In the classical age, southern India and Ceylon were the end of the world, the eastern edge of of the great web of seaborne trade that linked East and West. It was here in Madras, according to tradition, that Thomas the doubting Apostle repaired for his last mission, and here also that he was martyred. Scarcely a mile from where I sit is Santhome Beach ("San Thome"), named in his honor.
This being my last night in India, I participated in a jam with a bunch of people from the Institute as well as my colleague B., who is an outstanding guitarist. I am a banjo and guitar player of very ordinary abilities whose fingers always seem to seize up when I play in front of others. R., a brilliant young physicist from West Bengal, brought his sarod, a wire-strung lute-like instrument. Others brought guitars, a harmonica, and even a harmonium. R. played several haunting ragas, and I accompanied him somewhat haltingly. Another young man played several Bengali folk songs on his ragged harmonium, and several other Bengalis joined in on the vocals. In a typically Indian touch, a large rat scurried up the wall at one point and kept peeking out at us through a hole in the ceiling. Every time he showed his head, I would glare at him, and he would retire in haste!
It was a lovely evening, where East met West on neutral musical ground. I doubt whether ever in all of human history such a peculiar ensemble of instruments has ever played together. Yet banjo and sarod, guitar and harmonium, managed to make a fair go of it. At this time tomorrow, I shall be on my way home, but I am grateful for such a sendoff.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Jambudvipa
This blog has lain dormant for several months because I've been unable to muster any creative drive. Nor has there been much worthy of comment, it has seemed to me. This past spring was a convergence of catastrophes great and small that reached an absolute nadir in the month of March, an dreary expanse of weeks that saw my divorce finalized, one of the worst bouts of the flu I've ever experienced, the coming to grips with an unexpectedly heavy burden of taxes (thanks to an unusually successful amount of free-lance writing last year), and a little daughter thoroughly unsettled by unhappy events she cannot comprehend.
But now, things are looking up, as Fred Astaire used to put it, although life is not exactly full of four leaf clovers, at least not yet. Shortly after my monthlong Time of Troubles expired, I received an unexpected invitation to go to India (return, in point of fact, since I spent some time here in the last decade) to deliver a series of lectures on a topic I've been researching since my days as an MA candidate at BYU, the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley civilization. What was to be a summer of leisurely recuperation both emotional and spiritual turned into a whirlwind of preparation for the trip itself, a three week interlude that may well prove to be a turning point in my life.
I use the present tense because I am still in India (in Madras, now more correctly but less-familiarly known as Chennai, its Tamil name), readying for the long trip home tomorrow. In just three weeks, I have given six or seven lectures (I've lost count), met a boatload of new friends, established a welter of new research contacts, traveled to Bombay and Pune, and even appeared on national TV along with two of my colleagues. I've also tussled with a rat in my bathroom, witnessed part of my apartment wall collapse from the inside, enjoyed various harrowing rides in the tiny motorized three-wheelers that are India's preferred means of urban transport, and savored countless heavenly Indian meals. Despite its many hazards and frustrations ("Indian moments," I call them), I love India.
And India has been kind to me. My Tamil, fragmentary from long neglect, came flooding back, and with it my knowledge of Indian customs. Don't speak in the loud, brash voice so typical of Westerners that Indians discreetly ridicule. Keep facial expressions neutral, or nearly so. Don't say "thank you" except for exceptional and unlooked-for benevolent acts. Don't waste too much time bargaining with stoned rickshaw drivers. Remember that Indians shake their heads, rather than nod, to indicate agreement. Accept setbacks like power outages with equanimity. And so forth.
My academic work has been received here with great enthusiasm, exceeding my wildest expectations. Fifteen years ago, I suggested in my Master's Thesis that certain of the Indus Valley signs were indicative of weights and measures, a conclusion that seems rather obvious in hindsight, but which several generations of epigraphers -- hampered, perhaps, by a desire to read something less mundane in the inscriptions -- had overlooked. Several authorities in the field in the U.S. reacted derisively to my thesis, however, and that was that, or so I thought. The downside of American academic publishing is that the gatekeepers -- the peer reviewers -- have the final say. I assumed that my homely MA thesis would languish in obscurity.
