English, Sanskrit, and Nationalism in India

India's new, Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, took his oath of office in Sanskrit last week. This might strike outsiders as a little odd, since Sanskrit is the Latin of classical Indian culture, a language that nobody but scholarly priests has spoken in more than a thousand years. But this choice points to the trouble that language presents for India. India has dozens of native languages. Across the center of the country many people speak one of a small group of related languages descended from Sanskrit -- Hindi, Gujarati, Bihari, Bengali. When India became independent there was a move among nationalists to discard English and rely entirely on Indian languages, or perhaps to make Hindi the national tongue; after all, anyone who speaks any of the Sanskrit-descended tongues can learn Hindi without too much trouble. But the languages of India's south are not descended from Sanskrit and are radically different in structure and vocabulary, and Hindi is not widely studied there. In the south many more people speak English than any language of the north. Southerners therefore insisted that English remain an official tongue. (The same is true for some Himalayan areas, where the languages are related to Tibetan.) Most educated Indians are bilingual in English and the languages of their home regions; some also speak one or more other Indian languages, but since there are so many languages people from different parts of India commonly converse in English. Nationalists like Modi hate this.

So of course the new PM wanted to take his oath of office in a native Indian language; but which one? There is none that more than a third or so of Indians can understand. Plus, even modern Hindi and Gujarati are dissatisfying to some Hindu purists, since they have absorbed numerous words from the languages of Persian and British invaders. Hence the fascination with Sanskrit, which is not only the language of Hinduism's oldest religious texts but, nationalists think, a purely Indian creation, and one that is studied wherever there are Hindus. Some Hindu nationalists would like to do what Israelis did with Hebrew and bring back Sanskrit as a spoken tongue; I have read about people raising their children in Sanskrit-speaking households. Thus the oath of office in Sanskrit, a statement of Hindu faith, Indian nationalism, anti-westernism, anti-Islam, and, perhaps, the hope that one day India might have a common language other than English.

Moves Against Surveillance in the House of Representatives

Wired:

In a late night session, the House of Representatives voted 293 to 123 to pass an amendment to a Department of Defense appropriations bill that would cut off all funds for two of the agency’s most embattled activities: First, using the 702 provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to perform searches of collected surveillance data that target Americans, and second, asking hardware markers and software developers to build backdoors into their tools designed to give the agency access to users’ communications. On that second count, the amendment specifically forbids funding for any agency attempt “to mandate or request that a person redesign its product or service to facilitate…electronic surveillance.”

This is what I hoped would happen after Snowden's revelations and the growing unease among Americans over the government's surveillance capabilities. I never thought there would be a huge uproar and a radical move to curtail surveillance in one big bill. But Congress considers the details of surveillance policy on a regular basis, viz., every time they vote on a budget for the NSA or the Defense Department, and I hope that they will continue to whittle away at domestic spying. These days it is the populists of left and right who are energized about this issue, and the security alarmists who are in weary retreat.

Lavender Lemonade 2014

My elder daughter made lavender lemonade again this year with lavender from the garden, and took these magazine-ready photographs of her work.

Fifth Century Ship in Istanbul

This merchant ship was uncovered in 2011 during excavations at Yenikapı Marmaray for a new subway tunnel under the Bosporus in Istanbul; it dates to the fifth century CE and is about 50 feet (15 m) long. The entrance to the new tunnel is in an old harbor and 45 shipwrecks have been uncovered.

Chinese Imperial Robes, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century

Let's Pretend

I replaced the keyboard in my laptop this weekend, because both the E and W keys had stopped working in the old one. The cast-off was seized by my eight-year-old daughter, who used it to make this pretend computer. This even though she and her brother share a real computer.

I guess it isn't as wonderful as the one she can imagine.

Osprey Diving

Another photo that has gone around the net too many times for me to find the source.

