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My bond with Madras city

  We are comparatively new to Chennai city having a permanent home here only since June 1982, a year and a half before I was born. My father grew up in Chingleput while my mother lived her early life in Kumbakonam. But I was born here and spent my entire childhood here. And also, we had been familiar with Madras city for generations - both my grandfathers had done their schooling and graduation in Madras city and my maternal ancestors have had a house in Egmore since 1933. My dad did his BSc in Chemistry from A. M. Jain College, Meenambakkam commuting to-and-fro by suburban rail from Chengalpattu on a daily basis. When he took up the job with the bank, he was posted at Maduranthakam and then, Calcutta before moving to the bank's Adyar branch in 1981. The next year, he purchased a plot in the then village of Porur in the Saidapet taluk of Chingleput district. Though classified as a suburb of Madras city by MMDA, Porur, in the late eighties, as I can faintly remember, was more simil...
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THE BRITISH MISSION TO KARAIKAL (1624)

  John Johnson, an English sailor with a Danish ship Christian , marooned on the Bay of Bengal coast, travelled inland to Tanjore and had an audience with the Nayak king. He wrote back ... the Great Naik demands to know what the reason is that the English do not desire to trade in his land as well as the Portugal, saying they shall have the pepper and anything the land doth afford and likewise buy the commodities that they do bring with them as tin, lead, iron and red cloth is well sold. Little does our nation know how they are expected all this land, thus the Danes do trade under the name English and are marvellous well used. [1] Upon receiving Johnson's favourable report, the East India Company sent a mission from their factory at   Bantam (in Java), to negotiate with the Nayak king. Initially, the king promised a grant of the port of Karaikal free of duties. The ship Hart anchored at Karaikal on the 23rd of May 1624 and the agents proceeded inland upon receiving an i...
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Old wine in new bottle - New suburbs of an old city that aren't probably new

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 In 1833, Captain W. J. Butterworth, an officer in the Madras Army, compiled a guidebook titled The Madras Road Book  detailing major travel routes across the Madras Presidency. For some reason, the guidebook remained unpublished till 1839, when the first edition was brought out by The Male Orphan's Asylum which also published the annual The Asylum Press Almanack  uninterruptedly for over a century. The roadbook gives a glimpse of how now-famous Madras neighbourhoods appeared two hundred years ago when they were countryside villages on the periphery of Madras city and how each road was dotted with choultries and gardens at regular intervals so that horse (or bullock) and man could rest, eat and sleep.                 The book begins with routes from Madras to Bangalore and the first of the "roads" that it describes was the one that started from the Wallajah Gate of Fort St George and proceeded to Codumbaukum past a choultry on the L...
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What is Iran

  Read a short history of Iran in the TOI a couple of days back and I could not but agree how necessary such a piece is at this stage. For one, there are a lot of misconceptions about Iran. The most commonly-held misconception is that Iran is Arabic-speaking which, of course, is not true. The Official language of Iran is Persian whose grammar is different from Semitic languages like Arabic, though most Iranians use a lot of Arabic-derived vocabulary in their speech. But fewer people are aware of the fact that about a dozen languages are spoken in Iran apart from Persian - Kurdish, with its dialects Kurmanji and Sorani on the north-west, Balochi, Sistani and Brahui on the trination border with Pakistan and Afghanistan and Arabic, itself, which is spoken by roughly 3% of the population in the south-western region of Elam where it might have replaced a now-extinct language called Khuzestani, a possible descendant of Elamite that might have survived until the 10th century AD. Then, the...
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A brief introduction to Manichaeism

