Indology Conference and Festival

This year, instead of our usual Pechu Kacheri, Tamil Heritage Trust will host an Indology conference, entirely online. The driving force for this conference is Dr Vilayanur Ramachandran, the famous neuroscientist, author of “Phantoms in the Brain”. Several years ago, Prof Swaminathan, Sri Kannan, Dr Sri Annamalai, Sri Badri Seshadri, Sri TK Ramachandran and others attended one of his lectures, at the end of which they decided to start Tamil Heritage Trust. Ramachandran gave a talk at THT on Art and the Brain a couple of years later. For the last four years he met us every December and tried to get this going. In January 2019 he announced it a THT lecture. Earlier this year, he announced it to a much larger audience at the Indian Science Festival, Pune, organized by Varun Agarwal of Aspiring Minds. We made plans for a conference in February, but the corona lockdowns convinced us that it wasn’t feasible this year. But several persuasive emails from Ramachandran, and a very forceful argument by Shyam Raman at one of our discussions, convinced us to conduct this and we are on!

Audience at Pechu kacheri on Pandyas December 2019

I hardly knew anything about Indology ten years back. The interest in Indian heritage kindled by Kalki, and enhanced by the lectures of Dr Chitra Madhavan and Prof Swaminathan, was sustained by the monthly lectures of THT, and enhanced by Site seminars. In fact, for most of the volunteers and organizers of THT, these were the entry points and stepping stones. One of our desires, especially for Prof Swaminathan, is that every city and town and village in India have such organizations like THT, interested in learning about India and its past, their own town or state or community and its history and culture, and so on. Quite a few such organizations exist all over India, started by Indians, but usually confined to certain fields – say  poetry, music, architecture, engineering, business, religion, politics, environment, food, social reform etc. The corona lockdown and the wide availability of Zoom, Google Meet etc, the free nature of social media like Whatsapp and Facebook in spreading messages and program notifications, the large number of domain experts who are eager and willing to share their knowledge has been a boon in this area.

For the last couple of centuries, Indology and associated subjects like archaeology, history, classical arts, etc have been the domain of academics, or a small class of people with either passion or leisure or both. Such a class is not elite by wealth, power or social status, as is quite common in most countries, including India, but by curiosity and eagerness.  The academic community worldwide and especially in India have a strong leftist bias (which bias is really barely a century old – religion dominated academia for millennia). For the last thirty years, there have been nationalistic and rightwing resurgences politically in many countries, and clearly so in India. Unable to capture academia, deeply skeptical of some of their leftist narrative, and fully availing of social media, different groups of rightwingers have challenged the narrative forced upon the public in textbooks and mainstream media. This has led to extreme factions in both groups, besides such extremely nonsensical but popular narratives like ancient aliens. Ramachandran’s vision, shared by Tamil Heritage Trust, is to look at the past and its meaning without such political filters, objectively. For that he believes, we need a new Indology Society, along the lines of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, established by Sir William Jones, is needed. And in his opinion THT is the foundation on which such a society can be built. “There are two people I admire, William Jones and Swaminathan,” stated Ramachandran. High praise, indeed!

Whether it is possible for anyone to have any opinion which conflicts with his or her political social economic or other such ideological prejudices, is not clear. But several attendees of our many programs have been quite delighted. Granted this is a small number. But their repeated patronage and attendance has been very encouraging. Our lectures during the lockdown have attracted an audience from all acorss India, not just Tamilnadu, and Tamils across the world. India Science Festival, based in Delhi, has expressed a desire to collaborate with us. Badri and I presented a lecture on Indian mathematics at their forum, in January. Swaminathan delivered a talk on Ajanta. Academics and professionals from across the world who attended these, and Ramachandran’s announcement of the society, endorsed and expressed a desire to participate. VS Ramachandran, Dr Rajesh Rao (one of the speakers at this Indology Fest) and I also participated in a panel discussion on Indian history and science. 

