Day 4: History is all rot

I listened to a BBC History Today podcast a week or so ago. It was about comparative history although the speaker did not necessarily think that this description of the concept was necessarily the best to use. He started from a view that we had the Greeks and the Romans, that Christianity happened and Rome eventually embraced it. Christianity enabled the enlightenment at or around the time of Galileo. The Enlightenment led to Henry VIII and the Reformation and then the Renaissance. We had the Victorians and the Empire and then America happened. And that’s the story of the world.

Of course this view, which I and I suspect most of the readers of this blog were taught at school, kind of misses out a few important bits. One of these important bits is the Indian historical tradition. It’s not that the Western Canon and the Indian are unconnected. Vast hordes of Roman gold coins have been found in Southern India, evidence that there was trade.

A 19^th century historian and MP called Thomas Babington Macauley (who must have been a total dickhead) said in Calcutta in 1835 (in a Minute on Education) “who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole of the literature of India and Arabia”. He would not have known, or if he did he ignored it, that the world’s earliest printed book was done by the Chinese in 868CE, some five or six hundred years before Gutenberg. Now I know China is not India or Arabia but no doubt Macauley would have wrapped the Chinese up with the rest.

All this comes to mind because today we did a load of cultural stuff and suddenly there’s a whole heap of history and civilisation that I am pretty certain I was never taught at school. And I have not read much about it. And I am the poorer because of it.

It was a packed day and, because I am late in doing this update, I had to go back to my notes to get everything in order. One thing is clear: the more we could learn about comparative culture the better. The Indians, like the Chinese and indeed the traditional owners of Australia, see things differently to us; they see through a different lens that is ground from the dust of their climate, geography and experience.

Qubt complex

We clambered aboard the bus and headed to Mehrauli in New Delhi. We had a new guide called Jay (well he was called something else but he knew no one would be able to say his name properly). He was a really good guide (indeed all the guides we had were extremely good and all, of course, could trace their ancestry back one or another famous person). The highlight of Jay’s guidance came as we travelled between one sight and another (I cannot recall which two) and was a history of Islam in India. Unfortunately I have to say that, while I have no doubt’s that Jay’s account was a good and useful one, I was too frequently distracted by the street life of Delhi passing by to recall much of it.

At Mehrauli there is a whole host of fascinating and intricately executed buildings and structures. The most striking and in-your-face is the Qutub Minar. At 73 metres this is the tallest brick minaret in the world, and the second tallest minaret in India. A minaret is a tall tower near a mosque. The tallest minaret at 99 metres is the Fateh Burj (meaning the Victory Tower) which is in Punjab.

The tower was built in stages. Qutub-ud-Din Aibak, the founder of the Delhi Sultanate started construction of the Qutub Minar in 1200. In 1220 Aibak's successor and son-in-law Iltutmish added three storeys to the tower. In 1369, lightning struck the top storey, destroying it completely and Firoz Shah Tughlaq carried out restoration work replacing the damaged storey with two new storeys every year, made of red sandstone and white marble.

This minaret, which was started in about 1200CE, is not actually a replica of the leaning tower of Pisa.
Its apparent tilt is due to incompetence on the part of the photographer.

Major Robert Smith of the British Indian Army renovated the tower in 1928. He was clearly a total plonker as he placed a cupola on the top of the tower. It is the most hideously inappropriate addition you could imagine and fortunately Lord Haringe, then Governor General of Pakistan, directed that it should be dismantled. It has been re-erected in the complex ground enabling one to see how completely in appropriate it is!!

You cannot believe that someone would stick this on top of the minaret.

The Quwwat ul-Islam Mosque was built out of recycled columns and artefacts (suitably repurposed) taken from Hindi temples. I recall Jay telling us that 14 Hindu temples had been demolished and plundered to build the mosque.

The columns are recycled from plundered Hindu temples.

How long did it take people with hammers and chisels (and probably not very good ones at that) to do this work?

A detail from the archway above.

The Iron Pillar of Dehli s one of the world’s foremost metallurgical curiosities. The pillar, 7.21-metre high and weighing more than six tonnes, was originally erected by Chandragupta II Vikramaditya (375–414 AD) in front of a Vishnu Temple complex at Udayagiri around 402 AD, and later shifted by Anangpal in 10th century CE from Udaygiri to its present location. This pillar has never rusted and there is an interesting metallurgical analysis of why this is so: roughly as I understand it the iron has a very high phosphorus content which is related in some way to the fact that the Indian smiths who made the column did not use lime to their furnaces.

The Iron Pillar of Dehli which hasn't rusted after 1,500 years or so. We could learn shit from these dudes.

There’s just too much here to talk about so it’s easier to list them and leave you, Gentle Reader, to research as you are inclined (I know you will not be inclined at all).