But such has proven not to be the case, and this summer's trip has been vindicatory. A longtime colleague of mine who did his PhD at Harvard a few years back wound up with a research fellowship at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Madras, and managed to persuade the folks here to bring me for a visit. The Institute, be it noted, is primarily a facility for theoretical physicists and mathematicians, a sort of Indian Cal Tech. However, several of their people have been working on computer models of the Indus writing system; hence the allegiance between hard science and linguistic epigraphy. My colleague from Harvard, moreover, has no linguistic expertise, and has always valued the linguistic judgments I'm able to bring to bear on the problem.
The atmosphere at the Institute is heady and invigorating, to say the least. Here are assembled many of the best minds in India, the elite of physics and mathematics in a nation that has produced some of the most extraordinary mathematicians (Ramanujan) and physicists (Bose and Chandrasekhar) of the last century. By Western standards, it looks nothing like what an institute for heady theoretical sciences should be. Instead of carefully manicured, septic grounds with all the trappings of high-tech insularity, the campus is disheveled as most things in India tend to be -- mold stains on every building exterior, bamboo scaffolding clinging to various half-constructed elevator shafts and ells, and riotous tropical vegetation forever threatening to encroach on cracked walkways and a neglected tennis court. Geckos, mynahs, and jungle crows are everywhere, along with a species of large reddish millipede that comes out after it rains.
Yet here are men (and women) who discuss quantum gravity and Riemann manifolds over coffee as casually as the rest of us bandy politics or sports preferences. Several of them have become my friends. One of them, a young Bengali physicist with a mind as nimble as any I've ever encountered, plays the sarod, a beautiful lute-like instrument with wire strings. He and I plan to get together tonight -- my last in India, at least for now -- to jam (I brought my banjo along).
In Bombay, my Harvard colleague and I met with more of the same -- Indian scientists with a yen to aid in the decipherment of the language of India's primordial urban civilization. One of them, I assume, was responsible for contacting the Bombay TV station Times Now that put us on the Indian equivalent of the CBS Evening News shortly after we returned to Madras.
Then there was the lovely Deccan city of Pune, mercifully elevated above the sweltering desperation of Bombay on the high interior plateau east of the Western Ghats. That side junket was the nearest thing on this visit that I got to the great Indian outdoors, which on previous trips I've explored on various treks and birding excursions. In Pune we met with a gentlemanly Indian archaeologist who has been excavating a smallish Indus Valley (or "Harappan") site up Haryana way. I got to actually hold in my hands for the first time several of the tiny inscribed seals whose writing caught my fancy so many years ago. I also got to visit the famous Sanskrit Dictionary project at Deccan College where, since 1949, a team of lexicographers have been painstakingly creating the greatest dictionary every assembled, of any language. To give some idea of the scale of the project, consider that what was originally envisioned to be a thirty-volume work has mushroomed into an enterprise that will consume several Hindu kalpas to complete. Eight volumes have so far been published, and the compilers are not even halfway through the very first Sanskrit letter, a! Even the anonymous authors of the sprawling Vedas and Puranas would stand admiringly by.
For India, known to three of its great originary religions as Jambudvipa, the Island of Rose-Apples, is a place in love with complexity and disorder like no other. Visitors from the well-ordered West or the fanatically regimented Far East typically stand aghast at the frenetic confusion and impossible diversity of Indian society. John Kenneth Galbraith, President Kennedy's ambassador to India, famously characterized the Indian social model as "functional chaos" and, his considerable deficiencies as an economist notwithstanding, he was spot on. Indians seem to have little taste for regimentation or order along Western (or Eastern) lines. Traffic is an every-man-for-himself free-for-all in which only the cows wandering the streets are deferred to. Garbage is tossed on festering piles in every ditch and canal -- not because Indians are incapable of cleaning it up, but because they see no reason to. Pharmaceuticals available only by prescription in the West are sold over the counter at rock-bottom prices. People dress modestly, but do not scruple to relieve themselves in public, even along the busiest city streets. Hindu festivals, famous for their color, are also the most disorderly public events this side of a British soccer riot. City buses lurch along leaning at drunken angles from the excess of humanity clinging precariously to open doors. And so on.
