Stinking history!

(I have sent this across to the editor)

Higher education has been afire with discussions—substantive and rhetorical—about the dark histories of the people after whom buildings and colleges have been named. Locally, at the University of Oregon, two buildings, Deady and Dunn Halls, have made us rethink the biographies of the namesakes. The older the university, the more the possibility of controversial history. For instance, recently, Georgetown University has been in the news for how it sold its 227 slaves in 1838 in order to pay off the debts and sustain the financially struggling college.

We humans have been struggling forever, it seems, to figure out how to respond and react to the origins of wealth that is then used for honorable causes, like education. By and large, we seem to have operated along the lines of a Latin phrase that is almost two thousand years old—“Pecunia non olet” which translates to “money does not stink.”

The “stink” of the money is, thus, not new by any means. It is just that we conveniently opted not to talk about it. The recent discussions about Georgetown and Deady and Dunn have, thankfully, brought to the forefront those difficult and inconvenient issues.

Many of us from India have often pointed to Yale University as an example of “Pecunia non olet.” In order to understand this, we need to know more about the namesake. Elihu Yale was a Bostonian by birth, but was mostly raised in London because his father found the New England Puritanism too stifling. Growing up in England, Yale signed up for the promising and pioneering multinational corporation of the seventeenth century—the East India Company.

In 1670, Yale was assigned to work in one of the most profitable operations—in Madras, which is in southern India. (This city, where my parents and sister live, was renamed Chennai in 1996.) It was in Madras that Yale even got married—to his friend’s widow—and it was in the same city that his three-year old son was buried after an untimely death.

Yale’s personal, professional, and political lives were all made in India after his relatively humble economic beginnings. As one author put it, “Yale had come to India with the entry-level title of a company "writer" and an annual salary of £10—about half a shilling a day at a time when an English cloth suit cost around 15 shillings.” Yale proved that he knew a thing or two about the art of making a deal and he quickly made himself rich and powerful, while helping make the East India Company rich and powerful. Thus, from a lowly “writer” Yale quickly rose to become the governor of Madras. His aggressive methods also led to his downfall—he was fired from the post in 1692 after which he returned to England.

The two decades-plus in Madras had made Elihu Yale a wealthy man. As he got older, and because he did not have children to whom he could have willed the inheritance, Yale’s fortunes were sought by many. One of the beneficiaries of his largesse was the Collegiate School in Connecticut that was later renamed to Yale College in 1718, as a way of honoring Yale’s contributions.

Because of the connections to Madras that provided Yale University with its name, some of us from that part of the world joke that we deserve legacy admissions with free tuition. After all, the East India Company was more than a mere trading corporation, and a monopoly at that. In a matter of years, the company became a mighty political force with its own military forces with which it ruled a vast territory in the Subcontinent.

The land became the British Raj after the monarch assumed direct control. India, which accounted for more than a quarter of the entire world’s economy when these mercantile operations began more than three hundred years ago, was reduced to a poster-child for poverty, starvation, and beggars by the time the British government reluctantly granted independence in August 1947 to the newly created countries of India and Pakistan.

Thus, whether it is Yale or Georgetown or the United Kingdom of today, the question is the same one from the Roman days: Does money have a smell?

Perhaps the best approaches in these troubling issues will begin with an honest recognition of the patron’s past, especially regarding the wealth they accumulated. History cannot be undone, of course. We can constructively move forward by learning from history, and by establishing procedures whereby philanthropy will be appropriately vetted for the money’s olfactory backstories.

The Hipsters of Tamil Nadu: Plaid and the Madras Shirt

Perhaps it is my fascination for autoethnography and a quest for the meaning of life that makes me seek the connections between what I read and my own life.  It is my own way of finding my own personal connections to this universe and developing my own interpretation of the old mahavakya तत्त्वमसि (You are that.)

Today's piece in this fascinating quest: the plaid shirt.

Back in my first year of graduate school, I bought myself a plaid shirt, with the typical red and black color combination.  When I wore it to class on a Southern California winter day, a classmate--a White American woman--greeted me with "hey lumberjack!"

I had no idea what she was referring to.  Why am I a lumberjack because of the warm and colorful shirt that I was wearing?  Keep in mind that this was well before my immersion into all things Americana and, of course, before I figured out the importance of small talk in this culture.

Over the years I have also come to understand that as one from Madras (Chennai) and Tamil Nadu, maybe I had had the preference for the plaid shirt even back in India thanks to the Madras shirts--though I knew about the expression "Madras shirt" only after living in the US.  I know, I know, this autoethnographic piece is getting to be a ball of woolen yarn; so, will slowly thread the story for you ;)

In 1978, archeologists inspecting an ancient cemetery in China found the 3,000-year old remains of a "6-foot-2, tall, brown hair, and long-nosed" body referred to as the "Cherchen Man."  And, even more interestingly:

When the archeologists discovered this 3,000-year-old body, it was dressed in a “twill tunic and tartan leggings.” Various colors of wool were interwoven. They are the oldest preserved pants in the world and the first example of what we know as plaid. (Which isn't to say this is the first plaid ever made: There are references to the design that pre-date the Cherchen Man; his just happen to be preserved.)

