Apartheid in America

In 1492, Columbus "discovered" India.

Jill Lepore's narration of the story of the United States from that moment is compelling.  Deeply disturbing, even if the facts are not always new.  To read them all in a single-volume book is immensely more powerful than I had imagined.

The 400 year anniversary was during the post-war Reconstruction.  The original inhabitants had been practically wiped out, and most of the rest driven out of their lands.  Humans from Africa had been imported, traded, held as property, and finally proclaimed to be free by Lincoln.  A destructive Civil War was fought, in which the slave states lost.  Meanwhile, Mexicans and Chinese were also given the rough treatment.

Throughout all these, while the citizenship of the European settlers and their descendants was assumed as a given, the citizenship of non-whites was, well, unresolved.  (This is, of course, an ongoing issue as well, with the party of whites desperately trying to deny citizenship to non-whites.)

The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed freed slaves equal protection and due process of law, yes, but they were considered to be "Separate" in the post-war era.  Jill Lepore writes about the irony of the Fourteenth Amendment--business used that to further cement a legal fiction that corporations are persons!

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that over the course of fifty years, "only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.

It shouldn't surprise us that today's Party of Lincoln champions business interests more than human interests, especially the interests of disadvantaged non-white humans.  As Lepore comments, "rights proffered to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations."

In 1892, the country hosted "the largest-ever world's fair" in Chicago.  Frederick Douglass was the only eminent African American invited to address.  Otherwise, "as if to shame the Negro, they exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage."

When the day came for Douglass to deliver his talk, "he arrived to find the fair decked out with watermelons, and white hecklers waiting for him."

That reminds me about the time when a white friend "joked" about how to get Obama to quit the presidency. (This friend--a born again evangelical Christian--is a GOP loyalist.)  This white friend "joked" that a trail of watermelons leading out of the White House would do the trick.  I gave that white friend the benefit of doubt, and considered that a reflection of his puke-worthy taste in humor.  But, in retrospect, I should have served the quit notice right then. Mea culpa.

Douglass offered his blunt assessment:

The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.

This is how we can even frame the problem that we now have with trump's voters and enablers: Do they have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution?  So far, the answer is a clear NO! :(

Four years after the 400-year anniversary of Columbus, in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of yet another atrocity, in Plessy v. Ferguson.  The court ruled that separate accommodations for blacks and whites were not unequal accommodations.  Separate but equal became the law of the land for more than half a century.

Jill Lepore sums it up well: "The Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace."

If only there were more real Vaishnav people!

It is the anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi.  He was shot dead on January 30th in 1948. I am re-posting here a modified version of one my op-ed columns

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Gandhi, who was born in 1869, led the independence movement that, in 1947, resulted in the creation of two new countries of India and Pakistan and, with that, the end of the British Raj. The struggle for freedom, in which Gandhi passionately urged his followers to observe non-violence even against the colonizer’s brutal force, inspired many others, including Martin Luther King Jr.

Life is full of tragic ironies — Gandhi and King, the champions of peace and nonviolence, fell to bullets aimed at them. Unlike Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, King had not lived long enough to live in the promised land of freedom.

Albert Einstein summed it up best for all of us when he wrote about Gandhi that “generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.” 

In the contemporary United States, any talk in the public space about peace and nonviolence is rare. Politicians of all stripes want to prove how much tougher they are than the other, out of a fear of being labeled a wimp.  The worst ones are those who successfully dodged the Vietnam War draft but now want to establish their manliness! This has been especially the case since the fateful events on Sept. 11, 2001. At the national level, the “tough” ones smell blood when an opponent does not talk of war. At this rate, even those running for the office of dogcatcher will have to prove their toughness.

Of course, violence is more than merely engaging in war. The political rhetoric, especially over the past four years since trump as a candidate and then as the president (gasp!) seems to have been anything but peaceful and nonviolent. A new day begins with attacks on yet another person or group of people, based on whatever cultural trait is deemed to be the “wrong” one for the moment. Even I, as insignificant as one can be in the political landscape, have been a target for those who are seemingly at ease with offensive words and rhetoric.

While words, unlike sticks and stones, do not break bones, the violence conveyed through words causes plenty of harm. In the noise and confusion of the violent rhetoric that surrounds us in the real and cyber worlds, we seem to have lost a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.

One of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who are in misery.” Unfortunately, the rhetoric and practice--even among those who claim to be followers of Vishnu--is far from that interpretation of humanity.

When it comes to the terrible humanitarian crises, like the situation in Aleppo, Syria, it is depressing and shocking to see how quickly we closed ourselves off from the “pain of others” and how easily we refuse to “help those who are in misery.” We have refused to budge even when the screens all around us flashed the images of dead toddlers. Or, the images of mothers and children running after being tear-gassed at the border for seeking asylum.

The president's adviser on immigration, whose life is possible only because the US offered asylum to Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe, boasts that “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil.”

The moral arc of the universe might bend towards justice, but the radius of the arc seems to be getting longer.  Perhaps we shall overcome all our problems, but only over a much longer time than I would like. 

Native Americans. Africans. Mexicans. And now? Chinese!

Since 1492, and since Mayflower, and since the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, it has been one chaos after another for non-whites.  As we get more into the Jim Crow era in Jill Lepore's narration of the history of the United States, we will remind ourselves about what she is exploring in this book:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

And so far the evidence is ... awful!  The original inhabitants nearly wiped out. People from Africa imported, traded, and held as property.  An empire-building America provoked a war with Mexico and gobbled up the upper-third of its territory.  A horrible Civil War was fought in order to abolish slavery. Women were told that they shall not have rights to participate in politics.

Political equality? Natural rights? Sovereignty of people?

It was time to go after yet another group: Chinese immigrants.

Following the gold rush, "Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers during the 1850s."

Given the track record of white supremacy from 1492, it is easy to predict that the Chinese would have been attacked, killed, imprisoned, and their citizenship questioned, right?

It is incredible how when I was in the 8th or 9th grade, when Mr. Venkatesan taught (he was a horrible teacher anyway!) history, we were somehow led to understand that it was a glorious American political experiment, in which the only blemish was slavery, which too was corrected by Lincoln after the Civil War. And it was happily ever after!

So, people immigrated from China.

Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho's settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state's wage earners.

Imagine white settlers looking across and seeing hardworking Chinese.   Oregon and California tightly restricted the rights of Chinese. 

Frederick Douglass was consistent in his view of human rights:

Again, this is the Douglass about whom the current president knew nothing!

As I noted in this post back in September, the United States passed a law to exclude the Chinese. To strip them of their citizenship. And the US Supreme Court even upheld this law in 1889! 

Let's ask ourselves, again:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Five-fifths ... but separate

Lincoln's assassination was the literal and metaphorical shot that was clear signal that while slavery was illegal in the US, white supremacy cannot be eradicated through law.