India is a linguist's, anthropologist's or sociologist's dream, with literally thousands of languages spoken, hundreds of thousands of gods worshipped, and numberless castes, subcastes, and sodalities all vying for attention and prestige in every city and village from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.
How India came to be this way is anybody's guess, given the absence of reliable historiography beyond a few centuries ago. My best hypothesis is that it is a consequence of India's unique physical geography. India is not an island but is attached to Asia where the Middle East and Far East come together, allowing an influx of diverse cultures and languages across the centuries. The northeast of the country -- Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and other remote states -- are eastward in orientation, speaking languages proper to southeast Asia (except for Assamese) and whose people physically resemble the Burmese and Chinese. From the north the Tibetans encroach, spilling over the Himalayas in areas like Buddhist Ladakh. From the West have come the Arabs and the Mughals as well as (presumably) at a much greater time depth, the Indo-Aryans, who brought Sanskrit and the religion of the Vedas.
At the same time that India's contiguity to the great cultures of Asia has encouraged cultural diversity, natural barriers -- desert and mountain -- have also protected it against regular invasion. The occasional foreign occupier -- Mughal or British -- has left his stamp only briefly as against long centuries free from the brutal conquests and slaughter so typical of the rest of Asia and Europe. Even Alexander the Great foundered in the deserts of the Sindh, and the hordes of Genghis Khan preferred the easy pickings of the open steppes and accessible Middle Eastern fleshpots.
Thus India, in stark contrast to other Eurasian regions, has never been very steeped in militarism and the political regimentation that inevitably accompanies it. India has nukes now, to be sure, but their military is a far cry from the well-honed vehicles for combat and conquest typical of Western nations. We in the West take our fixation for regimentation, with its police and security forces, its military-industrial complex, its emphasis on the rule of law and the ascendancy of orderliness, for granted. But these cultural traits did not come about in a vacuum. They are, as Runciman once observed, the fruits of millenia of conflict, from Roman imperialism, through the Germanic invasions, down to the present day.
India, by contrast, has seen nothing like the upheavals that extinguished Rome, the Crusades, or the colonial conflicts that birthed the world-encircling empires of the French and British. At Plassey, the Indian response was perplexity. They failed to grasp the relevance of such a tiny engagement with upstart outsiders, and soon returned to their looms and rice paddies. The British, however, turned the episode into a platform for further expansion.
Even in the modern age, India has been blessed to be on the sidelines (relatively) of world-convulsing conflicts like the Second World War. The Japanese never made it past Burma, and the German war machine foundered on the Russian steppes.
As a consequence, as we warlike Westerners have busied ourselves discovering more and more ways to align our societies with martial values, India has continued much as it ever has been. The simmering conflict with Pakistan and even last year's terror attacks in Bombay have failed to provoke "a new reality." That, at least, is this observer's impression.
For all its cognitive dissonance, this time in India has been a healing balm for me in more ways than one. In a rash moment, I uploaded a picture and some biographical info to an LDS social website (okay, let's be more frank: a matchmaking website), and quickly made several online friends. My opinion of the fairer sex has taken quite a beating over the last few years, and I am happy to discover that there are obviously many lovely and intelligent LDS women out there after all. I deliberately made my profile as academic-sounding and severe as I could, figuring that no one would be interested in such an obvious misfit, an underpaid academic with deplorable real-world skills (I was once called "trash brain" by a vapid young thing out in Provo, who said she'd never met anyone encumbered with so much useless, impractical knowledge). I figured wrong, as it turns out.
However, having missed the entire online social networking revolution thanks to a terminally-ill marriage and complete disinterest in Facebook, I feel a bit like a fish out of water -- rather like a newcomer on the mean streets of India, in point of fact -- in this new medium of anonymous texting, flirting, and jactatory self-profiling. Emailing I'm used to, but text-messaging with a faceless, voiceless counterpart somewhere on the globe seems at once powerful and fraught with hazards. The souls on the other end are understandably cautious: Are you really divorced? Are you a member of the church? Probing questions like these are meant to draw out interlopers who insinuate themselves even onto LDS websites.
