“The child is mad.”
- Lawrence Durrell, 1931

A study of Gerald Durrell’s life informs me that unlike his more illustrious brother Lawrence, Gerald didn’t love writing, and in fact, wrote only in order to raise funds for his work as a naturalist. This is nowhere apparent from his bubbly, fizzy books.

In some ways, Gerald Durrell was to natural history what Jeremy Clarkson is to automobiles. Both combined a deep expertise and passion for their subjects with a penchant for traveling around the world doing crazy things that normal people don’t dream of doing, while keeping up a steady, side-splittingly hilarious banter with a bunch of equally crazy people. For both Clarkson and Durrell, much of the humor is written for a British audience and directed at foreigners with ‘funny’ ways. In a long and chequered career, Clarkson has managed to aggravate Romanians, Mexicans and others, and while I am not aware of any criticism levelled at Durrell on this score, I must admit that I found some of his descriptions of Greeks, Turks, Mauritians and Cameroonians uncomfortably patronizing, almost condescending; but then he was writing in the mid-twentieth century, when attitudes were vastly different, and I suppose we must make allowances for that. In any case, Durrell’s tone is more affectionate than it is mocking, and it is far less racially tinged than in the BBC 1970s sitcom Mind Your Language – a program I enjoyed as a child and find severely shocking as an adult.

A gecko found only on Snake Island, Mauritius - and discovered and named after Gerald Durrell. Nactus serpensinsulas durelli, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

But there is more to Durrell’s humor than poking fun at people, more to Durrell’s writing than humor, and more to Durrell’s work than his writings; and there is a common streak across all of them. They owe their origin to Durrell’s outstanding powers of observation and description.  As a naturalist, Durrell sees tiny birds, bats, geckos and fish – things that most of us would never notice – as significant creatures in their own right, whose survival and well-being are worth fighting for. As a writer, he has an indefatigable ability to describe the minutest details that he sees. As a humorist, he has an unerring knack for identifying the funny side of trivial day-to-day incidents that I suspect weren’t nearly as funny as he makes them sound.

All this allows him to see and describe baby palm trees as being shaped like Chianti bottles and looking ‘like strange pot-bellied people’ (‘when their fronds moved in the breeze, it seemed as if they were waving at you’). The sound made by Tropic birds reminded him of a noise made by ‘somebody having difficulty in getting a champagne cork out of a bottle’. And even when rendered speechless by the beauty of the coral reef in Mauritius, he couldn’t help observing ‘curious purple-colored land-crabs with pale, cream-colored claws which they waved to and fro, looking like bank clerks who had sent their lives endlessly counting other people’s money and now could not stop the reflex action of their hands…’ To see things as noone else can, and to evoke in his readers a vivid image of what he describes – if these are the  primary goals of an author, then Durrell succeeds, admirably.

Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons documents Durrell’s madcap efforts to save the creatures mentioned in the title (as well as an assortment of skinks and snakes) from an endangered existence in Mauritius in the late 1970s, while the Fillets of Plaice, a slightly older book, is a collection of animal-free anecdotes from Durrell’s youth and early career. Together, they give the reader an excellent perspective into how Durrell’s career as a naturalist intersected his career as a writer.

And yet, as I mentioned before, there is a lot to Durrell’s life that is not apparent from his books. He struggled for much of his early career, during parts of his life that he has written extensively about – parts that he makes sound like a barrel of laughs. Many of his childhood anecdotes concern the escapades of his large family of colorful characters in Corfu – yet he never once mentions his brother’s wife, who was apparently there all the time. And during the late 1970s, precisely coinciding with his riotous jaunts to Mauritius in search of bats and pigeons, he was battling work-related stress, alcoholism and a failing marriage. To be able to write so well and with such wonderful humor in spite of this – well, it cannot be easy.

An outstanding ability to notice and describe things in great detail makes Durrell’s books extraordinary; so, paradoxically, does his omission of certain important facts from his narrative.

“Because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.”
- Bertrand Russell, on why he loved Mathematics

Philosophy was a precarious profession to pursue in 17^th century Europe, somewhat like Formula One racing in today’s times. It must have been exhilarating, of course, and it must have paid reasonably well if you had the right sponsor, but there were pitfalls at every turn, and it could all end nastily at any moment, in a gigantic ball of fire. Just ask Giordano Bruno.