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                                               The four prophets of Manichaeism - Mani, Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus, from the Chinese "Manichaean Diagram of the Universe". Manichaeism was founded by Mani who was probably born a Christian in the city of Ctesiphon (now in Iraq) in the Sassanian Empire. Manichaeism incorporated the precepts of Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Buddhism and spread rapidly along the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire where, along with Mithraism, it emerged as a chief competitor to Christianity. St. Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean before his conversion to Christianity. The Sassanian emperor Shapur I (240-271) was an avid follower of Mani but after his death, the tide swiftly turned against the Manichaens. Varaharan (Bahram) I (271-274) was a devout Zoroastrian and follower and chief patron of the Zoroastrian priest...
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Report on The Hindu Lit for Life 2015 (From FB post)

  1st Day at The Hindu Lit for Life 2015. It started with a short introduction and lighting of the ceremonial lamp by Nayanthara Sehgal following which there was a book reading session by Man Booker Prize 2013 winner Eleanor Catton who spoke of her travails and tribulations in writing of the experiences of an adolescent girl. Following Ms. Catton's lively talk, there was a session with Geeta Doctor, writer Nayantara Sehgal who is cousin to Indira Gandhi and Sehgal's biographer Ritu Menon. Sharp and coherent despite her advanced age, 87-year old Ms. Sehgal passionately defended Perumal Murugan's right of expression and spoke of a need for a writer's union. She also vividly reminisced the 1975 Emergency days when she virulently opposed the censorship and dictatorial measures of the Indira Gandhi government. Her talk was extremely frank and sentimental. After Ms. Sehgal's interview, we had a talk by Jonathan Harris on his book "Firangis" which is about the ...
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The Pathans 550 B.C.- A.D. 1947 by Olaf Caroe

The Pathans 550 B.C.- A.D. 1947 is a magisterial work of anthropology and history by Olaf Caroe (1892-1981) who served as the colonial administrator of North West Frontier Province shortly before India's independence and Partition in 1947. Having served in the Frontier for about three decades, Caroe had immense knowledge of these lands and the people who inhabited them. * According to legend, the Afghans traced their ancestry to one Malik Afghana, a Jew who lived in the Levant. This Malik Afghana supposedly migrated to Afghanistan in 550 BC. So they were among "the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel". During the time of the Prophet, the leader of the Afghans, Qais Abdul Rashid travelled to Arabia where he embraced Islam and returned to convert his people. However, Caroe is dismissive of these legends as chronicles of history. * The Pathan tongue, Pashto is an Indo-Iranian language, halfway, Caroe says, between Persian and Scythian. * Though Pashto is an Indo-Aryan language, the A...
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My Facebook post dated 7 July 2024

  Indo-European language families are broadly classified into two groups - centum and satem languages. Anatolian, Tocharian, Greek, Italic, Celtic and Germanic belonged to the "centum" group while Indo-Iranian, Baltic and Slavic belong to the "satem" group. Proto-Indo-European, of which Greek is the closest living relative, is believed to have been a "centum" language. So, a process of palatisation of the initial velar *c (pronounced "k") must've taken place in "satem" languages turning it into a *ch and eventually to a sibilant *s. Now, it is possible to observe such changes in languages of non-Indo-European language families, too. The intial *c in Tamil, for example, must've undergone a change in the reverse direction into the Kannada *k, as in *cevi (ear) to "kivi" and *cedalu (termite) to "geddalu". Now, the linguist David Mcalpin who has championed the theory of Elamo-Dravidian family of languages propos...
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Archaeology and politics

  Egypt might be the only civilization with a continuous recorded history stretching back to the 4 th millenium BC. And when we come across Egyptologists reeling off third millennium BC dates with ease and with an assured familiarity, it makes us gape with awe. But does this mean that other civilizations did not count for as much as the Egyptians. Until recently, we too might have felt so but of late, discoveries have proved that there are other civilizations that might approach the Egyptians in continuity and they and the Mesapotamians in antiquity and that we had known far less about these old civilizations than the Egyptians only because archaeologists were less interested in them than Ancient Egypt or Mesapotamia. The reason for this neglect lies in our religious affiliations. Over thirty percent of the world’s population is Christian and universities with the best archaeology departments are situated in the Christian world. In fact, archaeology as a discipline originated th...
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