Congress passed four Reconstruction acts, which "divided the former Confederacy into five military districts, each ruled by a military general." 

One doesn't need a great imagination to understand that white supremacists in the South were not happy with this. 

And, the southern states were required to draft new constitutions, and "Congress made readmission to the Union contingent on the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment."

So far, so good.

But then came the elections of 1876.  Electoral politics took the United States on another path altogether. 

The Party of Lincoln lost, but "disputed the returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina."  I suppose even back then Florida was the eye of the presidential election hurricane!

Another compromise, a bargain, resulted.  In order to retain the Oval Office, the Party of Lincoln "abandoned a century long fight for civil rights."

The military withdrew.  The southern white supremacists regained power.  The KKK's terror campaigns stepped up.  Jim Crow laws came into effect. "Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, in 1881, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars."  Separate streetcars. Separate bibles in courthouses. Separate windows at post offices.  Separate dining areas. 

The law extended even to children: "In Birmingham, for a black child to play checkers with a white child in a public park became a crime."

As Jill Lepore notes, "slavery had ended, segregation had only begun."

Is this when America was great for the current president and his racist voters to make it great again?

"We have lost our Moses"

In the summer of 2016, "before an overwhelmingly white crowd in Dimondale, Mich., where 2.8 percent of the population is African American," then-candidate trump stumped for black votes, by asking them, "What the hell do you have to lose?"

Apparently that question did not get him African-American votes!  But, his negative campaign against Bill Clinton's crime bills, in order to remind blacks about Hillary, paid off well: "In 2016, black turnout was down eight points from 2012."  He and his political adviser and conduit to the Russians and Wikileaks, roger stone, played the dirtiest politics on their belief that “Hate is a stronger motivator than love ... Human nature has never changed.”

All these are a long, long, long way from Lincoln who believed in "the better angels of our nature."

Not all the people in the South wanted to secede.  Even in Virginia, where there was plenty of opposition to secede in the western part of the state.  Jill Lepore writes that in June, after Lincoln's inauguration earlier in March, "they held their own convention and effectively seceded from the state, to become West Virginia."

Ironically, West Virginia today is confederate flag land with people talking about their heritage and is a solid trump country!

Even the soldiers--North and South---fighting in the Civil War, knew well that the conflict was over one and only one issue: Slavery.  In 1862,  "a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade's newspaper wrote:  "Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation if the blacks is wither a fool or a liar."

Contrast that with the racists in today's "Party of Lincoln" who falsely claim that the war was about state's rights and not about slavery and emancipation!

Lepore reminds us: "It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states' rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy."

Think about this the next time you see a confederate flag!

Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation, shepherded the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibited slavery in the United States, and ran for re-election.  All "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

On Good Friday of 1865--April 14th--Lincoln was shot.  He died the following morning.

The Union is Dissolved

When I came to America and started learning as much Americana as I could in a short time, I was intrigued by Lincoln's debate with Stephen Douglas.  Well they were dramatic re-enactments.

The debates were a huge deal.  Jill Lepore writes that "debate was understood as the foundation of civil society."  Yes, the tragic irony that the civil society that the American experiment was trying to create included slavery and genocide and ethnic cleansing!

Lepore writes:

In 1787, the delegates to the constitutional convention had agreed "to argue without asperity, and to endeavor to convince the judgment without hurting the feelings of each other."

More than two centuries later, we have a candidate who was elected to office because of his ability to insult and demean people, so much so that there is a list--and this is merely via Twitter--that is often updated!

On August 21, 1858, it was rumble in the jungle. Well, kind of. Lincoln v. Douglas, as candidates for the Illinois senate seat.  The Dred Scott decision was still fresh on everybody's mind, and "Douglas reminded his audience of Lincoln's opposition" to the decision.  The debate was about their interpretations of "the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution."

Douglas was clear: "This government was made by our fathers on the white basis ... made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever."

Ouch!

Now I am able to appreciate a lot more the Lincoln quote that I have read and heard about forever: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people"--not for the benefit of whites alone.  Oh my, what a statement!

Like the current president who won a squeaker with overwhelming support of racists, Douglas also narrowly won.  Lincoln lost.

But, Lincoln had become the leader.  And was the candidate for the presidency in 1860--a four-way race that also included Douglas.

Lincoln won every northern state ... but Lincoln had won hardly any votes in the South.

The crisis was now full blown.

This is the confederacy that trump's "very fine people" love, cherish, and defend!

Checks and Balances

Many years ago, I read a column by George Will, in which he used lots of big words, like he always does, and convinced me about the core of his argument, which was this: The Constitution does not create anything like an imperial presidency, and that Congress--especially the House--is as powerful as the president is. 

Will argued that if the president has become powerful over the years it is because Congress was not doing its job, and was yielding its powers to the president.

I am sure there are enough constitutional scholars and presidential historians who can argue this until the proverbial cows come home.  I have always understood that Congress was powerful; maybe because when I came to the country, Tip O'Neill was a powerful Speaker and everything Reagan wanted to do seemed to need the Speaker's blessings too.

The Speaker became powerful, again, during Obama's tenure, only because the uber-patriotic Republicans did not like to see in the Oval Office a black Muslim who was born in Kenya!  And after they managed to clean up the White House by electing the brave soldier who exposed the Kenyan Muslim's birth certificate, the House and the Senate controlled by his party became the President's toy poodles!

I don't always get to read George Will these days.  Whether or not he agrees with the "Wall" or with Nancy Pelosi (he made sure to let everyone know what he thinks about trump and the GOP) I wonder if he is now happy with how the Speaker is functioning as the President's equal.

The NY Times reports on how trump has been checkmated by the Speaker--and a woman at that!

For a president who prides himself on being a master negotiator, Ms. Pelosi is a different kind of opponent, and one who so far has flummoxed him.

Pelosi "is her own boss" and "under the Constitution, she is a leader of a branch of government that is equal to the chief executive."

She is!

And in the standoff against Madam Speaker, trump has lost, and cannot seem to find a way out of the shitdown mess that he created, and for which he loudly, openly, and gladly claimed the mantle!

Maybe I should look for Will's recent columns to see if he has written about this aspect during this shitdown.

Ah, yes, tomorrow I will return to Jill Lepore's book.

Politics is a moral issue

A third into the book, I remind myself of the question that Jill Lepore set up for herself and for readers like me:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The evidence thus far does not make the American experiment look good.

In fact, it seems like the experiment gets worse by the page!

The more the North attacked slavery, the more the South defended "their way of life."  More and more compromises were made, in the name of saving the Union.  Morals be damned!

The final proslavery element of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial.

Turn in the runaway slaves?  "These truths"?

Enter Abraham Lincoln.

The 45-year old Lincoln came "out of his law practice and back into politics."  And, "he found a political home in a new political party, the Republican Party, founded in May 1854, in Ripon, Wisconsin."

