Mohenjodaro ‘Dancing Girl’ is Parvati, claims ICHR journal

The author claims that the Dancing Girl is Parvati because “where there is Shiva, there should be Shakti”.

The iconic ‘Dancing Girl’ of Mohenjodaro is Goddess Parvati, further proof that people of the Indus Valley Civilisation worshipped Shiva, claims a new research paper published in Itihaas, the Hindi journal of the Indian Council of Historical Research.

The research paper, titled ‘Vedic Sabhyata Ka Puratatva (Archaeology of Vedic Civilisation)’, authored by Thakur Prasad Verma, a retired professor of Banaras Hindu University, makes a case for the Vedic identity of the Indus Valley Civilisation and reiterates the longstanding claim of Right-leaning historians that Shiva was worshipped by the inhabitants of this civilisation. Verma’s interpretation of the Dancing Girl, dating around 2500 BC, as a Hindu goddess – the first such claim – is in line with this argument.

The research paper goes on to say that several artefacts excavated from Mohenjodaro point to Shiva worship in those times. According to Verma, the famous ‘Seal 420’, a seal of a horned figure sitting in yogic posture and surrounded by animals, is strong evidence of Shiva worship. The identity of the figure in the seal has often been the subject of debates. While archaeologist John Marshall in 1931 saw a “prototype of Siva” in this figure, historians have later differed with this interpretation and some have even suggested the figure is of a woman.

Further, to prove Shiva worship in the Indus Valley Civilisation, Verma states that the trefoil pattern seen on the shawl of the ‘Priest King’, another iconic sculpture excavated from Mohenjodaro, is sign that the king was the follower of a Hindu god. The trefoil pattern, he says, resembles the Vilva or Bilva leaves that are used to worship Shiva today.

The author then goes on to claim that the Dancing Girl is Parvati because “where there is Shiva, there should be Shakti”, a manifestation of the Goddess, though “till date, no one has identified any idol or statue of Parvati in Harappan Civilisation”.

Historian and Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Supriya Verma said this was the first time anyone had said the Dancing Girl could be Parvati. “Till date, no archaeologist has ever interpreted the ‘Dancing Girl’ as a goddess, let alone Parvati. This particular artefact has always been seen as the sculpture of a young girl. It is difficult to say anything more than that. The elaborate terracotta female figurines were described by Marshall as mother goddesses, although he categorised some of the other terracotta female figurines as either toys or as being associated with magic,” Verma said in an email to The Indian Express.

The latest edition of ‘Itihaas’ was released last month. This is the first edition of the journal published during ICHR chairman YS Rao’s tenure. Historian Sachidanand Sahai is the chief editor of the journal.

Source: The Indian Express, 26-12-2016

An equal music, a beautiful society

No aspect of life in India from the exalted heavens of the classical arts to the most mundane pits of bodily waste can escape the totalitarian structure of caste.

A recent event in Delhi brought together two Indian winners of the 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award, Bezwada Wilson and T.M. Krishna, in a wide-ranging conversation about freedom of expression, nationalism and inequality, issues of pressing concern. Both were outspoken against a growing majoritarianism, and passionate about building an egalitarian and just society through their respective fields. Wilson, 50, national convener of the Safai Karmachari Andolan, is a campaigner against manual scavenging; and Krishna, 40, is a prominent exponent of Carnatic music and a public intellectual.

The two men share a commitment to free speech and equal citizenship, to addressing entrenched forms of exclusion, discrimination and violence based on caste, to democratic rights and the Indian Constitution. They come from absolutely unrelated areas of engagement, and from personal backgrounds that are far apart, but what is remarkable is how they converge in their social activism as well as their shared ability to communicate clearly and forcefully with large audiences. The Magsaysay Award jury was astute indeed in recognising the laudable public spiritedness of both Wilson and Krishna, and their common concern with the problem of caste.

The annihilation of caste

Manual scavenging — including the removal, carrying and disposal by hand of human excrement, and the physical cleaning of latrines, sewers and septic tanks, a task invariably assigned to Dalits (including men, women and children) — has been targeted for eradication since Gandhi came back to India a hundred years ago. It was the Mahatma who began to insist, in the face of tremendous resistance, that all his family members and associates, regardless of caste, class and gender, clean toilets themselves. An Act of Parliament in 1993 officially banned the employment of manual scavengers and the construction of dry latrines. And yet it continues today, perpetuating the most extreme forms of indignity and oppression, causing disease and death, reducing life expectancy, and making the occupation of thousands of Indian citizens a living hell.