My real interest in some of the early history and discoveries of Indology was provoked by Charles Allen’s book Buddha and the Sahebs. The British and European scholars who created institutions to scientifically and systematically study Indology lit for not just the world, but for Indians as well, a lamp of knowledge, methodology, curiosity and aesthetic appreciation, that has been carried on a large number of people both Indians, and other nationals, which we hope to continue. I write this after having watched on television, the lamp lit at Tiruvannamalai earlier this evening, and an array of lamps lit in a million houses across my city and state on this night of Karthikai deepam. How delightfully apt!

Here is an letter in Tamil about this conference (இந்தியவியல் திருவிழா), written by J Ramki, published in writer Jayamohan’s website. Incidentally, Jayamohan was the inaugaral speaker of our first Pechu Kacheri in 2011.

I hope you attend the lectures of the Indology conference which we are celebrating like a festival. They will be online and available as recorded video also. The invitation, schedule and topics are in the THT website and also shown here. Please register in the website and spread the word.

 

Related Links

"VichitraChitta" Swaminathan

Art and the Brain - Notes from a lecture by VS Ramachandran

William Jones and Indology

இந்தியவியல் திருவிழா - Tamil Essay by J Ramki on the Indology festival 

மாமல்லபுரம் - 2016 பேச்சுக் கச்சேரி

காஞ்சி மகாமணி - 2017 பேச்சுக் கச்சேரி

நெடும் செழியர் கலைத் தென்றல் 2019 பேச்சுக் கச்சேரி

Ten books that influenced me

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My last few blog posts were about ten books that influenced me. This post is simply an index to the blog posts about these ten books

1. Garuda - Amar Chitra Katha
2. Noddy by Enid Blyton
3. Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
4. The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
5. Sivakaamiyin Sabatham by Kalki
6. Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection by Alfred Russel Wallace
7. Brhat Samhita by Varahamihira
8. Buddha and the Sahebs by Charles Allen
9. The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager
10. James Watt - a biography by Andrew Carnegie

Related Links

My blog posts on Literature

James Watt - 10 - Ten books that influenced me

Not only is this the first book I have read about James Watt, it is the first book I have HEARD OF about James Watt. And who is the author? One of the greatest steel magnates of the nineteenth century, one of the most amazing industrialists, perhaps the richest man of his time

Writing about one of the most transformational people in human history.

And I have never seen any book in a bookshop about either of them, or even any mention. I only stumbled on to this copy as a free version on Amazon Kindle(it is still free for download)

The story of James Watt and his improvement of the steam engine is far more fascinating than the cute legend we hear about Watt watching a kettle boil and being inspired to build a steam engine.

From Archimedes to Aristarchus, Baudhayana to Bodhidharma to Bhaskaracharya, Cai Lun to al Hazen, and Leonardo da Vinci to Isaac Newton, plenty of astoundingly brilliant people throughout history have watched water boil, (legend has it Bodhidharma was the first to boil tea itself)... but none of them invented a steam engine.

I first read in a casual browsing of a book about the history of science that Watt's great invention was the "external condenser", which vastly improved earlier steam engines made by Denis Papin, Thomas Newcomen etc. (That same week I also discovered why Edison was different from the others working on the electric

Carnegie wrote a marvelous biography, worthy of any professional writer. He maybe the best billionaire biographer the world has produced. He does mention the kettle story, but goes into the struggles Watt faced, his discovery of latent heat, a discussion with a friend, Prof Joseph Black, who had very recently discovered latent heat of steam himself, and Watt's marvelous tinkering and experiments and improvements and brilliant insight, which led to the external condenser, and made the steam engine useful and productive; and perhaps the most transformational device the world had seen since the discovery of glass and lenses a few centuries earlier. Far more impactful than the lens, though (not many scientists may agree - they seem to think the telescope deserves that honor).

The book also discusses how much Watt had to be a hands on person, because how hard it was for him to train others to understand his steam engine and operate it, and how sadly England suffered so depressingly from alcoholism, which probably retarded the Industrial revolution for a couple of decades at least.