Jill Lepore writes that Lincoln despaired about "what he described as the nation's "progress in degeneracy," a political regression":

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are equal."  We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes."

Lincoln couldn' make serious inroads.  Yet.

In 1857, President Buchanan was sworn in, and dismissed the importance of the slavery issue.

Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance.

How awful that the president of the United States did not think that slavery was of pressing and practical importance, leave alone the moral aspects of treating fellow humans as property!

It then comes down to the truths.  If the Constitution and the American experiment rests on three political ideas--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people--then, "does the Constitution sanction slavery or not?"

The US Supreme Court settled it, atrociously, in the Dred Scott case, in which the 7-2 majority ruled that ""no negro of the African race " could ever claim the rights and privileges of citizenship in the United States."

Frederick Douglass thundered, as he always did:

Slavery lies in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.

Or, to use the words of the current president, there were fine people on both sides!

A Civil War was inevitable.

Natives? Check. Blacks? Check. Mexicans? Also check!

The European settlers continued to displace people.  That's what alien settlers always do.  That is happening even now in contemporary times, like how the indigenous Miskitos are under assault in Nicaragua.

In the young USA, the leaders decided that they ought to displace Mexicans too.

Mexico was as large as the US in land area, and had a larger population:

"As early as 1825, John Quincy Adams had instructed the American minister to Mexico to try to negotiate a new boundary," writes Jill Lepore.  Yep, the new country was not even 50 years old.  trump's attacks on Mexico are merely the latest in this long history.

Why were the European settlers so interested?  The Mexican territories of "Coahuila and Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico, and west of the state of Louisiana, proved particularly attractive to American settlers in search of new lands for planting cotton."

Perhaps you have an immediate question: Working on the cotton fields meant slave labor; so, if somehow acquired by the US, would Texas allow slavery?

The anti-slavery north protested.  Mexico considered Texas its province, though a rebellious one.  The US wanted to annex it, and more.  The US laid a trap for Mexico in order to begin a war.  It was only a matter of time before Mexico fell into that trap.  Almost exactly to this date--on January 25th--back in 1845, "the House passed a resolution in favor of annexation."  And about slavery in Texas?  The resolution included a compromise: "The eastern portion of Texas would enter the Union as a slave state, but not the western portion."

From the 3/5ths compromise, the US has been at such dealmaking in favor of slavery; yet, we have a president in office who loudly wondered why they had never struck a deal in the past in order to avoid the Civil War!  What an ignoramus that 63 million elected only because he appealed to their racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and more!

President James Polk had grand dreams to extend the American empire; "Texas was only the beginning," Lepore writes.  He hoped to get Mexico into an armed confrontation, and it happened.  He asked Congress to declare war.

What would happen if the US won the war and gained territory?  Would Mexicans there now become Americans?  Quite a few leaders were against it.  "Ours is the government of the white man."  Would the new territory then be slave states as well?

As the war with Mexico came to and end in the second half of 1847, Polk "considered trying to acquire all of Mexico" from 26 degrees N all the way to the Pacific.  But, it was finally settled at 36 degrees north.  With a formal end to the war in February 1848, "the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the United States."

Jill Lepore writes: "As the United States swelled, Mexico shrank."

Build that wall

The Europeans kept coming in by the shiploads.  And the original inhabitants of the land were systematically ousted from their homes and lands.

Jill Lepore writes:

Many parts of the country, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, recruited immigrants by advertising in European newspapers.  Immigrants encouraged more immigrants, in the letters they wrote home to family and friends.  "This is a free country," a Swedish immigrant wrote home from Illinois in 1850. ... A Norwegian wrote from Minnesota, "The principle of equality has been universally accepted and adopted."

Maybe the Swede and the Norwegian did not know about the conditions of blacks and the original inhabitants.  Or, maybe they didn't care, and what mattered to them was how the whites were "free" and could enjoy the "principle of equality."

How huge was this white immigration?

European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent [of the U.S. population] in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. ... By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic.

The Catholicism of the new white folk bothered the older white folk who were Protestants.  "By 1850, one in every four people in Boston was Irish.  Signs at shops began to read, "No Irish Need Apply."

To think that America needs to keep immigrants out is a remarkable denial of the country's history.  The current President, who was elected by 63 million racists, openly declares that he would welcome immigrants from Norway but not from "shitholes."

We are yet to reach the critical time of the Civil War.   But, even at this stage of Jill Lepore's history of the US, think again about Frederick Douglass' speech from 1852, in which he thunders:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

When we sing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave," I am not sure who we refer to. 

We may have come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now.

(On the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I am re-posting here a slightly edited version of a post from a few months ago.)

MLK said that.

It is beyond my wildest imagination how MLK could have been optimistic.  To be that optimistic, even while fully knowing the horrors and horrible people all around, makes him an extraordinary human being.

I, on the other hand, in an immensely more comfortable setting, am always way more pessimistic than MLK could have ever been, it seems like.

In these trump times, and with a growing threat, worldwide, to liberty and the protection of the rights of minorities, as I look around, I don't see people with significant standing encouraging us with "we shall overcome."  They are not reassuring us that the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend towards justice.

Even the skies seemingly darken, I remind myself with MLK saying, "We may have come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now," and I cannot help but wonder how he kept his spirits up and also managed to feed optimism into others.

The first time I listened to MLK's "Mountaintop" speech, I cried.  When he built up the "if I had sneezed," it was a combination of tears and joy. The man literally moved me to tears.

I was ready to act on his “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”  After listening to his "we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago," I was ready to go and punch a few people, despite my pacifism.

The fact that MLK voiced these decades ago did not matter in that moment.  His words, his oration, his cadence, his tone, and the image of his face, moved me even though I came to his words decades after he was assassinated.

The reality is that we're all in the same boat now.  But, heading where?  And, who will get us to the promised land?

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Remember this factoid?

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide and then the ethnic cleansing did not end just because it was now the 19th century!

Enter trump in his previous incarnation: andrew jackson, who "extended the powers of the presidency," writes Jill Lepore.

"The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies in a heap of ruins at his feet," declared a senator from Rhode Island.  "When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it."

Jackson set his sights on Indian removal.  He wanted to forcibly move Native Americans from east of the Mississippi to the West.

The Cherokees had forever been fighting to remain on their lands.

We beg leave to observe, and to remind you, that the Cherokees are not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America; and that they now inhabit and stand on the soil of their own territory.

And then a most unfortunate thing happened: "Gold was discovered on Cherokee land."

The US Supreme Court and its Chief Justice, John Marshall, ruled in favor of the Cherokees.  andrew jackson "decided to ignore the Supreme Court."  The Trail of Tears was the result.

We often refer to slavery as America's original sin.  As sinful as that was, the destruction of the lives and histories of the original inhabitants of this land is an even older story.  As much as the aftereffects of slavery and white supremacy have never gone away, the shameful and atrocious treatment of Native Americans continues.  Especially now with version 2.0 of andrew jackson: trump.