I for my part am determined to be measured and responsible, and not to repeat the deplorable mistakes of youth: Don't lead anyone on. Don't be too personal, too soon. Be completely honest. Don't dwell on yourself (that's what blogs are for!). Without face to face interaction or even voice communication, I fear that a medium like instant messenging is a recipe for misunderstanding, unless kept under very strict restraints.
So what is the unifying thread of this tedious blog entry? I suppose it would be the metaphor of Jambudvipa, which doubled in Hindu cosmology as the literal Subcontinent and as the realm where mortal beings lived, a place at once beautiful and chaotic, perilous but rewarding.
The Web as a social medium, it seems to me, is a sort of virtual Jambudvipa, a place where all souls potentially converge and struggle to work through mortal inadequacies. So much for a contrived metaphor.
As for the living, breathing Jambudvipa outside these walls, I need to go get a hearty Indian lunch and then see to my packing.
But now, things are looking up, as Fred Astaire used to put it, although life is not exactly full of four leaf clovers, at least not yet. Shortly after my monthlong Time of Troubles expired, I received an unexpected invitation to go to India (return, in point of fact, since I spent some time here in the last decade) to deliver a series of lectures on a topic I've been researching since my days as an MA candidate at BYU, the undeciphered script of the Indus Valley civilization. What was to be a summer of leisurely recuperation both emotional and spiritual turned into a whirlwind of preparation for the trip itself, a three week interlude that may well prove to be a turning point in my life.
I use the present tense because I am still in India (in Madras, now more correctly but less-familiarly known as Chennai, its Tamil name), readying for the long trip home tomorrow. In just three weeks, I have given six or seven lectures (I've lost count), met a boatload of new friends, established a welter of new research contacts, traveled to Bombay and Pune, and even appeared on national TV along with two of my colleagues. I've also tussled with a rat in my bathroom, witnessed part of my apartment wall collapse from the inside, enjoyed various harrowing rides in the tiny motorized three-wheelers that are India's preferred means of urban transport, and savored countless heavenly Indian meals. Despite its many hazards and frustrations ("Indian moments," I call them), I love India.
And India has been kind to me. My Tamil, fragmentary from long neglect, came flooding back, and with it my knowledge of Indian customs. Don't speak in the loud, brash voice so typical of Westerners that Indians discreetly ridicule. Keep facial expressions neutral, or nearly so. Don't say "thank you" except for exceptional and unlooked-for benevolent acts. Don't waste too much time bargaining with stoned rickshaw drivers. Remember that Indians shake their heads, rather than nod, to indicate agreement. Accept setbacks like power outages with equanimity. And so forth.
My academic work has been received here with great enthusiasm, exceeding my wildest expectations. Fifteen years ago, I suggested in my Master's Thesis that certain of the Indus Valley signs were indicative of weights and measures, a conclusion that seems rather obvious in hindsight, but which several generations of epigraphers -- hampered, perhaps, by a desire to read something less mundane in the inscriptions -- had overlooked. Several authorities in the field in the U.S. reacted derisively to my thesis, however, and that was that, or so I thought. The downside of American academic publishing is that the gatekeepers -- the peer reviewers -- have the final say. I assumed that my homely MA thesis would languish in obscurity.
But such has proven not to be the case, and this summer's trip has been vindicatory. A longtime colleague of mine who did his PhD at Harvard a few years back wound up with a research fellowship at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Madras, and managed to persuade the folks here to bring me for a visit. The Institute, be it noted, is primarily a facility for theoretical physicists and mathematicians, a sort of Indian Cal Tech. However, several of their people have been working on computer models of the Indus writing system; hence the allegiance between hard science and linguistic epigraphy. My colleague from Harvard, moreover, has no linguistic expertise, and has always valued the linguistic judgments I'm able to bring to bear on the problem.