Mostly, the pitfalls involved what you said or thought about God. Apart from Bruno, there was Galileo, who was made to pay for his unorthodox views; and Descartes wrote his books as if he were only one jump ahead of the Inquisition and that his every word could be used against him. Pascal, too, decided to be sensible about the whole thing and not get into too much trouble. Berkeley and Leibniz went on wild metaphysical flights of fancy, but when it came to God and religion, they pretty much toed the party line. But not Spinoza.

Spinoza’s God is not your common or garden variety of God. He doesn’t have a white billowy beard, a kind face, a thunderbolt, a booming voice, a third eye, a home in the clouds, or four arms; and He doesn’t look like Morgan Freeman, either. Indeed, Spinoza’s God doesn’t look like anything. Spinoza’s God looks like everything. The entire universe, material and spiritual, every speck of dust, every thought running through any mind at any time was part of the infinite intellect of Spinoza’s God.

Let lesser men preach the existence of divinity. Spinoza preached the divinity of all existence.

Not Spinoza's God (Courtesy Wikipedia.org)

So pantheistic is his position that it is borderline blasphemous, and scandalously close to being atheistic, despite God’s perpetual presence in his thoughts and words. “Mais je crois, entre nous, que vous n’existez pas,” Voltaire wickedly has him say to his God: “Just between you and me, I don’t think you exist.”

So did Spinoza believe in God at all? I couldn’t say for sure at the end of this book. At times it felt as if a group of angry people with flaming torches and pitchforks were demanding to know if he believed, as they did, that there was an elephant in the room, and his reassuring response was, “My dear fellows, but of course I believe there is an elephant in the room – provided, of course, that we can all agree that an elephant is defined to be the combination of a table, six chairs and a small, silver salt-and-pepper shaker set.” So it wasn’t a Yes, and it wasn’t a No: it was a That Depends On What You Mean.

This much is certain: Spinoza believed in the God of the Old Testament no more than he did in a square circle. There is a point where he mentions that scripture and revelation are only important because most people are not smart enough to figure out that it makes sense to be virtuous, and have to be told that they would roast in Hell otherwise. (Actually, his exact words were, ‘for all can obey completely, and there are but very few… who acquire the habit of virtue under the guidance of reason alone’, but you know what the guy is thinking). Curiously enough, this position is closer to that espoused by the Hindu guru Adi Sankara (who points out that the Upanishadic establishment of the identity of our self with a World Spirit is too much for ordinary people, who would assume that such an abstract God is as good as non-being), than to Judeo-Christianity. Spinoza’s God is as abstract as it gets: He (she?) is impersonal Nature, the immutable laws of physics, the eternal theorems of Euclid, the never-ending chain of cause and effect; She (he?) is Logic itself.

But that’s the important thing about Spinoza’s philosophy, even when shorn of the God concept. It roots a harmonious, virtuous life firmly and deeply in logical thinking.  The real problem in life, Spinoza says, is that people don’t see things as they are, but only by how our mind is affected by them; and we don’t even know how our mind works very well. Our thinking gets clouded by emotions, which makes us confused and unclear about everything. Instead, if we were to eschew emotions like hatred, anger, pride, derision and envy, we would remove all hindrances to true knowledge, the pursuit of which is the highest possible ethic. We would then be able to “bear with equanimity those things which happen to us contrary to what a consideration of our own profit demands, if we are conscious that we have performed our duty”. Ah, there’s that Hindu streak again!

Also (continues Spinoza), to do all this, you don’t need to live like a hermit: “it is the part of a wise man to refresh and invigorate himself with moderate and pleasant eating and drinking, with sweet scents and the beauty of green plants, with ornament, with music, with sports, with the theatre and with all things of this kind which one man can enjoy without hurting another”.

In essence, Spinoza’s ethical philosophy is as follows:

1. Stuff Happens. You can’t control most of it.
2. Keep Calm and Carry On.
3. Never stop learning
4. Enjoy the good things in life, but in moderation
5. Always be cheerful. There is no such thing as being too cheerful.
6. Brush your teeth after every meal

OK, maybe I made up the last one, but it’s all pretty sane advice, and a devastatingly practical piece of philosophy. What is best about it is that by all indications, Spinoza lived his life in perfect accordance with his philosophy: that he was unassuming, friendly, down-to-earth and knowledgeable about many things. (When he died, the local community gave him a saint’s burial and turned his humble home into a shrine).