The Suicide Brigade

In Iraq, the stunning advance of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has been halted by pro-government forces. ISIS is made up of Sunnis, and they swept across northern Iraq because the Sunnis who dominate that region decided they preferred rule by dangerous Sunni terrorists to rule by the Shiite-dominated government. But now the fighting has moved into areas where Shiites are the majority and the remains of the army have rallied, supported by Shiite militias Americans last heard about when they were resisting the US occupation:

Large sections of Baghdad and southern Iraq’s Shiite heartland have been swept up in a mass popular mobilization, energized by the fatwa of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani urging able-bodied Iraqis to take up arms against Sunni extremists. Shiite and mixed neighborhoods now brim with militias, who march under arms, staff checkpoints and hold rallies to sign up more young men.

I find this moving; it always touches my martial side to see ordinary men rally like this to defend their homes against attackers. And yet one element of the scene is jarring to my sensibilities:

The long lines of Shiite fighters began marching through the capital early Saturday morning. Some wore masks. One group had yellow and green suicide explosives, which they said were live, strapped to their chests.

It struck me as I read this how deeply the image of the suicide vest-wearing martyr has sunk its roots in the contemporary Middle East. I suppose Shiites have long had a thing for martyrs, and of course being willing to die for the cause is always part of enthusiasm for war. But these vests, on men headed for what looks like a perfectly conventional battle, summoned for me a whole film reel of images -- Palestinian boys throwing themselves at Israelis, Taliban fighters blowing themselves up at American checkpoints, the planes of 9-11. I worry that this fascination with rebellion by suicide, with the explosive vest as the ultimate weapon of the weak against the strong, has become a myth with a power all its own quite divorced from any particular cause, and that Muslims will struggle for decades with the magical aura of this violent act.

The Siberian Fish Man and Ancient Shamanism

This small wooden idol was dredged up by a Siberian fisherman who donated it to the Tisul History Museum. The experts there said it is pagan god dating to around 4000 years ago.

Mike Williams at Prehistoric Shamanism says he thinks it is a fish-man figure; there are lots of fish-men in the art of Old Europe, including the one above from the Mesolithic village of Lepenski Vir on the Danube in Serbia. Native Americans, Siberians, and maybe others imagined the Other World as a place of watery depths, and therefore thought that aquatic creatures might cross back and forth between the land of the living and the land of the dead. In North America the otter was often seen as the shaman of the animals because it passed regularly between the realms of earth and water. Were these fish-men shamans?

The economy of Lepenski Vir was probably focused for much of the year on the runs of fish up the Danube, especially the beluga. Here is Williams' interpretation of the fish-man figures:

The run of the beluga upstream in the summer and (even if only figuratively) downstream thereafter, may have been interpreted as the fish crossing and re-crossing a portal to the otherworld (these beliefs survived in the region and in Siberia into modern times). In effect, these were not fish anymore but spirits. Furthermore, these animals readily gave themselves to humans (beluga are incredibly passive when caught); they made clear their willingness to enter the realm of the humans and sustain the people. The annual run of the fish was now far more important symbolically than it ever was economically. The imagery around the site became completely centred on fish (the dead were even covered with fish scales and bones of fish eagles made popular amulets). Over time, people, especially those with particular aptitude for crossing between worlds, (the shamans), shapeshifted into fish and joined them on their journeys to and from the otherworld (and they are reflected in the boulder carvings of half-human half-fish). Perhaps these individuals even led the dead on the route to the afterlife (a common role of shamans), and this was why the dead were aligned facing downstream: the route they had to take in death (again, this belief is still common in the region and in Siberia). When the fish returned in the summer (perhaps led by the same shamans), they brought with them the promise of life. At this time, people built new dwelling with a specially curated corpse of a newborn baby placed into the foundations (possibly reflecting the new life provided by the beluga run). Human life, the life of the village, and the life-giving migration of the fish had almost merged into one, and it was the shapeshifting shamans who oversaw and managed these annual events.

I love this notion that for people who live along rivers, death is seen as floating away  downstream. I wonder how widespread it has been?

