So the saying goes. Once a man asked another whether 100 was greater or 99. The other chap said 99. An argument ensued, and a third party was asked to mediate. He said: `` A Hundred is of course greater...but my friends...a ninety-nine is not very much less...''.
The Incas
A book (a work of non-fiction) that I wish to review is by Terence N. D'Altroy. The Incas. Blackwell Publishers. London. 2003.
Most of us in India are aware of The Incas, The Mayas, The Aztecs in their popularized avatars much as the Mummy series of movies. Thus Terence D'Altroy's work comes as a very pleasant and fresh historical breeze onto the Indian scene. For one, I was delighted to note that the Inca Empire lasted well into the 16th century, that is roughly contemporaneous with Mughal Rule in India. An Indian reader may therefore wonder at the vast remove from India at which the Inca imperial system is situated, their landscape, their economic and political systems, and ritual and beilief, all very diverse and very different from our Mughal System.
The chapters in this work are as follows:
The Land and its People
The Incas before the Empire
The History of The Empire: Narrative Visions.
The Politics of Blood in Cuzco
The Heartland of the Empire
Inca Ideology: Powers of the Sky and Earth, Past and Present.
Family, Community, and class.
Militarism.
Provincial rule
Farmers, Herders and Storehouses.
Artisans and Artistry.
Invasion and Aftermath.
This book gives us a rounded history of the Incas of Peruvian Andes (Latin America), at the time of Spanish Conquest in 1532. For this purpose D'Altroy marshallas a number of primary sources both Inca and Spanish. The Spanish ones are those authored by Pedro de Cieza de Leon (1547), Juan de Betanzos (1542), Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569).
Pedro de Sarmiento (1572). The native authors and memoirs of the Incas are: Quipcamayos de Vaca de Castro (1608), Probanza de Qhapaq Ayllu (1569), Royal Commentaries of the Incas (1609). The later Spanish chroniclers include the Spanish jesuit Bernabe Cobo (1653), the Spanish Inspections and Court Records and Relaciones Geograficas de Indias (1595).
The first chapter then gives us an overview of the nature and types of literary and archaeological sources available for reconstruction of Inca History. In the second chapter D'Altroy gives us a fair account of the geology, geography and the natural environmental setting of the Inca domains. These constitute mostly the high altitudes where the earliest of Inca settlements are to be found, and where the lack of Oxygen made life very difficult. He also informs us suitably about the availability of Copper, Tin and Gold in the Andean mountain ranges. We also get a very fair view of the land-use potential of the area and the ways in which it was marshalled in the pre-Inca times. Needless to say, it must have come in for some very intensive expliotation under the Inca imperial system, or how else are we to explain the fantastic wealth that was gathered by the Imperial Incas. In this chapter he also outlines the development of Inca Society from 1st Millenium B.C. onwards to 1st Millenium A.D. Primitive agriculture, Llama herding (pastoralism) seem to have been the mainstays of a society landlocked at the considerable height of about 3,000 meters above sea-level. Thus he leads us upto the time when the earlier disparate and scatterred settlements and peoples of the Andes were conqured by two of the first Inca rulers who forged the very vast empire. Thus he argues "even this sketch illustrates that complex society had been developing for millenia before Cuzco's ascendancy, the Incas saw things another way, of course, insisting to the Spaniards that they had brought order and civilization to a chotic world. Converseley, some of their subjects complained that their own cultures had been irrevocably disrupted by barbaric conquerors, Inca and Spaniards alike, but their voices were never clearly heard" (pp. 44). Thus it is easy to infer that the great empire was forged by bringing together several small and economically and culturally disparate groups who had been residing in the Andes from well before the times of the empire. The Inca rulers Pachakuti and Thupa Inka Yupanki were really responsible for bringing about this amalgamation and forging the pan-Andean empire and there is plenty of historical evidence regarding their military campaigns to unify the area.
He mentions in the preface to the work that even as the Incas were at the height of their rule, they were subdued by no more than 180 Spanish Militia, even as the Inca ruler sat meditating and observing his ritual fast, and that he was susequently executed (One tends to recall a bit of A bit of Werner Herzog's Aguirre the Wrath of God, with Klaus Kinski in it and which is all about a band of crazed Spanish Conquistadors in hte Peruvian Amazon).
Thereafter in the mayhem that ensued the Spanish executed the Inca Emperor and stripped the empire of over $50 Million in Gold and Precious stones that had been amassed by several generations of the Incas and their rulers. This then is the end of that civilization. However, as the table of contents suggests his book traverses a much larger ambit and examines the precolonial Incas, Incas under the Empire, agriculture, craft and industry, the legal, administrative and economic machinery. The view that emerges froma reading of the chapetrs dealing with the Incan Empire is that there is definitely the presence of a rural-dwelling, and perhaps even subaltern class, that were bearing the weight of the high-demands of the Incan Imperial System by way of labour or tithes. D'Altory describes in great, delightful and painstaking details the eccentricities of the ten or so Inca Rulers. Some of it is worth quoting directly from his work:"Washkar's ascent to the throne leads into a report of one of the most peculiar of Andean weddings. According to the native chronicler Pachacuti Yamaqui, Washkar had his mother officially marry his father's mummy to provide the young ruler with full genealogical legitimacy" (pp. 104).