It is unfortunate, though, that he should couch such a simple philosophy in such tortured prose, with definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations and scholiums, much of which I found fairly unreadable. The translator of the copy I read, WH White, no stranger to philosophy himself, says in the preface, with shocking and refreshing candor:

“We now come to the Ethics; but before saying anything about it, it is as well to make an admission…that the present author does not pretend to understand the whole of it and, so far as he can make out, nobody has fully understood it. It is easy to obtain what is called ‘a general view’ of it; it is easy to follow a handbook; the difficulties begin when we study it patiently for ourselves”

Well, a general view was enough for me, but there must have been a reason Spinoza wrote it as convolutedly as he did. Perhaps he felt that mathematical logic was the only way to convince people to see reason, but I can’t help feel that there is a certain inescapable Godelian circularity to using logic to prove the efficacy of logic, and in doing so, he restricted his appeal to an intellectual elite that could automatically and intuitively grasp an impersonal God (Einstein, Freud, Goethe, George Eliot and Borges were disciples) but not the ordinary people whose lives and attitudes he would have wanted to change. And of course, not everything about reality boils down to logical reasoning. Perhaps his biggest failing was to see every argument as something whose truth could be deduced from necessary facts.

But then that was one of the problems of being a 17^th century philosopher. Hume and Kant were yet to come.

“Santayana’s aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it”
- Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

When I became old enough to read the papers and learn about the world, it had already been in the icy grip of the Cold War for 35 years. Many of the men and women who reported or analyzed events in the media had never known a different state of affairs in their lifetimes. It was like a primordial tussle between the forces of Good and Evil. If you were on one of the two sides, you automatically knew that the other was Evil, that it was deeply immoral not to resist them, that your eventual prevalence in the struggle was pre-ordained and inevitable, and that the world would come to an end when this happened. But if your country, like mine, did not belong to either of the colliding worlds, but to a ‘third’ world, instead, over by the sidelines, your Cold War experience would have been different from the American or Russian one. Some of us painted it in ‘Good v Evil’ colors as well, but were deeply divided about which one was which, and we felt it would go on forever, like a metaphor for the human condition, the spinning yin and yang of life, symbols of the perpetual dilemmas that rage perennially in our mind. There was a certain epic timelessness about it all, a lack of understanding of the processes of political change, a denial of the very possibility of change, which was ultimately a negation of history. Small wonder, that soon after the War ended, someone who should have known better actually wrote a triumphant book called ‘The End of History‘.

It is this distortion of history that is the subject of May’s book, and to his great credit, he wrote it, not after the end of the War, but in 1973, right in the thick of battle. With the benefit of hindsight, and the perspective that comes from distance from both Washington and Moscow, it is easier for us to piece together the causes and consequences of the war, but such a narrative would not differ in substance from May’s.

Foreign Policy in the absence of History: Cartoon courtesy Filip Spagnoli (http://filipspagnoli.files.wordpress.com)

We now know that the US attempted to foist capitalism and US-friendly governments on many countries just as much as the USSR tried to propagate Communism in them. The actions of each side forced the other into defensive and antagonistic positions, and hawkish prophecies fulfilled themselves. Game Theory has often been invoked to explain the onset of this uneasy and unstable equilibrium, but May explains it more in terms of Organizational Behavior.

The advisors that a US President chooses usually share his prejudices and convictions. They collectively seek information and advice on foreign policy from diplomatic dispatches sent in from faraway nations. These diplomats tend to overstate their cases, to counteract what they believed to be the naivety and inertia of the politicians. The penalties for wrong prognoses are asymmetric: ignored indications of bad news are more career-limiting than exaggerated fears that don’t come true. These cases get summarized and never toned down as they go up the state department hierarchy, and by the time they reach the highest echelons of decision making, all shades of gray get systematically edited out and finally, the President is shown the picture in terse black and white terms: good guys and baddies, friends and foes, kill or be killed – much of which validates his original opinions anyway.

