Mechnikov at the recently founded Pasteur Institute in Paris. There he was given the task of developing a vaccine against cholera. And, after a great struggle, he succeeded. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/defaultwebready-94fd752.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Rings chalked on a Bombay (Mumbai) house indicate plague victims during a 19th-century epidemic. A lab in the city headed by Waldemar Haffkine responded by producing vaccines on a huge scale (Photo by the Wellcome Collection)" title="Rings chalked on a Bombay (Mumbai) house indicate plague victims during a 19th-century epidemic. A lab in the city headed by Waldemar Haffkine responded by producing vaccines on a huge scale (Photo by the Wellcome Collection)" /> Cholera, at that point, was finally receding somewhat from Europe. So Haffkine decided that the only way he would be able to demonstrate the acceptability of a vaccine to the public was with a series of controlled experiments. He would recruit a cohort of subjects, half of whom would get inoculated and half of whom wouldn’t. At that time, the British ambassador in Paris was the Marquess of Dufferin, who’d been viceroy of India; he was also extraordinarily interested in the possibility of inoculation against cholera, so gave Haffkine the opportunity to work there. Read more | The race for a cure: how we found vaccines for 4 of history's most dangerous diseases When Haffkine reached India, he discovered that the medical service there did not want to know. They assumed that simply disinfecting contaminated water would combat the problem, and weren’t interested in learning about microbiology or germ theory, in understanding the deep science of how these organisms live and multiply, or in how disease can be contained. So Haffkine had very little support and even fewer funds. Despite such reticence from the local medical community, Haffkine set to work inoculating not just Europeans in India but also the poorest of the poor. He began with people in Calcutta’s slums, then trained Indian doctors in inoculation, explaining why and how to do it. This is an extraordinary untold chapter in imperial history, when a gun-running Ukrainian-Russian Jew from a laboratory in Paris was working in India. Haffkine became famous in Britain, where people such as Joseph Lister lauded him as a hero. In 1899, he began work in Bombay (now Mumbai) heading up the first mass production line of vaccines, against plague. The disease had returned in a major way, killing approximately 12 million people between the mid-1890s and early 1920s, mostly in India and China. Haffkine’s lab sent out tens of thousands of doses each day across India, saving huge numbers of people. Read more | 14 surprising facts about the history of medicine He was constantly dogged by suspicion and hostility in India, though, because this was the era of the Great Game [when the British and Russian empires vied for dominance in Asia]. Because of his Russian origins, he was often viewed as eccentric or suspicious, and even at one point thought of as being a spy. And then, in 1902, a tragic catastrophe occurred. In the tiny village of Mulkowal in Punjab, 19 people died of tetanus poisoning caused by one contaminated batch of plague vaccine. It was discovered much later that the contamination actually happened not at the Bombay production facility but in the village. A rubber stopper had been dropped on the ground – inoculations in rural districts often took place in fields, in the open air – but, rather than being passed through heat sterilisation, as Haffkine had insisted, it was simply swished around in a carbolic solution. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/06/2H441XMwebready-c6792be.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Waldemar Haffkine inoculates people against cholera in the Calcutta slums, 1894. In spite of his life-saving work, the Ukrainian-Russian Jew was dogged by suspicion and hostility (Photo by Well/BOT/Alamy Stock Photo)" title="Waldemar Haffkine inoculates people against cholera in the Calcutta slums, 1894. In spite of his life-saving work, the Ukrainian-Russian Jew was dogged by suspicion and hostility (Photo by Well/BOT/Alamy Stock Photo)" /> Blame was directed at Haffkine, who was suspended and then fired in disgrace. The viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, was beside himself with rage: he held Haffkine responsible for what he viewed as a disaster that had undermined the credibility of the British empire. This was a period, after all, in which the empire wanted to be seen as tough and strict and paternalistic but also interested in the physical welfare of its Indian subjects. Curzon went so far as to declare that Haffkine should be tried and hanged for his actions. There was, of course, a strong whiff of antisemitism surrounding this, although it wasn’t explicit. Haffkine tried to plead his case – giving lectures in Paris, writing to the great and the good – to no avail. Then another extraordinary figure, Ronald Ross – who had discovered that Anopheles mosquitoes transmitted the malaria parasite – launched a campaign that resulted in vindication for Haffkine, though not until 1907. Too late: his career and life had been ruined. How does that story reflect the wider issues of power and society at the time? It happened in an era of great pomp and circumstance – Elgar composing music, Kipling writing stories – but also at a moment when imperial authorities in India were beginning to feel the ground shift beneath their feet in ways that made them uneasy. They were concerned that the government, both in India and in the colonial office in London, should be seen to be