President Donald Trump started off the week by mocking one of the worst Native American massacres in US history in order to score some political points. By Friday, a group of young white teenagers were following his footsteps by taunting Native American elders at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC — on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, no less.
In videos shared widely on YouTube and Twitter, a young man wearing a self-assured smirk and a red “Make America Great Again” stands inches away from a native elder who is beating a drum. Different angles of the incident show a group of a few dozen young people, mostly boys, in the background, jumping up and down and jeering in unison at the group of elders present for the day’s march. In some shots, the teens appear to be shouting “build that wall, build that wall.”

The native elder, Nathan Phillips, is also a Vietnam vet--the war that President Bone Spurs dodged well.

“I heard them saying ‘build that wall, build that wall,’ ” Phillips said while wiping away tears. “This is indigenous land. You’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did for a millennia. We never had a prison. We always took care of our elders, took care of our children, always provided for them, taught them right from wrong. I wish I could see that energy … put that energy to making this country really, really great.”

Yet another Indian elder shedding tears is not going to influence the thinking of 63 million racists!

The revolution in the "shithole"

This is the first long weekend of a new year; Monday is Martin Luther King Day.  Therefore, I will continue to focus on the slavery history of the United States in Jill Lepore's book.

I have written--many times--even in this blog, that I have no idea how African-Americans live without always being angry at the white folk who proudly claim their slave-owning history.  Or, when they openly talk about white supremacy.

Lepore gives me plenty to get angry about--despite that I am not an African-American, and was raised with Brahmin privilege in the old country.  I have no firsthand experience of being the underclass ever, and I am pissed off!

Consider this, for instance: The American Revolution of 1776 echoed across the waters with the French Revolution in 1789.  Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Right?

It was the same France that had colonized Haiti, which was then known as Saint-Domnigue. It was "the largest colony in the Caribbean, and the richest."  Whites on the island were outnumbered by slaves, whose population was eleven times the population of whites.

A "democratic" revolution in the nearby United States, and another in the colonial power.  So, of course, Haiti's brown people rose up in 1791.

The leaders of the American revolution did not support the revolution in Haiti.  Instead, they attacked it.  Not just with words: "Between 1791 and 1793, the United States sold arms and ammunition and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid to French planters on the island."  Yep, the young republic set a precedent way back then by sending money and materials to a war, not to help the downtrodden but to support the white and the wealthy!

American newspapers did not cheer the Haitian Revolution, but instead reported it "as a kind of madness, a killing frenzy."

America reinforced itself not as a land of liberty, but as a land of slavery.  How awful!

When George Washington called it quits and headed back home, some of their slaves fled.  Washington "sent a slave catcher" after one of them, who offered to return only if she would be granted freedom.  "Washington refused, on the ground that it would set a "dangerous precedent.""  When Washington died, blacks outnumbered whites in that room, Lepore writes.

Nearly 230 years after that revolution, the sitting President of the United States casually and callously referred to Haiti as a "shithole".

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

We the people ... which people?

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued his famous presidential proclamation, freeing slaves.  He was the 16th President.  Why didn't any of the previous fifteen issue such a proclamation?  For that matter, why didn't the first president, Washington, issue one?

Jill Lepore writes:

What would have happened if he had decided, before taking that oath of office, to emancipate his slaves? ...
[Yet] he would not, could not, do it.  Few of Washington's decisions would have such lasting and terrible consequences as this one failure to act.

Lepore doesn't sugarcoat her interpretation of history.  Good for her!

Of course, Washington was acutely aware of the deal that was struck--the three-fifths clause--for the Constitution.  He knew how the slave-owning southern delegates felt about slavery, slaves, and blacks. Like William Loughton Smith of South Carolina, who opposed emancipation "by insisting that if blacks were free they would marry whites, "the white race would be extinct, and the American people would be all of the mulatto breed."

Such bigotry exists today, even nearly 230 years later.  Iowa's long-term representative, steve king, has been saying such crap for years before trump jumped on that hatred and made it a winner!  When trump boasted to king about how much money he had raised for him, king's reply was telling: “But I market-tested your immigration policy for fourteen years, and that ought to be worth something.”

Washington set a precedent: In politics, leaders will compromise on morals and basic human decency for the sake of money and power.  It should not surprise us then that the GOP and 63 million voters prostrated before trump! 

During Washington's time, and later too, slaves were, after all, "property" and, therefore, wealth.  The leaders treated their fellow humans as less-than-human even though they fully knew otherwise.  And they compromised.

They all knew well what they were doing.  Which is why the framers of the Constitution "tried to hide it. Nowhere do the words "slave" or "slavery" appear in the final document."  They tried to hide it.  But, they knew that the truth will reveal itself sooner than later.

Easy truths ...

Of course we have differences of opinions on various aspects of the human condition, within our countries and across the world.  I might disagree with you, dear reader, but I will not lose respect for you simply because we disagree.

However, there are issues where there is simply no fuzziness.  Some issues have only one correct answer each, and everything else is wrong.  And on those issues, if you choose, and advocate for those wrong answers, I lose respect for you. trump is one of those in these contemporary times.  

Three hundred years ago, it would have been slavery.

Even with all the understanding that I have, I simply cannot imagine how one group of humans decided that another group of humans was not not really human.  And, therefore, there was nothing wrong in making them slaves. Raping them. Torturing them. Branding them. How sick does one have to be in order to think this way!

The more Jill Lepore gets into slavery--I am yet to reach 1776 in the book--the faster that I am losing respect for the revered white men.  George Washington, who inherited his first human property as a ten year old, was no exception.  While I have, of course, known about the founders' slave-holding, it feels strikingly new when I read sentences like this:

George Washington's slaves had been running away at least since 1760. At least forty-seven of them fled at one time or another.

Let's recap. Washington, the ardent military man who is already engaged in self-governance for the colonies, is fully aware that his slaves are also willing to risk their lives for freedom by running away from his estate ... and the guy does nothing!

In December 1765, George Mason wrote--an essay--to Washington "in which he argued that slavery was "the primary Cause of the Destruction of the most flourishing Government that ever existed"--the Roman republic."

Towns here and there voted in favor of abolishing slavery.  But, these were in the minority.

As the armed conflict between the colonies and the British worsened, Lord Dunmore "offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty's troops in suppressing the American rebellion."  The bastards were no noble saints; it was merely their bloody divide and conquer strategy at play here too.

In doing so, Dunmore tipped the scales:

Edward Rutledge, a member of South Carolina's delegation to the Continental Congress, said that Dumore's declaration did "more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies--than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of."

The symbolic Boston Tea Party didn't launch the revolution. Rather "it was this act; Dunmore's offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence."

