Zheng -He and His Voyages

Recently a retired English naval officer published a book entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered the World innwhich this former sailor argues that Zheng _He the eunach of the Ming Emperor, Yong-Le was responsible for the discovery of North and South America, Australia and hold your breath, even Antartica. The run away success of this book means that many people who have had little, if any expoture to History, will learn about these remarkable events only from Menzies. That would be a real pity. I am not complaining that the book is wrong and muddle headed and thererfore needs to be corrected.If this interesting book makes people curious about the past in the same way that Dan Brown's book made people curious about the early history of Christianity, I would have no trouble with this work. However, given the hype and publicity surrounding this book it is likely that most readers will not make any attempt to go beyond this volume and hence my blog today.

Conspiracy theories make bad history. In fact historians are loathe to use conspiracy theories because it is so easy to writ history bacjkwards and make every bit of information fit on the procrustan bed of appriori notions and fancies. This is the same case with Menzies. He obviously has enjoyed writing this book, Who would not given the fantastic royalty he commends. In fact thie figure itself is encouraging that people are willing to spend tonnes of money on History. Now coming back to my blog: Whenever there is need for hard evidence the author falls back on the familiar ruse that the evidence once exixted but has now been destroyed a la Dan Brown.

The fact is that Zheng-he was accompanied by a Historian Ma Huan who wrote the history of at least 3 of the seven voyages of Zhenh-He. The book by Ma Huan is not only free from fanciful theorisis of the sort that afflicts Menzies, but also been corroborated bynfurther archaeological evidence.

The most striking case of such corroboration is the Tri lingual inscription left by Zhebh-He in Sri Lanka. This inscription was found in 1914 and is now preserved in the Museum at Colombo.At Mogadishu too Zheng He is known to have erected a steale but that has not been found. Nearly 100 years back a Dutch scholar , Dyvendak studied the inscritions and solved many tricky questions about the voyages. Menzies has made Zheng_he a Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook and Robert Falcon Scott all rolled into one.

Biography and History

Ever since human beings developed an interest in their own past, they have tried different way through which to explain and understand the events of their lives. Seemingly unrelated events seemed to form patterns and those patterns were related conceptually to the movement of the earth around the sun in its own orbit and from that point onwards there emerged the view that our lives were governed by the stars. This was a very comforting notion because those with power and privilege could always rationalise it and those without felt comforted that their travails in life were due to influences beyond human control. One may say that an astrological ordering of life is essentially the ideology of a conservative staus conscious society.

It is to yhe credit of the Greeks that they refused to accept this idea. Events in their human exixtence had to be explained in terms of everyday occurences. In the Homeric myths we have the idea that heroes are especially blessed by the Gods on Mount Olympus. By the time we get to Hesiod and Herodotus a new insight is strirring in the Greek mind. While the play of Fortuna is not entirely rejected, we now have the notion that events that happen in the lives of people is due to certain underlying factors that are visible at least in terms of the consequences. Thus when Herodotus spoke of the invasion of Darius I and the Greek response to it he had necessarily to place this cataclysmic event in the context of the interaction between the Greeks and Others. This is the point that Francois Hartog makes in his fabulous book, The Mirror of Herodotus. The awareness that their are cultural differences and therefore the kind of lives worth recording is the first step in the establishmment of a principle of historiography.

Casablanca An Eternal Classic

Humphery Bogard and Ingrid Bergman in their classic roles in the war time movie Casablanca played roles that have seldom,if ever been surpassed. What makes this movie just a great film. The editing is spotty. For instance, the famous scene in the Railway station at Paris and when it is raining hard and Richard is dripping wet and by the time he enters the train in the very next scene his dress is dry. It is obvious that the director has overlooked this point. The dialogues are cliche ridden. Is that the sound of cannon fire or is it my heart poundinng. This line spoken by Ingrid Bergman is as cliche ridden as most of the other dialogues; Of all the gin joints in all the towns of the world she walks into mine;this line uttered by Eric Blaine aks Richard aks Ricky is just mushy sentimentalism. In spite of the obvious flaws thetre is something immensely grand about the movie.