All this is done with recourse to much painstaking documentary research. Here is the crunch. We learn that the precolonial Incas also practised ritualised human sacrifice. From a variety of sources, Terence D'Altroy has marshalled, we learn that as thousands of individuals may have been sacrificed. Here and there the author raises the very important question as to why and how this was posssible and with what possible justifications. This is not the smallest of the questions the book raises since we do hear of the ritualized practice of human-sacrifice from rather a few more locations around the world, but ceratinly, in my knowledge nothing even remotely compares with the Inca figures. Why? Why? Why? We have heard of killings in inter-tribal warfares, and severed human heads are recovered from excavation in the north-east of India (see http://cis.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/39/1/75).
That was trophy-taking that proved the masculinity of the trophy-taker. But human sacrifice for religious or ritual purposes must be the question of their (the Inca) and our times. The Inca empire is also very unlike anything South Asian in that it flourished in a range of mounatains, where as the author points out, that at a height of 3,000 meters above sea-level life neither nor work is easy. D'Altroy finds numerous traces of the practice of agriculture, as should be expected in a mountain terrain, most probably of the shifting cultivation type. That raises the question of how surplus could possibly be generated in such a subsistence agricultural regime? Anuradhapura, Prambanan, and Tikal (Maya) Empires were the only ones, Nancy M. Fariss tells us, that were were based on this type of farming, where surplus production may be inferred from monumental structures and other material accoutrements of such cultures. However, through such plates as D'Altroy provides us that relate to cultivation systemsof the Incas we may infer that the plough was known to them and that it is this form of agriculture as well as trade and commerce that provided the surplus for the growthof this civilization.
English, August: An Indian Story
The next book I shall review, that I had proposed to earlier, and have finally managed to purchase a copy of, is Upamanyu Chatterji's English, August: An Indian Story. I am re-reading it. Have completed reading the work and have been holding my belly from constant laughing since page 1.
The protagonist in this story is a young recruit into the elite Indian Administrative Service also know as IAS. August is an thoroughly urbanbred boy who finds his first posting in Madna, a little district headquarter in the middle of nowhere in particular. the story is about August finding his feet in this unlikeliest of locales given his deep disgust for all that Madna has to offer.
There is something in the repeated flights of the protagonist Augustya Sen, mostly from rural locales of Madna, to the metropolis whether Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata, that smacks of a certain unabashed truthfulness that a lot of urban Indians suffer from claustrophobia while out in the wilds and conversely a lot of rural Indians feel the same when they visit the great urban jungles.
There is nothing wrong in either one of such protagonists running from dislikable locales, on account of them all being runners! However, Augustya Sen, is a also chatterer. He is constantly mutterring (albeit only in his thought world!) to himself, and thus exercising self-reflexivity in situations that he finds thoroughly dislikable such as committe meetings, Revenue Meetings etc. Even in a work of fiction to impart such fallibility to a character is surely a first in such modern Indo-Anglian fiction that I have read.
I mean the consistency with which Augustya is able to do this should by far out-rival the same talent in any other fictional character created thus far.
It is very difficult for a non-English lit person to review a literary work of the quality that is this book. However, let us invoke academic democracy that allows us, from time to time, to shed the garb of the specialist and act like normal people. This may give us the lee-way we need to justify whaever we write about Upamanyu Chatterji's excellent debut novel of the late 1980s. At a time when most of our young students are inclined to "Take The Civil" Chatterji's novel should come as an eye-opener to what there is in this line of service beyond the imagined fat pay packets!
Upamanyu's work is by no means meant to be a manual for administrators or young administrators as was Kautilyas Arthasastra. It is really the remnisences of a king...just as if Chandragupta Maurya were to write about the Mauryan period rather than Kautilya....which infact is not the case!
In my limited understanding of Indo-Anglian Literature in English, whether prehistoric, colonial, or postmodern, writing provides catharsis, and that seems to be the main purpose of English, August!