I first read in a casual browsing of a book about the history of science that Watt's great invention was the "external condenser", which vastly improved earlier steam engines made by Denis Papin, Thomas Newcomen etc. (That same week I also discovered why Edison was different from the others working on the electric bulb, but that's another story).

But the fact that a biography of one of the greatest engineers was written by the richest man in the world; and a century later, the book is practically forgotten; seems astounding to me   - too much Ajivika, too much Wallace. So this is my choice.

Related Links

My essays on Literature

My essays on Inventors and Discoverers

Bill Gates review of a book on Steam engines

The Alchemy of Air - 9 - Ten books that influenced me

I picked up this book from the now defunct Landmark bookshop at Spencer’s, along with Darwin’s Armada by Iain McCalman. The latter book was extraordinarily delightful and informative, describing the ocean voyages of four scientists, all biologists. I knew about Darwin and Wallace (my blog is named after Wallace), their co-discovery of Natural Selection, and the great divergence in their fame and fortunes. I also knew a bit about Thomas Huxley, famously called Darwin’s Bulldog. But the book gave very detailed information about their backgrounds, their voyages, adventures, travails, mishaps, discoveries, surprises, collaborations, friendships, mutual admiration, Wallace falling out of favour; absolutely riveting stories of nineteenth century biology, some of which I knew.

Of Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, the heroes of Thomas Hager’s book, I knew nothing. My friend and high school chemistry teacher Mohan Krishnamurthy, says he spent a month teaching the Haber-Bosch process to his students, but I don’t remember reading it at all in school.

Or ever hearing about it. Anywhere.

I only vaguely knew that NKP, Nitrogen(N) Potassium(K) and Phosphorus(P) are important elements in fertilizers.

Hager’s book was eye opening in every single way. About agriculture, about chemistry, chemical engineering, about Germany, German industry, industrial espionage, guano, South America, the first and second world wars – I learnt so much about everyone of these areas. Along with Guns, Germs and Steel and Sivakamiyin Sabatham, I rank it the most informative in multiple domains that book I have read. A year or so later, I found his other book, The Demon under the Microscope, equally amazing, informative, and brilliantly narrated.

Hager talks about how vital nitrogen is to life – it is an essential element in every protein, in DNA, so in every plant and animal cell. But while Earth’s atmosphere is 80% nitrogen, it is in a form unusable except by a few microbes, or when it is transformed by lightning into usable nitrogen compounds. (This raises questions about evolution about which there are no books or any research that I have come across.)

The book starts with William Crookes’ challenge to the world’s scientists, to solve the Malthusian threat of famine to a growing human population. I was only aware of Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution. This book made me realize that Haber-Bosch had really given us the first Green revolution of the twentieth century.

The first two chapters survey the state of agriculture and fertilizers, across space and time  - ancient Rome, medieval China, colonial India, the Prairies in America and steppes in Russia. Saltpeter and other nitrogen fertilizer sources, are also raw material for explosives, and hence their critical for military use. The next three chapters discuss mountains of guano in South America, nitrates in the Atacama desert, how they were shipped to European and American farms, and the political and social turmoil in Peru and Chile.

The next section explains, first, Fritz Haber’s discovery of the process of making nitrogen form the atmospheric air. Haber succeeded where much more famous scientists before him failed. The book gives a brief history of the development of the German chemical industry, and companies like BASF. Haber’s success was astounding, but not sufficient. To make fertilizer on an industrial scale, required a vast number of other inventions, financing, investment and Government backing; and this was mostly overseen by Carl Bosch, an expert in metallurgy, who didn’t mind working physically with everything. The complexity and enormous difficulty of translating a laboratory invention to factory production, is superbly illustrated by the challenges that Bosch faced and the solutions he came up with. Hager narrates this in great detail, satisfying and enlightening for the engineer and scientist, not too difficult to understand for the lay reader. As difficult an accomplishment in writing as whatever Bosch accomplished in industrial production. This section is the core of the book and explains the development of the Haber-Bosch process, and its global success in averting famines and providing alternates for guano.