Ghandi Smriti

Gandhi Smriti is a museum dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi. It is where Mahatma Gandhi spent the last 144 days of his life and where he was assassinated on 30 January 1948. Ghandi’s history is worth a read: he seems to be very important in the modern Indian’s mind. Along with Nehru he was an important founder of the India that is today.

Clever idea (L) for a footpath to the place (R) where the assassination took place.

He was shot by an extremist Hindu. It was a time of some polico-religious upheaval in India that arose from the partition of the country into India, West Pakistan and East Paksitan which was done on largely religious lines. According to the 2011 census, 79.8% of the population of India practices Hinduism and 14.2% adheres to Islam, while the remaining 6% adheres to other religions (Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and various indigenous ethnically-bound faiths).

Notwithstanding the partition in 1947, India’s history seems to be an example of tolerance of and co-existence between religious faiths. There is something to be learned here I think.

Luncheon

We lunched at The Saravana Bhavan which is a southern indian vegetarian restaurant where we had a very commendable thali. There is apparently a Saravana Bhavan in Parramatta in Sydney. Not many people know that.

The G enjoying a thali at the Saravana Bhavan

Gurdwara Bangla Sahib

The Gurdwara Bangla Sahib is one of the most prominent places of Sikh worship. Idates from the 18^th Century and was originally the bungalow (“haveli” or “bangla”) of Mirza Raja Jai Singh, hence the name "Bangla Sahib". Its original name was Jaisinghpura Palace. The building was built by Sikh General, Sardar Bhagel Singh in 1783, who supervised the construction of nine Sikh shrines in Delhi in the same year, during the reign of Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam II.

There’s a few names here that don’t easily trip off the Western tongue:

• Mirza Raja Jai Singh (1611 –1667)  was a Kachhvaha Rajput prince and a senior Mughal general.
• Bhai Baghel Singh (1730 - 1802) rose from humble beginnings to become a successful general.
• The Mughals were Muslims who ruled from about 1526 (the First Battle of Paniput) to the mid 18th Century.

The Sikh scriptures say that "a tenth of your income and time should be dedicated to serving people." I learn that this is about purging the ego, something that a great many people I come across might benefit from. In the temple is the langar (which means “community diner”), which is staffed by volunteers and feeds about 10,000 people a day.

Many of you know that The G spent years re-engineering large catering operations (which is why the idea of dinner for 100 is a breeze for her; it’s all in the planning) so she was very interested in the process that was used to prepare 10,000 meals a day and serve the food to the people.

There are pictures below but it is worth recording The G's observations on the production process and you will see how she looks at food production.

She was pleased to see a workable and efficient production system that demonstrated how something on this scale can work. She noted that there were no occupational health safety (OH&S) constraints and no refrigeration. There are no wages to pay as everyone is a volunteer.

The ingredients used were simple: oil, ghee, flour, rice, lentils, chick peas, potatoes, spices and some fresh herbs. cauliflowers are in season so they were used as well as onions and lots of good karma.

She noted the staffing levels (it didn't even occur to me to count them). They were as follows:

• vegetable preparation - 14
• flat bread rolling - 5 (though only 1 of 4 stations were working)
• serving rice and cooked dishes - 10
• roti making (using a large tunnel toasting machine that rolled them and baked them) - 1
• washing up (everything was served in stainless steel trays with no cutlery. There was a veritable cacophony from the stainless steel trays as they banged together in the washing up process) - 10

In addition there are more volunteers receiving supplies into the warehouse, moving supplies around and mixing batches of dough.

Preparing vegetables: cauliflowers and potatoes.

Peeling onions - huge piles of them. Great job - I want to have a go!

Making the naans: there is a machine (L) that rolls them into discs and bakes them. 

A huge cauldron of vegetable curry being ladled by the bucketful into smaller containers for distribution.

A row of cooking facilities. The G was impressed with these copper kettles which are more attractive than the stainless steel kettles that we might use.

Manipulating the bread dough for the flatbreads: rolling it into balls and flattening it out..

Tucking in: 10,000 times a day.

On the way out of the temple we saw this money on a wall. That is not a carrot he is eating: it is an icy pole that he has unwrapped (the wrapper is on the right).

Dinner at Claridges

We dined in some style at Claridges. It wasn’t the best meal we had on the tour but it’s a lovely hotel and redolent of the days of Empire with beturbaned staff in bight orange costumes (even though it was built in 1952 after independence). I cannot recall everything we ate but there were many dishes and it just kept coming. The only way to stop it was to stop eating.

Claridges: I did not take this photograph but it does look like this.

We had hired a couple of taxis for the evening (it's cheap and cheerful to do this) so the ride back to the hotel was easy.

And so to bed.