I certainly think Williams' notion that the fish-men are shamans is at least as likely to be true as the old idea that these figures represent gods.

Hokusai, Dragon Flying over Mount Fuji, 1849

Solstice Garden

It's a cloudy day here, but lots of lights in the early summer garden.

Happy Solstice

A Blessing for Wedding

Today when persimmons ripen
Today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow
Today when the spotted egg releases its wren song
Today when the maple sets down its red leaves
Today when windows keep their promise to open
Today when fire keeps its promise to warm
Today when someone you love has died or someone you never met has died
Today when someone you love has been born or someone you will not meet has been born
Today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness
Today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired
Today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow
Today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace
Today, let this light bless you
With these friends let it bless you
With snow-scent and lavender bless you
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days

--Jane Hirshfield

Which stupid war does this remind you of?

U.S. to Send Up to 300 Military Advisers to Iraq

From the Melting Ice

Archaeologists in Canada's Yukon have recovered these and many other objects preserved in ice thousands of years old, which is now melting and leaving them lying on the ground.

Strategic Incoherence

Ezra Klein interviews Chas Freeman, longtime American diplomat and former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, about our Middle East policy:

Ezra Klein: Others have made the point that in helping the opposition in Syria and now in trying to strengthen the government in Baghdad we're really intervening on both sides of the same conflict. Do you think that's fair?

Chas Freeman: I think that's correct. The contradictions and incoherence of our strategy really beggar the imagination. And it's not limited of course to the Iraqi and Syrian issues. We are trying to arm moderate opposition to Assad but that armed Islamists. We're trying to back Baghdad which is helping Assad remain in power. Any solution that boosts Assad or Baghdad helps Iranians. So all of this boosts Iran's prestige in the region and alienates Saudi Arabia and other traditional partners in the region.

This all goes back to two decisions made by Bush II. First, to wage war against the Taliban, al Qaeda and allied Sunni radicals while remaining cozy with the Sunni radicals who rule Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This from the start put us on both sides of the conflict, since the main support for the Taliban, al Qaeda and now ISIS comes from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This may have been unavoidable, but it did not make for any sort of clear strategic vision.

Second was to overthrow Saddam Hussein while still insisting that Islamic radicalism, especially as expressed by Iran's Shi'ite government, was the real threat. Saddam Hussein's Iraq may have been the most secular state in the Middle East and it was certainly the number one regional foe of Shi'ite radicalism, so his removal only strengthened the Islamic and especially Iranian radicals we claimed to hate. This was completely avoidable, and it completed our immersion in incoherence.

I think Cheney, Addington, Wolfowitz et al. actually understood this. Their plan was to get away from having to choose between Islamic fundamentalists and nasty dictators by creating a third force, Arab democracy. They failed spectacularly. Maybe it was a gamble worth taking, although I for one thought from the start that it was mad wishful thinking. You can't summon a new political order into being with a couple of armored divisions.  As a result we are left with the same old choices and are trying to be both against and for both of them.

The Prince of Pleasure's Gothic Candelabrum

Now in the Huntington Library, this candelabrum was one of a set of ten made for the Gothic conservatory that Thomas Hopper installed in Carlton House, the London residence of George IV when he was the Prince Regent. It is made of "Coade-stone," a sort of concrete developed in the 1760s. Pictures are from the Huntington's delightful tumblr.

The Baby Mammoth of California Place

According to the plaque, this is Strom, by Chad Alan and Friends. Sitting in a front yard just off embassy row. Cute.

It Was a Total Disgrace

Simon Jenkins:

There is scant morality in western military intervention these days. Tony Blair returned this week from beyond the grave and showed no concern for justice, reason or even national interest. He is a confirmed Iraq disaster-denier. Civilisation may advance in leaps and bounds over millennia, but politics remains stuck in Homer's day, in human vanity and tribal loyalty. . . .

