049 - Invasions on History
The good non-revisionist kind
Hello!
I wrote this issue of Bombay Daak amidst a calm and easy week in Bombay. By the time I finished it, we were having hours long thunderstorms. An upheaval in weather in this former colonial port that seemed to mimic the upheaval in Britain. With the Queen’s passing a modern icon has moved into the folds of history. An unfortunate coincidence to set grounds for this issue.
Modern Invasions
Earlier this year when Russia declared its 'special military operation' on Ukraine, I read this piece - Putin's spiritual destiny by Giles Fraser.1 Made me think how different would Putin have been, had his history books been different?
The records of human history is dominated by wars and kings and generals because they were the only ones to employ record keepers. It is not surprising that the most vehement students of history are world leaders. And they always do the same things over and over again, because what they learned is the same thing. There will always be wars as long as it gets written about.
But the world of today presents new hope. People who study history today could imagine things beyond kings and kingdoms when they consider their own legacies.
This lends a certain reassurance that all that we capture today will feed the minds of tomorrow, and the world may be better for it. That it is upon us to invade on the lands of history to build it different than the one from the past.
Tangential Departures
Fascism is built on this idea that former glories can be recaptured so long as you are manly and strong enough to single-handedly rescue humanity from the so called mistakes that it made... that you can press the rewind button.
— Andre Naffis Sahely on the Poetry of the Shelf podcast episode called Before we Return to Dust. It is a thought provoking episode and Sahely's own fragmented history and rootlessness finding their way into his poems is beautiful.
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On the point of gorgeousness comes this review by Garry Reece on Colby Deal's book Beautiful Still as history of space.2
Deal’s fealty to the power of the medium is in line with Frederick Douglass’s unwavering belief in photography as the “mirror of reality,” a cudgel he enlisted in the fight for freedom and human dignity. It also echoes Walker Evans’s gospel-like belief in the limitless power of images; in the power of art to actively confront and change things. Deal knows full well that the eye barters solely in feelings.
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The modern novel's history is often accused of beginning with Joyce. But Joyce's own literary influences stretches a millennia back to the Greeks. How modern then is the modern literature? How far have we come from the shadows of history in literature?
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The story of Omar Ibn Said, a muslim scholar stolen from Senegal and sold into slavery. He handwrote his biography in Arabic 190 years ago that was recently acquired by the Library of Congress. Truly remarkable.
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The History of Ketchup
Staying on the history of food.
Here’re two essays on the fascinating history of The Elberta Peach
I had absolutely no idea that a history of a fruit and its impact on the economy could be so significant. I also had no idea that peaches in America were a very recent derivative, I just always thought fruits were timeless bounties of nature. Agricultural history is fascinating. 3
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It is a season of history on my reading shelf. Up next on my list is this book on the history of Bombay by Gillian Tindall. I am sufficiently excited for it. In parallel is Peter Watson's The German Genius from 2010.
Last year I read Guns, Germs and Steel and How Asia Works and both had a profound impact on how I viewed world.4
The rebellion of Prince Akbar, though it was fostered by the Rajputs and originated, grew to fullness, and expired in Northern India, changed the history of the Deccan and hastened the fate of the Mughal Empire as well. His flight to Shambhuji raised a danger to the throne of Delhi which could be met only by Aurangzib's personal appearance in the south.5
— Prince Akbar’s mother, the chief consort of Aurangzeb died out of the complications that arose giving birth to him. The anguished emperor built a tomb in the likeness of that of his mother that his father built in Agra.
Endnotes
In the context of Putin’s spiritual ambitions, the warning had come nearly a decade back from this 2013 essay in Time - The World According to Vladimir Putin by Simon Shuster
Last year, one of the more popular issues of Daak was on spaces. I am tinkering with a sequel for it and I find myself frequently going back to this excerpt from Reece’s review
I am a huge Seinfeld fan, and this puts the episode on the Mackinaw Peaches in a totally different light.
How Asia Works is particularly fascinating in the context of history. Suffice to say the book argues that economic policy makers could learn more from historians than economists.
Meanwhile, an international man of history