To quote from Shakespeare, "For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

A final piece from Lepore wraps it all up:

If all men belonging to civil society are free and equal, how can slavery be possible? It must be, Virginia's convention answered, that Africans do not belong to civil society, having never left a state of nature.

Terrible!

You call it war. I call it massacre.

Even as I continue to read Jill Lepore's sweeping, single-volume, history of the United States, it is difficult to shut myself off from the shit that pours out of trump's mouth and tweets.  It is his mouth that is really a shithole!

The horrible human being in the Oval Office evoked the Wounded Knee massacre in a recent tweet, in order to mock Senator Elizabeth Warren.

In this post, I noted from Jill Lepore that between 1500 and 1800, as many as fifty million Native Americans died.  The hunting down of Indians continued on.  Many European settlers believed that “indigenous practices were by definition savage, superstitious and coercive.”  So, what did they do?

In part because of this belief, the U.S. government decided not to recognize Native Americans as citizens of sovereign governments in the 19th century, but as colonial subjects. In 1883, the Department of Interior enacted the first “Indian Religious Crimes Code” making the practice of Native American religions illegal. These codes remained in place until 1934.

Keep in mind that many European settlers were also the same people who fled religious persecution back in their old countries!

In response, Wenger writes, some Native American groups tried to convince government agents that their gatherings were places of “prayer and worship” similar to Christian churches. Others claimed that their gathering were “social,” not religious.
But this kind of masking of religious practices did not stop the U.S. government from using violence to suppress these Native American ceremonies.
In 1890, the U.S. military shot and killed hundreds of unarmed men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in an effort to suppress a Native American religious ceremony called the “ghost dance.”

This is the Wounded Knee that trump uses to mock Warren!  Millions of Jesus-loving born-again Christians voted for this horrible human being?

Lepore writes about the religious revival in the colonies, which gives us an idea of the track record of most of the religious in this country.  But, there were exceptions.  Very, very few.  But, the  kind of exceptions that give us hope.  One of them was Benjamin Lay.  A widely traveled man, and well read, he was one of the first to speak up and loudly against slavery.

In 1718, Lay sailed to Barbados, where he saw people branded and tortured and beaten, starved and broken; he decided that everything about this arrangement was an offense against God, who "did not make others to be Slaves to us."

In contrast, his contemporary, George Washington "inherited his first human property at the age of ten."

After a few years in England, Lay and his wife left for Pennsylania--the Quaker State.

He traveled from town to town and from colony to colony, only ever on foot--he would not spur a horse--to denounce slavery before governors and ministers and merchants. ... His arguments fell on deaf ears.

What a commitment to the cause!

But, even he ran out of steam.  Benjamin Lay became a hermit.

Outside of Philadelphia, he carved a cave out of a hill. Inside, he stowed his library; two hundred books of theology. biography, poetry, and history. He'd decided to protest slavery by refusing to eat or drink or wear or use anything that had been made with forced labor.

Such principled activists are how we will make America great again!

He continued to press Benjamin Franklin about the slaves that he owned.  "Lay pressed him and pressed him: By what right?"

In 1758, "the Philadelphia Quaker meeting formally denounced slave trading; Quakers who bought and sold men were to be disowned.  When Lay heard the news, he said, "I can now die in peace," closed his eyes, and expired.

A hundred years later, the country fought a Civil War over slavery.  But, it took another 100 years to end separate but equal.  And 60 years after that, we have a President who talks about fine people on both sides!

But, at least there were a few people like Benjamin Lay.  May their tribe increase!

Yelling for freedom, while killing and enslaving!

Barely into a tenth of the book, one truth emerges--the hypocritical and contradictory beliefs of the Europeans who settled in the new world.  On the one hand, they claim to be fleeing persecution, and are in search of freedom.  On the other hand, they annihilate Native Americans and bring in humans from Africa as slaves.  All these well before the Declaration of Independence!

Jill Lepore compels us to think about a number of questions, which she then proceeds to discuss.  Questions such as:

In December 1511, on the fourth Sunday of Advent, Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican priest, delivered a sermon in a church on Hispaniola. Disagreeing with the king's ministers, he said the conquistadors were committing unspeakable crimes. "Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do yo wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations?  And then he  asked, "Are they not men?"

That was less than 20 years since Columbus discovered America!

When Columbus landed on the shores of Hispaniola--his "India"--"there were about three million people on that island."  A mere fifty years later, "there were only five hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung."

Columbus couldn't care. The King of Spain couldn't care.  The Pope couldn't care.

Five hundred years later, trump couldn't care either--Haiti was his primary target when he specifically referred to a few countries as "shitholes."

"Are they not men?"

That was perhaps the first of the questions, to which there was no end.

As European invaders raped women, or even fell in love with them and stayed with them, the land now had "mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women,"  Soon, these outnumbered Indians, whose population sharply decreased.  "An intricate caste system marked gradations of skin color." Awful, "as if skin color were like dyes made of plants, the yellow of sassafras, the red of beets, the black of carob."

And, therefore, "pressed upon the brows of every person of the least curiosity the question of common humanity: Are all peoples one?"

In the contemporary US, trump and his 63 million toadies have clearly stated, over and over, that all people are not equal. 

The guy who co-chaired trump's campaign in Iowa, who had been spewing white supremacist and white nationalist talk for ever, recently said:

what matters more than race is “the culture of America” based on values brought to the United States by whites from Europe.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King said. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

Oh, and what was the response to Montesinos' question?  The conquistadors were required to read aloud to anyone they proposed to conquer and enslave a document called the Requiremento.  If the natives accepted the story of Genesis the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen, then their lives were spared.

The Evangelicals' support for trump is a mere echo of this 500-year old beginning!

The Chinese and the Mayans didn't care. Europeans did. We now have trump!

One of the factoids that I share with students is how India and China were the richest countries on the planet for the longest time.  Not only rich, but advanced in scientific and literary fields also.  Math, astronomy, metallurgy, whatever it was, well, they had it all.

Yet, they didn't seem to have had a great deal of interest in exploring the rest of the world in order to colonize them.

Trevor Noah joked about this in one of his bits, where he asks the audience to imagine Jamaicans, living in the paradise that the Caribbean is, going to cold Europe to colonize the people and the land.

The world changed in 1492.  Jill Lepore writes that "it is a little surprising that it was western Europeans in 1492, and not some other group of people, some other year, who crossed an ocean to discover a lost world."

Lepore gives us an idea of some of the other groups of people:

The Maya, whose territory stretched from what is now Mexico to Costa Rica, knew enough astronomy to navigate across the ocean as early as AD 300.

(A quick comment/question: Why is Lepore using the "AD" instead of "CE"?)

Lepore adds:

The Chinese had invented the compass in the eleventh century, and had excellent boats. Before his death in 1433, Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim, had explored the coast of much of Asia and eastern Africa, leading two hundred ships and twenty-seven thousand sailors. But China was the richest country in the world, and by the late fifteenth century no longer allowed travel beyond the Indian Ocean, on the theory that the rest of the world was unworthy and uninteresting.