Wilson has been campaigning to put an end to this abominable practice for close to thirty years. The turning point for him was around 1990-91, the birth centenary of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), that brought the life and work of the great Dalit leader back into the mainstream of national consciousness and forced the government of the day to implement the Mandal Commission Report, expanding the scope of affirmative action against caste-based social inequality. How can India proceed with its ambitious economic and political agendas for growth, change and prosperity, Wilson asks, when such an archaic form of caste discrimination, a kind of slavery and a form of torture, continues to exist and to ruin countless Dalit lives?

Krishna comes at caste from the direction of the arts, particularly Carnatic music, for almost a century now the preserve of elite urban Brahmin men — whether as composers, singers, musicians, accompanists or listeners — in Chennai and other artistic capitals of southern India. He has been arguing that what is now considered Carnatic classical music and what is now called Bharatanatyam classical dance were both originally the provenance of women, especially temple dancers and courtesans, and of non-Brahmin “holding communities” like the Isai Vellalars. These groups were sidelined and their art forms taken over by socially dominant Brahmin practitioners and patrons, who cleansed the music and dance of their vernacular, erotic, demotic and popular character, and reinvented them as classical, religious, refined and urbane. The temple courtyard and the noisy village square gave way to the kutcheri and the sophisticated concert hall as performance spaces, which closed their doors to ordinary people.

In 2015 Krishna announced his decision to stop performing in the December concert season — in the Tamil month of Margazhi — of Chennai, even though he has been the star of this vaunted annual cultural event from a young age. He now organises a new winter-time music festival in the small fishing village of Urur-Olcott Kuppam in Chennai, teaches music and performs free concerts at corporation schools, trains girls and women in Carnatic vocal and instrumental music, and extends the ambit of his pedagogic outreach to tribal, rural and marginalised communities. He has also expanded the repertoire of music that he himself sings, including modern Hindustani and Bengali forms. Most recently he has made joint appearances with the Jogappas, a transgender community of devotional folk performers, associated with the goddess Yellamma, from northern Karnataka and contiguous parts of the Deccan (Andhra and Maharashtra), unimaginable in the hallowed halls of classical music for the Carnatic orthodoxy.

Self-purification and self-respect

Krishna and Wilson — together, as a pair — remind one of the late D.R. Nagaraj’s insightful formulation of “self-purification” and “self-respect” as the two modalities of a moral resistance to caste, especially untouchability, flowing from Gandhi and Ambedkar, respectively. According to Nagaraj, the caste Hindu and especially the Brahmin self must purify or purge itself of its impulse to exclude or hurt the untouchable, while the Dalit self must assert its intrinsic worth and inalienable dignity even in the face of relentless discrimination.

Krishna, constantly aware of and critical about his own birth, training, conditioning and privilege, has been advocating strenuously that Carnatic music “de-Brahminise” itself, undertake some “social re-engineering” as an act of self-purification to render itself less unequal and more inclusive. The arts are after all a microcosm of society, reflecting and even amplifying its inequalities. Wilson meanwhile states unequivocally that if the Constitution guarantees the self-respect of Dalits, then an abhorrent demeaning practice like manual scavenging simply cannot be allowed to persist in today’s India.

But what is more striking than this obvious dialectic of self-purification and self-respect, which can be traced back to Gandhian and Ambedkarite stances on caste, is how both Krishna and Wilson in their own ways struggle to actualise what Ambedkar called “social endosmosis”. This is the natural flow and exchange of ideas, values, practices, knowledge and energies between and across groups that Ambedkar lamented could not occur in the rigidly stratified and segregated Hindu social order. The traditional caste system controls social reproduction through strict endogamy, and places nearly insurmountable taboos on cohabitation, commensality and other forms of conviviality and commerce between different castes.

Ambedkar and ‘social endosmosis’

Untouchability may have been outlawed through Article 17 of the Indian Constitution, but that is only the most extreme way to keep human beings and fellow citizens apart. In fact, Indians of different castes even today seldom eat together, live together, inter-marry or in other ways participate in each other’s life-worlds across the invisible yet impenetrable barriers of caste. As Krishna has shown, in a manner that is all the more effective for being so blunt, we can’t even sing together, an indicator of how little we hear the speech, the pain, the yearnings, the silences of others.

