Salman Rushdie Coming to Madison

Salman Rushdie will be making a Madison book tour appearance to speak and discuss his newest book The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel on July 11, 2008 at 7:00 PM at Madison - Borders (3750 University Ave.).

You can listen to an interview here:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja/2008/06/30/Salman-Rushdie

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 by William Dalrymple

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 by William Dalrymple


16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
"The light has gone out of India. The land is lampless.", August 12, 2007

A great strength of 'The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857' by William Dalrymple (White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India) is its use not only of more familiar British sources, but also many Indian (Urdu and Persian) sources on one of pivotal events in the history of both India and the British Empire, the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 or the First War of Indian Independence as it is also sometimes called.

Dalrymple describes his excitement at discovering some 20,000 Persian and Urdu documents in the Indian national Archives. A particularly important source was the 'Dihli Urdu Akhbar' a principal Urdu newspaper that continued to publish during the revolt. These sources allow Dalrymple to give voice to the Indian as well the British point of view.

In 1857 the sepoys of the British Raj's Bengal Army mutinied (the reasons are explored in the book, but were at least partly due to a clash of newly arrived Christian evangelicals and adherents of Islam and Hindu). What began as mutiny became something larger at least in part because the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II endorsed it.

Dalrymple centers his telling of the tale on Zafar, the man destined to become the last Mughal emperor. By 1857 the Mughal Emperor possessed no real tangible power and was nothing more than the King of Delhi as he was derisively called. An aesthete himself, Zafar was singularly well-suited to his role as head of a court that elevated culture, poetry in particular, but wholly unsuited by temperament and age (he was 82 years old) to a role as leader of an armed revolt.

Delhi before 1857 was a remarkably tolerant mix of Hindu and Islam - roughly a 50/50 split - in part because of Zafar's manner of ruling. Zafar's acceptance of a titular leadership in the revolt meant that both Muslims and Hindi rallied to the cause. That symbolic role, however, was about all Zafar brought to the war.

The revolt began to flounder almost immediately due a lack of proper direction and discipline. The Sepoy regiments each acted independently and allowed a much smaller British force (ostensibly come to lay siege to the city) to survive repeated but serial attacks. The early stages of the revolt also saw horrific slaughter of noncombatant and unarmed British residents.

Eventually the British took the city and the revenge they took is described by Dalrymple in bloody detail. The killings were nothing short of mass murder and heartily endorsed by nearly every Britisher with any knowledge of it (William Howard Russell was one exception). Men who had lost family in the initial outbreak were allowed to massacre at will for months - Theo Metcalfe is the most notable example. Those locals not killed were left homeless and starving.

The British executed nearly the entire Mughal royal family and would have done so for Zafar, but for the promise that his life would be spared if he surrendered. It was a promise that the British determined they were bound to keep even though they didn't like it much.

One supposes this example represents Victorian attitudes about rectitude that the British somehow held in their heads at the same time that they authored unspeakable murdering sprees. In a somewhat lighter example, Dalrymple quotes a British soldier's letter written to his mum on the eve of battle in which the youth expresses his fear that engaging in the fight may cause him to swear!

As stated at the outset the rich sources give 'The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857' its strength, but Dalrymple's over-reliance on the raw materials makes the book drag to its conclusion. For the last 100+ pages, Dalrymple sometimes gives over the narrative to his primary sources as page after page consists substantially of quotes from letters, reports, or memoirs. Dalrymple also spends only the briefest time placing the events of 1857 in a larger historical framework. Nonetheless, the book is a triumph of research and offers that rarity in historical writing, the truly fresh perspective. Dalrymple gives voice to the Indian perspective of the fall of Delhi. As the great court poet Ghalib so poignantly expressed it, "The light has gone out of India. The land is lampless."

Highly recommended.

Indian Summer Continued

Continuing my string of books on the world's second-most populous country - here's the CIA's World Factbook section on India - I've finished The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling by David Gilmour and A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. The Kipling biography is an excellent treatment of a figure who is often overlooked, but was once of towering importance (Here's the September 27, 1926 Time Magazine cover). Passage to India is a classic from the 1920's, but it just did not work for me.