The atmosphere at the Institute is heady and invigorating, to say the least. Here are assembled many of the best minds in India, the elite of physics and mathematics in a nation that has produced some of the most extraordinary mathematicians (Ramanujan) and physicists (Bose and Chandrasekhar) of the last century. By Western standards, it looks nothing like what an institute for heady theoretical sciences should be. Instead of carefully manicured, septic grounds with all the trappings of high-tech insularity, the campus is disheveled as most things in India tend to be -- mold stains on every building exterior, bamboo scaffolding clinging to various half-constructed elevator shafts and ells, and riotous tropical vegetation forever threatening to encroach on cracked walkways and a neglected tennis court. Geckos, mynahs, and jungle crows are everywhere, along with a species of large reddish millipede that comes out after it rains.
Yet here are men (and women) who discuss quantum gravity and Riemann manifolds over coffee as casually as the rest of us bandy politics or sports preferences. Several of them have become my friends. One of them, a young Bengali physicist with a mind as nimble as any I've ever encountered, plays the sarod, a beautiful lute-like instrument with wire strings. He and I plan to get together tonight -- my last in India, at least for now -- to jam (I brought my banjo along).
In Bombay, my Harvard colleague and I met with more of the same -- Indian scientists with a yen to aid in the decipherment of the language of India's primordial urban civilization. One of them, I assume, was responsible for contacting the Bombay TV station Times Now that put us on the Indian equivalent of the CBS Evening News shortly after we returned to Madras.
Then there was the lovely Deccan city of Pune, mercifully elevated above the sweltering desperation of Bombay on the high interior plateau east of the Western Ghats. That side junket was the nearest thing on this visit that I got to the great Indian outdoors, which on previous trips I've explored on various treks and birding excursions. In Pune we met with a gentlemanly Indian archaeologist who has been excavating a smallish Indus Valley (or "Harappan") site up Haryana way. I got to actually hold in my hands for the first time several of the tiny inscribed seals whose writing caught my fancy so many years ago. I also got to visit the famous Sanskrit Dictionary project at Deccan College where, since 1949, a team of lexicographers have been painstakingly creating the greatest dictionary every assembled, of any language. To give some idea of the scale of the project, consider that what was originally envisioned to be a thirty-volume work has mushroomed into an enterprise that will consume several Hindu kalpas to complete. Eight volumes have so far been published, and the compilers are not even halfway through the very first Sanskrit letter, a! Even the anonymous authors of the sprawling Vedas and Puranas would stand admiringly by.
For India, known to three of its great originary religions as Jambudvipa, the Island of Rose-Apples, is a place in love with complexity and disorder like no other. Visitors from the well-ordered West or the fanatically regimented Far East typically stand aghast at the frenetic confusion and impossible diversity of Indian society. John Kenneth Galbraith, President Kennedy's ambassador to India, famously characterized the Indian social model as "functional chaos" and, his considerable deficiencies as an economist notwithstanding, he was spot on. Indians seem to have little taste for regimentation or order along Western (or Eastern) lines. Traffic is an every-man-for-himself free-for-all in which only the cows wandering the streets are deferred to. Garbage is tossed on festering piles in every ditch and canal -- not because Indians are incapable of cleaning it up, but because they see no reason to. Pharmaceuticals available only by prescription in the West are sold over the counter at rock-bottom prices. People dress modestly, but do not scruple to relieve themselves in public, even along the busiest city streets. Hindu festivals, famous for their color, are also the most disorderly public events this side of a British soccer riot. City buses lurch along leaning at drunken angles from the excess of humanity clinging precariously to open doors. And so on.
India is a linguist's, anthropologist's or sociologist's dream, with literally thousands of languages spoken, hundreds of thousands of gods worshipped, and numberless castes, subcastes, and sodalities all vying for attention and prestige in every city and village from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.
How India came to be this way is anybody's guess, given the absence of reliable historiography beyond a few centuries ago. My best hypothesis is that it is a consequence of India's unique physical geography. India is not an island but is attached to Asia where the Middle East and Far East come together, allowing an influx of diverse cultures and languages across the centuries. The northeast of the country -- Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, and other remote states -- are eastward in orientation, speaking languages proper to southeast Asia (except for Assamese) and whose people physically resemble the Burmese and Chinese. From the north the Tibetans encroach, spilling over the Himalayas in areas like Buddhist Ladakh. From the West have come the Arabs and the Mughals as well as (presumably) at a much greater time depth, the Indo-Aryans, who brought Sanskrit and the religion of the Vedas.