The third section explains the work of Haber in producing chemicals weapons for Germany, for WW1; his marital troubles because of this apparently unseemly activity; the conflict in Europe about whether he should be lauded as a man who fed the world, or a war criminal who produced deadly weapons. Haber, a Jew, converted to Christianity, feeling more German than Jewish. This didn’t help him a decade later, when Hitler rose to power. The book describes the terrible sufferings Germany went through after its defeat in the WW1, humiliation, hyperinflation, economic crash and the rise of Hitler and anti-Semitism. All this was new history to me; the social history is as fascinating as the scientific and technological one. BASF and Bosch came up with processes to make petrol substitutes from coal. Germany had a lot of coal but no oil, and this was vital. The Haber-Bosch process was also vital for German manufacture of ammunitions, especially explosives. The decline and disappointment of Haber and Bosch, the two scientists, as Germany conquered and colonised Europe and then was devastated by Allied Forces, is well narrated in this section. This also explains why these two people are almost unknown to most of the world, in spite of their inventing perhaps the most useful scientific process of the twentieth century.

There are surprising facts scattered around the book. For example, the Romans had a god of manure! India’s Gangetic plains were a major source of the best nitrates, and were exported to Britain both for fertile and ammunitions. This aspect of colonialism was unknown to me. Until reading these books I thought America is most influential country of the twentieth century; but I think Germany was at least equally influential. We see the world through an Anglo-American perspective, because of the dominance of English and Hollywood, and global media in general.

In 2013, I responded to an email within the THT email group about some strange phenomena in Indonesia, with a strange explanation. I replied to the group that the strange phenomenon had a name – the Wallace Line. This instigated Badri Seshadri, who was in the email group, to tell me I should start a blog and write such things there, for public consumption, rather than restrict it to a small group. I had already started the blog in 2012 on the Mayan Long Count date, but I hadn’t made it public. So I wrote about Haber-Bosch, based on Hager’s book, as my first public blog essay. Even Badri and Prof Swaminathan were quite impressed; usually they are the ones impressing other people. And my blog made its way into Badri’s blog honor list – a list of some of the most popular writers and most influential writers in Tamilnadu, all 100x bloggers. Badri wrote about this book in Tamil, in greater detail than I did. I reviewed this book at Gandhi Study center that year; in Tamil; and the small audience of about twenty-five stayed put.

I discovered Vaclav Smil via Hager, and a couple of years later Bill Gates stumbled upon Vaclav Smil too, featuring him often in his blog. Smil is an energy expert, an amazing analyst and opens up new worlds and perspectives also. But he is very technical, which doesn’t seem to suit the general public. But I find his books extraordinary also. For that too, I am doubly thankful for Hager’s book.

Literature essays in my blog

Chemistry essays in my blog

Agriculture essays in my blog

Buddha and the Sahebs - 8 - Ten books that influenced me

 

I picked up Charles Allen’s The Buddha and the Sahebs at the Eluru Library in Boag Road, Thyagaraya Nagar. It opened up a facet of Indian history that I was almost totally unaware of until then – the European contributions to the rediscovery of India’s past and its enormous role in shaping India’s present and future.

It was as shocking and eye-opening as The Lexus and the OliveTree which made me understand how unaware I was of current affairs, or Sivakamiyin Sabatham, which made me aware of my ignorance of Indian history and Tamil culture. The history I learnt in school, PS Senior Secondary school in Mylapore, was basically half about some aspects of India’s past, and half about British colonialism and India’s independence movement.

A common complaint among Indians nowadays, especially those who take up learning about Indian history in their twenties or later, not from academia but from reading books, tweets, blogs and attending lectures, is that there is too much stress on Guptas and Mughals and almost complete neglect of every other aspect of Indian history. Tamils feel the pang that Cholas and Pandyas are left out, Kannadigas about Hoysalas and Chalukyas, Telugus about Kakatiyas and Satavahanas and so on. Another complaint is that Leftists took over academia, obliterating the noble and glorious accomplishments of not just these dynasties but of poets, scientists, artists, philosophers of that period. While there is some truth to such allegations and angst, reading this made me aware of how widely, deeply, passionately and dispassionately, European scholars, primarily English, and some Indian collaborators had researched vast swathes of India’s buried past; and how much Indians owe an enormous debt to such scholarship. Allen and the geniuses in his book –William Jones, James Prinsep, Alexander Cunningham and others – almost turned me into an Anglophile.