Similarly, the Middle East and North African Muslims couldn't care about the rest of the world because they already dominated trade--Mediterranean and continental.

Trevor Noah's Jamaicans serve as wonderful metaphors.  The world outside of Europe was happy and content.

Europeans, on the other hand, were not.

It was somewhat out of desperation, then, that the poorest and weakest Christian monarchs on the very western edge of Europe, fighting with Muslims, jealous of the Islamic world's monopoly on trade, and keen to spread their religion, began looking for routes to Africa and Asia that wouldn't require sailing across the Mediterranean.

Columbus discovered America!

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide, the rape of cultures, and more that they don't always teach in school!

I suppose white supremacy was also born!

By the end of the 19th century, China and India had been reduced to lands of beggars by white colonialists and imperialists, and the material and cultural riches of Central and South America had been wiped out by Europeans.  Two decades into the 20th century, the Middle East was carved into prizes for Europeans.  And Africa was raped and plundered--even by the tiny Belgians.

These truths are setting up the book well.  Looks like it might be a depressing read.  After all, all these truths have given us trump and his 63 million.  I hope Jill Lepore will give me plenty to be cheerful about too.

From Tamil country to Kalapuya land

When we were kids, the world was explained to us in simple terms. And we believed in those explanations.

As we get older, even by middle school, we begin to ask questions that require a bit more detail.  The more we learn, it turns out that often we end up knowing less.

Way back in school, I forget what grade it might have been, we were taught that Columbus discovered America.  I suppose it was not only me who was naive enough to have bought into that, so were my classmates--even Vijay! 

Right then, we didn't ask the teacher, or ourselves, a simple question that much later in life I asked my niece's son when he told me about Columbus having discovered the country where I now live.  I asked him: "So, before Columbus discovered America, there were no people there? He was the first person to go to America?"

In the decades since elementary school, I have come to know more about America.  The first time I came to know that Washington and Jefferson and many others, too, were slave owners, I was crushed.  All that glorious language of "we the people" and "democracy" and more suddenly became meaningless. 

In this tad more informed existence, when I think about the genocidal killing of the people who were in the lands before Europeans arrived, I get intensely angry.  Slavery. Jim Crow. Chinese exclusion. Japanese internment.  America's past is immensely tragedy-filled, with tragedies caused by humans, and a sharp contrast to "Columbus discovered America" and everybody lived happily ever after of my elementary school days.

But, even the answers that I have now about America's past are incomplete.  All I know is that I know very little of it.

Jill Lepore will educate me.

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The nearly 800 pages that Lepore follows up with will keep me busy for a long time.   I need to do this. We all need to read and think about our past.  For people like me who have moved far away from where we were born and raised, there are multiple pasts, like learning about Tamil, that we need to understand.

The past is an inheritance, a gift, and a burden. It can't be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There's nothing for it but to get to know it.

And to get to know is what I have planned to do.

These truths from the old country to the adopted country

After the series of posts related to David Shulman's Tamil: A Biography (click here for the posts) I need a break.

When I return, I will launch into learning about the adopted country.  The text--if it interests you, dear reader--is by one of my favorite contemporary public intellectuals: Jill Lepore.

Vanakkam ...

Source

... to the Tamil of today

The only problem that I have with David Shulman's biography of Tamil is that for a book authored by a person of his caliber, and for a book published by Harvard University Press, there are quite a few inconsistent spellings throughout.  Even Tenkasi is spelled as Tenkaci in one context.  In the opening pages, the pallavi of the Carnatic music is written as pallava.

But, otherwise, what an awesome learning experience it has been for me!

Shulman writes that the Tamil world had changed almost beyond recognition by the middle of the nineteenth century.  Manonmaniyam Sundaram Pillai played an integral role in the revival and revitalization of Tamil.  I recall his Tamil Thai Vazhthu from the school days.  Shulman lists many more who worked on recovering the old Sangam texts and providing commentaries about them.

In the early 20th century, the struggle to get rid of the bastard raj also became a struggle to re-establish Tamil.  Unfortunately, this became entangled with anti-Brahmin and anti-caste issues, which were also extremely important, and are important even today.  But, the co-mingling of these issues led to a political movement to also get rid of the Sanskrit--associated with Brahmins--words from the Tamil language.

Shulman writes that "the very intensity of anti-Sanskrit feeling that we see in the Pure Tamil fanatics is itself a sure sign of the deep interdependence of the two languages."  But, politics does not care for such nuances.  And despite the maniacal efforts of the fanatics, "Tamil today, like the Tamil of yesterday, indeed like nearly all major living languages, remains saturated with borrowed vocabulary."  The language lives on.

Shulman ends the book with a contemporary Tamil poem, by Manushya Puthiran.

Tamil becoming modern

Even in the title, David Shulman makes clear that he is writing a biography of Tamil, and not a history.

Old languages like Tamil, given to intense reflection of many centuries, write their own autobiographies, in many media, though we may not know hot to read them.  Sometimes they ask the assistance of a ghostwriter, a biographer, like me.

What a wonderful storyteller he is!  In this biography of Tamil, he educates me on how the grammar evolved, which then made the rich poetic literature happen, and then as the times changed, well, prose also developed.

Modernity is always a relative concept, privileging the more recent over the more distant past and thereby habitually distorting the latter.  It never happens in a single shot.

That applies to the changes in the language as well as to any aspect of life, it seems.

From the Sangam poetry to modern prose is one hell of a journey over nearly 2,000 years.  "Modern literary prose," for which the Tenkasi period played a critical role, is very different from the poetry of the past.  "Nothing can quite prepare us for the expressive power and stylistic range of nineteenth-century Tamil prose works, which 'bespeak a change of consciousness, of conscience'"

In addition to Sanskrit being woven into Tamil, "by the late seventeenth century, two new languages have entered into Tamil-ness from the outside--Persian and Arabic."  The biography of Tamil, it seems, is also about assimilation.  Perhaps this cosmopolitanism that is innate in the language in which we grew also contributes to how easily we move around and assimilate into societies that are completely unlike the Tamil country.

Shulman discusses "the great Muslim poet Umaruppulavar."  Of course, I had no idea about him either.  Even though he was from the part of the Tamil country that was home to my people. He was born in Ettayapuram, the same place that also claims as its own the poet whose verse I have in a tshirt!

Umaruppulavar's opus was:

the best-known literary work of Muslim Tamil, the Cirappuranam, probably the finest large-scale narrative poem in Tamil in the seventeenth-century; this vast work, largely modeled on Kamban, tells the story of Muhammad in a Hijaz that has reimagined as the verdant Tamil land

I had no idea that my ancestral areas in the old Tamil country played such roles in the evolution of the "modern" Tamil.