It beggars belief that further military intervention by the west in Iraq is now being considered. Yet the yearning to intervene, to bomb someone even if just to "send a message", shows how thin is the veneer of sanity cloaking great power aggression. War still has the best tunes. How glorious it must seem to certain politicians to somehow turn 10 years of disaster in Iraq into a final victory.

That is why the causes and effects of 2003 must be nailed to the wall, time and again. Trillions of dollars were spent and tens of thousands of people died, for no good reason then and no good reason now. It was a total disgrace.

The unrolling chaos in Syria and Iraq gives the lie to all simple notions of success, failure, right, wrong, democracy, authoritarianism, and so on. At the moment the U.S. is debating whether to use air strikes to support the Iranian militias we were denouncing a few weeks ago as the worst evil on the planet. I find myself thinking that we should forget about helping to overthrow Syria's Assad and instead help him win his civil war -- he is a vicious thug, but could his rule be worse than an interminable civil war that, besides killing people and destroying their homes, is mainly empowering the same Sunni fanatics we have been fighting since 9-11?  A third of their country has fallen to ragtag rebels, but the Maliki government that we installed at such vast cost is still refusing to negotiate with any Sunnis whatsoever, despite the urgings of both the US and Iran. Now people are saying that we should remove him, or make his resignation a condition of any further aid.

In the midst of this great mess there are still people calling for simple solutions -- besides the war-mad neocons who want to surge back in and fight it all over again, there is this strange plea placed in the New York Times by liberal interventionist Anne-Marie Slaughter, under the title Don't Fight in Iraq and Ignore Syria:

When a government begins to massacre its own citizens, with chemical weapons, barrel bombs and starvation, as Syria’s continues to do, it must be stopped. If it is not stopped, violence, displacement and fanaticism will flourish. Deciding that the Syrian government, as bad as it is, was still better than the alternative of ISIS profoundly missed the point. As long as we allow the Syrian government to continue perpetrating the worst campaign of crimes against humanity since Rwanda, support for ISIS will continue. As long as we choose Prime Minister Maliki over the interests of his citizens, all his citizens, his government can never be safe.

As if the President had a magic wand he could wave that would turn the governments of Syria and Iran into humanitarian democracies and their citizens into unprejudiced, law-abiding democrats.

We cannot give either the Syrians or the Iraqis a good government. We cannot unsnarl the mess that is the Middle East. We cannot bring peace.

The best thing we can possibly do is get out of the way.

NGC 3081

The Mad Persistence of the Neocons

James Fallows takes on the neocons who have the gall to offer more advice about Iraq:

If you're anything like me, when you hear the words "wise insights about the Iraq war," two names that immediately come to mind are Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. Fortunately the Hertog Institute has engaged them both to teach a course, "The War in Iraq: A Study in Decision-Making."

I will confess that when someone told me about this today, I assumed it was an Onion-style joke. As in, "The Work-Family Balance: Getting It Right," co-taught by John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer. But it turns out to be real. Or "real." . . .

Am I sounding a little testy here? You bet. We all make mistakes. But we are talking about people in public life—writers, politicians, academics—who got the biggest strategic call in many decades completely wrong. Wrong as a matter of analysis, wrong as a matter of planning, wrong as a matter of execution, wrong in conceiving American interests in the broadest sense. None of these people did that intentionally, and many of them have honestly reflected and learned. But we now live with (and many, many people have died because of) the consequences of their gross misjudgments a dozen years ago. In the circumstances, they might have the decency to shut the hell up on this particular topic for a while. They helped create the disaster Iraqis and others are now dealing with. They have earned the right not to be listened to.

And here Fallows considers the new Op-Ed from Dick Cheney and his daughter, where they wrote, "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many":

You want a specimen of being so wrong about so much at the expense of so many? Consider the thoughts of one Richard B. Cheney, in a major speech to the VFW in August 2002, in the run-up to the war:

Another argument holds that opposing Saddam Hussein would cause even greater troubles in that part of the world, and interfere with the larger war against terror. I believe the opposite is true. Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region. When the gravest of threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace.