At the same time that India's contiguity to the great cultures of Asia has encouraged cultural diversity, natural barriers -- desert and mountain -- have also protected it against regular invasion. The occasional foreign occupier -- Mughal or British -- has left his stamp only briefly as against long centuries free from the brutal conquests and slaughter so typical of the rest of Asia and Europe. Even Alexander the Great foundered in the deserts of the Sindh, and the hordes of Genghis Khan preferred the easy pickings of the open steppes and accessible Middle Eastern fleshpots.
Thus India, in stark contrast to other Eurasian regions, has never been very steeped in militarism and the political regimentation that inevitably accompanies it. India has nukes now, to be sure, but their military is a far cry from the well-honed vehicles for combat and conquest typical of Western nations. We in the West take our fixation for regimentation, with its police and security forces, its military-industrial complex, its emphasis on the rule of law and the ascendancy of orderliness, for granted. But these cultural traits did not come about in a vacuum. They are, as Runciman once observed, the fruits of millenia of conflict, from Roman imperialism, through the Germanic invasions, down to the present day.
India, by contrast, has seen nothing like the upheavals that extinguished Rome, the Crusades, or the colonial conflicts that birthed the world-encircling empires of the French and British. At Plassey, the Indian response was perplexity. They failed to grasp the relevance of such a tiny engagement with upstart outsiders, and soon returned to their looms and rice paddies. The British, however, turned the episode into a platform for further expansion.
Even in the modern age, India has been blessed to be on the sidelines (relatively) of world-convulsing conflicts like the Second World War. The Japanese never made it past Burma, and the German war machine foundered on the Russian steppes.
As a consequence, as we warlike Westerners have busied ourselves discovering more and more ways to align our societies with martial values, India has continued much as it ever has been. The simmering conflict with Pakistan and even last year's terror attacks in Bombay have failed to provoke "a new reality." That, at least, is this observer's impression.
For all its cognitive dissonance, this time in India has been a healing balm for me in more ways than one. In a rash moment, I uploaded a picture and some biographical info to an LDS social website (okay, let's be more frank: a matchmaking website), and quickly made several online friends. My opinion of the fairer sex has taken quite a beating over the last few years, and I am happy to discover that there are obviously many lovely and intelligent LDS women out there after all. I deliberately made my profile as academic-sounding and severe as I could, figuring that no one would be interested in such an obvious misfit, an underpaid academic with deplorable real-world skills (I was once called "trash brain" by a vapid young thing out in Provo, who said she'd never met anyone encumbered with so much useless, impractical knowledge). I figured wrong, as it turns out.
However, having missed the entire online social networking revolution thanks to a terminally-ill marriage and complete disinterest in Facebook, I feel a bit like a fish out of water -- rather like a newcomer on the mean streets of India, in point of fact -- in this new medium of anonymous texting, flirting, and jactatory self-profiling. Emailing I'm used to, but text-messaging with a faceless, voiceless counterpart somewhere on the globe seems at once powerful and fraught with hazards. The souls on the other end are understandably cautious: Are you really divorced? Are you a member of the church? Probing questions like these are meant to draw out interlopers who insinuate themselves even onto LDS websites.
I for my part am determined to be measured and responsible, and not to repeat the deplorable mistakes of youth: Don't lead anyone on. Don't be too personal, too soon. Be completely honest. Don't dwell on yourself (that's what blogs are for!). Without face to face interaction or even voice communication, I fear that a medium like instant messenging is a recipe for misunderstanding, unless kept under very strict restraints.
So what is the unifying thread of this tedious blog entry? I suppose it would be the metaphor of Jambudvipa, which doubled in Hindu cosmology as the literal Subcontinent and as the realm where mortal beings lived, a place at once beautiful and chaotic, perilous but rewarding.
The Web as a social medium, it seems to me, is a sort of virtual Jambudvipa, a place where all souls potentially converge and struggle to work through mortal inadequacies. So much for a contrived metaphor.
As for the living, breathing Jambudvipa outside these walls, I need to go get a hearty Indian lunch and then see to my packing.
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