The Hungry Tide
As a student at Cambridge, once while i was deeply lost in the University Library Stack-Area, i stumbled upon an umlikely article in the Journal of the Royal Society - A Captain someone had written an article on the freshwater dolphins that are commonly found all along the ganges. he had even drawn a diagram of a skeleton of one such dolphin from which it was easy to infer that this is what we after all saw from the roof-tops of our school in Patna, and from the shores of the ganges at Bhagalpur. But most of all, I am an Amitav Ghosh fan, and read The Hungry Tide recently. It is about the Sunderbans Delta of the Great Ganges; what life (human and animal) obtains there and their interactive dynamics. Absolutely transporting. of course Amit Da, as he says somewhere in this work, has put in considerable field research on freshwater dolphins, if not in the Ganges delta then somewhere else in Southeast Asia. What I like most about this work is his eye for the correct sort of detail and his background knowledge of the subject. Such that the reader of his work emerges a little wiser than when he started.
The Pilgrimage
I also happened to read Coelho's The Pilgrimage. Astounding. Just when I thought that modern Europe is all about machines and material culture, comes a book that takes us into the inner spiritual cultures of Latino Europe. The kind of pilgrimages, revelations and magic that we hear exists only in exotic locales like the Orient.
Italo Calvino - Mr. Palomar
This is a book and an author very much to my liking. this is his very first work that i have read. infact the book contains somethings about mrs. palomar as well. so palomar, who is a quintessential dreamer is also suitably domesicated. thank heaven's that Mr. Calvino lives in Italy, else in this work, mr. palomar could easily have drifted into an existentialistic character. no, he appaers to be firm, detached, purposeful and organized in his dreaming whether he is dreaming as he is watching the seawaves, the sky, his garden or listening to the blackbird (the latter being the most interesting story according to me in the pages that i have read until now because it is certainly a relevant idea of mr. palomar that if the blackbird could speak the human language then humans could learn from her all the nature's secrets, and conversely if humans could whistle like her then she could learn all the secrets of human culture - this is an adorable construct).
Matthew Johnson: Archaeological Theory: An Introduction. 1999. Blackwell Publishers, London.
In contrast to Paddayya's work, Johnson's is an account and an apparaisalof archaeological theory processual and postprocessual from within the Anglo-American world. Thus the orgnization of this work reflects ( as what Paddayya correctly calls, some regional concerns). His chapters are labelled as: Common Sense is Not Enough, The New Archaeology, Archaeology as a science, testing Middle-Range Theory and Ethnoarchaeology, Culture as a system, Looking at thoughts, Postprocessual and interpretative archaeologies, archaeology and gender, archaeology and evolution, archaeology and history, archaeology in a postmodern world. In the peface to the work Johnson states clearly the aim of his work "It is intended as a route-map for the student. That is, it seeks to point out prominent landmamrks on the terrain of theory, comment on relationships between different bodies of thought, and to clarify the intellectual underpinnings of certain views" (pp. Xii)
K. Paddayya. 1990. The New Archaeology And Aftermath: A view from outside the Anglo-American World. Ravish, Pune.
The opening volley of this book goes a long-way to explaining its contents:" Almost all existing reviews devoted to the examination of processual and post-processual trends emanate from the Anglo-American world and are, therefore, rarely free from regional and personal biases. A stage has come when workers in other parts of the world need to undertake independent evaluations of these developments in the discipline and relate them to archaeological research in their respective regions" (Author's Note). The author claims further that " Archaeology has witnessed the growth of so many trends and counter-trends within a short span of two decades (that is from 1990) that it can no longer be treated as a monolithic edifice...My ownunderstanding is that the New Archaeology has been and still continues to be the dominant element of modern archaeology (in India or elsewhere? Query, mine.). Most of the other trends which have developed during the 70s and 80s and are claiming centre-stage place, are either extensions to or amplifications, or else, critiques of the New Archaeology" (pp.1). he classifies these new developments into specializations, applied trends and perspectives including the "old school". Specializations are settlement archaeology, ecological archaeology, geoarchaeology, economic archaeology, social archaeology, and demographic archaeology "each devoting itself to the examination of a particular aspect of the archaeological record" (pp. 1). Amongst applied trend are cultural resource management archaeology, garbage studies, industrial archaeology and marine archaeology. "One must include here also attempts to gauge the impact of social, economic, political, psychological and even gender-related factors on archaeological research". This has reference to works by Gero, Lacy, Blackey, Conkey and Spector, "and studies to explore the social relevance of the study of the past"(pp.2), with reference to Leone, Potter and Shackel, Shanks and Tilley). Amongst perspectives "some mentalistic and others materialistic" he includes Schiffer's behavioural archaeology and Marxist and neo-Marxist trends like cultural materialism, critical archaeology, dialectical Marxism and structural Marxism amongst the materialistic oriented trends (Friedman and Rowlands, Spriggs, Ross). The mentalist or mind-seeking trends are structuralist Archaeology, cognitive archaeology, symbolic archaeology (Hodder, Leone). "Finally, we have the traditionalists themselves who are either oblivious of or else still are unable to reconcile themselves (with the development of these new trends).(pp. 2)
Ajay, 2008.