Tamil at the border ... and yet at the center

Tirunelveli with its own dialect is where my people are from.  Well, one branch is from close to Tirunelveli, and the other is at Sengottai, which is at the foothills of the Western Ghats.  Sengottai used to be a part of the old Travancore kingdom, and then Kerala.  After the disastrous creation of language-based states, Sengottai became a part of Tamil Nadu and Tirunelveli district.

Tenkasi is the big town near Sengottai.  I have never explored that town, other than waiting at the bus stand there, or passing through.

David Shulman makes me feel that I have missed out on something important at Tenkasi.  This town that is seemingly insignificant was not really insignificant:

A line of rulers claiming to be descendants of the medieval Pandya kings consolidated a small-scale state in this far southern corner of the Tamil country in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  By the decade of the 1440s this Pandya state had attained a solid economic base, at least partly sustained by the lucrative trade passing over the Ghats, that enabled the rulers, among other projects, to build the great Visvanatha-Siva temple still standing in the city

One of the rulers was Ativirarama Pantiyan.  Tamil literature "beginning ca. 1564, witnessed a burst of activity unparalleled elsewhere in Tamil Nadu."

From Tenkasi!

How unparalleled at that time?

the king himself was a powerful poet, the author of the complex work known as Naitatam ... Once considered the basis of an education in Tamil, this work is, sadly, little read today, as are Ativiraraman's other monumental narrative poems

Again, in Tenkasi!

Contributing to poetry itself is significant.  But there is more.  Tenkasi poets produced "major works of what we could call poetry-as-prose."

In Tamil, believe it or not, one could draw a line leading from late-sixteenth century Tenkasi poetic narratives to twentieth-century prose artists such as Putumaippittan, with a big but necessary detour around late-nineteenth-century novelists such as Vedanayakam Pillai and Rajam Iyer.

Maybe I should have picked up the Putumaippittan collection.

A guy who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and an Israeli after immigrating, teaches me about Tamil and Tenkasi and Tirunelveli.  Serendipity at the bookstore!

Traditions, when the times they are a-changin'

Consider the following sentence:

Tradition means living while adhering to usage as befits the refined culture of particular people in a particular time and place.

What an awesome definition of tradition, right?

But, there is way more to that sentence.

What happens to the glorious Tamil literature that followed the rules of the sophisticated grammar that involved the mythical Agastya and the real life Nakkirar?  Do the old canons get thrown out?  Will a new grammar have to be created?  What about the tradition?

It is in this context, writes David Shulman, that Peraciriyar (the great teacher) took on the challenge of "defining, defending, and explicating the classical Tamil past."  Centuries have passed since the Sangam literature, and the times they are a-changin' in the 13th century.  Poets are experimenting, and Peraciriyar thinks and writes about marapu:

Tradition means making poetry while adhering to usage (valakku) as befits the refined culture (nakarikam) of particular people in a particular time and place.

Even as I read that sentence, I was struck by how contemporary the issue is.  Shulman adds:

Let's say that actual speech changes over time [...]; does this mean we need a new grammar in each new period?

That question is relevant even today.

Languages and cultures do not stay stagnant.  If they do, perhaps they will perish.  The Tamil of today is vastly different from the Sangam Tamil, from Nammalvar's Tamil, from Peraciriyar's Tamil ... even from Kannadasan's poetry.  What happens to tradition when the times they are a-changin'?

Tradition means living while adhering to usage as befits the refined culture of particular people in a particular time and place.

A verse from Pukalenti's Nalavenpa and Shulman's commentary appeal to me a lot--even though my traditions are far removed from Peraciriyar's:

I, too, think that everyone should see the world as it is.

Tamil as a world language

Back during the Neyveli years, we went to the local sabha to watch live musical performances and theatre.  I simply assumed then that most of India was into the highbrow cultural life.  And have been disappointed to find out ever since that most of India does not care a shit about the intellectual and cultural lives, even though seemingly every Indian is proud of its rich heritage!

One of the plays that we watched was by Kathaadi Ramamoorthy (?)  A character in that play was from Tirunelveli.  This character comes to Madras (as it was known then) and speaks with a strong Tirunelveli dialect that others find it difficult to understand, which then set up many comedic situations. 

Why is the Tirunelveli dialect so distinct?

Turns out that there is a historical linguistic reason, which I did not know until I read David Shulman's Tamil.

As the Pandyas weakened and other kings and invaders from the north attacked the Tamil country, the Vijayanagara forces reached well into the region by the mid-14th century.  They didn't merely attack, raid, and return with the riches, but came to stay, writes Shulman, who adds that Telugu-speaking farmers and merchants also arrived and "settled mostly in the far south of the Tamil country in the basin of the Tamraparani River."  Yes, the same river that is a pleasant walk from my grandmother's old village!

Telugu speech, present from ancient times in the border zones of northern Tamil Nadu, now became a natural presence throughout the southern region.  You can still hear it today in Tirunelveli District--a distinct dialect with archaic features preserved in relative isolation from the evolving fate of Telugu in Andhra and Telengana, somewhat like the Rabelaisian French of Quebec in relation to today's standardized French.

Again, all I have is only one reaction: Mouth wide open!

From this post, six years ago

This was in the mid-14th century, by when the three powerful forces--Pallavas, Cholas, and Pandyas--were in decline.  But, their achievements prior to that had already made Tamil a world language.  Among the many pieces of evidence that Shulman writes about is Quanzhou, which I had also blogged about a while ago.

Throughout all these, Shulman discusses plenty of poetry and literature from those periods, and how the language evolved to become more and more cosmopolitan.  I have a hard time choosing my favorite among them.  I loved his story about the eccentric improv poet Kalamekam (Black Cloud.)  I will outsource that to this reviewer:

Asked to write a poem in the form called venpa about a mountain made to shake by a fly nearby, he ups the ante: “Why not the whole universe?” The venpa is a notoriously tricky verse form, tightly restricted in its cadence, with a complicated pattern of double rhyme. The resulting Tamil poem is a little miracle of assonance and rhythm; Shulman beautifully captures its lyrical eccentricities:

The eight elephants that stand at the cardinal points,
great Mount Meru, the oceans,
the Earth herself—all teetered and tottered
when a fly came buzzing
into the wound left on Vishnu’s body

by the cowherdess with the musical voice

when she struck him
with the thick churning rod.

(It helps to know that in traditional texts the directions are, indeed, guarded by elephants; Mount Meru is the axis mundi; and Vishnu was incarnated in a village of cowherds as the mischievous, larcenous, adorable baby Krishna, whose long-suffering mother Yashoda was forced on occasion to deliver corporal punishment, with cosmic consequences.)

Dandin, the bestselling Pallava author

I had always wondered about the Sanskrit in the names of the big time Tamil kings of the past.  Like Mahendravarman and Narasmimha among the Pallavas, and Raja Raja and Rajendra Cholans.  I mean, these figures loom large among the Tamil imagination and yet they have Sanskrit names?  In comparison, the great Tamil poet and grammarian had a "real" Tamil name--Nakkiran.