As for the reaction of the Arab "street," the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are "sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans." Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.

"The freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace." Yes, that is exactly how historians will register the lasting effects of the invasion for which Cheney was a major proponent and decision-maker. Along with the rest of his forecasts. What a guy.

Don't listen to them. They were wrong before, and they are wrong now. They are wrong morally, they are wrong politically, they are wrong strategically. They led us to disaster, and they should shut up and go home.

In Which Glenn Beck says I was Right about Iraq

From the beginning, most people on the left were against going into Iraq. I wasn’t. At the time I believed that the United States was under threat from Saddam Hussein. I really truly believed that Saddam Hussein was funding terrorists. . . .  In spite of the things I felt at the time when we went into war, liberals said: We shouldn’t get involved. We shouldn’t nation-build. And there was no indication the people of Iraq had the will to be free. I thought that was insulting at the time. Everybody wants to be free. They said we couldn’t force freedom on people. Let me lead with my mistakes. You are right. Liberals, you were right. We shouldn’t have.

--Glenn Beck

This puts him above Cheney, Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, the Kagans, and all the rest who still refuse to admit the invasion was a mistake. Take that, guys: Glenn Beck is more honest and less crazy than you are.

My 2002 thoughts on this disaster here and here, in case anyone is curious.

Archaeology and the Passenger Pigeon Genome

Searching for new evidence as to why the population of passenger pigeons collapsed so spectacularly in the nineteenth century, Taiwanese geneticist Chih-Ming Hung and his colleagues took a close look at the birds' genome. They found evidence for repeated population bottlenecks; that is, they think the birds' population has fluctuated dramatically in the past, perhaps coming close to extinction several times. Their explanation for the birds' extinction is that human hunting and habit destruction did not wipe out the whole huge population on their own, but only worsened a crash that seems to have been typical of the species.

This fits well with the findings of archaeology. In 1800 passenger pigeons were the most numerous birds in the world, and flocks were reported that numbered in the billions. Aha, you must be thinking -- at least if you are an archaeologist -- what a fantastic food source for ancient Native Americans, the salmon of the east coast. And accounts written by European explorers in the 1700s do describe some of the clever ways Indians had found to trap hundreds of birds at a time. But if you look in the trash heaps of Indians who lived in the Late Woodland and Mississippian periods (AD 1000 to 1600) you find only a few passenger pigeon bones. The most common view among archaeologists is that the passenger pigeon boom of 1700 to 1850 was a new phenomenon created by the near extinction of the Indians, plus environmental changes such as the Little Ice Age, the rapid growth of new forests on land Indians had farmed, and the replacement of carefully tended and rather small Indian farms with the space-wasting but labor-efficient farms of European Americans, which were much easier for birds to rob. So the collapse of passenger pigeon populations in the 1800s was not the destruction of an ancient resource like the slaughter of the plains bison, but a classic boom and bust, both created and then ended by Europeans and the environmental changes they set in motion.

Nice to see genetic evidence that passenger pigeons were prone to the sort of booms and busts that the archaeology of the past 500 years suggests.

Chauvet Cave

Discovered in 1994, Chauvet Cave in southern France contains an amazing array of art dating to around 30,000 years ago.

Until this cave was discovered there were theories about Paleolithic cave art that focused on its depiction of the herbivores that Paleolithic people probably hunted. So, "hunting magic." But at Chauvet the herbivores are outnumbered by carnivores -- hyenas, lions, bears. So much for that theory.

Of course there are herbivores at Chauvet, too.

This is probably the most famous image at Chauvet, "Venus and the Sorcerer." Venus is represented by the pubic triangle (with a slit scratched into the rock) and thighs, a composition very much resembling some of the "Venus" sculptures. But the left thigh of the Venus also seems to be the left thigh of a person wearing a bison mask looming in from the right -- this is the "Sorcerer," otherwise the Man-Bison. The whole ensemble is incorporated into the back half of a lion.

What a marvel that such things survive after 30,000 years.