And,

While it's still not entirely clear how persons of Celtic descent ended up in China, the discovery is proof that the Scottish people have been using plaid/tartan as a design for more than 3,000 years.

Imagine that!

Fast forward from the time of the Cherchen Man to the British mercantilism morphing into imperialism.  The Subcontinent, especially in the cotton-growing areas, is way too hot for wool.

The modern day Madras fabric has a plaid or checked and sometimes even striped pattern in generally bright colors. These patterns, especially plaid, first made their appearance about a hundred and fifty years ago and were the result of the tartan craze which started with the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822. As was to be expected, this influenced the British in India and tartan started to be incorporated into Madras. The Harris Museum in Preston, Lancashire has two swatches of Madras fabric dating from 1866; one is a tartan and the other very similar to modern day Madras

I recall wearing plenty of checked-patterned shirts when growing up in India, but had no idea then about this rich story of Scottish tartans and the British Raj.

Source

Of course, it was not I who brought the Madras Shirt to the US ;)

It first made its appearance in America in 1718 as a part of a donation made to the Collegiate School of Connecticut by the then Governor of Madras Elihu Yale.

Ahem, by now you know well about my thoughts on Yale--the person--right?

the big breakthrough came allegedly in 1958, when the leading textile importer William Jacobson embarked on a trip from the U.S. to Bombay in the hopes to return with this exotic fabric from India.

What happened?

Upon his arrival, the local textile Commissioner Mr. Swaminathan directed him to Captain C.P.Krishnan Nair the proprietor of Leela Scottish Lace Ltd, a textile exporting company from Chennai ( modern day Madras) who presented Jacobson with a fabric that he fell for right away. It was a Madras plaid fabric with a strong smell of vegetable dyes and sesame oils that was dyed in vivid colors that was originally made for export to South Africa. Mr. Nair was delighted to supply Mr. Jacobson with the Madras fabric at $1 per yard, warning him that the fabric required utmost care when laundering because the color would run out if it wasn’t gently washed in cold water.
The American exporter sold ( 10,000 yards ) of the same fabric to Brooks Brothers who manufactured trousers and jackets (which sold for $50) . 

Wait, this gets more interesting:

However Jacobson failed to fully explain the properties of the fabric and did not issue washing instructions to Brooks Brothers.
Customers were furious when they saw the colors run that ruined their expensive summer apparel. Jacobson was likewise furious and summoned Mr. Nair to the United States where his attorneys threatened to sue Mr. Nair and the Leela Scottish Lace Ltd.

Which is where the marketing genius kicked in:

One of the attorneys arranged an interview for Mr. Nair with the editor of Seventeen Magazine in which he created a story about this miracle Madras fabric from India that was exclusively made for Brooks Brothers in New York. In the following issue, the editor ran a seven-page article about fabric titled “Bleeding Madras — the miracle handwoven fabric from India”. And since pictures say more than 1,000 words, they added beautiful photographs with the caption “guaranteed to bleed”.
Within a days of the magazine hitting the newsstands, Brooks Brothers was flooded with thousands of requests for the Madras items and it became an overnight success. Both, Mr. Jacobson and Mr. Nair made a fortune from the sale and paved the way for future Indian fabric exports of millions of yards of Madras cloth.
In the 1960’s, David Ogivily, one of the leading “Mad Men” of the era, would further a very similar campaign for Hathaway Madras shirts, and all of a sudden customers couldn’t wait to see their Madras shirts fade fast enough.

To borrow the words from another American, "there's a sucker born every minute."

And to bring this to a close, from right here in Oregon, well, there is a town close by that is named Madras.  Why?

According to one version of the story, someone noticed a bolt of Madras pattern cloth and suggested that the town be called “Madras.” Others contend that the name was chosen because of the early settlers’ spiritual affinity with the city in India.

तत्त्वमसि 

Namaste! ;)

Pecunia non olet? Not if it is from Yale. From Chennai?

The title of this post should not, by any means, mislead a reader into thinking that I am now a Latin student at Yale.  Far from that; they would not allow the likes of me at those Ivies!

A few years ago, when I was in Boston for a conference, I went to Harvard, and walked about.  When I was in the law school buildings I decided to use the restroom instead of hunting for one later on.  As I like to joke about it, I have contributed a lot to Harvard!

Boston's Charles River, 2008

While those kind of contributions stink, we stink, therefore we are human ;)  Money, however, apparently has no smell.  Remember that earlier post on Pecunia non olet?