No aspect of life in India from the exalted heavens of the classical arts to the most mundane pits of bodily waste can escape the totalitarian structure of caste: this was Ambedkar’s rage against varnaashramadharma, the total society. From music to excreta, everything is segregated, violating the basic principle of equal citizenship. Having Krishna and Wilson come together on a common platform exemplifies what Nagaraj characterised as the necessity for modern Indians to address, simultaneously, “the beauty and the horror” of caste. “My journey began from the question of beauty,” Krishna said. “What is beauty?” For a moment this seems like a strange way to begin thinking about the cultural politics of Carnatic music, or indeed any other art form, but it turns out to be an enormously productive line of inquiry. As Wilson points out, an equal society is the most beautiful thing that human beings could make.

Why can’t scientists, planners and bureaucrats come up with a way to end forever the scourge of manual scavenging, Wilson demands, not just a moral and political alternative but a technological and policy solution? Krishna’s path has been more challenging to interpret as a radical move in the politics of aesthetics. In systematically educating himself and us about the actual historical origins and forgotten trajectories of Carnatic music; in abandoning the highest prosceniums for unexplored spaces and unexpected audiences; in opening himself to the sounds and rhythms of every kind of community populating the hum and hubbub of India; in learning to listen and unlearning how he was taught to sing, he has indisputably transformed himself as an artiste.

Articulate to a fault, Krishna reflects, writes, lectures and teaches continuously about what he is doing. But even if he were not to talk about it explicitly, any sensitive listener can hear in Krishna’s voice as it continues to evolve, over the past couple of years especially, a note of compassion, empathy and sweetness that deepens immeasurably the musical experience for singer and audience alike. This is not just amazing virtuosity, which he has had from the very beginning. It is, rather, the sound of virtue itself, the profoundly moving melody of an ethical music. Is there only suffering for the Dalit condemned to manual scavenging, Wilson was asked. “The fight for justice is itself the greatest happiness,” he answered.

Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi.

Source: The Hindu, 24-12-2016

Note ban not enough: Corruption in India is like water, it finds a way

Every citizen can join this mahayajna against the ills of corruption, black money and fake notes... Let us ignore the temporary hardship.”

It is now 48 days since Prime Minister Narendra Modi made that appeal, as he scrapped 86% of India’s bank note--by value--in circulation. Initially, millions of Indians queuing up to withdraw their own money from bank accounts did indeed ignore the hardship of lost wages and stress of the queue. The common refrain: It’s worth it because the rich with black money will suffer. As it becomes increasingly evident that only those in the queue are suffering, as are livelihoods, the lines are as long as ever and people have died waiting for money, there is a distinct change in mood.

Over the last week, there have been attacks on banks in Uttarakhand, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, and roads have been blocked by frustrated mobs in UP. Images of hundreds pressing against a bank entrance’s steel grill, narrowed to allow one person to enter, appear to have become the leitmotif of the era of notebandi, the colloquial term for Modi’s grand experiment. The patience displayed in the queue has given way to jokes, frustration and abuse and eroded the government’s credibility.

Government spokespersons insist there is no shortage of money. They may not be entirely wrong. Every day, India is witness to law-enforcement agencies seizing bundles of the distinctive, pink bundles of Rs 2,000-denomination bank notes. Those in queue ask the obvious question: We stand here for days to get a few thousands, how do they get lakhs and crores?

The short answer is corruption, the very thing notebandi is supposed to strike at. A vast money laundering exercise in India’s unseen financial netherworld appears to have been largely successful, as the anticipated return of almost all the money that was taken out of the banking system indicates (The government thought Rs 2.5 lakh crore or so in unaccounted money would not return). Some of those with unaccounted or “black” money did get their comeuppance, but those numbers are likely to be far smaller than anticipated.

How could this happen? It could happen because Indians are masters of subversion and because notebandi was a shot in the dark, with no precise target or preparation to overcome this culture of subversion. So, corrupt bank officers colluded easily with corrupt seekers of pink notes. Thus far, about 50 bank officials from private and public banks and the Reserve Bank of India have been found conspiring with money launderers--many more have got away. Bundles of pink notes continue to turn up in cars, homes, offices and bank lockers. Bear in mind that these instances only relate to cash. Thousands of crores of unaccounted rupees were converted to real estate, gold and luxury items, from watches to handbags.

Modi has either not understood the reach of corruption into India’s administrative system and collective soul or he did understand but was convinced by his circle of trusted bureaucrats that a series of administrative fiats — surgical strikes, to use popular government nomenclature — without adequate planing could, somehow, bring about the new normal that he seeks.

Corruption in India is like water — it finds a way. It is marked by ingenuity, determination and perseverance, qualities that could transform India if deployed for honest means. The most ingenious method recently evident: Thousands of poor Indians with basic bank accounts persuaded — for a fee, obviously — to rent their accounts to launder old bank notes into new.

It isn’t politically correct to say this, but the majority in India is dishonest, either by circumstance, culture, upbringing or habit. I would like to believe many can be turned if circumstances change, but that may be optimistic, given the casual and widespread disregard of laws in every sphere of life, most visible in the form of the roadside havaldar who waits for a Rs-50 bribe from the streams of vehicles that run red lights. Corruption in India can only be curbed through carrots, sticks, meticulous planning and sustained effort. Incentives are important; so is stronger punishment. As former chief economic adviser Kaushik Basu has argued, it may make sense to decriminalise the giving of bribes.

Read: Note ban not a surgical strike on corruption, it’s firebombing on poor: Rahul

However, most important is administrative and political reform.

In 2007, the second Administrative Reforms Commission made 18 recommendations to enforce ethics in political and legislative functions. All 18 were rejected. Politicians have consistently closed ranks over political reform, and Modi has stayed within those ranks. Indeed, in the budget session of Parliament earlier this year, his government tweaked foreign contribution laws to allow political parties to receive foreign donations retrospectively, from 2010. As soon as this amendment passed, the Congress and BJP, held guilty by the Delhi High Court of accepting foreign donations illegally, withdrew their appeal from the Supreme Court. Yet, Modi said last week that his party had not altered even “a comma or a full stop” in the law that regulated political funding. Some honesty would be in order.

Many commentators have also pointed out how political parties need not account for donations below Rs 20,000. It is no surprise that in 2014-15 six leading political parties received 60% of their funding from “unknown” sources, and the BJP received the most such funding with Rs 977 crore over two years.

The systemic eradication of corruption also requires reconstructing an administrative system largely unchanged since colonial rule. Modi began well: Some old laws were scrapped and business requirements eased. But the bureaucracy and its rusting frame still remains India’s backbone and the tentacles of the inspector raj are as tightly wound around the economy as ever. We have also seen the right-to-information system eroded, no Lokpal--whatever its infirmities--is in evidence, and, now, the efforts to find notebandi’s laundered money portend a greater bureaucratic invasion of our lives, which Modi had once promised to reverse (remember “minimum governance”?). Without a carefully planned, wide-ranging — and honest — war of reform against politics and the bureaucracy, no isolated surgical strike can survive its overstated claims.

Source: Hindustan Times, 26-12-2016

Good policing can’t do much without a social transformation

The person acquitted after 14 years because there was no evidence against him in the Lajpat Nagar blast case brings out the importance of the findings of the People’s Tribunal on Acquitted Innocents in terrorism cases. The tribunal, led by former Delhi High Court Chief Justice AP Shah, has talked about the “special nature of wrongfulness in terror prosecutions” and has suggested the government make erring police persons “criminally liable for the malicious acts done by them in their official capacity”. The tribunal went on to say: “In testimony after testimony, we heard of illegal and wrongful detention, torture in police custody, forced confessions extracted under duress, long incarceration, repeated denial of bail, to be acquitted finally years after their arrest.’’ This, in a nutshell, reveals the face of our criminal justice system. Not much remedy is in sight because of prevalent attitudes, such as the one aired by a Union minister who recently instructed the people to believe the police on everything that the law-enforcers do.

Repeated lapses in the delivery of criminal justice in matters of terrorism charges are not to be seen in isolation because they have prejudices and social conflicts built into them. It is not surprising that the Muslims form a large proportion of undertrials in India, higher than perhaps any other community, languishing in jail year after year, according to the data of the National Crimes Record Bureau. The Scheduled Castes and Tribes do not fall far behind them. All the data in existence show that it is some communities’ constant neglect and marginalisation which lead to prejudices being formed against them, an undertaking in which the moral majority plays no small part and co-opts the police in the exercise. The data from the National Human Rights Commission too support this.

The question of good policing is relevant mostly to the way it deals with ordinary crime in urban areas, or it affords protection to women and the elderly. But things such as detention without trial, extra-judicial murders, custodial killings, arrests without evidence, etc have much more to do with matters other than policing. In those cases the police are compelled to act because of social pressures; orders, sometimes illegal, from the government; class, caste or community divisions in society; plain party politics, etc. In those cases a police officer, even of high levels, is virtually powerless though he might be conscientious. Hence improvement in criminal justice means much more than uplifting the police system and the magistracy. It means a gamut of changes that lead to empowerment and a redistribution of assets and social power.

Source: Hindustan Times, 14-12-2016

World's most heat resistant material found

MM





The finding may pave the way for next-gen hypersonic vehicles

Scientists have identified materials that can withstand temperatures of nearly 4,000 deg rees Celsius, an advance that may pave the way for improved heat resistant shielding for the faster-than-ever hypersonic space vehicles.Researchers from Imperial College London discovered that the melting point of hafnium carbide is the highest ever recorded for a material.
Tantalum carbide (TaC) and hafnium carbide (HfC) are refractory ceramics, meaning they are extraordinarily resistant to heat.
Their ability to withstand extremely harsh environments means that refractory ceramics could be used in thermal protection systems on highspeed vehicles and as fuel cladding in the super-heated environments of nuclear reactors.
However, there has not been the technology available to test the melting point of TaC and HfC in the lab to determine how truly extreme an environment they could function in.
The researchers developed a new extreme heating technique using lasers to test the heat tolerance of TaC and HfC.
They used the laser-heating techniques to find the point at which TaC and HfC melted, both separately and as mixed compositions of both.
They found that the mixed compound (Ta0.8Hf0.20C) was consistent with previous research, melting at 3,905 degrees Celsius, but the two compounds on their own exceeded previous recorded melting points. The compound TaC melted at 3,768 degrees Celsius, and HfC melted at 3,958 degrees Celsius.
The findings may pave the way for the next generation of hypersonic vehicles, meaning spacecraft could become faster than ever.
“The friction involved when travelling above Mach 5 ­ hypersonic speeds ­ creates very high temperatures,“ said Omar Cedillos-Barraza, currently an Associate Professor at the University of Texas.
“So far, TaC and HfC have not been potential candidates for hypersonic aircraft, but our new findings show that they can withstand even more heat than we previously thought ­ more than any other compound known to man,“ said CedillosBarraza, who carried out the research as a PhD student at Imperial College London.
“This means that they could be useful materials for new types of spacecraft that can fly through the atmosphere like a plane, before reaching hypersonic speeds to shoot out into space,“ he said.

Source: Mumbai Mirror, 26-12-2016

We are All Connected

THICH NHAT HANH





Buddhism considers the individual an illusion: is there still room in this vision for the distinction between good and evil?
In the 20th century , individualism became important and this has created a lot of suffering and difficulties. We create a separation between ourselves and others, between father and son, between man and nature, between one nation and another.We are not aware of the interconnection between ourselves and everything around us.This interconnection is what in Buddhism we call `interbeing'. The ethical path that is offered by Buddhism is based on a deep understanding of inter-being. What happens to the individual influences what happens in society and the planet. In this way, the practice of mindfulness helps us to make a distinction between what is good and evil, right and wrong.
When we're mindful, we can see the destruction that has been caused to the animals and the planet in order to produce meat for our consumption. With this awareness, eating vegetarian food becomes an act of love towards ourselves, towards our ecosystem and the planet.
Many of us are running after fame, power, money or sensual pleasures. We think that these things can bring happiness, but they can lead us to destroy our body and our mind. Young people often confuse sex with true love, but an empty sexuality can destroy love, and bring even more desire, loneliness and despair. Mindfulness helps us to develop our understanding about the other person. True love cannot exist without understanding.

DEAR READER

WISH YOU A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS

TISS GUWAHATI CAMPUS LIBRARY

He is Love Incarnate





`Love came down at Christmas, Love all Lovely , Love Divine' -so goes a famous Christmas carol. In a beleaguered world 2,000 years ago, Christ was born as Love Incarnate. The Bible sums it up in just one verse, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life“ (John 3:16).Christ taught the importance of love, when he reduced all commandments of the Bible to just two: love God and love your neighbour as yourself (Luke 10:27). He went on to say: love your enemies, too (Matthew 5:44). It is this message of love and hope that resonates around the world during the season of Christmas.
Genuine love is not a passive or weak emotion; it is a powerful force of mind and soul found in all. We can freely express it or suppress it and let the dark side take control. Love engenders peace, forgiveness, reconciliation, sacrifice and a strong resolve to work together for peace and harmony .
One final thought! Are there limitations to love? Does love work in the face of extreme violence, injustice, exploitation and discrimination? Yes should be the answer. Jesus Christ showed us this path of love, which is not confined to any one religion, race or region. May this universal message of Christmas spread more joy , peace and love to one and all around the world!