And I'm nearly finished with The Death of Vishnu: A Novel by Manil Suri, a strangely enchanting book about a man named Vishnu who lies dying on the staircase landing where he lives (yep, where he lives) and the lives of the other people who live in this crowded apartment building in Bombay. Is this fellow Vishnu really Vishnu the Hindu god or just a drunk guy named Vishnu? Leaving Vishnu aside, the stories of the other tenants is "part-sitcom and part-meditation" according to Powells.




Here's an interview with Manil Suri about The Death of Vishnu on the Powell's bookstore web site. Powells is the great used bookstore in Portland, Oregon.

Winners and Losers

As reported on the BBC web site, the winners are:

Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza in Mexico

India's Taj Mahal

The Great Wall of China

Machu Picchu in Peru

Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer

The Colosseum in Rome

Jordan's Petra

Follow this link to some interesting up close pictures of Taj Mahal

I can't argue with any of those, except the Christ Redeemer statue, whihc is only about 70 years old and stands a mere 105' tall, admittedly its got a great location, but so does the lodge on the Grand Canyon's South Rim.

The only three finalists that I've visited all failed to make the final cut. The Eiffel Tower, Stonehenge, and the Statue of Liberty. Frankly, I can't fathom that Stonehenge isn't on the list and I would certainly take Lady Liberty over Christ Redeemer.



Of course, She had no chance given the rest of the world's views of the US at present, but Liberty stands for ideals of universal freedom and democracy. Americans may not always live up to those ideals (although I'd argue it's our leaders that more often fall short) the Statue of Liberty calls us to aspire to those values.





And besides, Lady Liberty once graced the waters, err, frozen waters of our own Lake Mendota.

Patriarchy anyone?

The BBC reports this story about a low caste woman who stripped to her underwear to protest physical abuse by her husband's family for not providing a dowry. The story notes:

"Although paying and accepting a dowry has been illegal in India for more than 40 years, it still goes on.

Official estimates show that every year almost 7,000 women are killed by their spouses and in-laws because of inadequate dowry payments."

Meanwhile, over on the Times of India the debate is whether Pooja is victim or culprit.

In another heartbreaking story from the Asian subcontinent, Hindu widows thrown out of their homes upon the death of their husband flee to the "holy city "of Vrindavan to die.

Indian Summer

I often like to read several books on one topic or related topics. This summer it's been India, more specifically India as part of the British Empire.

I'm an admitted Anglophile, but a cynic (i.e. a disgruntled idealist) as well and my India reading began with Flashman and the Great Game. George Macdonald Fraser's great Flashman series combines wit with history and before you know it, you've been uproariously entertained and learned a few things. I suppose I should issue a disclaimer that Flashman tends to be on the bawdy side, but not graphically so. Flashy is also thoroughly a cad of 19th century upper class England.

Flashman and the Great Game centered on the Indian Mutiny and that led me to finally reading the more serious, but still entertaining Siege of Krishnapur , a fictionalized account of the Siege of Lucknow during the Mutiny (also known as the Sepoy Rebellion). The Siege of Krishnapur was the second of J.G. Farrell's three books on the British Empire. I read the New York Review of Books Classics version and highly commend it. The NYRB books always have excellent introductions that add great value and context.

Here's an excellent short study of British attitudes towards Indians in the colonial era: http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/fichiers/FORTESCUE.pdf

I've also tossed off Under the Banyan Tree a collection of short stories by R.K. Narayan. Here's an essay on Narayan.

I've delved into Kim by Rudyard Kipling, the Norton Edition, which includes a number of essays that set the historical context (late 1880's) or provide critical reviews over the years, such as one from Edward Said among others. Whatever you might think of Kipling, and today's left mainly sees him as a great expositor of colonialism (to the extent that he's thought of at all any more), the book is good story, well-told and an important piece of history.

I've never been to India; always thought it would be fascinating, but challenging travel, to say the least.