It is most appropriate that I continue with that smelly topic from here in Chennai.  Not because of the stink in Chennai, about which one could write doorstoppers.  But because of Chennai's connection with Yale.  With the university's namesake, that is.

Elihu Yale was more a product of the East India Co. than of any place or political jurisdiction. Descended from a Welsh family, he was born in 1649 in Boston but spent most of his childhood in London, where his father, David, sought freedom from the puritanical strictures of New England and a friendly environment for trade. Young Yale enjoyed an education from William Dugard, headmaster of the storied Merchant Taylors' School, before obtaining a job with the East India Co. in 1670. He soon shipped out to Fort St. George, the company's lucrative outpost in southern India, around which had grown the town of Madras, now Chennai, India's sixth largest city. There he remained for the next quarter-century, eventually becoming governor of the settlement. In between, he and his wife, Catherine, would become the first couple married at St. Mary's Church—India's oldest Anglican church—and Elihu would amass a fortune dealing in textiles and precious stones on his own account. After retiring to a grand estate in London, he arranged for a burial at his ancestral home in Wrexham, Wales, beneath a tomb paying homage to his peripatetic life: "Born in America, in Europe bred / In Afric travell'd and in Asia wed / Where long he liv'd and thriv'd; at London dead."

From a common puritan to a governor.

Yale had come to India with the entry-level title of a company "writer" and an annual salary of £10—about half a shilling a day at a time when an English cloth suit cost around 15 shillings. Having demonstrated a knack for negotiations with local trade partners, by 1687 he had been named governor.

Sounds like there is no reason why his money should smell, right?

His position was precarious: Opportunities for graft were extraordinary, and governors were vulnerable to accusations of improprieties. It didn't help that Yale was widely regarded as a brusque and divisive manager. After the company replaced Yale in 1692, a wide array of allegations regarding his tenure as governor emerged, keeping him on the legal defensive in Madras. But he used the time off the company's payroll in India to focus on growing his vast estate. The precise size of his fortune by the time he left India is unclear, but his assets were numerous enough that their disposal at his death required seven separate auctions.

I suppose the formula is simple.
First, you plunder.
Then create universities or hospitals or scholarships and launder that money clean.
And get recorded in history as one of the greats.

Yale had ensured that his name would emerge in the centuries to come as a byword for learned privilege. Always a a shrewd trader, Yale found in his gift to the fledgling New Haven school the best deal he ever made.

Oh well ... I have other smelly problems to deal with rather urgently--like how no amount of deodorants can help me in Yale's old robbing grounds ;)

More on Kagan

More on Yale banning cartoons in a book

I blogged earlier about Yale University Press forcing the author of a forthcoming book on the Danish cartoon controversy not to include the cartoons in the book.

Christopher Hitchens says it best (as always):

[Now] the rot has gone a serious degree further into the fabric. Now we have to say that the mayhem we fear is also our fault, if not indeed our direct responsibility. This is the worst sort of masochism, and it involves inverting the honest meaning of our language as well as what might hitherto have been thought of as our concept of moral responsibility.

Last time this happened, I linked to the Danish cartoons so that you could make up your own minds about them, and I do the same today. Nothing happened last time, but who's to say what homicidal theocrat might decide to take offense now. I deny absolutely that I will have instigated him to do so, and I state in advance that he is directly and solely responsible for any blood that is on any hands. He becomes the responsibility of our police and security agencies, who operate in defense of a Constitution that we would not possess if we had not been willing to spill blood—our own and that of others—to attain it. The First Amendment to that Constitution prohibits any prior restraint on the freedom of the press. What a cause of shame that the campus of Nathan Hale should have pre-emptively run up the white flag and then cringingly taken the blood guilt of potential assassins and tyrants upon itself.

Yale bans a book--on the Danish cartoons issue

Cartoons published in an obscure newspaper in Denmark shook the world. And burnt the world. Why? Because the cartoons were about Islam and its founder. People who value the freedom to express views were aghast, and newspapers (a few brave ones) republished the cartoons in order to stress their freedom and in support of the Danes.

Almost four years have gone by since then. Naturally one would expect academics to crank out books on this issue; academic books that nobody will read, which is the case with most "university press" publications.

Well, not so fast! The NY Times reports that Yale University Press has banned those cartoons from a forthcoming book:

Yale University and Yale University Press consulted two dozen authorities, including diplomats and experts on Islam and counterterrorism, and the recommendation was unanimous: The book, “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” should not include the 12 Danish drawings that originally appeared in September 2005. What’s more, they suggested that the Yale press also refrain from publishing any other illustrations of the prophet that were to be included, specifically, a drawing for a children’s book; an Ottoman print; and a sketch by the 19th-century artist Gustave Doré of Muhammad being tormented in Hell, an episode from Dante’s “Inferno” that has been depicted by Botticelli, Blake, Rodin and Dalí.

Lest you think that the Danish cartoon controversy was an exception that has not been repeated since, think again.