I regard the corrupt police officer, Claude Rains who plays Captaibn Renault as the real hero of the movie. He admits that he is a poor corrupt official but manitains a warm and exceptionally largehearted relationship with everyone. The poor girl from Bulgaria who does not have the money to bribe herself to an exit visa is helped by Renault. In the end when he could have had Rick arrested for the murder of the German officer Major Strasser, Renault allows Rick to escape saying: Major Strasser has been shot:Round uo the ususal suspects. Rightly, it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I wonder why no novelist has ever thought of a sequel to Casablanca. The most wooden and by far the fraceless character of in the movie is Victor Lazlo. He is self righteous, loves a woman who obviously does not love him,and tries to use his heavy hand to get Rick to part with the letters of transit. I think it would have been great if Bergman and Bogard had stayed behind in Casablanca.

Guns, Germs and Steel

I have always liked reading histories with a wide global sweep. The kind of history that one is trained at graduate school is what I call the miniscule school of history: a medieval count. a decaying castle, a bunch of worn out parchment and the like. While I do recognise that much of history is based on such painstaking research, I personally do not find such history terribly exiting. This is not to say that minute analysis of documents cannot be interesting. One has only to read the book by M T Clanchy, From Memery to Written Records to realise that medieval historiography can be as much of a paGE TURNER AS ANY CONTEMPORARY NOVEL.

I recently picked by Jared Diamond's Guns Grms and Steel in a bookstore that rightly calls itself landmark. I had read a review of his recent book Collapse in the Economist. Jared Diamond is an anthropologist probably teaching in one of the West coast Universities . This book is refreshing in that there is hardy any of the soul destroying jagon so dear the American anthropologists. In this Diamond is in good company: Marshal Sahlins learnt to write like a historian towards the fag end of his teaching career. If one reads his Stone Age Economics and compare the style with his Islands of History you can hardly believe that the same person wrote both books. However, Sahlins son Peter Sahins writes with elegance and polish and yes, Sahlins junior is a trained historian.

The basic theme of Jared Diamond in his Guns, Germs and Steel is simple. Mankind over a period of nearly a millennium learnt to remove the toxicity from a number of plasntsd by selective breeding and by carefully collecting the mutated grains. I was surprised to learn that the humble potato had once been highly toxic.In a similar manner human being too developed resistance to viruses. When the Spanish conquerors reached the so called New World they brought with them a whole range of new diseases for which them native peoples had no immunity. In the pan demics that followed the entire population was killed off. Is the AIDS virus something similar.

The Da Vinci Code and Historians

Dan Browns novel the Da Vinci Code is a run away success. The book has been widely read and it is unfortunate that most people will form their opinion of early Christianity by reading this interesting but outrageous book. Jesus Christ is venerated as a saviour by billions of people and the basis of the Christian faith lies in the belief that He died on the Cross as a supreme aacrifice for the sins of mankind. One may or may not agree with this notion but no one, least of all a novelist has the right ot insult this belief. Further the fact that Mary Magdalen was only a companion of Jesus and probably the most compassionate of all his followers. To transform this lonely, tragic figure into the wife or partner of Christ is not only unhistorical but also insulting to peoples belief. Of course, I do not believe that she was what the Roman Catholic chruch made her out to be, but that is another story. I thimk the whole plot senationalises certain conspiracy theories and therefore while it makes interesting reading it is certainly not literature.

Katrina and the American Race Question

The hurricane that lashed the coast of Louisianna and other Gulf states in Souther US has exposed a dark seamy side of American society that had lay hidden under swathes of sanctimonious hyperbole: the world's larges superpower is resting on a social base that is not only unequal but is also marinated in the mal odourous slime of racism. The people who were deeply affected by the Tragedy were not the rich, educated suburban elite but the poor blacks and other minotities. It was for this reason that the response from the American state was extremely tardy. George Bush took full 5 days even to travel to the affected statye and there he engaged in a public spat with the Governor. Later there was the Blame Game as to who should take the rap fro this tragedy. The fact is that the federal budget for the upkeep of the Levees have beeb cut and the misguided policies of Bush meant that Iraq was topmost on his agenda rather than the domestic situation. Had this event happened in the first term it is unlikely that Bush would have been re elected.