Allen’s book is perhaps the most perfect and scholarly riposte that I have read, to Edward Said’s critique of colonial scholarship – “Orientalism”.

I found Said’s book practically unreadable; Allen’s book is unputdownable.

I later discovered that Allen followed in the footsteps of John Keay, several of whose books I have also enjoyed reading. I think that Indian academics have tossed out the baby of Orientalist scholarship along with the bathwater of European colonial exploitation, at least as far as school textbooks are concerned.

I read this book around 2009 or 2010 I think. I had read some other history books on India before this – Nilakanta Sastri’s History of South India, Abraham Eraly’s Gem in the Lotus (where I first read about Ajivakas), AL Basham’s The Wonder that was India, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India, al Beruni’s Indica, Travels of ibn Batuta; and several others I don’t remember.

The Buddha and the Sahebs starts with the discovery, in the late eighteenth century, of several isolated pillars in some major cities lke Delhi and Prayagraj (Allahabad); and remote places like Vaishali, Lauriya Nandangarh and Sanchi in India. Some of them, like that in Ferozeshah Kotla in Delhi and the Allahabad pillar, had inscriptions, not only in Persian in the Arabic script but also others in an archaic Nagari script and a then unknown script which no living Indian could read or recognize. Curious and adventurous Englishmen kept stumbling upon mounds, temples, buried and destroyed monuments, broken idols, abandoned cities, coins, and all kinds of objects, whose existence was a surprise and whose history was a closed book to the most learned Indians of that time. The bureaucrats and scholars brought over from England by the East India Company, to help the businessmen make money, collect taxes and administer society, found endless wonders wherever they looked – if they looked. The formal establishment of a society to study Indian history, geography, culture, literature, law, economy, music, science, medicine, religion etc organized the information they collected across the length and breadth of the land. The very act of organizing, discussing and theorizing produced a wealth of information that astounded eager audiences in Europe, who only had vague notions of what India was from Arabian tales, ancient Greek and Roman travelogues, and the chaotic, disjointed, and sometimes fanciful accounts of sailors and merchants.

The company’s adventurers not only explored India, but also all its surrounding territories – Nepal, Tibet, Burma, Ceylon. The recent field of archaeology was yielding rich treasures in Europe itself, about ancient Rome and Greece; and newly conquered old civilizations like Egypt and Mesopotamia. Some of the Indian pundits who were first skeptical and cautious about the English sahebs, later recognized that some of them were truly curious and eager scholars, and began to both help them and learn all the new fields of knowledge that the European Enlightenment, Renaissance and the  Industrial Revolution had to offer.

Allen explains the travels, discoveries, missteps, surprises, of these Orientalists, who published them under the auspices of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The tales are as riveting as are their adventures. Their ignorance was sweeping in its scale; what amazed me was how much Indians too were ignorant of their own past, and substituted myth and legend and hearsay for actual history, with no sense of the scale of the eras or the volume and dimension of the events of their past. All of this is presented in school text books in bland and dull prose, as though Indians always knew all this history.

I had a chance to present this exciting story of the rediscovery of India’s past a few times; once at the Indianoil, Patna branch, thanks to a friend, Ganesh, who helped me travel and enjoy several places in Bihar. A second time for INTACH, at the New College in Royapettah, Chennai. And afterwards for THT and Ethiraj college.

The first reading of The Buddha and the Sahebs effected a substantial transformation in my understanding of history. And of the political social and cultural motives that inspired people and institutions to ignore and obfuscate it.

Literature essays in my blog

History essays in my blog

The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's past