David Shulman writes that "modern spoken Tamil is astonishingly rich in Sanskrit loan words.  Indeed, there may well be more straight Sanskrit in Tamil than in the Sanskrit-derived north Indian vernaculars."

The usage of "modern" does not answer the question about Mahendravarman, who lived 1,400 years ago.

Even as I think about all these, Shulman throws me a curve ball.  A googly, to use a cricket equivalent.  He offers an interesting theory, which perhaps the Indologists and Tamil scholars have been arguing it out.  As this reviewer in NYRB notes:

Likely to ruffle some scholars is Shulman’s insistence that this remarkable literary culture was, since its inception, deeply in dialogue with Sanskrit, and that a great many (perhaps most) of its poets partook of the Brahmanical culture that already spanned all of South Asia by the Common Era’s early centuries.

I am willing to buy into this idea.  Shulman writes:

What we can say with confidence is that speakers of Vedic Sanskrit were in contact, from very ancient times, with speakers of Dravidian languages, and that the two language families profoundly influenced one another."

Dandin helps me understand such a possibility.

I had no idea about a historical character named Dandin until I read this book.  Seriously, how did a fellow who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, who immigrated to Israel, manage to understand all these, and then write in a delightfully simple prose so that even idiots like me--born a Tamil--can understand and appreciate the richness of the language and the people going back centuries?

Shulman writes:

Dandin, a native Tamil speaker, chose to compose his work on poetics in Sanskrit, the cosmopolitan language accessible to scholars throughout India and beyond--and indeed, the Kavyadarsa became one of India's bestsellers, known throughout Asia and eventually translated/adapted into Tamil (Tantiyalankaram, possibly twelfth century), Tibetan, and other languages.  The Pallava court was clearly open to the pan-Indian world of erudition and artistic production couched in Sanskrit and also eager to contribute to that world.

There is only one way to respond to this: Mouth wide open!

Now, when I look at the photos like the one above that I have from my visits to Kanchipuram, I wonder about the backstory is of this person who could very well be a scholar from China visiting the highly cosmopolitan Pallava capital!

In terms of political and social dynamics, a northern-oriented, highly Sanskritic state centered in Kancipuram and the Tondai plain complemented the southern kingdom of Pandya Madurai with its Tamil-centric ideology.  Powerful literary works in Tamil appeared a little later in the Pallava north than in the Pandya south, though we should not forget a great narrative poem such as the Perumpanatrupatai, from the Ten Songs.

They never even hinted about any of these in my high school history!

Verse 72 from
The Tiruviruttam of Nammāḻvār
Source

The aboriginal Tamils

I have blogged, talked, and written about how the formal education system from elementary school onward is rarely about understanding the big picture.  Instead, it is mostly about monetizing what one can do.  Learning languages and history, reading and appreciating poetry, are some of the prominent losers among many in such an education framework.

Poetry, history, language and more are all what I am learning by reading David Shulman's Tamil. In school, we were taught more about Western history and poems than about anything Indian.  Most of even the little bit that I know about India's past has been despite the school's best effort to make sure we didn't know a damn thing!

Thus, now, I am stumped at everything that Shulman offers.  A guy who was born in Waterloo, Iowa, who immigrated to Israel, seems to know more about Tamil than all but a handful of the 80 million Tamil-speakers put together!  His respectful appreciation of the language, culture, poetry, and more, makes me want to sue my old school and the government for having failed to educate me.

When writing about the Sangam literature, Shulman spends a few pages about Tirukkural, which is "a part of the larger set of the eighteen minor works."  Of course, anybody who is from Tamil Nadu knows about this collection and its author, Tiruvalluvar.  But, like almost everybody, that is all I know.  Nothing more.

After quoting and discussing a few of the couplets from Tirukkural, Shulman writes that "the reader is warmly advised to find his own favorites in translations such as P.S. Sundaram's or the beautiful French one by Francois Gros."

Shulman writes about a popular account of Tiruvalluvar as the son of a Brahmin father and a Dalit mother: "his Paraiya-Dalit nature is integral to the thick web of stories woven around him in both premodern and modern times."

"Paraiya" is no longer used for a good reason--it is like the "n" word in the US.  But, it is one of the many words that has been brought into the English language thanks to the bastard raj.  We refer to, for instance, Kim Jong-Un's North Korea as a "pariah state." 

We cannot ever retract that word from the language.  But, perhaps we ought to celebrate how this out-caste word has gone global.

Here's one of the couplets of the Brahmin-Dalit Tiruvalluvar that Shulman writes with appreciation:

If I tell her I love her more than anyone, she asks:
"Which anyone?"

Those cunning linguists!

In my early years of teaching, which was back in California, it did not take me much time to understand that students in my classes needed to learn how to write at the college level.  But, I could not spend all my class time teaching them about writing, nor did I have the ability to explain to the class how to write well.

I, therefore, did the smartest thing ever: I sought help from the English Department. As I have noted here, Kim loaned me one of her teaching assistants for 30 minutes each week for about six weeks.  One of those was Rebecca.  Once, over lunch, we talked about books, and to this day I am pleasantly flummoxed by her response to the my question on the book that she was reading.  It was about grammar!  Yes, it was about grammar. No kidding!

David Shulman gives me an idea of why those linguistics folks love to explore grammar.  He writes about the grammar in Tamil, which makes it interesting even for blokes like me.  Shulman then proceeds to write about the beauty of the language by using the example of the word undayirukka (உண்டாயிருக்கா) which means "to be or become pregnant."

I had no idea about any of these until now!

Of course, Shulman's book is not merely about grammar.  It is a biography of Tamil.

So, about this old language with a rich past and apparently a beautiful grammar too, well, where did it come from?

Shulman writes that "speakers of Dravidian languages were in place in south India, and perhaps also farther north, in the first millennium B.C."  But, it is all a mystery.  "We do not know when Dravidian language first penetrated the subcontinent; there may be a link to the Iron Age cultures of the southern megaliths, or even to the far more ancient world of Neolithic pastoralists."

But, so much is clear: Tamil's grammar paved the way for its poetry.

One of the many examples that Shulman uses in order to convey the richness and beauty of the language is one from the Sangam period.  The anthologies from this period "are broadly sorted into two thematic categories: akam or “the interior,” consisting of love poems, and puram or “the exterior,” a more diverse group, including martial eulogy, public praise, and worldly wisdom."  Here is one (translation by A.K. Ramanujan):

Of course, the akam and puram duality "can only be artificially kept apart."

A seemingly outer being like the beloved, or the god, is so deeply twined into the poet's own in-ness that we soon give up on identifying any out-ness at all.  The Tamil cosmos has no external boundary.

That is profound.