doing things for the good of Indians themselves. And they were correspondingly eager to scapegoat someone or something – the someone being Haffkine, the something being the new science of microbiology – that had, as they saw it, rashly discarded the cult of disinfection. On the podcast | Gareth Williams explores efforts in history to combat lethal diseases, from smallpox to polio Cholera was constantly on their minds, but when plague came along – a disease that has nothing to do with contaminated water but everything to do with microorganisms living in fleas that bite and infect humans – a completely different mindset was needed to figure out what it was and how to deal with it. The authorities continued their policy of disinfection, however, tracking down any body suspected of showing symptoms and inspecting people as they stepped off trains. They tore down houses, burned furniture and clothing, and separated families – often impoverished families – taking children from parents and husbands from wives. Haffkine pointed out that none of this was doing any good. When you destroy a house, the rats simply leave – and the fleas leave on the rats, carrying with them the microorganisms, spreading plague rather than getting rid of it. The authorities, of course, did not want to listen, and Haffkine was regarded as committing a heresy against the accepted method for containing infectious disease. How would you like your book to change our view of our own pandemic moment and our relationship with the wider world? This book is a passionate statement on behalf of science. I referred earlier to the paradox in which we’re trapped: on the one hand, humans are a marvel of ingenuity and astonishing resourcefulness. Yet at the same time, we seem to exist in this great pond of primitive terror and paranoia and superstition. So I would love it if this book could act as an antidote to some of the mistrust and suspicion that surrounds science, and to the sense that scientists are involved in some kind of scheme that only benefits themselves. If this history moves the dial even a tiny bit through the stories it tells, then that will make an old geezer marginally happier. This article was first published in the July 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Why we should remember Direct Action Day
Historian Faisal Devi considers the large-scale violence on Direct Action Day that put India firmly on the path to partition…
On the morning of 16 August 1946, crowds of Muslims made their way to a park in central Calcutta (now Kolkata). They were gathering to observe Direct Action Day, called nationwide by the All-India Muslim League to protest what it saw as the abandonment of India’s Muslim minority by the British colonial government and the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress. The general strike and rallies planned were intended to imitate Congress’s tactics of mass protest but, while the day passed off peacefully elsewhere, in Calcutta large-scale violence broke out between Hindus and Muslims, resulting in thousands of deaths. These riots are seen as marking a turning point after which the country’s partition into India and Pakistan became inevitable. Earlier in the year, a British Cabinet Mission hoping to secure a unified post-independence India had proposed a plan for a weak central government to serve as a meeting point for groups of provinces representing Hindu and Muslim majorities. When Congress backtracked on its support for the plan, the League’s president, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, renounced constitutional methods and called for Direct Action Day. Recent scholarship has placed the killings in the context not of party politics or religion but war, famine and poverty. Calcutta hosted countless destitute migrants drawn by the promise of employment and food during the Bengal Famine, caused partly by the wartime requisition of grain, killing some 3 million in 1943. Thus the violence wasn’t indiscriminate but a reaction to the need for food and housing, leading to the looting of shops and provisions, and attacks on companies seen to be denying jobs to people based on religion. The disorder prompted other, sometimes more serious riots elsewhere, including in neighbouring Bihar province. Read more | Enduring trauma: Kavita Puri on the legacy of partition Though not entirely unprecedented – the country had witnessed smaller riots during the 1930s – the violence of Direct Action Day made tangible for the first time the possibility of civil war, which was forestalled only by the country’s hurried partition. This allowed Britain, as well as India and Pakistan, to present a more acceptable and self-congratulatory narrative about a peaceful transfer of power resulting in the successful achievement of independence. Faisal Devji is a professor of Indian history at the University of Oxford. His books include Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Harvard, 2013) Read more Why we should remember…? Why we should remember the translation of Anne Frank’s diary Why we should remember Target Zero Day Why we should remember the Amnesty Act of 1872 <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/05/GettyImages-515185532cmyk-63dcf68-e1690361399495.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt="A group of formerly enslaved African-Americans around the time of the US Civil War" title="A group of formerly enslaved African-Americans around the time of the US Civil War. The Amnesty Act removed prohibitions on political roles for many Southern rebels after the war. (Image by Getty Images)" /> This article first appeared in the August 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine