The district of Nuh is quite fascinating for its topography. As one ascends the forlorn ridge of the Aravali from Sohna, the hill is distinctly characteristic of peneplanation and rejuvenation until descending along a sweeping curve west of Gurgaon District before taking on the highway trisecting 3 short spurs of the Aravali, 2 of which are thrown north, and 1 west. The road now courses towards Tauru with the Aravali literally running like a hypotenuse towards Nuh Town and Firozepur Jhirka, the southern extremity of the district. This topography was strategically important during the Delhi Sultanate, later the Mughals, Jats & Marathas, and finally the British to keep check on the turbulent, rebellious and disturbed Mewat.

The Fort was one such vantage point stirring turbulence during the later Mughal Period, especially in the aftermath of the Maratha defeat by Abdali in the third Battle of Panipat in 1761. Bands of Mewatis would commit highway robberies on the Hodal stretch of Delhi-Agra Highway and run over the hills into Mewat. Though the Jats under Jawahar Singh, son of Suraj Mal was severely punitive, one Sanulba, a Meo with 10 brigands created havoc. He found shelter in this Fort, where Asaudullah Khan Baloch was a resident. Asaudullah took his share of the booty from Sanulba as protection. Suraj Mal admonished Asaudullah to hand Sanulba over, but the former refused. Jawahar Singh attacked Tauru then but was repulsed. Meanwhile Najib Khan, C-in-C of Abdali warned Suraj Mal against harming Baluchis as they were his proteges. Jats, never to be humiliated reinforced their resolve and took by force the Fort at Tauru.

Now derelict, the Fort has later Mughal styles with Lakhori bricks, cusped arches & alcoves. But, extensive use of rubble masonry takes away the sole-proprietorship of the later Mughals and reflects on the Sayyids’ style of the Delhi Sultanate, who did have architectural presence in the region and also due to their constant skirmishes with the Meos, especially along the ridge from Indor/Tijara to Tauru/Nuh. The ceilings have collapsed, the surrounding has intrused, and entrance to the ruin is next to impossible due to impounded vehicles within the complex of the police station. The monument is on a ventilator.

Weaponize Trust - This is what the book is about, more or less.

Annie Jacobsen's "Biological War - A Scenario" is an extremely frightful picture of the world with real-life analogues.

Take this excerpt from the book,

"A genomic scientist examines the data. What she sees is terrifying. The sequencing machines reveal signatures of human design. DNA scars from laboratory tools. Sequences that don't fit into normal evolutionary mutation patterns. This organisation was engineered..."

The real-life analogue to this scenario playing out in the US was the nefarious Soviet biological warfare program code-named "Chimera". “Chimera” is an organism that contains genetic material from two or more other organisms. In the words of Ken Alibek, whose Biohazard is yet another scary read, "Chimera" is an imaginary monster with the head of a lion, body of a ghost and a serpent's tail. This program was engineered by Sergey Netesov in the 1970s and 80s, whereby he was to genetically modify plague to express proteins from Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis virus, or VEE. The rationale behind the plague-VEE hybrid was to create a bacterial carrier that would infect the human body with plague andv then, when triggered would dispatch a lethal load of VEE to the infected person. This would be done by splicing genes from the virus that causes encephalitis into the genome of the Yersini Pestis, the bacteria that causes plague.

Annie's book is a fast-paced thriller, interspersed with interviews with the officials and authorities who worked in the past deciding strategies to neutralize the impact of an intense bio-attack on American soil. The book tends to flirt with speculation like Richard Preston's works, but the author opines in her acknowledgement, towards the end of the book that this is just one imaginary scenario, whereas experts in the field have made it known that biological warfare can take unprecedented scales of movements with no parallels.

The meticulously researched book is a grim reminder of the foreboding lurking on the tiny scales that can potentially turn out to be civilizations' end, and in the process invoking the havoc wrecked by the CoViD pandemic as nowhere close to the speculated insurrection, chaos and death on the world, with hardly any curr in sight. Jacobsen slaps subtle and not so subtle charges on Trump's handling of the pandemic in his first term, which was fueled by disinformation and ineptitude and throws heavy clues on the likeness of insurrection the world's witnessed while Trump was demitting office with his cabal storming the Capitol, repeating itself in more in a more grotesque form throughout the land of the free!

Biological War seems to travel back to the fall of the Soviet Empire, where the Soviets want to exact revenge for the so-called End of History by inflicting devastation on the Americans, but not wittingly, as it appears. The story in short is an accident at the Russian BSL-4 (Bio Safety Lab - 4), popularly known as the "Vector" located in Siberia. The Soviets with their secret bio-weapons program used synthetic biological principles (did this field even exist back then?) and inserted an endomorphine gene for euphoria into plague. When a human was exposed to this bacteria, she would go out and socialize for a day or two before losing complete control of her body, and dying a horrific death in 24-48 hours after the effect of euphoria weaned. This narrative is about the deadly pnemonic plague at play, which is airborne with an R0 of around 11!

As the author puts it, "The scenario that follows chronicling the hours, days, and weeks after the release into society of a genetically modified biological weapon is based on facts and projections sourced from exclusive interviews with presidential advisors, Defense Department officials, medical doctors, microbiologists, epidemiologists, diplomats, congresspeople, C.I.A. officers who work to counter weapons of mass destruction, Federal Emergency Management officials, and first responders who train for mass-casualty biological incidents and attacks." It also, she continues, "echoes biological war scenarios run by the Pentagon." The hypothetical events that unfold along the way are grounded in details that are, for the most part, highly plausible; she intermittently breaks the main narrative to provide the context of a relevant "History Lesson." The danger is that any account of doomsday that feels credible can also feel domesticated. The horrors of uncertainty are translated into the language of manageable risk, risk that somebody, somewhere, has the responsibility and foresight to manage. That's the reason why she calls it 'a' scenario and not 'the' scenario.

Jacobsen reminds the reader that her "scenario builds on science fact, not science fiction." She has taken real events and tweaked them just enough to make her counterfactual seem not only conceivable but inevitable makes the "Biological War" a sobering treatise where her honesty as an investigative journalist is not compromised. Many reviews praise Jacobsen’s research and narrative skill, calling the book "terrifying," "essential," and a "non-fiction thriller". The structure is seen as a compelling but deeply unsettling roadmap to a potential global catastrophe. The only two issues with the work are, the extreme "all-at-once" collapse of every system is acceleratedly far-fetched, and for writing a scenario that is unprecedented, the problem is there is never a good precedent to it.

Come monsoons, and the rugged region of Maval bursts forth with cascading waterfalls, misty & green peaks and the land is carpeted with verdure, the scenery, quite unparalleled. It is in this rugged land that one finds passes connecting the coastal belt of Konkan with the interiors of Maharashtra. These passes were used by traders from at least 2 millennia ago. The region before the Common Era had flourishes under Buddhism and Jainism as attested by hundreds of monasteries excavated into the scarps of the Western Ghats.

And it is in Maval that one finds the oldest Jaina record, not just in Maharashtra, but possibly in India. Let us travel to Pale, a nondescript village nestled in the Sahyadris.

Introduction -

A ‘maval’ is the generic name for one of the fertile river valleys which run east from the watershed of the Western Ghats in the Pune District of Maharashtra. They are called mavals only so long as they are fairly narrow and enclosed between the many spurs which run east from the summit crest of the Ghats and they end roughly at a line drawn north-south just short of Pune city itself, so that the whole belt of country west of Pune, about 25 miles wide and 70 miles from north to south is often called ‘the Maval’. It was in the Maval that Sivaji first established the power base which, after many vicissitudes, developed into the Maratha kingdom and the hardy mountain people who formed his guerrilla forces and raiding parties were known as māvaḷe. The word probably derives from the Marathi verb māvaḷaṇeṃ—‘to set, of the sun or any other heavenly body’, and so the Maval was originally just ‘the West’ if you happened to live in Poona. An alternative name for some of the higher and narrower valleys is khor.

Topography -

The topography of Maval consists of undulating hilly terrain typical of the Maval lowlands, which serve as a stepped descent from the steep escarpments of the Western Ghats (Sahyadri range) to the elevated Deccan Plateau eastward. Elevations average around 600 meters, with higher ridges in the Sahyadri foothills exceeding 1,000 meters and deeper valleys carving through basaltic rock formations. This landscape includes gorges and plateaus formed by volcanic basalt flows, contributing to a varied relief that influences local drainage and agriculture. The region is drained by westward and eastward flowing rivers originating in the Sahyadri highlands, such as the Pavana, Indrayani, and Andra, which feed into larger systems like the Bhima and Ulhas basins. These waterways traverse steep gradients in the western hills before broadening in the valleys, supporting reservoirs and irrigation in the undulating plains.

Climate -

Maval tehsil, situated at the foothills of the Sahyadri range in Pune district, experiences a tropical monsoon climate with significant variation due to its topography. The region receives heavy southwest monsoon rainfall from June to September, averaging 2,000 to 5,000 mm annually, higher than the district’s eastern parts owing to orographic effects from the Western Ghats. Summers from March to May are hot, with maximum temperatures often exceeding 38°C in lower elevations, while winters from November to February are mild, with minima around 10-15°C and moderated by higher altitudes in areas like Lonavala. Relative humidity peaks during monsoon, frequently above 80%, contributing to lush vegetation.

Geology -

Almost the entire Pune district is underlain by Deccan Volcanic Basalts belonging to Sahyadri Group of Upper Cretaceous to Eocene age, comprises of various lava flows, which can be classified in the field into two types as simple and compound flows. The compound flows occur at lower elevations whereas the simple flows are confined to the elevation above 680 m. The compound flows although vesicular and amygdaloidal in nature, hard and compact in their middle sections. They are fractured and jointed, and show moderate degree of weathering at places. Each individual lava flow consists of lower massive part becoming vesicular /amygdaloidal towards top, ranges in their individual thickness from a few centimeters to tens of meters. The flows have wide variation in colour and texture especially when they are amygdaloidal in nature with secondary mineral infillings such as Zeolites, calcite, and Agate and Chalcedony etc. The red /green/black bole beds constituting the marker horizons separating the two flows were discontinuous and generally inconsistent. The basalts are intruded by dykes and are found commonly in pahoehoe flows in the area. The dykes vary in thickness from one or two meters to as much as 10 meters and extend for long distances. The dykes display the joints parallel to the walls, at right angle to the walls besides horizontal ones, with chilled margins. The dykes act as barrier or as water conduits / pathways for the movement of groundwater flow depending on intensity of fracturing in the dyke rock.

Pale lies at the junction of what are known as the Indrayani (river) and Karla (famous for rock-cut caves) formations. The former is characterized by the presence of compact, massive, porphyritic basalt (dark, fine-grained volcanic rock featuring large, visible mineral crystals called phenocrysts). The phenocrysts are embedded in fine-grained groundmass. This formation is classified as Khandala Formation of Lonavala. Indrayani Formation lava flows are, generally jointed and highly weathered, occupy the low-lying flat plain areas. The latter essentially comprises of compound lava flows exhibiting the pahoehoe (Pahoehoe lava is a fluid basaltic volcanic rock with a smooth, billowy, or ropy surface. As molten lava flows, a flexible skin cools on top and wrinkles into shapes that look like twisted rope) characters. This formation has been classified as Bushe Formation. It is comprised of aphyric or sparsely plagioclase phyric compound flows. The flows are characterized by the presence coarse grained, altered, amygdaloidal basalt and near absence of plagioclase (a continuous solid-solution series of framework silicate minerals within the feldspar group).

Before considering the history of the place, let us look briefly at what Lava Tubes are, for these are essential to understand the cave in question.

What are Lava Tubes?

Lava tubes are defined as natural tunnels that form beneath the surface of a lava flow, allowing molten lava to travel while insulated by a rigid crust that develops as the surface cools. These structures often occur in basaltic lava flows with low viscosity and can leave partially empty tunnels when the lava supply ceases. Lava tubes are by-products of volcanic processes themselves. They form either as the result of surface cooling of lava flows or the result of sequential lava flows, with later flows going underneath the older ones and cavities by a process called inflation. Tubes form by the crusting over of lava channels and pahoehoe flows. During long-lived eruptions, lava flows tend to become channeled into a few main streams. Overflows of lava from these streams solidify quickly and plaster on to the channel walls, building natural levees or ramparts that allow the level of the lava to be raised.

The Jaina caves at Pale are a natural formation, in that they were a resultant of a Lava Tube. Natural, also because it is clearly evident within the caves where the monks used their chiseling techniques to further their cause in accordance with their monastic needs.

Historical Eras -

Pre-Marathas -

The region exhibits evidence of early human activity through rock-cut Buddhist architecture indicative of Hinayana Buddhist influence during the Satavahana dynasty’s control over the Deccan. Following the decline of the Satavahanas around the 3rd century CE, the area fell under successive Hindu dynasties, including the Chalukyas of Badami (6th-8th centuries CE) and Rashtrakutas (8th-10th centuries CE), though direct archaeological evidence in Maval remains limited compared to broader Deccan sites. The Seuna Yadavas of Devagiri, ruling from the late 12th to early 14th century, incorporated the Pune-Maval tract into their domain, promoting agrarian expansion in the valleys through local feudal structures. Muslim conquests disrupted Yadava rule when Alauddin Khilji annexed Devagiri in 1296 CE, integrating the region into the Delhi Sultanate. By 1347 CE, the Bahmani Sultanate asserted independence over the Deccan, including Maval, but internal fragmentation after the 1490s led to the rise of successor states, the Ahmadnagar Sultanate (Nizam Shahi dynasty) dominated the Pune vicinity from the early 16th century, granting jagirs to Maratha nobles like the Bhosales while maintaining oversight through subedars. Local deshmukhs, often from Koli or Maratha clans, wielded significant autonomy, collecting taxes and maintaining militias amid frequent raids. By the early 17th century, overlapping claims by the Ahmadnagar and Bijapur sultanates exacerbated instability, with deshmukhs engaging in territorial disputes and extortion, fostering a landscape of fragmented authority and banditry in the rugged Maval terrain from circa 1605 to 1636 CE. This era of “Maval anarchy” saw declining central control, as sultanate campaigns diverted resources, allowing local chieftains to consolidate power through watandar (hereditary estate) rights, setting conditions of chronic insecurity.

Marathas -

The Maval region served as the cradle for Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s early military recruitment and the formation of the Maratha Empire’s core forces in the mid-17th century. Shivaji, born in 1630, began consolidating power by allying with local deshmukhs and enlisting resilient peasant communities, primarily Kunbis and Marathas, as Mavla warriors, who provided the infantry backbone for his campaigns against the Adilshahi Sultanate of Bijapur. These recruits, hardened by the demanding hilly terrain, enabled Shivaji to challenge feudal tyrants and establish initial independence in the region by the 1640s, transitioning from localized resistance to structured swarajya (self-rule). Their tactics, termed Ganimi Kava (guerrilla warfare), emphasized ambushes, night raids, swift retreats, and exploitation of terrain to outmaneuver numerically superior foes, a strategy Shivaji adapted from regional precedents to counter Bijapuri and later Mughal armies. Their decentralized structure and local knowledge sustained Maratha resilience, enabling raids deep into enemy supply lines and fort captures, though vulnerabilities emerged in open-field confrontations against disciplined imperial artillery and heavy cavalry.

Colonial -

Following the defeat of the Peshwa Baji Rao II in the Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817–1818), the Maval region, part of the former Peshwa territories in the Pune area, was annexed by the British East India Company and incorporated into the Bombay Presidency. Mountstuart Elphinstone, appointed as commissioner for the Deccan, supervised the transition, establishing direct British administration over the fertile valleys and hill tracts of Maval, which had previously been held by Maratha Deshmukhs and sardars. This marked the end of autonomous Maratha control in the region, with residual pockets of resistance quelled by 1819, leading to the deposition of the Peshwa and the imposition of subsidiary alliances on surviving Maratha states. Earlier interactions during the First Anglo-Maratha War highlighted Maval’s strategic terrain. On 12–13 January 1779, Maratha forces under Haripant Phadke, Mahadaji Scindia, and Tukoji Holkar trapped a British column of approximately 3,900 troops led by Colonel Charles Egerton near Vadgaon Maval village. The British, hampered by mountainous passes and supply shortages, signed the Convention of Wadgaon, surrendering artillery, baggage, and prisoners while agreeing to withdraw from Maratha lands. The British government later disavowed the treaty as unauthorized, using it as pretext to reinforce their position and escalate the war, though the event underscored the defensive advantages of Maval’s ghats against early colonial incursions.

Under British rule from 1818 onward, Maval was administered as Mawul Taluka within the Poona (Pune) Collectorate, encompassing roughly 88 villages divided among former Deshmukh lineages such as the Garatada and Dalavi families. The colonial authorities conducted land revenue surveys in the mid-19th century, transitioning from Maratha-era inams (hereditary grants) to fixed assessments based on soil fertility and crop yields, primarily rice in the river valleys and forestry in the Sahyadri slopes. This system, influenced by Elphinstone’s policies favoring light initial taxation to stabilize post-war agriculture, integrated Maval into broader Bombay Presidency revenue frameworks, though periodic droughts, such as the Deccan famine of 1876–1878, strained local peasant economies and prompted relief measures. The taluka saw limited infrastructure development, including early road links to Pune and Bombay, but remained peripheral to urban cantonments, preserving its rural character amid colonial economic extraction focused on cash crops and timber.

Pale Caves -

The cave is located at an approximate distance of 13 km from Kamshet off the Old Pune-Mumbai Highway (NH-4). Upon crossing the railway tracks and the gorgeous Indrayani River at Kamshet, the road (with potholes aplenty!) takes us to a small rivulet Kundalika. We deviate right before reaching a ascending terrace, locally known as the Patangana, with the village of Pala on the right. This terrace snakes for around 200 m before reaching a flatland, which is the foot of the cave. On a dry summer day, the cave can possibly seen from here, but in the monsoons, the slope is thickly vegetated, thus concealing the opening to the cave. The trek begins here, and it is not a difficult one, though quite steep in a few places. There is another gradually rising path a hundred m ahead which can take you straight to the opening, but we used it for descent. The height of the opening of the cave from the flatland is about 70-75 m. The cave is east facing, commanding a magnificent view of the valley below. While standing facing east at the mouth of the cave, the left is a vast canvas of steep scarp of the hills dotted with cascading waterfalls.

The cave is 23 m deep, 6 m wide, and around 7 m high. The ceiling is probably incomplete, as is clearly distinguished between the finished and the unfinished portion. Facing into the cave, one can see a cell on the right, which is more or less a cuboid measuring 1.2 m dimensionally in 3D. The inscription is carved on the right above a cistern, which is referenced in the inscription. The smoothed surface on which the inscription is carved is rectangular in shape measuring 50 cm x 40 cm, whereas the actual inscription occupies a little over half the space, implying that the original space purposed for the inscription possibly had room for more lines or letters, which weren’t inscribed after-all for reasons unknown. The inscription has four lines with 10 letters in the first line, 11 each in lines two and three, and only 2 letters in line 4. The language of the inscription is Prakrit, influenced by Sanskrit.

The inscription is -

When translated, it reads,

The importance of this record lies in its paleography, and still more in the invocation managalācharana. The following noteworthy forms of the ordinals occur, kātuna[ṁ] (Sk. Kāritva, absolutive: marks both the direct object of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb), Indarakhita, and kāahi. So far as the absolutive from kātuna[ṁ] is concerned, there is an occurrence of a similar absolutive in Ashoka’s Calcutta-Bairat inscription. Professor MA Mehendale opines that as an absolutive form for Kāritva (having done or made), Ashoka’s Calcutta-Bairat inscription can help clear the muddy waters. A reference in the index of Luder’s List shows that there are some twelve persona names with Inda as the first part, this is the first (at Pale) instance that it is found immediately suffixed with rakhita (rakshita). This name shows that the Bhadanta (the revered one), before he became a Jaina monk, must have been a kshatriya, and a follower of the cult of Indra, which later became unpopular. The name kāahi also appears for the first time and would stand for with other devotees.

This is where things start getting interesting.

There have been up north of 1500 early Brahmi inscriptions recorded in India, of which 350 come from the caves of Maharashtra alone. A century-odd numbers of these belong to the Before the Common Era, and not in one (well, there is an exception at Lohgarh Fort) does an inscription start with an invocation. The inscriptions merely say, a gift, or a meritorious gift, but a managalācharana is unique at Pale. Thus we have seldom any means to regard a cave as Buddhist or of any other faith, except by the contents or the association in which it appears. The invocation of the type ‘Om Namō’ only begins to appear from the 6th-7th centuries.

The invocation “Namō arahaṁtānaṁ” appears in a Jaina context on the āyagapatas and images from the Jaina Stupa at Mathura, datable to the early centuries of the Common Era, and in the inscription from the Kharavelas at Udaygiri Caves in Odisha, slightly older than the ones at Mathura. Only at Rajgir, Bihar there exists an inscription that invokes Arahat in a Buddhist cave. Though Arahat refers to a monk, either Jaina or Buddhist, in an overwhelming number of cases, the word denotes a Jaina monk, or a Tirthankar. Moreover, Arahat preceded or succeeded by “Namō” can only mean devoted to the worship of Jina, and not to Buddha. For at this time, the early Buddhist period is not characterized by worshiping Buddha as a God, while the Jainas worshiped the Jinas or Tirthankars.

Based on this reasoning, HD Sankalia and Shobhana Gokhale premised that the inscription at Pale is not only the oldest in Maharashtra, but possibly in India, a premise concretized on paleographical analysis. The date for the Pale inscription is early 2^nd century or late 1^st century BCE.

Continuing my journey in locating the lesser known Bahamani buildings, I traveled to Shahabad (Chitapur Taluka, Gulbarga District). I must have crossed Shahabad fifty times over on my way between Pune and Chennai, but was oblivious to what the dusty cement town had to offer (though, during these 50 crossings, history was never even a hobby!). Located on the northern banks of the river Kagina (the Britishers called it the Cognee), the 64-km river rises in the hills near Vikarabad in Telangana, flows westwards, and joins the Bhima near Yangunti, near Wadi (another cement town). Shahabad is located in the northeastern quadrant of the confluence. This region is historically very rich, going back to Mauryas of Kanganahalli, to whom is attributed the only known surviving sculpted portrait of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka explicitly labeled with the Brahmi inscription “Raya Asoko”. The region then served as a bridge between the Mauryas and the Satavahanas, and later the Rashtrakutas, the Western Chalukyas (of Kalyani), the Kakatiyas of Warangal, the Bahmanis and the Nizam Shahis of Hyderabad. The landscape features vast rolling plains, black cotton soil, and a semi-arid climate. Geologically, the region is marked by extensive Deccan Trap basalt formations, ancient Archaean granites, and rich limestone deposits, of which the Shahabad Stone is the most well known. Shahabad’s economy is significantly driven by its limestone mining sector, renowned for Shahabad stone, a durable cherty limestone quarried from shallow deposits in the region. This natural resource, characterized by large, level slabs easily extracted via open-cast methods, has long been utilized in construction due to its strength and cooling properties.

History Till the Bahmanis

Shahabad originated as a small settlement during prehistoric times, with evidence of human habitation tied to the fertile banks of the Bhima River and its tributaries, such as the Kagina. Archaeological surveys have identified megalithic structures, including stone circles and alignments from the Iron Age (circa 1200–200 BCE), in and around Shahabad, indicating early community-based settlements supported by pastoralism and rudimentary agriculture on the region’s clay-rich soils. These sites, first documented by explorer Philip Meadows Taylor, whose observations were published in 1941 as a reprint of his earlier work, and later confirmed by geological surveys of the former Hyderabad State, reflect the area’s role in broader Deccan prehistoric networks, where river proximity facilitated access to water for farming and seasonal migrations of agro-pastoral groups.

During the early historic period (300 BCE–500 CE), Shahabad’s development accelerated as a sedentary village within the Satavahana sphere of influence, benefiting from the Bhima River’s navigational potential for inland trade. Artifacts like Black and Red Ware pottery, iron implements, and beads unearthed in nearby sites suggest participation in regional exchange networks, linking the settlement to larger centers such as Sannati, where Buddhist religious activities drew traders and pilgrims. The abundance of high-quality limestone deposits, further shaped initial economic activities; quarrying of these durable, layered blocks began in prehistoric times, providing material for tools, structures, and later monumental architecture, while supporting a nascent trade in building resources along Deccan routes.

The town’s early identity solidified in the medieval period under the Bahmani Sultanate (1347–1527 CE), which established Shahabad as a strategic administrative outpost in the 14th century. The construction of Shahabad Fort between 1397 and 1422 CE, using locally quarried limestone in an irregular layout that allowed for expansions, marked a pivotal phase of growth, transforming the settlement into a defensive and governance hub overseeing regional trade and military campaigns. Influences from the nearby Bahmani capital at Kalaburagi introduced Indo-Islamic architectural elements, as seen in the fort’s bastions and the Gadi ki Saat Sutun Shahi Jama Masjid, built with white stone pillars echoing Persian styles. This era’s developments, driven by the plateau’s trade routes connecting the Deccan to coastal ports, enhanced Shahabad’s role in quarrying and agrarian economies before its integration into the Nizam of Hyderabad’s administration.

The Fort

The Fort is located in Old Shahabad town in a locality called the Ashoka Square. To my utter horror the main entrance to the Fort seemed sealed. Maybe, there was another way to get in. But, in my conversations with the locals, my horrors didn’t abate. I learned that there was an incident of communal flareup that forced the local police to seal the entire fort, thus ruling out any possibility of entering the complex and checking on the Jami, the main reason behind me visiting the place. With a heavy heart, I circumambulated the premises, looking for a tiny slit through the solidified walls to get a glimpse of the Mosque, but to no avail. Jumping the walls would have been too dangerous and a direct confrontation with the law apparatus would have resulted. Sanity prevailed, and I backed off.

The irregularly-shaped fort is maybe 2 to 3 acres in size. The main entrance is flanked by strong bastions, with the sealed entrance having the pointed horse-shoe profile for an arch, a plan which was imported by the Bahmanis from the Tughlaqs. The upper level of the bastions includes tapering three-layered stone supports that provide both functional overhang and architectural elegance. The western wall and its bastion are in relative strength. At the southeast corner of the structure stands a square bastion, while the rear exit of the fort includes a small wooden door topped by a large stone arch. Once a thriving seat of local governance and military strength, the fort has now deteriorated significantly. A series of gun slits puncture through the perimeter of the fort signifying defensive tactics. As one walks the perimeter, one encounters a significant front of the walls depressed, white-washed and shaped into a dwelling, which turns out to be a school, a Saraswati Shishu Mandir. Maybe, from here, one could get a glance into the interiors, but that too turns out to be a missed call!

The Mosque That was Unseen

The Jami inside the Fort premises has not been documented. But, it follows a prototype from the Tughlaq Sultan, Firoz Shah’s building activities in Delhi. Closer home to Bahmanis’ capital city at Gulbarga, and especially the gorgeous Jami at Gulbarga Fort, this mosque at Shahabad too has low stilted domes, numbering twenty one. Thirty two columns, which are similar to the ones at Gulbarga support the roof with twenty eight arches and seven bays on the façade. The perimeter merlons at roof level cut off practically all sight of the drums on which the domes rest (zooming in on Google helped me decipher this, and so I might be totally off-track in this assessment). The internal arrangement of the Jami contains an arcade of wide arches, very similar to the ones at Gulbarga. While the double bind of Persian influence and local Deccan tradition squeezes this mosque, the Sultanate elements are stark here. Such a squeeze draws on the leitmotif characterized by the aesthetic of austerity, where spacious, vaulted and largely unadorned interiors with a multitude of domes carried on pendentives are compelling in their simplicity. The front elevation features chajjas (stone eaves) attached to the roof, supported by stone slabs. These designs follow the Indo-Islamic architectural tradition and are also seen in older homes throughout the region. Almost every dwelling place in the region is built in Shahabad Stone, where flat sheets or slabs quarried are stacked together to construct a solid wall. The rooves too are trabeated. And this plan is exactly replicated in the fort’s construction.

Let me begin with a footnote that is highly unsettling (176).

"... The most appalling case was that of Ota Benga, a Pygmy from the Congo, who was displayed in the monkey house of New York's Bronx Zoo in September 1906. An orangutan shared his space. Visitors picked his teeth for... devouring human flesh. To further this impression, zookeepers left a few bones scattered on the floor around him. A poem said that Benga had been brought

From his native language of darkness,
To the country of the free,
In the interest of science,
And of broad humanity.

The promoter who staged this exhibit was a former Presbyterian missionary who abandoned preaching for business. A delegation of black ministers reached Ota Benga. He remained in the US and committed suicide ten years later.”

Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is a book of horrors suspended by the cruelty of Belgium's colonial past in Congo, bordering on genocide and the traumas that still linger. While, not much is novel in what Hochschild has written, save for some newer documentary evidence, it nevertheless is one piece of investigative journalism that puts the perspective under the story of greed, propaganda and heroism. The book continues to fuel the debate around genocide. Yes, the events described in King Leopold's Ghost feature mass violence and population decline, but applying the specific term "genocide" requires careful contextualization. There are three points to consider before such a categorisation becomes plausible, and these points are counterargued by the critics. The first is "Intent", which going by the legal definition under the UN Genocide Convention, requires proof of specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Adam Hochschild argues that Leopold’s primary motivation was economic exploitation, maximizing profit from rubber and ivory—rather than the physical extermination of the Congolese people for their identity. However, critics of this view point out that the systematic brutality, mass starvation, and social collapse caused by the regime had an effect functionally similar to genocide, even if the primary driver was greed. The second is "Scale of Death and Legal Definition". This argument is diluted by Hochschild. The staggering population decline—estimated at roughly half the population—is often cited as evidence of crimes against humanity. However, a significant portion of this mortality was attributed to secondary causes like introduced diseases and societal breakdown stemming from the forced labor system. This distinction often complicates the straightforward application of the term "genocide," as mass death alone does not automatically fulfill the legal criteria without the specific intent to destroy the group. The third is "Systematic Ethnic Brutality ". The violence was not explicitly designed to eliminate a specific ethnicity but rather to control a workforce and suppress resistance. In this sense, the system was more akin to colonial terror and crimes against humanity, the brutalization was indiscriminate and targeted all Congolese who failed to meet rubber quotas, rather than singling out a particular subgroup for extinction. These points have their branches that either concretize the claims of a genocide in Congo, or dilute it, notwithstanding the graphics of decapitation, extermination and obliteration of the indigenous population, all carried out in the name of civilizing the dark continent (a phrase popularized by HM Stanley) by the so-called philanthropist, the King of Belgium.

In 1835 was born the scourge of the Congolese. Leopold II, cousin of Britain's Queen Victoria was crowned the King of the Belgians in 1865. This was the time when most of the European powers had colonies, except Belgium. In 1879, Leopold II hired the services of the Welsh, Henry Morton Stanley, often called the greatest explorer on the African continent. Stanley mapped the Congo River for a significant distance, then considered a damningly mysterious river known for its turbulent cataracts and the volume it discharged into the Atlantic, second only to the Amazon. During the exploration, Stanley helped build primitive infrastructure and struck a chord with the natives of the Congo, whose chords were mostly illiterate and who were cajoled to strike a deal with the Belgian monarch. The King, known for his PR skills and a humanistic nature convinced the US and Europeans to acknowledge Congo as his personal property. He then exploited the central African tract to extract resources like ivory and rubber. The latter, because of pioneers in rubber use in cycling technology, thanks largely to John Boyd Dunlop and Charles Goodyear, the latter known for vulcanization process. Little did anyone suspect that this was to unfold into a horrific reality. King Leopold unleashed his private army, 19000 strong to terrorize the local population. The book chillingly documents the practice of severing the hands of Congolese people, both as punishment for failing to meet quotas and as a way to prove that soldiers had not wasted ammunition.

But, it was only a matter of time before the dastardly acts of the Monarch were caught. The crusaders against the grim reaper came from England and the US. Be it Joseph Conrad, the author of the iconic Heart of Darkness, or Roger Casement, the ideator of the Congo Reform Movement and a British Consul, or Edmund Morel, the Weekday who first grew suspicious of human trafficking and slave trade at the port of Anywerp, or the African American journalist George Washington Williams, who wrote the first major public indictment of the regime; the missionary William Sheppard, whose documentation brought the brutality of the Congo State adequate attention, these souls sowed the seeds of the first international human rights movement that did the ambitions of Leopold II in. The relentless campaigning by Edmund Morel, Roger Casement, and others created massive public outrage across Europe and America. They used photographs of mutilated children, eyewitness testimonies, and mass rallies to force governments to act. Under immense international pressure, King Leopold II was finally forced to sell the Congo Free State to the Belgian government for a massive sum. The colony was annexed as the Belgian Congo, and Leopold's personal rule ended. While this was a victory for the reformers, it was not liberation for the Congolese. The Belgian government took over, and while the most visible atrocities (like the hand-severings) were reduced, colonial exploitation, forced labor, and harsh racial domination continued for another 52 years until the Congo gained independence in 1960.

The book closes with the post-independence Congo, when Patrice Lumumba, a charismatic and gutsy leader became Congo's first democratically elected leader and slammed the Belgian rule almost immediately after his assuming office. But chaos was writ large on the newly independent African country. The army mutinied and the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded with Belgian support. When the UN refused to help him crush the secession, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for aid, a move that alarmed the US and Belgium in the midst of the Cold War. Barely three months into his Prime Minister's office, he was dismissed by President Kasa-Vubu and then ousted in a coup led by Colonel Joseph Mobutu, backed by the CIA. He was captured by Mobutu's forces and assassinated on January 17, 1961, at the age of 35. CIA's plot to assassinate him was confirmed by the US Senate Inquiry. Following the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo's fate fell into the hands of his former ally turned betrayer, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. He would rule for the next 32 years, not through nationalist liberation, but through a brutal system of corruption and dictatorship that became the very definition of a kleptocracy, rule by theft.

The book is a compelling read, but not without its share of critics, who majorly point towards Hochschild's Eurocentric viewpoint and calling out his take on the colonized nation's culture as static and separate from the colonial nation's history. Th is the double bind, one cannot escape reading Hochschild, but it does ring an alarm bell on historiography that is centred away from the periphery.

Around 40 km from Solapur in Mangalvedha Taluka lies a non-descript village by the name of Brahmapuri, neighboring which lies Machnur, a famous Shri Kshetra (Temple Town). In Brahmapuri, there is a squarish fort (while the fort is called the Machnur Fort, historically speaking, it is the Brahmapuri Fort), quite unassuming and bereft of any imperial architectural relic, save for an austere mosque behind which the western edge of the fort falls precipitously on to the river bed of the Bhima river. This fort, now almost in ruins with crumbling walls and thick vegetal growth, was the administrative headquarters of Aurangzeb in the Deccan from about 1695-1701 CE. The fort was built by Aurangzeb to thwart the continuous frustrations caused by the Marathas, and was at one point a part of the cantonment lines that straddled the banks of the river, with Begampur or Ghodeshwar on the other side. Little is spoken about Brahmapuri today, and the presence of the last of the great Mughals here, who eventually died in Bhingar Camp near Ahmednagar before lain to rest at Khuldabad near Aurangabad is more a matter of the Gazetteer, than even that of the historians, save a few.

Solapur’s tryst with Islam began as far back as the Delhi Sultanate’s invasion of the Deccan under the Khiljis and continued under the Tughlaqs. The Bahmanis’s second capital at Gulbarga and third at Bidar aren’t too far away from the southern district of Desh in Maharashtra to have remained immune. The mosque inside the fort at Solapur has a typical Tughlaq vocabulary, but was instated by the Bahmanis, whose earlier style of architecture showed much similitude (more on the mosque in a later post). Post the Bahmanids, the Adil Shahis of Bijapur and the Nizam Shahis of Ahmednagar held sway over the district, with the former renovating large segments of the fort at Solapur, as attested by inscriptions in Persian. The Mughals, especially under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb never underestimated the importance of the Deccan and especially the five Islamic factions that were borne out of Bahmani’s decline. In 1635 CE, Shaista Khan reduced Naldurg (Solapur district) and occupied the tract between Solapur and Bidar. A year later, the final rites of the Nizam Shahis was concluded with the signing of the treaty between the Mughals and the Adil Shahis of Bijapur, whereby control of Parenda (in today’s Dharashiv district of Maharashtra) and Solapur forts was handed over to Bijapur. For close to three decades, Solapur went into hiatus, but then reappeared with a strange take off history that is sacrilegious to speak today in objective terms, for dear of igniting dormant sentiments and exploding into communal tensions. Following is the brief -

In 1665 CE, Mughals entered into a Treaty with Shivaji, whereby it was understood that Shivaji with 2000 horse and 8000 foot co-operate with Jaysingh, the Mughal Commander to check Bijapur. Jaysingh, having reduced Phaltan (in today's Satara district) marched unopposed towards Bijapur, until his forces reached Mangalvedha (around 55 km from Solapur), where the Bijapur horse suddenly appeared and fought the Mughals tooth and nail under the office of Venkoji Raje Bhonsale (Shivaji's half-brother), Rattaji Deshmukh from Mhasvad (Satara district), and Abdul Karim Bahlol Khan. On the side of the Mughals, Shivaji and Netaji Palkar were distinguished in employing their infantry to cause maximum damage. Yes, a brother battled a brother here. Then in 1668 CE, a deal was reached between Aurangzeb and Bijapur in Agra, whereby it was agreed that the fort at Solapur was given back to the Mughals, along with the revenue North of £50,000 per year. In 1679 CE, the Mughals laid a siege on Bijapur, who ultimately called Shivaji for help, which the latter couldn't provide, but did start traumatizing the Mughals elsewhere between the Bhima and the Godavari rivers. In 1686, the protracted duration of the siege at Bijapur made Aurangzeb determined to proceed there in person. At the beginning of Shaban in the twenty eighth year of his reign, Aurangzeb set out from Solapur, and by the twenty first of the month, he was in Bijapur. Bijapur was finally disestablished in 1686, after which Aurangzeb turned to Golconda, which fell into his hand in 1687. Thereafter, he returned to Bijapur where he stayed out till 1689, and was forced to move north due to a ravaging plague.

It was now that plans were set afoot towards Brahmapuri. But to reach there, the Mughals still had to camp through Akluj Fort on the banks of the Nira, a tributary of the Bhima, and located in Solapur district. Post Shivaji, Sambhaji continued to annoy Aurangzeb, and at Akluj, Aurangzeb decided to finally deal with Sambhaji, once and for all. He sent detachments to territories under Sambhaji, and the Mughal forces led by Mukarrab Khan succeeded in capturing Sambhaji and others at Sangameshwar in Konkan's Ratnagiri district. Sambhaji, who was publicly ridiculed was fretting with bitterness of soul and when an offer was made to spare his life on certain conditions he spurned it. He gave free vent to his long pent-up sentiments against Muslim faith and loosened his tongue in abuse of the emperor and his prophet. This decided his fate. He was cruelly executed at Tulapur on the banks of the Bhima in Pune district. After Sambhaji's execution, Rajaram was proclaimed king on February 9, 1689. This move did not fail to disillusion the emperor and prove that the Maratha monarchy was not at an end. To nip this revival of Maratha royal power in the bud, he sent his able general Zulfikar Khan to invest Raigadh, which after a brief, yet story resistance capitulated. But, Rajaram escaped. Under Rajaram, Sambhaji's brother and successor, the Marathas began to plunder the Mughal dominions in the north Deccan and successfully resisted the Mughal detachments sent to oppose them under the able leadership of Ramchandrapant Amatya, Santaji Ghorpade and Dhanaji Jadhav. These raids greatly annoyed Aurangzeb who, in 1694, in the hope of drawing the enemy southwards, moved from a place on the Bhima to Galgale in south-west Bijapur. This feint proved unsuccessful. Gingee (in today's Tamil Nadu) now became the centre of Maratha activity. The Maratha raids continued in the north and Ramchandrapant, the Maratha leader, levied contributions as far east as Solapur. Aurangzeb was forced to bring back his unwieldy army to Brahmapuri on the Bhima, which he renamed Islampuri.

He built a makeshift fort here, which turned out to be his administrative HQs for for years. The fort eventually became part of a Cantonment, with the main offices lying on the eastern bank of the Bhima that he called Begampur, earlier referred to as Ghodeshwar (and now too!). The place was so called because of a fine Mausoleum in honour of Aurangzeb’s daughter, who many falsely claim to be that of Zeb-un-Nissa, whose burial place is contested between Agra, Delhi and Lahore. I am unaware of whose tomb this is, but the fortified complex, though small in size must have been very sanctimoniously built, considering the finesse of post-Shahjahanesque architectural vocabulary still showing glimpses of its splendor.

From Brahmapuri the operations of Aurangzeb's armies and the affairs of his empire were directed for several years. In 1699, when Rajaram was on tour collecting chauth and sardeshmukhi, Zulfikar Khan, whose success in the Karnatak made him the only Mughal officer whom the Marathas dreaded, was ordered to repair to the cantonment at Brahmapuri. It was then determined to adopt a new plan of operations by which while one army attacked the Marathas in the field, and another was sent apart for the reduction of their forts. The fort army Aurangzeb reserved for himself, and gave the command of the field army to prince A'zam's son Bedar Bakht with Zulflkar Khan as his lieutenant. Zulfikar Khan's first effort was to attack Rajaram, when he was plundering Jalna in the Nizam's territories. The attack was so vigorous that Rajaram had to flee pursued by the Mughal army. Rajaram evaded pursuit; but the fatigue of the march brought on an illness which proved fatal. He made for Sinhgad where he expired on March 2, 1700. While Zulfikar Khan was in pursuit of Rajaram, the cantonment at Brahmapuri was abandoned much to the regret of idle Mughal officers many of whom had built excellent houses. A store was formed under the protection of the fort. The emperor marched to Satara which after some resistance surrendered in June 1700.

The fort, merely 4 acres in area is reached by walking through sugarcane fields on a non-metaled road through the village of Machnur. The gate is hidden behind a carefully laid trap entrance, which unfortunately is crumbling today, but must have been formidably planned in the hey days. The walls of the fort aren't high, and these range around 17 m high on an average punctuated by twelve bastions in varying degrees of decay. Guard rooms flank the main doorway, and immediately to the right upon entrance is the remnant of a tank that is now filled with rubble and overgrown thicket. The tank has lost its geometrical proportions of a cuboid. Two series of steps on either side of the guard rooms take one on to the walls, where one can walk, albeit with caution for the decadence caused by elements and human interference. The walls form the boundary only on the eastern, northern and the southern sides, while the western end seems devoid of the need, for it slipped down to the river bed. The northern and southern walls are punctured with two more doorways, subsidiary entry and exit points to the main gateway on the east. A vast expanse of absence folks the fort, save for the northwestern corner, where sits an austere three-bay wide and one-aisle deep mosque. Three niches pierce the Qibla wall, with the central one, a span larger than the flanking ones, acting as the main mihrab. The is nothing remarkable about the mosque, until one lays sight on the ceiling, which is built on the base of Sal Wood beams in East-West direction. The Sal, known for resilience against decay is the reason why the ceiling is intact still, but recent constructional activities have strengthened the ceiling using concrete, an anomalous edition to say the least.

While many claim the Bahmanids to be the earliest Muslim dynasty in the South (Deccan), the distinction of the first goes to the Madurai Sultanate (also known as the Ma’bar Sultanate), which was a short-lived, independent Islamic kingdom based in Tamil Nadu, from 1335 to 1378. Founded by Jalaluddin Ahsan Khan after rebelling against the Delhi Sultanate, it lasted for just 43 years and saw eight different rulers before falling to the Vijayanagara Empire.

The Bahmanids were the second, which sprouted with a rebellion against the Tughlaqs at Daulatabad (earlier known as Devgiri). Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq, reigning in Delhi, witnessed the self-destruction of his empire in front of his eyes. In the Deccan, the influential group of Muslim nobles, called Amiran-i-Sada by Muslim chroniclers, rebelled against the rule from Delhi, and set up their own independent kingdom with Daulatabad, as the capital and Ismail Makh as the sultan in 1347. When Muhammad bin Tughluq decided to shift the capital of the Delhi Sultanate to Daulatabad, he appointed Kutlugh Khan as the governor. In turn Kutlugh appointed a number of military officers as captains of the army. Within them was an adventurer named Hasan Gangu. Suspecting the loyalty of the nobles of the Deccan, Muhammad bin Tughlaq asked Kutlugh to send them to Bharuch, where he was camped at the time. In Bharuch, the Sultan had subdued a revolt by some nobles and thereafter executed them for their rebellion. During their journey to Bharuch, the Deccan nobles came to know of the treatment meted out to the nobles of Gujarat and suspected that the Sultan intended to murder them also. The nobles turned back halfway through their journey, returned to Daulatabad and declared their independence under the rule of Ismail Makh, who was given the title Nasir ud-Din Ismail Shah. The Sultan once again attacked Daulatabad and imprisoned most of the nobles. Some nobles under the leadership of Hasan Gangu escaped to Gulbarga. Three months later Muhammad bin Tughlaq had to go back to Gujarat to quell yet another rebellion. In the meantime, Hasan had been gathering an army with the aid of Kapaya Nayaka of Warangal, and biding his time to initiate action. He considered the departure of Muhammad bin Tughlaq from Daulatabad an opportune moment to make his move. Hasan attacked and defeated the Delhi army stationed in Daulatabad. The Delhi commander was slain, following which the Sultanate army dispersed and fled to Malwa.

Nasir ud-Din Ismail Shah, the title that Ismail Makh had assumed, abdicated the throne in favor of Hasan Gangu, who was crowned on the 13^th of August 1347 (The date is according to Firishta; According to the Burhaan-i-Maasrir, the date of crowning was Shaban 28, 748 AH), thus founding the Bahmani Dynasty with the initial capital at Daulatabad. The dynasty went on to rule for 180 years from their second and third capitals, viz. Gulbarga and Bidar. Firishta cites a romantic lore on the origin of the dynasty, and it has been pretty conclusively established that Hasan was a descendant of Bahman Shah, King of Persia, and that the brahmanical origin of the dynasty is a pure myth. Firishta writes (175-6),

Syed Ali Tabatabai, the author of Burhan-i-Maasir is a better authority on the history of the Bahmanids than Firishta, and states that Hasan traced his pedigree from Bahman bin Isafandiyar, and makes no mention of the astrologer that Firishta refers to. Moreover, numismatics and epigraphy provides support for Tabatabai’s history. Even so, there are few facts that do not find satisfactory explanations regarding Hasan’s early life. For example, Yahya, an earlier authority than the authors mentioned above, refers to Hasan as Sultan Hasan Kanku. The title ‘Kanku’ does not find any clear explanation and could be considered a version of ‘Gangu’. Considering this, Ferishta’s claim that Hasan was a low-born Afghan cannot be completely discounted off-hand. However, the story of Hasan’s servitude and the discovery of the pot of gold that changed his life will have to be considered embellishments to a success story.

Bahman Shah ruled for eleven years and the title is found in inscriptions in the Gulbarga mosque as well as on coins of the dynasty. Soon after assuming the throne in Daulatabad, Bahman Shah shifted the capital of the kingdom to Gulbarga. This may have been a calculated move to put more distance between Delhi and the capital of the fledgling kingdom. It could also have been for sentimental reasons, since Hasan Gangu derived his strength from the army that he built at Gulbarga. Gulbarga continued to be the capital of the Bahmani kingdom till 1425, when the capital was shifted to Bidar. Bahman Shah spent most of his reign waging war subduing refractory and recalcitrant chieftains in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital, expanding his territorial holdings, and exacting tribute from smaller principalities. In conducting negotiations to expand the territory of the kingdom, Hasan did not spare even his old ally Kapaya Nayaka. Nayaka was forced to cede control of the fort at Kaulas (in Kamareddy district of today’s Telangana), a 9^th century Rashtrakuta-built fort, and also to pay an annual tribute to the Gulbarga ruler. The first major expedition of the newly anointed king was towards the Nasik region during which the remnants of the Delhi army was conclusively driven out of the Deccan. He then subjugated the Hindu principalities around Baglana (a medieval Hindu Rajput monarchy located in present-day Nashik district, Maharashtra). The chiefs who accepted Bahmani suzerainty were permitted to continue to rule their fiefdoms while those who opposed Hasan were summarily executed and their territories annexed.

Throughout its existence as a viable entity, the Bahmani kingdom was in perennial conflict with the Vijayanagar Empire that had been established a mere decade earlier in South India. This power struggle started in the second year of Bahman Shah’s reign, and the first conflict did not yield any decisive results for either of the kingdoms, although the Muslim records insist that Bahman Shah was able to capture and annex Karaichur (modern Raichur located in the fertile Krishna Tungabhadra Doab in Karnataka). Five years later a second conflict followed in which the Bahmani kingdom was allied with the Madurai Sultanate. There are conflicting versions of the result of this conflict. The Muslim chronicles declare a Bahmani victory, whereas the Hindu sources claim that Harihara I ruling Vijayanagar achieved a resounding and decisive victory. It can be surmised that the end-result of the conflict was once again indecisive. Irrespective of the indecisiveness of both the conflicts with the rising power of the Vijayanagar kingdom, by the end of Bahman Shah’s reign, his kingdom was territorially extensive. It extended to the Arabian Sea in the west and included the ports of Goa and Dabhol; the eastern limit was marked by Bhongir (today’s Bhuvanagari in Telangana and part of the Hyderabad Metropolitan Area); and the Rivers Penganga and Krishna bounded the northern and southern borders. It covered parts of the Marathi, Telugu and Kannada speaking linguistic regions. With the establishment of the Bahmani kingdom, the era of the trans-regional states had firmly arrived in Peninsular India. Bahman Shah divided the kingdoms into tarafs, or provinces, and assigned each to amirs who had rendered good service to him during the military expeditions before and after he came to power. These amirs had to maintain a specified number of retainers who were to be send to the king, when required, for military service. In the case of Bahman Shah this meant that the provincial soldiers were almost continuously under his command since the king was almost always at war.

He died in 1358 at the age of 67 after prolonged illness that had almost incapacitated him. He was succeeded by his son Muhammad Shah I. His tomb is located in Gulbarga, and is an unassuming Mausoleum for a founder monarch. Very near to his tomb, his son, Muhammad Shah I lies buried in an equally unassuming tomb, but with slightly added architectural elements.

About half a km from the southern gate of the Gulbarga Fort are the tombs of the Bahmani Sultans. The tomb of Hasan Gangu is located at the extreme west end. In plan, the tomb comprises a square hall (41’) built on a platform about 5 ft high from the surrounding ground. The hall is topped by a squatted dome (of the Tughlaq kind). The batter on the walls are yet another Tughlaqian vocabulary employed here. The height of the walls from the platform is about 20’ and at the top they are bordered by a parapet of arch-heads with ornamental finials (guldastas), yet another reminiscence of the Tughlaq architectural template. There are three entrances from the north, south and east, and the western wall is solid for it has a mihrab niche. Only the eastern doorway is nowadays allowed for entry, and that too is generally kept closed to restrict vandals from defacing and mentioning their love interests. The doorway is wider at the base and narrows as it rises in height near the springers, suggesting the clever technique employed by the architect to counteract the thrust of the dome in maintaining the equilibrium. The interior of the hall is squarish (27’), but transforms into a octagon with height to suit the ring of the dome. Such a transition is brought about by the classical placement of squinches at the four corners. The walls are austere, except for the band of orbs and diamonds alternating in appearance. The walls are built of masonry laid in mortar, whereas the dome is brick-built. Three graves ae present in the hall, and the one with a casket-shaped sarcophagus in black stone is said to be of Hasan Gangu, founder of the Bahmanids.

Half a km away in a thoroughly packed residential quarter lies the tomb of the second Bahmani Sultan, Muhammad Shah I. Not much differentiates it from his father’s tomb, except for an open mosque to the west of the tomb. The complex, though, is in an advanced stage of decay, with a finial topping the dome, now all but collapsed. The interior of the building is 26’ square. The walls are unusually thick for a tomb of this magnitude, almost 8’ in width at the base. The walls are built of irregular courses of masonry and laid in mortar, which is peeling off. The dome as usual is squatted, a Tughlaqian elemental. However, what is interesting is that mihrab at the west side of the tomb’s chamber has an elaborate shape, unlike the simple features of the exterior of this tomb.

“Not until the seventeenth century did Europe attain the kind of “normal science” that existed in Central Asia in the eleventh century.” -- SFS

Frederick Starr’s ‘The Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane’ is a lateral sweep across the spatio-temporal dimension where he excavates the oblivious cultural and intellectual milieu that otherwise challenges the populist notions of the geography under scrutiny. Contrary to popular belief that Central Asia, mostly what the historians term ‘Transoxiana’ (the region between the Oxus and the Jaxartes, viz. Amu and Syr Darya rivers) wasn’t a peripheralized backwater on the intellectual realm, but in many ways, a foreword to the European Renaissance. The book tries to give the region it’s due, which, for any acknowledgement of legitimacy gets caught in the unfortunate footnotes of academic-dominated historiography.

While, Enlightenment in the classical and philosophical sense is said to have derived from the Kantian dictum of emergency from self-imposed immaturity, the instutionalization of the Islamic Caliphate did bring about people’s compliance with its decrees, but also sprung forth detractors, who were more than willing to risk their lives and livelihoods by challenging the asphyxiating orthodoxy of the expanding Islamic dominance in Central Asia. These detractors were very many, some well known by voluminous contributions to music, history, art, architecture, medicine, mathematics and natural sciences, among other domains, while some related to academic scholarship and thus outside the orbit of popular parlance. Starr reclaims history for these polymaths, and along the way demystifies notions rooted in sciolism. To take an example, the debate between ‘Arab’ and ‘Central Asian’ has muddied waters for centurie, on how the Central Asian scholarship was actually Arabic. This belief is misconstrued, since a lot of Central Asians wrote in Arabic, their Central Asian roots were overshadowed by Arabic and forgetting peregrination undertaken in search of patronage.

The work extensively profiles thinkers who were active in cities like Bukhara, Samarkand, and Gurganj. These include Al-Khwarizmi (the father of algebra), Avicenna (Ibn Sina, a prince of physicians), Al-Biruni (the polymath who calculated the Earth’s circumference), and Omar Khayyam (the poet and mathematician), including the famous debate and exchange of letters between Ibn Sina and Al-Biruni, bordering on the vexatious temperament shown by both the parties to the contest. Additionally, it examines the conditions that fostered this era, such as the translation of Greek and Indian texts, the patronage of local dynasties like the Samanids, and the role of religious and cultural tolerance, particularly the influence of the Mu’tazila school of rationalist thought. Starr frames this period as a “humanist” or “rationalist” enlightenment. He emphasizes that Central Asian scholars treated the natural world as knowable and subject to empirical observation, contrasting this with later periods of stricter orthodoxy in the region.

Starr’s chronicle of the region seeks to explain its rise, and explores the competing theories behind the causal links that lead to its eventual demise. Caught between the blades of expanding Islam and Mongol invasions, the luminaries from the region had resolutely stood up to depravity, before tolerant patronage, urban prosperity, and cultural synthesis evaporated, and invasions, religious orthodoxy, shifting economics (trade routes) began to take adverse effects leading to is withering away fitting into the cauldron of civilizational rise and fall. Only in ‘Retrospective’, does Starr invoke the Incumbent at the American University in Beirut, Ahmed Dallal, the Islamic scholar, who in his ‘Islam, Science and Challenge of History’, bluntly says that the decline in Central Asian science was a result of the growth of Sufi mysticism, which Starr admits as a result of the iconic Abu al-Ghazali’s untiring efforts to legitimise within Islam as an instrument of knowing, the episteme.

Even though, the book is a valuable source to familiarize with the intellectual history of Central Asia, it suffers from reductionism, in that it is caught in the dichotomous world of polars, with his training in Eurocentric historiography unable to eject him safely from the double binds he is caught up in. Such a confinement in dichotomies does little good to his work when it comes to analytical treatment, especially when he, it seems, is unwilling to get up from his stupor and come clean on the categories that prevent him venturing into the nuanced scopes, the work could have otherwise unleashed. A startling set of misses in the book is Starr’s lack of primary literature referencing, as almost all of his references are secondary in nature, which when couple with a lack of bibliography poses serious questions on the author’s scholarship, which nevertheless is a deep scratch for researchers working in the field as a semblance of redemption is through extensive notes to chapters. But, his honesty in first few lines of the preface is evident when he admits that it’d have been better if someone else had written the Lost Enlightenment, for her would have devoured the penmanship. And again, his impulse to write it was to catalyze some Joseph Needham in future from the region, in reference to the Brit’s massive twenty seven volume ‘Science and Civilization in China’.

The book is a laborious read, and a drag on the uninitiated. Incidentally Frederick Starr’s 2023 offering ‘The Genius of their Age’, is a good starting point to get through this 2013 opus. Other than that, if continuing with advancing period on the region, James Puckett’s ‘Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia’ is a far more accessible work within the calculus of Central Asian, Iranian and Indian transregional system of knowledge with a loci around Islamic studies from the mid-eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century.

Some time back, I had written about why Meshuggah’s ‘Bleed’ is the most mathematically precise song from the genre djent. Well, their ‘Clockworks’, the opener from ‘Violent Sleep of Reason’ is yet another masterpiece that has a blistering tempo with mind-bending polyrhythms. The album is a political take on religious dogmatism, and terrorism.

On to the drum part of this song, the question is - how is what Haake accomplishes even humanly possible? For he is performing a neurological stress test, which he clears with utmost ease.

The most infamous part of the song is the main groove, where Haake’s hands are playing a frantic, syncopated 23/8 pattern on the china and snare, but his feet are playing a straight, unyielding 4/4 pulse on the kick and hi-hat, which is ghosted. While the right foot plays that steady 4/4 pulse, Haake's left foot is often playing a separate, off-kilter pattern on the hi-hat clutch. So you have three independent limbs (left foot, right foot, right hand) all doing different rhythms before the left hand even enters. It's limb independence on steroids. This is a complex combo as the brain of the listener is unable to sync them up, since these appear to intentionally be out of phase.

On the ride china, he plays a constant stream of 16th notes, but he accents bizarre, unpredictable off-beats within that stream. It sounds like the rhythm is glitching. The physical control required to make those accents pop while keeping all the unaccented notes perfectly even is absurd. This is the core of the inhuman part of his drumming. Haake triggers the kick drum in rapid-fire bursts of three or five, right on top of that steady 4/4 pulse. Now, unless your calves are made of steel, this requires gargantuan precision and practice to produce a constant rhythm with one foot while squeezing in extra, explosive notes with the other foot (or the same foot in quick doubles) to create a dizzying push-and-pull effect that easily collapses. Because of the 23/8 phrasing, the snare drum backbeat almost never lands on beats 2 and 4, but falls on the 'e' of 3, or on 1 itself. This might appear disharmonic, as the listener, more often than not, is trained on the internal clock to anticipate the snare crack as the anchor, which Haake improvises constantly, forcing the listener to re-anchor to the hi-hat foot instead. This in short, is nothing but sheer technical genius, and accompanied with the speed, it is enough for the muscles to give in, of not sheet by the 2-minute mark.

During the verses, Haake plays snare hits that are so tightly grouped they sound like a machine gun stutter. These aren't just single strokes, they require finger-control buzzes or insane wrist snaps that must be executed perfectly in between the ride china accents. The fills aren't just "down the toms." Haake deliberately chooses contradictory sticking patterns. He'll play a fill that logically should start with his right hand, but he starts with his left, forcing the accents to land on the "wrong" drums. It's like he's fighting muscle memory on purpose.

He plays all of this with extreme dynamic contrast. The ghost notes are whisper-quiet, the accents are thunderous, and the kick drum patterns are perfectly even. Most drummers, at that tempo, would just flatten everything into a loud, compressed mush. Haake keeps it surgical. The final section isn't a decay, it's actually more complex. He strips back the chinas, but doubles down on the kick/snare polyrhythms, without the hi-hat foot as a crutch anymore. It's where most covers completely fall apart.

This is undoubtedly the precision that is programmed than manual, but then, it is Haake, possibly the best drummer out there!!

Introduction

In Bodhan, there exists a most extraordinary mosque, extraordinary not just for its name, but even for its patronage. Called the “Deval Masjid” (Literally, “Temple Mosque”, Deval is Temple in dialects across Kalinga), and has a near cousin in Deool (Marathi for a Temple), the Telugu name for the building is “Vanda Stambhala Gudi”, or the Temple with 100 Pillars. While such juxtapositing is extremely rare, it is not unique to Bodhan, for one such instance I can think of is found in Rajasthan’s Bayana, where there exists a Ghurid Mosque called the “Ukha Mandir Masjid”, it should not be taken to be syncretism, but is often directed by a zealous piety in a world of binary categories of the righteous believers and the wicked infidels. Driven by ideological paradigms, the exaggerated claims by the court historians of the early Turkish and Afghan dynasties in regards to destruction of the sacred Hindu and Jaina sites fomented assertions like these at face value and thereafter were furthered by the British imperialists to stamp their authority on India by legitimizing the colonial designs. The zealousness of such piety is seen in the present-day India, where the provision for convenient historical justifications of their respective agendas isn’t in short supply.

Undoubtedly, the rulers of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughals (and others as well) engaged in desecration of temples, but the perspective to see this is either too broad or too narrow in framework. It is too broad in that there wasn’t anything distinctive in such an engagement. Ever since the 7^th century CE, royal temples were considered objects of political contestation, and states throughout India actively engaged in desecration of temples belonging to the vanquished sovereignty. Through the narrow lens, it only concentrates on isolating the response in terms of desecration. A wider perspective would be to underline – what did victors do with the built landscape of defeated regimes, and why? In particular, how did they deal with architectural monuments most closely associated with such regimes? This wider expanse helps moving out of the shadows between art history and polity, thus enriching the nexus between architecture and power as a site of venerable scholarship. Bodhan, like so many other sites instantiate this bill quite well. Before dealing with the built heritage in Bodhan, let us look at the place in geographical and historical terms.

Geography

Bodhan, in Telangana’s Nizamabad district, is part of the Deccan Plateau and sits nestled between the Godavari and Manjira rivers (the latter is Godavari’s longest tributary). With an elevation of approximately 360 m MSL, the area around the town features gently undulating plains, with several small hills (Bhimuni Gutta Hill), and rocky outcroppings dotting the landscape. The Bhimuni Gutta Hill is characterized by massive, weathered granite boulders that have formed natural caves and shelters.

History

The ancient history of the place goes back to almost 700 BCE, when it was known as Ashmaka Mahajanapada, one of sixteen Mahajanapadas which existed between 700 and 425 BCE according to the Buddhist texts Anguttara Nikaya, Mahagovinda Suttanta, and the Puranas. This was the only Mahajanapada in the South, i.e. south of the Vindhyas. The capital city was called by various names, including Podana, Potali and Paudanyapura. Historians identify this as the modern-day Bodhan. Its Prakrit name, Bahudhanyapura, meant “City of Many Grains”. The Mahagovinda Stuttanta mentions a king Brahmadutta who ruled from Podana. Until recently, much of what was known about Ashmaka came from literature, but with the discovery of a Mukkatraopeta inscription in Karimnagar district, dating to the 1^st century BCE proves the earliest material evidence that mentions Ashmaka or Ahimaka and confirms its connection to this region.

Under the Kakatiyas (12^th-14^th centuries CE), Bodhan served as an important northern outpost for their kingdom, primarily strengthening a fortification and leaving behind a temple that still stands. The hundred-pillar temple was built in the late 12th or early 13^th century CE and followed the typical Kakayiya style with a star-shaped plan, featuring a central garbhagriha, an antechamber, and a large hall with many intricately carved stoned pillars. While a Hindu shrine, some historians like G. Yazdani suggest it may have been built over an earlier Buddhist or a Jaina site. The Jain connection is a recurring theme, as the site is linked to the Jain Saint Bahubali, and it’s a likely worship place for multiple faiths during the Kakatiyas era, who were known to patronize Jainism.

Arrival of the Tughlaqs

The third of the Delhi Sultanate dynasties, Tughlaqs ascended the throne after the dismantling of the Khiljis in 1320 CE. Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq immediately set off to capture vast tracts of the Deccan under his dominion, and for the purpose he sent his son, the Prince Ulugh Khan (later Mohammad Bin Tughlaq) in 1321 CE towards the Kakatiyas stronghold, Warangal. He first came to Devagiri (Daulatabad), where the imperial army and the garrisoned officers joined the northern army to march into the domains of Pratap Rudra. The initial siege around Warangal lasted for six months, but resulted in failure and Ulugh Khan was forced to retreat to Devagiri, regroup and march again in 1323. This time, Ulugh Khan captured the fort at Bidar, and then proceeded to Bodhan.

The temple at Bodhan was a star-shaped structure (aerially, it still looks like one) with a single sanctum and a vestibule on the western side. This was joined to an open-pillared hall of nine bays (3 x 3), with single-bay porches projecting from the middle of the north, east and southern sides. The temple was converted into a mosque during the period of Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq’s reign. While not much desecration was caused, the walls and the superstructure were removed from the shrine and a prayer hall of 45 bays (9 x 5) was constructed in its place. A mihrab niche was built into the middle of the qibla. It is said that a stone pulpit once existed just north of the mihrab, but any traces of the same have disappeared now. The sanctum of the original temple wasn’t altered much, but were made to recast as a majestic entry to the adjoining prayer hall. Nine spheroid domes were built on the terrace to lend it a more Islamic feel. Such a high number of domes were unusual for the period, and were only introduced during the reign of the Tughlaq, Firuz Shah in his mosques in Delhi. The domes, made in bricks and mortar replaced the rotating squares of the ceiling that had originally covered the temple’s porches and mandapa.

But, is this really Tughlaq’s Mosque?

This question does not have a straight forward answer for reasons given thusly –

Firstly, no chronicle or inscriptions on the structure itself mentions Ulugh Khan’s building activities in Bodhan. Though there are two incomplete inscriptions lying in the courtyard of the mosque, these do not call out the mosque. The inscriptions are carved on several pieces of stones. The tablets evidently broke when the buildings on which they were originally set up, collapsed. I could gather five tablets in varying conditions of decay inside the courtyard, which itself looks ravaged. The writing is Naskh, of a bold, vigorous type resembling closely the contemporary script of Delhi inscriptions. The phraseology of the epigraphs also confirms the surmise of their being designed by a court writer. While, one inscription mentions the construction of a watchtower, the other vaguely refers to an auspicious building, which possibly cannot refer to the Deval Masjid, since in Indian inscriptions, mosques are referenced as mosques.

Inscription 1 (what remains)

The translation reads,

Inscription 2 (what remains)

The translation reads,

Secondly, from an architectural point of view, the Deval Masjid is pretty much anomalous with the Tughlaq mosques found elsewhere in India. Moreover, its mihrab lack the pointed horseshoe profile so characteristic of the Tughlaq architecture. Thirdly, the domes are very many on Deval Masjid, which is quite uncharacteristic of the mosques built in the Deccan in the Khilji and the Tughlaq periods, which were either flat-roofed throughout or possessed a single dome located before the mimbar or mihrab.

These questions, though, are resolved to an extent by the Chronicler, ‘Isami in his Futuhus Salatin Or Shah Namah-i-Hind, who mentions Ulugh Khan’s army passing through Bodhan during the march to Telangana in 1323 CE. ‘Isami writes,

Now, this passage implies that the temple could have been converted into a mosque at the behest of the Rai, who was Bodhan’s principal political figure, and thus the patron of the temple, and who by this designation had the authority for converting such a sacred space into a sanctuary for Islam. In the words of Richard Eaton and Phillip Wagoner,

So, what has transpired in Bodhan in all likelihood is the intrusive form of engagement that was redefinition, whereby the structural integrity of the monument was maintained, but its function was transformed by adding and/or removing ritually critical components. What is exceptional about this structure, though, is that its redefinition appears to have been accomplished not by the governing Tughluqs but by the local chief, who was a convert to Islam.

Introduction

The southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu boasts of the earliest Islamic relics in India. These buildings and gravestones even predate the ones in Kerala, which for some quirky reasons are based on erroneous beliefs (we will come to that in a bit). The advent of Islam in South India is very different from that in North India, as in the former case, Islam came mainly due to trade and commercial practices, whereas in the latter, it came via conquests. This is a good starting point to illustrate that architectural and artistic practices in the South differed from that in the North. The Arabs had trade links with the peninsular region going back as far as the 3rd century BCE. It was only after the birth of Islam in the 7th century CE that Arabs came as Arab Muslims. This resulted in expansion of Muslim trade practices and activities from Ceylon to other parts of South-East Asia. In due course, these traders married local women and began their settlements on the Coromandel Coasts. Though Islamization started in the 7th-8th century CE in the South, Islamic architecture as is known in the North came down south only after the Khilji, Alauddin invaded the tract under the generalship of Malik Kafur. The true character of Islamic architecture became known in Tamil Nadu only in the 16th century, much later than the founding of the Madurai Sultanate in the 14th century CE. Does that mean that there weren’t Islamic buildings until the 17th century? There were, but these were mostly built in the style prevalent in the South, with local masons practicing syncretism. As the locals began converting to Islam, they were not too rigid about the codified nature of architecture, but were satisfied with a more traditionally-rooted aspect of it. And with the local rulers (the Cholas, for that matter) patronizing the building of mosques, the newly converts did not see any ill-will on the rulers’ part in adhering to the already exisiting vocabulary in construction activities. The style began to shift ony after the Sultans of Bijapur and Golconda introduced Islamic codes on buildings that gradually overrode the Dravidian blueprint, but this happened much later in history. When the British occupied these lands, they introduced a style that shot Madras to the forefront of Indo-Saracenic architecture, an amalgamation of the Islamic and Victorian/Gothic elementals.

Islam’s Arrival in Tamil Nadu

The Sangam Literature mentions the word “Yavanas” as foreigners who came to trade. The word “Yavana” in ancient Indian texts has an evolving meaning. It originally derived from “Ionian”, referring to the Greeks, but its usage changed over time. One source explicitly notes that in later Sanskrit works like the Vishnu Purana, “Yavana” was used to denote Arabs. Sangam poetry offers vivid, grounded descriptions of the Yavanas' role in the bustling Tamilakam region (roughly modern-day Tamil Nadu and Kerala). They were not just faceless traders, but active participants in the economy, society, and even politics of the time.

In this process, a chain of Muslim towns and ports grew along the Coromandel coast from Pulicat to Colachel. The native Hindu rulers also encouraged the settlements in their dominions as they would profit from the seaborne trade. The tombs of the earliest missionaries Kasim (Wali) AH 4 / 624 CE and Abdul Rahiman (Wali) AH 8/628 CE in Kottaru (Nagercovil) and Kotharisa Hills (Tirunelveli) are the earliest Islamic graves in India. Not just confined to the coasts, Islam also entered the interior of the state with Tiruchirappalli, once the capial of the Cholas housing what is India’s earliest dated mosque, the Mecca Masjid (locally known as such and otherwise called the Pallivasal or Kalluppalli) and dated to AH 116 / 734 CE.

Before getting to the mosque, let us deal with the story of Kerala’s Cheraman Mosque, wrongly believed to be the earliest in India and dating from the time of the Prophet himself.

Kerala’s errors emanate from an anonymous Arabic manuscript from the Malabar Coast, titled ‘Qissat Shakarwati Farmad’, whose authenticity is doubtful. Its title translates to “Tale of the Great Chera Ruler”, with “Farmad” being an Arabic version of the title “Perumal”. The text is significant because it is the oldest and most detailed recorded version of the Cheraman Perumal legend, which traces the introduction of Islam to the Malabar Coast. The work is explicitly categorized as a legend (a “qissat”) by historians. Its value is not in providing a chronological record of events, but as a source for the “constitution and self-definition of Islam in Kerala”. As one academic analysis notes, the legend is studied for its mythological elements, as it can give historians hints as to the narrative themes present in the society's cultural history. The central narrative, of a Hindu Chera king (Cheraman Perumal) converting to Islam at the time of the Prophet Muhammad and then dividing his kingdom before leaving for Arabia, conflicts with established historical timelines. The later Chera dynasty (the Perumals), who are central to the legend, only came to prominence in the 9th century and ruled until the 12th century, making a meeting with the 7th-century Prophet Muhammad chronologically impossible. The division of the kingdom and the genesis of the major Kerala chiefdoms are historical processes that unfolded in the 12th century, not during the time of the Prophet. While not a literal history, the text is extremely valuable to scholars. For example, a detailed academic study shows that the list of the first mosques in Kerala described in the Qissat matches a Yemeni administrative document from the 1290s. This indicates the list reflects the realities of Muslim trade and settlement in the 12th and 13th centuries, rather than the 7th century, and shows that the legend was assembled later to explain and legitimize a far more gradual historical process. So, which are the mosques in the Qissat? They are 10 + 1 (the + 1 adds a mosque in Kottayam that many believe was constructed during the time of the 10 listed here -

1. Kodungallur (Cheraman Juma Mosque)

2. Kollam (Quilon)

3. Madayi (Pazhayangadi in Kannur)

4. Barkur (in present-day Karnataka)

5. Mangalore (in present-day Karnataka)

6. Kasaragod (Thalangara)

7. Kannur

8. Dharmadam

9. Panthalayani (Koyilandy)

10. Chaliyam

The legend holds that the last Chera king, Cheraman Perumal, converted to Islam during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad and instructed Malik Ibn Dinar to build mosques in his kingdom. The Cheraman Juma Mosque in Kodungallur is therefore celebrated as the oldest mosque in India, traditionally dated to 629 CE. These early mosques were not built in the typical Arab or Indo-Islamic style with domes and minarets. They adapted to the local Kerala vernacular, featuring sloping tiled roofs and whitewashed walls, similar to traditional temples in the region. This blend of architectural styles is a testament to the long history of interaction and cultural exchange on the Malabar Coast. Some of the mosques on the list have physical evidence pointing to a much later construction date. For example, the Madayi Mosque has an Arabic inscription on a copper slab that records its foundation year as 1124 CE. This suggests that while the mosque is on the list of the “earliest” ten, the current structure was built centuries later. Thus, the list of ten mosques is a foundational narrative of the Mappila Muslim community’s origins. It is more valuable for understanding the community’s identity than as a precise historical record of 7th-century construction projects.

Early Years of the Hijrah

Hijrah, the Prophet Muhammad’s migration (622 CE) from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina) upon invitation in order to escape persecution. After arriving, Muhammad negotiated the Constitution of Medina with the local clans, thereby establishing the Muslim community as a sociopolitical entity for the first time. The date represents the starting point of the Muslim era. Muhammad himself dated his correspondence, treaties, and proclamations after other events of his life. It was ʿUmar I, the second Caliph, who in the year 639 CE introduced the Hijrah era (now distinguished by the initials AH, for Latin anno Hegirae, “in the year of the Hijrah”). ʿUmar started the first year AH with the first day of the lunar month of Muḥarram, which corresponds to July 16, 622, on the Julian calendar.

Quba Mosque: Built during the Prophet's journey from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, it is widely considered the first mosque in Islam . Its foundation stone is said to have been laid by the Prophet himself.

Al-Masjid al-Nabawi (The Prophet's Mosque): This was the second mosque built by the Prophet in Medina after his arrival in 622 CE. Built on a site that was originally his house, it served not only as a place of prayer but also as the center of the growing community.

The early mosques in Medina were remarkably simple structures, which later became the prototype for mosques around the world. The mosques were originally open-air buildings. The first Prophet's Mosque, for example, was a rectangular enclosure built with unbaked brick, palm trunks for columns, and mud walls. They were designed with a shaded portico (the suffah) on one side of a central courtyard (ṣaḥn). The prayer direction (qibla) was initially towards Jerusalem but was later changed to face Mecca (this was as a result of a sudden revelation the Prophet had). As Islam expanded, the architectural model of the Prophet's Mosque, a hypostyle hall (with columns) around a courtyard, was carried to new lands. Early mosques were established in newly founded garrison cities across the conquered territories. For example, the first mosque in Basra (Iraq) was built around 635-636 CE, followed by mosques in Kufa (Iraq) in 638-639 CE, and Fustat (Egypt) in 642 CE. These were built just a decade or so after the Hijrah, demonstrating how quickly the institution of the mosque spread with the early Muslim community.

The qibla was marked by a mihrab, which is usually a niche placed on the qibla. The first mihrab was erected in Prophet’s mosque in Medina in AH 88/706 CE, before which it was indicated by a block of stone placd in the centre or a paint on the qibla. The original mihrab had a rectangular plan, and it was later transformed into a semicircular design with arches appearing on top.

The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is the oldest surviving Islamic monument in the world, a shrine of profound religious significance and an architectural masterpiece that bridges Byzantine and early Islamic traditions. Commissioned by the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik, construction on the Dome of the Rock was completed in 691–692 CE (AH 72). It's not a mosque but a shrine built to enshrine the sacred rock at its center. Its architecture and mosaics were heavily inspired by nearby Byzantine churches and palaces, employing similar techniques and aesthetics. The use of marble and mosaics is directly borrowed from Byzantine traditions. The universal presence of domes and arches, usually of a pointed kind, in an Islamic building is due to the influence of th style practiced at Baghdad during the time of the Abbassid Caliphs in the 8th-9th centuries. The style was itself derived from the ancient vaulted architecture of Mesopotamia.

Mecca Masjid, Tiruchirappalli

The Kalluppalli (Kal + Palli = Stone Mosque) in Tiruchirappalli was built to mirror the early structural temples in Tamil Nadu. This is covered with walls on three sides, and the eastern side was left open. The western wall had the mihrab, and was square inside like its protrusion outside. These elements have undergone a change since. The square mihrab was a characteristic feature of the early Persian mosques, with the curved back of the mihrab only getting introduced in AH 99/709 CE. Just to the north of the mihrab was the pulpit or the mimbar, which ws originally in three steps (now four). The hall was supported by massive columns made in indigenous styles with the ceiling costructed of stone slabs, and the intervening spaces between columns filled with beams. The cornice of the ceiling was typically congruent with a mandapam in a temple. These features, having changed over time and with renovations give a signature of the Dravidian temple, a style seen aross many mosques in Tamil Nadu.

The authenticity of this mosque is primarily validated by an Arabic inscription on a granite slab above the prayer niche or mihrab. This inscription records that the mosque was built by one Mohamed Ibn Hameed Ibn Abdullah in Hijri year 116, which corresponds to 734 CE. The inscription also includes the names of the four Rashidun Caliphs: Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, Uthman, and Ali. The mosque looks like a small granite mandapam (pillared hall), about 25 feet by 15 feet, supported by six granite pillars. The pillars are square at the base, octagonal in the middle, and square again, a classic feature of the region's temple architecture. The mosque has been renovated several times over the centuries. Two minarets were added more recently, and the mihrab (prayer niche) has also been modified from its original square shape. The ground level has been raised to prevent flooding. Fragments of 10th-century Tamil writing have been found on some granite blocks in the walls, suggesting these materials were brought in from other sites during renovations.

The architectural story of this mosque is inseparable from the peaceful arrival of Islam in South India through maritime trade, and not military conquest. This is a key distinction from the historical trajectory in North India. The merchants were often granted special privileges, enabling them to build these unique mosques that stand as a powerful testament to centuries of cultural exchange and synthesis, and the one here stands tall. It is located near the Kottai Railway Station in Tiruchirappalli. Its presence in this area is tied to the ancient city of Uraiyur, now a suburb of Tiruchirappalli.

"... One of the most horrifying things I have read in my whole life".

-- Stephen King on Richard Preston's The Hot Zone.

While true, Preston's Hot Zone and especially the first chapter is graphically extremely gory, where the Ebola virus dissolves the organs before the patient drowns in his own blood, it nonetheless is a sensationalizing of what the virus, belonging to the family Filoviridae, is capable of wringing. The best criticism of Preston is a memoir, titled Level-4: Virus Hunters of the CDC, written by Joseph McCormick and Susan Fischer, who called Preston out for fictionalizing the narrative. Moving on from Preston, and a few films that have underlined the dangers of Ebola, Lassa and Hanta, the common ground is that Ebola punctures the health infrastructure and overwhelms the frontline workers with a lethality that is nothing short of harrowing.

Ebola is an extremely deadly disease, with an average overall fatality rate of roughly 50% across all historical outbreaks. However, the exact mortality rate varies significantly—ranging from 25% to 90%, depending on the specific viral species, the patient's access to modern medical care, and how early they receive treatment. The devastating 2014-16 West African Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone was caused by the Zaire ebolavirus species (specifically a variant lineage known as Ebola virus Makona). While the Zaire species can be up to 90% fatal without treatment, the massive scale of the West African epidemic saw an overall case-fatality rate of roughly 39% to 40% across Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone due to international intervention and supportive medical care. This was the largest Ebola outbreak in history, resulting in 28,610 cases and 11,308 deaths across the region.

Getting to Zero is Sinead Walsh's (the then Irish Ambassador to Sierra Leone) and Dr. Oliver Johnson's (a British citizen and a faculty of medicine at King's, London) account, or rather memoir at the frontline of the deadly outbreak in Sierra Leone in 2014-15. The book is not a treatise on epidemiology as much as it is the 'blow-by-blow' struggle against the inept bureaucracy, the international agencies, Government's blasé response, and even the citizenry, who, ensconced in traditions were non-cooperative in the initial stages, before turning the lethal events associated with the outbreak around. Lancet, the famed journal of the medical fraternity noted its "honest and engaging tone" and its illumination of "operational errors that increased the number of lives lost"; while The Guardian called it a "compelling read, full of compassion, grief, ingenuity and stories of courage".

After the first case was confirmed in the middle of May in 2014 in Sierra Leone, it spiralled out of control in no time. Though Freetown, the capital city came under the influence later than Kenema and Kailahun, both of which were ravaged, Freetown eventually became the centre of the dreaded epidemic. With hardly any experience in tropical medicine, Sinead Walsh and Oliver Johnson decided to fight the battle with whatever resources were available at their disposal. Battling it out with international donor agencies, their own country's state apparatus, and other humanitarian bodies, the duo finally converged in on one another, which until then, they were warring along their respective tasks. When the first case of Ebola was confirmed, Sierra Leonean health infrastructure was not ready for what was to come. Indeed, a key issue that conditioned the response to the outbreak was the nature of the national public health infrastructure, which made it difficult for Johnson and his team to handle the initial outbreak effectively. Worse, the main hospital in Freetown was poorly resourced, and it experienced numerous problems with a demotivated staff. That Johnson and his team transformed the emergency unit into an isolation ward that became the center of Ebola management and containment, even though they had limited resources at their disposal, points to the dedication and sacrifices they made in providing care to patients. The responses were conditioned by a complex set of issues, including relations between international organizations and the central government and international concerns that the outbreak might extend beyond West Africa. For political reasons, the Sierra Leone government responded slowly to the challenge, significantly delaying the containment of the outbreak. The authors highlight how international organizations failed to provide coordinated responses. Only after it became clear that the outbreak could become an international emergency, with massive implications for international security and peace, did more sustained and coordinated responses come from international organizations, such as the WHO.

The WHO (and even the CDC) came in for sharp criticism in its handling of the epidemic, as they were too lackadaisical in their speed in declaring the outbreak an emergency. The complacency had its international nodes from New York to London, and from Washington to Geneva, with the state capitals of the three West African countries themselves embroiled in state inefficiency. Had any of these paid any heed to the outbreak in the beginning, thousand of lives could have been saved and many thousands more could have been protected from the aftermath of the epidemic. When experts were flown in to much fanfare, their presence was inadequate as many couldn't translate their expertise into a pragmatic approach. The link between theory and practice was evident. It was only after the death of Sierra Leone's 'Hero', Dr. Sheikh Humarr Khan, did the country and slowly the international community started to wake up from their slumber. Finally, the UK and the US decided to intervene, and especially the former in Sierra Leone, whose erstwhile colony the African nation was, felt the moral grounds for. It came in late, but was efficiently spearheaded thereafter, when the infrastructure was set up, and eventually the number of beds available crossed the number of cases recorded on a weekly basis. This phenomenon is what pushed the authors to call the memoir, Getting to Zero.

While the authors had no intention of writing the book, it resulted only after a chance meeting after the epidemic subsided, and the two shared their common frustrations with a host of actors, whose inefficiency caused such a huge tragedy unfold. Sinead Walsh bases her testimony on the 85 interviews she conducted throughout her active presence on the field as well as literature review and attending scores of conferences on the topic. Oliver Johnson's is his close connect with frontline workers, including those exposed to the threat immediately, many of whom he lost to the deadly virus. These testimonies are reflected in the Afterword, which may come across as summarising the unfortunate experiences of dealing with the powers that be earlier noted in fine detail in the book, but also add to what could be done or could have been done differently. Expressing their gratitude to the strength of the community, individuals and adding the international actors to strategize the responses to the epidemic sums up the memoir that, in the words of David Miliband is brave, bold and humble at the same time, and calls for a compelling read so that the world is better prepared. But, who knew that give years down the line, the Corona virus would wreck havoc across the world.

Grief is a solitary journey.

Falling through the cracks of society into the lap of extreme Right-Wing fundamentalism, 'One Of Us' is Åsne Seierstad's (author of the highly acclaimed 'The Bookseller of Kabul') chilling and graphic description of Norway's deadliest terror attack perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik, who massacred 77 people, including more than 60 teenagers at a Labour Party Camp on the island of Utøya in cold blood on the 22nd of July 2011. Eight other fatalities were caused when he detonated a powerful bomb in the heart of Oslo, in the Government's sector that housed the Norwegian Prime Minister's office and other governmental departments. Breivik was largely self-indoctrinated by literature of the neo-nazis, including right wingers like Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Gisèle Littman (writing under the pseudonym Bat Ye'or, whose Eurabia, itself a highly provocative and disturbing book), and Pamela Geller (a conservative political activist, blogger, and commentator known for her staunchly anti-Muslim political views, opposition to radical Islamic extremism). Initiated into Freemasonry, it is not clear how much of it fuelled his extremist position, though, he wasn't a regular at the Lodge.

Born to a career diplomat, his parents divorced when he was still young, and was eventually disowned by his father. His mother flirted with the idea of passing him off to an orphanage, but decided against it. The permutation of his early years when he suffered his parents' idiosyncracies made him distant and aggressive at the same time, the latter emotion directed at his elder sister, Elisabeth. The former was by far responsible for his asocial behaviour that turned deadly anti-social, when he began his addiction with computers, initially an addiction with World of Warcraft, a game where he failed yet again at social acceptance, this time on the virtual platform. He then began devouring literature about the Right-Wing ideology that was available online, and here too he wasn't accepted by his inspirators, but nonetheless managed to find a like-minded crowd scattered all over Europe who promoted Islamophobia. Breivik spent hours on end trying to familiarize himself in the art of arms and ammunition and learned the bomb making process on his own, majorly through trial and error using chemicals and fertilizers that were to prove potent in the bombing at Oslo.

Although, unable to make lasting friendships from school days, one of his earliest friend was a boy of Pakistani descent. Breivik would team up with some of his colleagues, including immigrants and take up graffiti art as a tagger. Never one to play the second fiddle, his domineering personality hardly won him any accolades as a tagger, which he considered himself to be the best of. In those years, he even observed the Muslim way of life at close quarters, thanks to his contacts with people from Pakistan to Somalia, and is known to have shown sympathies for the Muslims. His vociferous denouncing of Islam was born out of his delusional understanding of Marxism, which according to him gave legitimacy to multiculturalism, and in turn sowed the seeds of Europe's takeover by the world's fastest growing religion.

Though above average in intellect, he dropped out of college with barely six months remaining to graduate in commerce studies, to follow up on a series of experimental jobs, one of which did bring in monetary success, when he set up an institution printing fake degrees in collaboration with an Indonesian separated continentally. But after the curtains were downed on that, he started flirting with the politics on the fringe, when he made up his mind to win a ticket on behalf of the Progress Party, the right of the center political party in Norway, known for its anti social-democratic resentments, including the 'Islamization' of Europe. Breivik's vagaries got the better of him and he was denied the ticket. It was then around 2006 that Anders withdrew into a shell, reading and writing on explosive topics, which were somehow unrecognised by those who knew him, including his mother with who he was staying put. His “2083: A European Declaration of Independence” cobbled together his reading and a large helping of fantasy to picture a Europe on the brink of capitulation to Islam, and himself as the “Justicious Knight Commander” of the Knights Templar, dedicated to saving Western civilization. Giving himself the intellectual fervor, he didn't rally against radicalism that was taking over Islam, but focused on Cultural Marxism, which, for him, was responsible for the decay of the West and ultimately submitting to Islam.

2083... His manifesto were not mere words, for he began to assemble his bigotry into action by renting a place in an isolated countryside, where he put to practice his bomb making skills. Still unsuspected by a few visitors and his mother, Breivik wrote the preamble to strike on his own. Having amassed raw materials for the bomb, he first struck terror in the heart of Oslo with an explosion that ripped through the main government building before setting carnage on the island. The longest chapter in the book is the most graphic and heartbreaking when he was on a killing spree.

Some parallel narratives run alongside the main plot, and the killing of these characters, especially a girl whose family sought asylum in Norway to escape the dastardly acts of Saddam Hussein's on the Kurds in Iraq, are dealt with in extreme gory details. Wanting to surrender twice during the massacre, his messages were unheeded due to ineptitude on the law and order apparatus (the police), or as a result of gross misunderstanding. He was finally captured by the elite Delta Unit of the Norwegian armed forces, but not before Anders had destroyed hundreds of lives irredeemably.

The book is divided into three parts, the first one being the build up to the terror and finally unleashed, while the other two concern with Anders Behring Breivik's trial, and its aftermath. The question the world asked after the Norway massacre, as it does after every one of these, was "Why?" What happened to Breivik to make him do this? The urge to demand an explanation is a natural one. One of Us does not provide one, because there isn't one. None of the psychiatric interrogations give any resolute answers to his loneliness, depression, or sorrow, for his psychological instability proved as inexplicable as the terror he perpetrated in the name of far-right fascistic tendencies that were created rather than lying dormant and waiting to be catalyzed into action. The verdict has put Breivik behind bars for 21 years with the possible extension of 5 years if he proved to be a threat to society further still. He is left to languish with the fear of the future gnawing away at him all the time. The book is a chronicle of pain that sickens with the progression of bigotry into the horrors of madness, that has left numerous families still struggling to gather scattered pieces of their lives.

Though I don't watch cinema anymore, I do have some classics as favourites. The Postmaster by Satyajit Ray ranks very high in my viewed experiences, especially the last scene where the child artist Chandana Banerjee scintillatingly portrays emotions that were nothing short of catharsis when I first watched it more than 3 decades ago. Ray's ouevre as a director, artist, and composer is resplendent with a treasure trove unparalleled in India. His meticulous treatment is not just a stylistic trope, but the foundational philosophy of his cinema reflecting his belief that the profoundest truths are found in seemingly trivial, everyday moments. This philosophy is beautifully captured in Andrew Robinson's biography of the Maestro. Having previously read Marie Seton's biography of Satyajit Ray, I was a bit sceptical of Robinson's scholarship in value added terms, but Robinson turned out to be a Superstructure on Seton's foundational set-up with his astute balancing act between his opinions and those of his contemporaries.

Having made 31 films and 5 documentaries, when Ray was given the Honorary Academy Award in 1992 by his favourite actress, the elegant and stunningly beautiful, Audrey Hepburn, which he received while in the hospital, it was a most fitting tribute to a life that touched versatility intimately. A cinematic journey that began after watching what is considered the best film ever made, de Sica's 'Bicycle Thieves', Satyajit Ray put Indian Cinema firmly on the World Map with 'Pather Panchali' in 1955, ended with 'Agantuk' in 1991, where the ever brilliant Utpal Dutt seemingly portrays a screen presence of Ray himself.

For all the smokers out there, Ray designed the packet of Wills, Navy Cut, and there was a time when his hoardings would dot Calcutta. The packet design was the work of one of the first graphic designers in India, a road that the film maker never took seriously and left Shantiniketan without completing his course before turning to films. His skills at calligraphy and typefacing were acute and have been preserved at the Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Films.

Andrew Robinson, who had previously written biographies of Tagore, Einstein and the polymath Thomas Young has taken the reader to travel along with Ray with a fine balance of delicacy and refinement, thanks to proximity that the author had during extended interview sessions (the third edition includes a prolix interview in the end). Be it during composing music, writing screenplays with precision or designing film posters, Robinson's presence is felt throughout. This constancy is liable to a critique in terms of hagiography, which the book fails to hide. This is accentuated by fleeting mentions of personality traits that any student of the Subaltern Studies would mark out clearly. While certainly a limitation, the biographer neutralizes these deviations by normalising through impressionistic readings of Ray's art and aesthetics.

One of the many achievements in the book is to go further deep into the ouevre from the Appu Trilogy. It is in such a sojourn that Robinson brings out the politics in Ray's cinema, which the film maker himself was reluctant to reveal most of the time. Though left leaning, the first of the Calcutta Trilogy, 'Pratidwandi' follows the ordeal of an unemployed youth navigating through the corrupt bureaucracy, at a time when the Naxalbari movement had picked up steam. The city was facing urban decay, and in the midst of anarchy, two brothers, one who drops out of medical school to hunt for a corporate job and the other with sympathies for the naxal movement are portrayed with enough scope for deifying the breakaway faction of the left, but, which Ray handles without in any way glorifying the movement, and by exhibiting the loose ends, the pliable consequence of which would be ideological dogmatism. The other two films of the trilogy, 'Seemabaddha' and 'Jana Aranya' are equally bleak riding on the moral decrepitude of compromises and dehumanized corruption. The politics of the trilogy are lanes away from lyrical humanism and traverse the angst-filled individualism dragging through the socio-political chaos.

In between the two trilogies is Charulata from 1964, considered to be Ray's masterpiece. The cinema is especially noted for its music. Robinson points out a fascinating cultural cross-connection: the melody for the song “Phule Phule” is “based on a Scottish tune which Tagore heard as a young man on his first trip to England”. The tune recurs throughout the film, sung by different characters, with variations in the singing reflecting their personalities and emotional states. Robinson emphasizes Ray’s belief that the “setting is itself a character”. He describes the film’s bourgeois Bengali mansion as a metaphor for domesticity and even the nation. Key details are highlighted, such as the specially printed wallpaper, which was “similar to a William Morris design,” showcasing the Western aesthetic influences present in 19th-century Bengal. The open balcony overlooking an inner courtyard is also noted as a liminal space between the public and private domains. Before Charulata, 'Jaalsaghar' is yet another jewel, where the biographer analyzes the film's central tragedy: the zamindar (landlord) Biswambhar Roy (played by the legendary Chhabi Biswas) who bankrupts himself hosting extravagant music concerts while a crass, nouveau riche moneylender rises in his place. For Robinson, the film is not merely about a fallen aristocrat but a profound exploration of the clash between tradition and modernity.

Satyajit Ray dabbled into comedy and detective movies as well. His 'Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne' is still the most celebrated cinema in Bengal. Turning back on politics, 'Sadgati' from 1981 starred the iconic Om Puri, Smita Patil and Mohan Agashe in the only Hindi film that Ray made ('Shatranj ke Khiladi' was Urdu)as a short film for Doordarshan. This is Ray's superlative political statement. The story follows Dukhi, who seeks the priest's help to fix an auspicious date for his daughter's wedding. In return, the priest exploits his power, forcing Dukhi to perform exhausting chores. The tone is described as grim, realistic, and "terrifyingly precise" in its control. Robinson's analysis highlights the film's ability to generate unbearable tension from simple, quotidian actions. Dukhi, weak from hunger and illness, collapses and dies while chopping wood. The film's most damning sequence depicts the aftermath: no one from the upper castes will touch the "polluted" body, and even the other Dalits refuse to remove it. Ultimately, the Brahmin himself is forced to drag the corpse away with a rope and a stick, discarding it among animal carcasses. Ray employs a stark, neo-realist visual approach. The camera is often still and observational, which complements the slow, languid pace of village life and intensifies the focus on the physicality of Dukhi's suffering. 'Shatranj ke Khiladi' is often described as a timeless comment on non-involvement, especially at a time when the the history is collapsing and the Lakhnavi nobles have been obsessed in their private engagement of a game of chess. The film is notable for its bilingual nature—dialogues are split between Hindi/Urdu (for the Indian characters) and English (for the British, including Richard Attenborough as General Outram).

Ray's Devi shows his prescience to the hilt. No other movie probably resonates with the idea of 'New India', or the Bharat of today. Devi is a dramatization of the clash between blind faith/religious orthodoxy and Western rationalism/modernity. However, the film is more than a tract; it shows sympathy for the old order and suggests that reason alone is insufficient to combat deep-seated belief. Upon release, the film was controversial and was initially banned from export by the Indian government for its depiction of Hindu orthodoxy, though it was later cleared with the intervention of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. It is now regarded as one of Ray’s masterpieces, a "little gem" and a powerful critique of superstition that transcends its 19th-century setting. In Robinson's estimation, Devi forces viewers to look beyond the surface-level debate of faith versus reason. The biography illuminates how the film's true power lies in its intimate, tragic portrayal of a young woman destroyed by the love and reverence of her own family, a fate far more complex and horrifying than mere victimhood.

Ray's has worked with a galaxy of actors, from Soumitra Chatterjee, Uttam Kumar, Utpal Dutt, Madhabi, Sharmila Tagore, Om Puri, Smita Patil, Mohan Agashe, Amjad Khan, Sanjeev Kumar, to name some. Some of them, already doyens of the world ll d of cinema, and some got a launch pad propelling them into stardom. But, Satyajit Ray, the man carried into his old age the loneliness that he encountered as a young child in the illustrious company of a cultural capital that can embed in a mortal the strongest sense of jealousy. The book captures the cultural capital from Satyajit Ray's grandfather to himself via his father Sukumar Ray, who passed away when Satyajit was only two. Though, the biographer is enthralled by Satyajit Ray, any shortcomings are only spelt out by the film maker himself. The book, nevertheless remains authoritative and a must read for any student or aficionado of cinema.

“Our nation’s intelligence is the infantry of our ideology”

-- John Le Carré

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

-- Hannah Arendt
(This quote hits home truer and harsher)

Taylor Swift, the pop diva had three concerts lined up in August 2024 in Vienna, selling over 200, 000 tickets. The CIA provided the Austrian authorities with intelligence that four individuals affiliated to ISIS-K (K meant Khorasan) planned a terror plot to devastate the concerts. The main plotter, a 19-year old Austrian pleaded guilty and was convicted. Had the plot not been detected, the carnage would have been massive. This was one of the bright highlights of the resurgent CIA that was marked by a turbulent history since the beginning of the 21st century.

“The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century” by the Pulitzer winner Tim Weiner is a perfect sequel to his Legacy of Ashes, and chronicles the agency’s turbulent history post the collapse of the Soviet Union to the first few months of Trump’s second term. Built on previously undisclosed materials, the book opens the window on an unprecedented access, in an era when the CIA was often caught between the train blades of legality and morality of its actions. Floundering between the two, there was enough fecund ground created for politicising the agency, when it went against the decree of having nothing to do with policy framing to actually becoming a policy maker, and even flirted dangerously close to moving away from pure intelligence gathering.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, CIA found its mission punctured, and with the Warsaw Pact countries ejecting out of the Communist orbit, it found itself all but rudderless in a direction unknown until the big breakthrough came when the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed by the Al-Qaeda in 1998. CIA’s war on communism was replaced by the war on terror, or rather counter-terrorism, to begin with. In the lead-up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the CIA unsuccessfully tried to convince US president George W Bush that al-Qaeda was about to commit terrible acts against the US, although the agency could not identify precisely the time and nature of such acts. After 9/11, the US government called upon the CIA to be the tip of the spear for the war on terror. As a lethal paramilitary force, it erected secret prisons and inflicted torture during interrogations, something it was not set up to do. This diversion away from the CIA’s core business of espionage only served to further tarnish the agency’s reputation.

CIA’s credibility took a further hit when it was asked by the US Senate Intelligence Committee to postpone into Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction, especially Chemical and Biological agents. Since, CIA didn’t have a station in Iraq from 1998, its intelligence wasn’t up-to-date. It nevertheless put together a national intelligence estimate which reported that Saddam had nuclear, biological and chemical weapons capabilities far beyond what he actually had. Bush wanted just such a legitimacy, and upon receiving it, the invasion of Iraq was imminent.

Meanwhile, the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan became the catalyst that turned the CIA from a spy agency into a “lethal paramilitary force”. Weiner calls the mission in Afghanistan framed as part of a broader failure of the “war on terror”, a grinding conflict where tactical drone strikes and manhunts replaced strategic intelligence gathering. In completing the full arc, the book is not qualmish about the eventual US withdrawal and the Taliban’s return to power, marking the ultimate failure of that two-decade mission. In the midst of the Afghan conflict, CIA cleverly portrays the treacherous behaviour of the Pakistani establishment, especially its elite ISI, whose loyalty in the war on terror was never acknowledged as serious. The assassination of Osama bin Laden, when he was holed up in Abbottabad, a stone’s throw away from Pakistani Military Academy, confirms this. And then, there were constant fears of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal falling into extremist hands, a nightmare scenario the CIA had to prepare for while being actively undermined by Pakistani intelligence.

The agency ran secret prisons and “black sites” (including Guantánamo), where “enhanced interrogation techniques” (which Weiner and others classify as torture) were codified into government policy. Weiner argues the CIA was rarely “rogue”; Presidents (the “mahouts”) drove the policies, though operatives like future Director Gina Haspel (the first woman Director) participated willingly. A significant muddying of the water happened during the 2016 US Presidential Elections, with Russia’s massive interference and political warfare on Trump’s behalf. A CIA spy inside Putin’s circle helped uncover the operation. Add to that, the agency suffered from the theft of personnel files by Chinese spies and the penetration of networks by Russian intelligence, which prompted a total overhaul of the network protocol. But, the CIA did strike back. After 2016, it refocused on Russia, successfully stealing Vladimir Putin’s war plans for Ukraine. This intelligence allowed the U.S. to warn the world of the invasion (unlike the WMD failure) and helped NATO prepare for the 2022 conflict. Yet another success attributed to the success and is rarely talked about is the manner in which the agency helped dismantle AQ Khan’s nuclear trafficking programme with rogue countries.

The last hundred pages are the most gripping in the book as Donald Trump, Biden and Trump again take center stage. Donald Trump’s first term was a period of profound hostility between the White House and the CIA. Trump entered office viewing the agency as part of a “deep state” that had tried to delegitimize his victory, given the CIA’s conclusion that Russia ran a covert operation to help him win in 2016. Weiner notes that Trump ignored intelligence briefings, proposed ideas like going to war with Mexico, and was effectively “Russia’s ally” in his public posture, even as his first CIA director, Mike Pompeo, tried to keep the agency functional. Overall, the first term established a toxic dynamic, career spies trying to protect national security while their own commander-in-chief attacked them from within.

The Biden administration was a return to a more traditional, trusting relationship between the White House and the CIA, but one still shadowed by the agency’s post-9/11 legacy. Biden, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, deeply valued intelligence and relied heavily on CIA Director Bill Burns, whom Weiner praises as the most effective director in decades. The book’s signature success story, the CIA stealing Vladimir Putin’s war plans for Ukraine, unfolded under Biden, allowing the U.S. to warn allies and prepare for the 2022 invasion. Weiner also credits Biden with ending the CIA’s use of “black sites” and torture, though the agency remained a paramilitary force. However, the book notes that the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, despite intelligence warnings, showed that even a friendly president could stumble. Ultimately, Weiner argues Biden restored the CIA’s morale and purpose, but the deeper rot of politicization and loyalty tests would return with Trump’s second term.

The Mission portrays Trump’s second term as an unprecedented existential crisis for the CIA, with the president himself as the “greatest danger to American national security”. The book closes with the epilogue, “Autocracy in America,” describing Trump as an arsonist setting fire to the architecture of U.S. intelligence. Central to this is Director John Ratcliffe, whom Weiner calls “a spineless person who will do whatever Trump tells him to do”. Ratcliffe has imposed ideological purity tests, asking candidates whether the 2020 election was stolen, and purged experienced officers while sending terminated staffers’ names to Elon Musk in an unclassified email. The book’s most alarming claim is that Trump has “gone over to the other side,” becoming objectively “Russia’s ally”, evidenced by the U.S. voting with Russia against a UN resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine. As Weiner puts it: “The arsonist is the president of the United States”.

The Buddhist caves near Karad are collectively known as the Agashiv Caves. They form an extensive group of rock-cut Buddhist monuments dating back to the 1st century BCE. The complex includes over 60 caves divided into three main groups on the Agashiv hill range. The Agashiv group (Caves 1-26) is the largest and contains both prayer halls (chaitya) and dwelling cells (vihara). The Bhairav group (Caves 27-39) consists entirely of vihara caves, while the Dongrai group has over 20 caves including two chaitya halls. The caves were carved in the 1st century BCE and are remarkably simple in design. An important inscription records a gift by Sanghmitra, son of Gopala, confirming Buddhist monastic activities here. The earliest Buddhist symbols, including a Dharma wheel and lion, can be seen carved.

The Karad copper plates, discovered here are a set of three historic copper-plate charters dating back to 880 Saka era (958 CE). They are a foundational historical record of the Rashtrakuta dynasty, providing vital details on their military campaigns and administration in South India. The plates were discovered while digging the foundation of an old house in Karad. They were subsequently studied by the renowned orientalist Dr. R.G. Bhandarkar and published in Epigraphia Indica (Vol. 4). The historical significance of Karad is noted from copper plate grants of the Shilahara ruler Jatiga-II. These plates, along with literary sources, indicate that Karad was the first capital of this branch of the Shilaharas before they shifted to Kolhapur. An inscription found at Bhoighar (near Karad) mentions a village called Karadāṇḍa. Dating to Śaka 946 (1024 CE), this record details a settlement regarding orchards and mentions the resettlement of Brahmanas from the Karad area.

The coming of the Muslims in Karad is generally linked to the Adil Shahis of Bijapur, which is rarely contested as Karad lay on the road from Bijapur to Dabhol (Ratnagiri district), which was a major port for the Adil Shahis. The building activities in Karad clearly attribute to this fact. But, there are two instances that point out the presence of the muslims before the Adil Shahis. Two tombs in the city’s Guruwar Peth locality are believed by the locals to have been built in the mid-14th century. While no historical record attests these, the architectural vocabulary clearly points to Bijapur Sultanate’s times. The other relic, though is far more intriguing. It was (the past tense is knowingly used!) a stone slab with a broken half having been lost and the remaining half mentioning the construction of a building in the reign of the Khilji, Sultan Ala-ud-Din unearthed in Karad. This half with the inscription was brought to Pune’s Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Kendra. During a visit undertaken by me about a year ago, I could not locate this half. So, the record is probably gone forever, and the authorities too were unaware of it.

Karad once had a mud fort, whose buiding was necessitated to protect its trading import as the town was the first major settlement after descending from the Kumbharli Ghats on the way from the Konkan coast to the Deccan. The construction of the fort is attributed to the Bahmanis and the locals call it the Pantacha Kot (Pant Pratinidhi’s Fort), clearly jumping history by at least 2 centuries, if not more. The fort, which once encompassed most of the town is now as good as gone, save for traces of a bastion and part of the wall by the Koyna river in the town’s Somwar Peth locality. Originally, the fort had 18 bastions and was a ground fort (Bhui Kot). Even though the fort is lost, an architectural marvel housed inside the precincts of it remains, the Step-Well. As is common with any architectural relic whose history is unknown, here too, a legend has become part of the folklore. The Step-Well, whose original name eludes is locally referred to as Nakatya Ravalchi Vihir (Nakatya Raval’s Well), a demon who captured people coming to draw water. The legend has nowadays turned to an urban legend, as is most commonly expected.

The 136-ft long Step-Well lies on the western fringe of the fort overlooking the Koyna. The west-end is 36-ft square and the north-east corner is rounded off with the purpose of lifting water from the well. Of the 100 feet remaining along the length, a spectacular flight of 83 steps lead down to the water. The well seems to have been dug in murum, a natural granular soil and fragmented weathered rock, widely used in construction and landscaping across India. To prevent the well from falling in, it has been lined with trap masonry in mortar. The sides slightly slope outwards from bottom, with each line of stones protruding beyond the line above. Multiple landings break the flight of steps. The flight of steps is separated from the main shaft of the well by two massive ogee-shaped archeways, a vocabulary implying Bahmani origins. Thus, in the absence of a historical date to the Step-Well, this architectural style is evident of the fact that this remains the oldest extant Islamic building in Karad, and upsets the local beliefs about the two tombs in Guruwar Peth as the oldest. These archways are conected with each side of the well and form a massive block beween the steps and the shafts. The block is about 70 feet high and 12 feet thick, while the archways are about 30 and 20 feet high, with the solid masonry above each of them about 10 feet high. The sides also have their peculiar longitudinal rectangular grooves on a level with the three landings with 10 semi-circular transverse cuttings at regular intervals. The purpose of this peculiarity, it is claimed was to have flooring along the grooves to be supported by transverse beams thrust into the cuttings, and thus convert the well into a three-storied underground building. Was this undertaken is only a guess? But, a good rationale must have been to construct an ambuscade, in case the fort was besieged. Other than that, the well must have been purposed for water storage, as the Koyna is barely 100 feet away.

The Step-Well is under ASI’s protection, but the shaft is filled with refuse. The well, though faces a natural threat, and that being the floods, which are damaging with their ferocity with every passing monsoon. The fort wall that separates the Step-Well from the Koyna has collapsed, and unless adequate measures are taken, the danger to this marvel is imminent.

According to the historian of religion and capitalism, R H Tawney,

“The philosophy which would keep economic interests and ethical idealism safely locked up in their separate compartments finds that each of the prisoners is increasingly restive.”

This is the unfortunate repulsion to the logics of capitalism within major Islamic studies that years capitalism as a juggernaut that is universal in spread, and the way the Muslims responded to it historically has been by retreating behind the protective wall of moral economy. Michael O’Sullivan in his academically sophisticated “No Birds of Passage - A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities 1800-1975” deconstructs this logic by establishing a symbiotic, rather than antagonistic narrative of modern Islam and capitalism. The work builds on the pioneering text titled “The Muslims of Greater Gujarat” written by the Ismaili Khoja historian Karim Mohammad Mastar in 1936, which was representative of centuries old tradition of intimacy and interconnections, however guarded between the Bohras, Khojas and the Memons. In between Mastar’s treatise and O’Sullivan’s, a Soviet historian of South Asia, Sergey Levin had written a text on the developement of the Muslim mercantile castes and classes in Gujarat, and how the three communities in question helped foster the process of identity formation as part and parcel of capitalism in the subcontinent. In the ending period between the mid-1960s and the early decades of the 21st century, many historians, especially those in the US and Pakistan pushed to the backburner Levin’s thesis of the three communities in shaping the unified, if competing, bourgeoisie in Pakistan and substituting y same with the legendary 22 family dictum, first popularized by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The influence of Levin is apparent in O’Sullivan’s work, in addition to Mastar’s.

The title of the book is evocative of the entrenched position of the Bohras, Khojas and Memons within capitalism and is lifted from a survey of the Indian diaspora in East Africa in 1873. Sir Bartle Frere, the colonial administrator, spoke of the Indian traders as “Birds of Passage”, who were as likely to make Africa their home as a young Englishman in Hong Kong. But, the first usage of the phrase could be attributed to Edmund Burke in 1785, where in the context of British Imperialism, in one of his many harangues of the East India Company’s corrupt administration of India, he rebuked it’s servants by starting that there was nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage.

With less than 1% of the Muslim population in the Indian Subcontinent, the Shia Bohras, Khojas and Sunni Memons have represented Islamic capitalism in the region for more than 200 years. During the nineteenth century, three Gujarati Muslim commercial castes—the Bohras, Khojas, and Memons—came to dominate Muslim business in South Asia. Following entrepreneurial firms from Gujarat to the Hijaz, Hong Kong, Mombasa, Rangoon, and beyond, Michael O’Sullivan reveals the importance of kinship networks, private property, and religious obligation to their business endeavors. This paradigm of Muslim capitalism found its highest expression in the jamaats, the central caste institutions of each community, which combined South Asian, Islamicate, and European traditions of corporate life. The jamaats also played an essential role in negotiating the position of all three groups in relation to British authorities and Indian Muslim nationalists, as well as the often-sharp divisions within the castes themselves.

Michael O’Sullivan brings together a range of sources in multiple languages. This multilingual approach is crucial for a multi-community, trans-imperial history, allowing him to move beyond English-language colonial archives to consult materials in Gujarati, Kutchi, Arabic, and Urdu (including community records like jamaat documents). Interestingly, the book avoids imposing Western economic models. Instead, it focuses on “endogenous institutions”—those arising from within the communities themselves. This is where the jamaats (caste councils) become central. The authority vested in leaders of the jamaats allowed them to allocate capital and resolve civil disputes, while the threat of excommunication maintained discipline. Despite their ambiguous hierarchies and regressive tendencies, jamaats enabled vulnerable minorities to thrive amid pervasive mistrust from the wider Muslim and Hindu populations. In that unfriendly setting, cooperation with their new British rulers was the logical choice. He views them as dynamic corporate bodies blending South Asian, Islamicate, and European traditions, exploring history from the “inside out.”

What O’Sullivan does fantastically well is arguing that the success of Gujarati Muslim business communities has been misunderstood due to stereotypes embraced equally by colonial administrators and Muslim commentators. These groups have been long viewed either as “Hindus in all but name” or as “Westernized” Muslims who embraced colonial institutions. But, from inter- to intra-religious feuds, fissiparity took centre-stage resulting in lengthy litigations that more often than not did not resolve satisfactorily. Even the Governor of Bombay, Montstuart Elphinstone failed in his attempts to reconcile common law with the ground reality of castes. Such cases of failures in reconciliation cascaded into issues of inheritance and ownership. A noteworthy instance here compelled one judge to decide in 1866 whether the Khojas were Sunni or Shia Muslims, only for subsequent case in 1908 to arbitrate what specific kind of Shias.

The quest for a single Muslim nation in India, coherent and undivided, meant that jamaats’ capital could no longer remain undisturbed inside opaque religious trusts. When Sunnis in Bhopal deemed the Bohras insufficient in their sympathy for the Ottomans, they instigated a pogrom that turned the city’s business elite into refugees overnight. Within the jamaat, courageous women began to assert themselves, demanding their rights to inheritance according to the Koran and leveraging the English press in their fight against purdah. By the early 20th century, a Bohra woman would sue the leader of her own jamaat for defamation and win. In the immediate aftermath of India’s independence, which more or less coincides with many countries winning their own independence, the three communities in question would have been instrumental in nation building, but fell pitiably to the parochial outlook of nationalists. Countries like Iraq, Tanzania and Uganda expelled the Gujarati Muslim communities, and even Pakistan that favoured them in its infancy turned the tide with Bhutto, and further exacerbated by Zia Ul Haq. The strangest position, though, was taken by the framer of the Indian Constitution, B R Ambedkar, who remorselessly was dismissive of the commercial classes and castes, calling them as continuing the imperial means. The question of “What If The Treatment Was Any Better?” has many permutations and combinations for answers, but nothing really takes away the fact they are burdened in their own historical homeland and heartland, where racial animus and capital asymmetries are resurfacing, and however tenaciously they hold on, the tide of communal hate and Right-Wing politics feed into the state an adjudication that fuels more disagreements than otherwise.

“Time spins away and space misbehaves”

These six words characterize the remoteness and the desolation of what lies under our feet, and the journeys undertaken to comprehend the deep time. Even though the nether world is historically distant from the one we inhabit, they are nevertheless connected by echoes, stretched away from the present moment by the dizzying expanse of Earth’s histories.

Underland by Robert Macfarlane has got to be the best book I have read this year so far, and the first few pages, which is the first chamber, is deeply philosophical and reminiscent of geotrauma as subtly described by the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani taking cues from Daniel Barker and spinal catastrophism of UK-based Thomas Moynihan that traces multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology and geology, and demonstrating that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history. Geotrauma, on the other hand is a belated critical interposition between Freud’s and Ferenczi’s theories of trauma and Kant’s and Schelling’s accounts of radical evil, that moves toward a geocosmic account of trauma and allows for renegotiation of materialism in the wake of tensive topologies (traumas) and contingent depths (freedom at cosmic scales). When topology of traumatic tensions is extended from the realms of the organic nervous system and the social structure (polis, nation state, etc.) to cosmic expanses, the extensity of space simultaneously deprives matter of its allegedly autonomous privileges and mobilizes it through a productive topology of tension where such an act of dispossession itself takes a new form of materialist expression whose binding entails a ceaseless renegotiation of the axiomatic verities of Man, the Earth and Matter. This cosmically determined yet traumatically or tensively posited renegotiation of verities imparts a fundamentally territopic (rather than terroristic) quality to a conception of matter that is not governed by its own autonomy, hyletic creativities and intensive differences – that is a conception of matter disenthralled by radical evil or the will qua freedom of depths.

In Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, trauma operates on three interconnected levels: physical (the claustrophobic terror of caving), historical (the horror of past violence buried beneath stunning landscapes), and psychological (the grief of comprehending humanity’s toxic legacy). The book, in short is an unsettling discourse on dissonance, where the invisible traps in a claustrophobic squeeze of geological crevices characterized by deep time, which is extremely traumatic because it radically decenters humanity. It forces us to realize that our cities, monuments, and even our species are a thin moss on a stone that has been turning for eons.

The book is trisected as a descent into - Seeing (British Isles), Hiding (continental Europe) and Haunting (The Scandinavian North), each examining the paradoxical relationships of shelter, yield and disposal. Taking inspiration from Suzanne Simard’s brilliant science memoir, “Finding the Mother Tree”, where the central tenet challenges the notion of post-Darwinian selfish gene as cardinal to survival, and brings in cooperation and collaboration that is quintessential to the sustenance of forests, where trees are connected by a “wood-wide web”, and information is exchanged through fungal networks, Macfarlane tours a forest on the fringe of London in the company of the mycologist, Merlin Sheldrake, author of a modern classic, An Entangled Life, to unearth the superpowers of fungal networks, and in the process demystifying taxonomized categories and pointing to a mutualism beyond what is previously perceived.

In Slovenia, Macfarlane descends into a cave with a scientist to find “snotite”, a microbial slime that hangs from cave walls like fleshy stalactites. The snotite is actually colonies of extremophile bacteria that feed on sulfur and drip acid with a pH of 0 (battery acid). This reminds me of the story of “The lonely traveler”, which refers to Desulforudis audaxviator, a unique, rod-shaped bacterium discovered 2.8 km beneath the Earth’s surface in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. This was the first ecosystem ever found to consist of only a single biological species, living entirely independently from other organisms, and instead of relying on the sun, it survives by harvesting chemical energy produced by the natural radioactive decay of uranium in the surrounding rock. The underland contains life that is utterly alien to us, yet it is the biochemistry from which all complex life evolved. We are walking through the living past.

Up north in Norway, Macfarlane joins a marine biologist to dive beneath the frozen surface of a fjord, where beneath the ice, the world is inverted. Stalactites of frozen brine hang downward. Anemones the size of dinner plates grow upside-down from the ice ceiling. He describes the “halocline” - a shimmering boundary where freshwater meets saltwater, creating a lensing effect that distorts time. This is a journey characterized by unbelongingness, a state which is neither on land not on the open ocean. In the high mountains of Norway, Macfarlane walks with an archaeologist to a melting ice patch that has been releasing prehistoric artifacts for decades. As the permafrost thaws due to climate change, it “vomits” up objects frozen for thousands of years: arrows, shoes, even a complete 5,000-year-old reindeer antler with knife marks still visible. The archaeologist tells him about the Ötzi effect, preserved bodies emerging from ice with skin, hair, and clothing intact. This is where the author comes closest to defining “cryo-stress”, the psychological weight of watching ice die. On a seemingly pristine beach in the remote Norwegian Arctic, Macfarlane in the company of a scientist finds microplastics in every handful of sand, colored flecks of fishing rope, bottle caps, glitter, Styrofoam ground to powder. The scientist quotes the anthropologist Mary Douglas: “Dirt is matter out of place.” The author realizes that plastic has become a geological marker. In the far future, the rock record will show a thin layer of petro-polymers embedded in the strata, the “Plasticene.” And that’s where the author asks a question that realistically speaking forms the crux of the book, “Are we being good ancestors?” He appears to be pessimistic, but, at the same time shows faith in the people who refuse to settle for despair.

The last chapter of The Haunting, “The Hiding Place”, is the most disturbing and philosophically perplexity. It takes about Onkalo, which means “cavity” or “hollow” in Finnish. It is not a metaphor. It is a real place: a deep geological repository for high-level nuclear waste, currently under construction on the island of Olkiluoto. When complete, it will be the first permanent tomb for the most toxic substance ever created by human hands. He descends into the underland, and at 450 meters, steps out into a tunnel wide enough for two trucks to pass. The walls are bare granite, 1.9 billion years old (the rock formed in the Paleoproterozoic era, long before multicellular life). He touches the wall:

“The rock was cold and slightly damp. I pressed my palm against it and felt nothing. No vibration. No pulse. No history. Just mass.”

The Technology employed is The “Copper Coffin”, where the waste is packaged in the KBS-3 system (Kärnbränslesäkerhet, “Nuclear Fuel Safety”, a Swedish design). Each package has multiple layers, each designed to fail at a different time. To the author, “It looked like a sarcophagus from a future religion. Which, in a sense, it is.” Philosophically, how do you warn humans 10,000 years from now, who may speak no known language, follow no known religion, have no concept of radiation, not to dig here? Macfarlane reviews the proposals that were rejected:

Proposal Why rejected
Giant concrete spikes (”landscape of thorns”) Might become a monument, not a warning. People might dig to see what’s under the spikes.
A “nuclear priesthood” (semiotician Thomas Sebeok’s idea) An institution that passes down the warning for 10,000 years. Unrealistic, as no institution lasts that long.
Genetically modified cats that glow blue near radiation Impossible (no gene for “glow near radiation”). Also, cats might become beloved, and people would dig to find the source of the blue cats!!!
A “black hole”, no marker at all (Finland’s actual choice) The site will erode, and the land above will become anonymous. But then no one will be warned.

The resolution, if at all it can be called that comes from a quote by Roger Clarke, an expert in Human Factors,

“The only certain way to prevent human intrusion is to ensure that no one knows the waste is there. But then you have deceived the future.”

And deception of the future is indeed we are collectively moving towards. The book is a treasure trove, albeit dark at heart, of vivid narratives from dark matter laboratory (British Isles) to cave paintings or the “Red Dancers”, rock art painted 2,500 years ago in the Lofoten Islands, accessible only by perilous winter climbs to the Parisian catacombs to the underground river at the Carso Plateau in Italy, and the sunken graveyards of Slovenian sinkholes. An absolute masterpiece and highly recommended.

If not for the wreckage caused by Watergate, communist perfidy and congressional pusillanimity, Henry Kissinger claimed to have had reached a decent settlement in Vietnam, though both Kissinger and Richard Nixon knew well enough that South Vietnam was doomed. The charge against the two had not been that they failed to preserve the Saigon Regime, but that they sought to persuade the Americans at the time, and posterity since, that they ever supposed they could. In June 1972, when the New York Times began publishing Pentagon Papers, the highly classified report that recorded with icy candor the deceits and misjudgments whereby the country had become entangled in Vietnam, there was an explosion of conviction that the Americans should never have been in Vietnam in the first place.

It was during the CoViD lockdown that I changed upon reading the Pentagon Papers and a few works by Henry Kissinger, and the latter’s complicated and controversial strategy that combined secret bombing campaigns, broad geopolitical maneuvering, and intense negotiation. His goal was to achieve “peace with honor”—a U.S. military withdrawal that would not appear as an outright defeat. Kissinger remains a central figure in Vietnam’s debacle, for the polarizing role he came increasingly to play. While his supporters give him credit for the plan he exercised and for successfully navigating a catastrophic situation, extricating America from an unwinnable war while preserving U.S. credibility, his detractors argue how he needlessly escalated the war by expanding it into neutral Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and agreeing to a deal in 1973 that was essentially available in 1969—wasting nearly four years and over 20,000 additional American lives. Leading up to the deal, there were even talks about exercising the “Madman Theory”, a strategic concept Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon employed, whose core idea was to make U.S. adversaries (the Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam) believe that Nixon was so unpredictable, irrational, and volatile that he might resort to nuclear weapons if pushed too far. For such feigned irrationality to work, the bluff had to be absolutely believable. However, the U.S. military’s own internal “Saturday Night Massacre” of nuclear command—where officers were trained to question irrational launch orders—meant the bluff had little operational reality. North Vietnamese leadership, led by Le Duan, correctly calculated that the U.S. domestic anti-war movement and Soviet/Chinese pressure would constrain Nixon, and they never broke.

These strategic details and the blunders they resulted in are thrashed out in Max Hastings’ 700-pager tome, Vietnam - An Epic History of a Tragic War. On the other hand, the book is a graphic description of the excesses of war, the heinous level to which humans stooped in causing atrocities in the ideological end points of the East versus the West, yielding a balanced account as well as a statistical nightmare about the lives lost and damaged. The concluding pages of the eight-volume Vietnam’s War History, titled “Total Victory” suggests casualty figures - almost two million civilians killed; two million crippled or disabled; a further two million exposed to chemicals (including the Napalm). On the battlefield, Hanoi estimates 1.4 million men killed and missing, together with s six hundred thousand wounded. The civilian numbers serum exaggerated, but the military statistics are of the right order of magnitude. Nobody will know for sure. Fifty for thousand American lives were lost in the war that aimed to put a halt to the communist expansionism in the South East. Finally, the communist north claimed the American-backed south, and even though the north assured rhetorically that it had no wish to impose communism on the south, a grey totalitarian pall descended upon the country.

The book begins with the arrogance and eventual failure of the French ambitions, as the European nation, much like the Americans later on, could never understand the fine distinction between fighting the national revolution and fighting a proxy communist insurgency. Hastings nails it by detailing how French brutality at Dien Bien Phu and their refusal to grant genuine independence radicalized the population. He argues that Ho Chi Minh was initially willing to accept a Western-aligned Vietnam, but Western colonial arrogance destroyed that possibility. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the Viet Minh (communist-led nationalists under Ho Chi Minh) declared independence. France, weakened but desperate to restore its empire, refused to recognize this. The turning point came in November 1946 when a French naval bombardment of the Viet Minh-controlled port of Haiphong killed an estimated 6,000 civilians. This triggered open warfare. The Battle of Dien Bien Phu ended the war. The French, seeking to draw the Viet Minh into a traditional set-piece battle they could win with superior firepower, set up a fortified valley garrison at Dien Bien Phu, near the Laotian border. The plan failed catastrophically. The Battle led to the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1954, a temporary peace plan that everyone immediately broke. Vietnam was temporarily split at the 17th parallel into a communist North Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh) and a western-aligned State of Vietnam (later the Republic of Vietnam). Nationwide elections to reunify the country were scheduled for July 1956. The US and the new anti-communist South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, refused to sign the accords and blocked the elections, knowing Ho Chi Minh would almost certainly win. The US believed that if Vietnam fell to communism, all of Southeast Asia would follow (the “domino theory”), leading them to immediately begin funding and advising the new South Vietnamese army. The French defeat directly created the conditions for the US war. By refusing to hold the 1956 elections, the US violated the Geneva Accords, escalating a political stalemate into a military one. The anti-communist leader the US backed, Ngo Dinh Diem, proved brutally corrupt and unpopular, leading to a communist-led insurgency in the South (the Viet Cong) by 1960—the spark that drew President Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson deeper into Vietnam.

The American hubristic approach, especially, “search and destroy” doctrine proved a “costly failure.” Hastings highlights the obsession with body counts as a meaningless metric, arguing that killing Viet Cong fighters was useless because the North could replace every lost soldier tenfold, while the US could not endure the political cost of attrition. The Americans committed a brutal massacre at My Lai on March 16, 1968. American soldiers from Charlie Company murdered between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly men, in the hamlet of My Lai. The massacre occurred after a “search and destroy” mission based on faulty intelligence that the Viet Cong’s 48th Battalion was hiding in the village. Upon arriving, soldiers found no enemy combatants. Instead of withdrawing, they rounded up villagers and executed them in groups using automatic weapons, grenades, and bayonets. In a notorious scene, a large group was forced into an irrigation ditch and shot. At least 20 women and girls were also gang-raped before being killed. While, the U.S. Army initially covered up the massacre, reporting a victory over 128 guerrillas. The truth was revealed a year later by journalist Seymour Hersh and whistleblower Ronald Ridenhour, sparking global outrage. Hastings dedicates significant space to North Vietnamese and Vietcong war crimes, arguing that both sides committed genocide-level atrocities against civilians. He counters the popular narrative that the “Tet Offensive” was a purely noble uprising. During the “Hue Massacre,” the Viet Cong and the North Vietnam Army executed between 2,800 and 6,000 unarmed civilians—teachers, doctors, Catholic priests, and foreign aid workers—burying them in mass graves. Hastings argues this was deliberate ethnic and political cleansing, not collateral damage, as is widely believed.

The book has its share of controversies as well. In one damning chapter, Hastings critiques the Western anti-war movement. A liberal himself, he argues that many protesters were “morally arrogant.” He claims that activists refused to acknowledge the brutality of the Viet Cong regime in areas they controlled (land reform massacres, re-education camps). He also accuses many journalists and protesters of romanticizing the VC as simple agrarian heroes, ignoring that the North Vietnamese regime was a ruthless Stalinist state that forced collectivization, resulting in hundreds of thousands of starvation deaths in the 1950s.

For the US of A, Vietnam was a strategic defeat born of hubris, but fought by a society that remained (unlike later wars) relatively restrained. Max Hastings rejects the “evil America” narrative. For the North, the war was a military victory that cost 2–3 million lives for an ideology that, by the 1990s, was abandoned for capitalism anyway. The northern regime became as corrupt as the Saigon regime they despised. And that’s no surprise. The South were the true losers. A population caught between a brutal guerrilla war and a corrupt democracy, ultimately sacrificed by both Washington and Hanoi. Five U.S. presidents shaped the Vietnam War, each deepening involvement. Starting with Truman (aid in 1950) and Eisenhower (domino theory, backing Diem), Kennedy expanded advisors to approximately 16,000. Lyndon Johnson massively escalated via the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, deploying combat troops and bombing North Vietnam. Nixon pursued “Vietnamization,” withdrawal, but secretly bombed Cambodia. President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1969) is the leader most responsible for transforming the Vietnam War into a large-scale, full-blown American conflict. He launched the first sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam (Operation Rolling Thunder). The goal was to destroy industrial bases, transport networks, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but the campaign was heavily restricted by political targets for fear of provoking China or the USSR. Johnson shifted the mission from “advising” to direct combat. In March 1965, the first U.S. combat battalions arrived. By the end of his presidency, he had deployed over 500,000 American troops to Vietnam. His downfall began immediately after the Tet Offensive. Although a tactical failure for the North, the surprise Tet Offensive shattered Johnson’s claims that the enemy was near defeat. After Tet, his own advisors turned against the war. On March 31, 1968, a visibly shaken Johnson announced he would not seek re-election to focus on peace talks.

President Richard Nixon (1969–1974) took over a deeply unpopular war and pursued a strategy of disengagement while paradoxically widening the conflict geographically. His core goal was “Peace with Honor” —withdrawing U.S. troops without appearing to lose. Vietnamization was Nixon’s signature policy: gradually withdrawing U.S. combat troops while massively expanding, equipping, and training the South Vietnamese army to take over the fighting. It reduced U.S. ground casualties but shifted the bloodshed to the Vietnamese. To disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines and base camps along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Nixon ordered secret B-52 raids on neutral Cambodia. This was hidden from the U.S. public and Congress. The bombings destabilized Cambodia, inadvertently pushing it into civil war and ultimately enabling the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge. When peace talks stalled, Nixon ordered the most intense bombing of the entire war—Operation Linebacker II—over Hanoi and Haiphong harbor. It lasted 11 days using B-52s. After international outrage and heavy American bomber losses, negotiations restarted. It was at The Paris Peace Accords (January 1973) that

Nixon finally secured a ceasefire agreement. It called for a complete U.S. military withdrawal and the return of American POWs. Crucially, it allowed North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South—ensuring the eventual collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. After Nixon resigned due to Watergate, Congress cut off all military aid to South Vietnam. Without U.S. air support, the North Vietnamese Army overran Saigon in April 1975. The iconic helicopter evacuations from the U.S. embassy roof marked the war’s end. As for the role of China and the Soviet Union, China provided the essential geographic shield to keep North Vietnam safe, while the USSR provided the technical firepower to make it lethal. Without both, Hanoi could not have outlasted the United States.

Max Hastings’ book is extraordinarily difficult to read, as he narrates stories from the trenches. In his own words,

“Within the big canvas, many individuals behaved decently...I have sought to tell the stories of such people, because it is mistaken to allow virtuous endeavor to vanish into the cauldron of bomb blasts, brutalities, and betrayals from within which most accounts of the way served up.”

Meticulous in details, the book might seem too drag on a bit, but, were it not for the details, the fabric of the tragic events wouldn’t have been woven in voices from the forgotten. Replete with maps and photographs (who could forget the naked child escaping the deadly Napalm bombings in 1972, or the Buddhist monk setting himself afire), the epitome of the book lies in the fact that in the tragic war, no one was supposed to win, and eventually none did. And this is where Hastings has often been critiqued as polarizing, though in my view, his approach was amply supported by research for him to maintain a neutral approach, a rarity in terms of the subject matter at hand.

While the Government Survey School (presently College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai) has the distinction of Asia's oldest technical school, and first of its kind outside Europe (founded in 1794), the peninsular India towards the other side of the coast has India's oldest western-styled Degree College in CMS (Church Missionary Society) College in Kottayam, Kerala. Indeed, Zakir Hussain College in Delhi predates the one in Kottayam by a score years, it is the 'western pedagogy' that marks the latter as the first and beating the iconic Presidency College in Kolkata by a few days.

Initially called The College Cotym, the roots of the college lie in the reformist zealot, Col. John Munroe when he assumed the position of a Dewan in Travancore. He is credited with abolishing slavery in Travancore in 1813, and set out to inquire into the socio-political and economic status of the Syrian Christians in the province along the South-Western strip in India. He appealed to the provincial capital, Madras to initiate a school setup in Cotym (As Kottayam was anglicized back then). The Church Missionary Society, which was founded in 1799 took hold of the opportunity after the British Parliament ratified the Charter to enable the British East India Company to propagate missionary and educational work. As these foundational principles were being worked out, the Maharani, Gauri Lakshmi Bai of the Royal Travancore family acted in earnest by granting 16 acres of land, cash equivalent to Rs. 500 and arranged timber from the public forests for the construction of the School along the Meenachil River flowing past Kottayam. The river bank also houses a Mosque falsely believed to be built during Prophet's time. In addition to Maharani's support, the First Resident of Travancore, Colin Macaulay also extended financial support.

The college was built in 1817, primarily as a Grammar School and moved to the present 32-acre premises in 1838, which is a thickly wooded green estate on the low-lying Western Ghats, and still surrounded by seemingly virgin forests sloping down the hills. The sprawling campus wears a colonial look architecturally, with eclectic use of Thatchu regional elements. The College Chapel is an impressively imposing Gothic building opened in 1846, and settled after St. John's Chapel in Cambridge. Reporter with wooden paneling, it still houses the original Bell. As one walks amidst a plethora of flora and fauna, one cannot fail to notice how the campus preserves and maintains the robust functions of the plants and animals that host the community. The College is the habitat of 560 species of plants, among which around 70 are endangered species.

Reverend Benjamin Bailey, the first Principal laid the foundations of a modern secular education by implementing a curriculum with a strong concentration of subjects such as Syriac, Sanskrit, Latin, English, Greek, History, Mathematics, and Geography. Col. Munroe and Rev. Bailey were insistent that the academic programme at The College be no less rigorous than that at the University of Cambridge, even as the students used local materials like dried palm leaves and iron stencils instead of Western writing implements such as paper, pens, and quills. Selectae e profanis, Virgil’s Aeneid, Cicero’s Orations, Horace’s Epistles, Demosthenes, the first six books of Euclid and plane and spherical trigonometry were part of the syllabus. Reverend Joseph Fenn, who succeeded Bailey initiated a feeder programme via the Grammar School to ensure that students also kept pace with natural philosophy. The college is also credited with setting up the first printing press in Kerala, with Bailey, no longer the principal adopting the Malayalam script to fit into his press.

Reverend Richard Collins, principal of the college from 1855 to 1866, established the Department of Malayalam with a view to streamlining the teaching and learning of the native language of the students of The College. Exploiting the printing facility already available, the department published the first-ever College Magazine in South India, titled, ‘Vidya Samgraham’, meaning Anthology of Knowledge/Education in 1864. This magazine continues to be published today under the same name. In line with the best traditions of an institution of higher learning, The College inaugurated the era of scholarly publishing in Kerala. It is no surprise, therefore, that Kerala in general, and Kottayam in particular, can boast of a very high concentration of newspaper and magazine publishers, and publishers and sellers of academic books and journals.

Generations of students and teachers have passed through the portals of this ancient seat of learning. Luminaries like Dr. K. R. Narayanan, former President of India, Sri. K. P. S. Menon, former Indian Ambassador to the U. S. S. R., Padmavibhooshan Dr. George Sudarshan, the world renowned Physicist, and Oommen Chandy (Chief Minister of Kerala) are some of the illustrious alumni of the CMS College.