The military leadership does not object to doomsday predictions, not because they are paranoid psychopaths but because such a reading helps pass budget bills; then, as today, the first self-preservatory instinct of a cost center is to maximize budgets. The politicians, in turn, see that the general public seldom disapproves of hardline positions: the simpler the narrative, the easier it is to sell. The media agrees. All these factors, willy-nilly, caused a state of cold war to exist, and colluded to maintain the status quo for nearly half a century.

None of this would have happened if the decision-makers, the diplomats and the public had not had an utterly misguided understanding of how history works, which was based on a single pattern of events, that of the years leading up to World War II, and a single image of the enemy, that of Adolf Hitler.

If Hitler had been stopped when he rose to absolute power, Anschluss wouldn’t have happened; if he had been stopped at Austria, Sudetenland wouldn’t have happened; if he’d been stopped in Czechoslovakia, Poland wouldn’t have happened; and if not for Poland, there wouldn’t have been a World War. At every step, appeased by the well-meaning but naive Allies, the monster grew stronger , until he was a threat to the entire world. This was the only lesson that was learnt from the war, and applied to every situation. Thus, the logic went, if Turkey was lost, Greece, Arabia, Africa, Iran, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia would follow suit, and soon we’d be fighting on the beaches of Miami. If South Vietnam wasn’t defended, Laos would fall, followed by Thailand and Burma, and soon the world would be fallen to communism, like dominoes.

And so, in order to avoid playing dominoes, the US and the USSR played poker, using real nuclear warheads for chips, and chess, using real Third World nations for pawns. Even though the term ‘Third World‘ seems to suggest that we were not part of the conflict, it was here that most of the actual shooting and all the civilian casualties in this war took place. The Cold War was better than a ‘real’ one, the reasoning went, and it was – for the people of the first two worlds. Millions died in Angola, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, Hungary, Nicaragua, Iran, Chile, Afghanistan and several other countries – but then body counts don’t mean an awful lot if you are a pawn.

None of this need have happened, May points out. The Hitler analogy was inapplicable in most scenarios. Further, governments consistently made a layman mistake that qualified historians would never make. May quotes political analyst and fellow Harvard academic Graham Allison (in his Essence of Decision):

“When thinking of international relations, most of us visualize nations as rational unitary actors, defining objectives, laying plans, and following sequences of coherent actions in pursuit of their ends. In doing so we ignore important ways in which complex organizations do not behave like individual men and women.”

Ernest May’s solution is to have presidents employ historians as foreign policy advisors. Trained in analyzing facts and forming educated hypotheses about causes of events, historians would be better at predicting the consequences of actions. Unfortunately, May then helpfully provides a bunch of predictions so that we could judge this for ourselves. Writing in 1973, he predicted that the US policy would remain broadly the same over the next decade or so. First Europe, followed by the Far East, then the Middle East, and then the rest – this, according to May, would remain USA’s order of priorities; but that the experience of Vietnam would cause the US to be wary of engaging in foreign wars. Further, he predicts that the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks started by Nixon in 1973 would continue to ease tensions, and that the US public would, once again, gradually lose interest in foreign affairs.

Of course, however good a historian May was, what he did not – COULD not – foresee, were events themselves. The OPEC oil scare of 1973, followed by the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Lebanese Civil War and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, all happened before the end of the decade, leading to a reversal of the detente and the re-jigging of priorities, with the Middle East theater gaining a prominence and notoriety in American minds that it has still not lost three decades later.

One problem with historians is that they can identify trends, but they can’t predict game-changing events like these  - nobody can. But the biggest reason that the White House does not employ a large Department of Historian Advisors, is that historians aren’t given to making quick and concise generalizations. This is their biggest virtue, but also their biggest failing as a decision support mechanism. Nobody in today’s fast-paced world has time any more to sort through all the shades of gray, least of all in the middle of a crisis.

What does this mean for world peace? Sadly, that the USA (and everyone else) will continue to make stupid decisions. HistoryMan is not going to fly down in his cape and hood and save us any time soon.

The time: 1785 to 1810. The place: Hyderabad, city of grand palaces, soaring minarets, fluttering standards, spice and diamond markets, rolling hills and scenic lakes. It is the premier city of South India and capital of the fabulously rich Nizam-ul-Mulk, Viceroy of the Mughal Emperor and plenipotentiary over much of the Deccan peninsula. He is advised by his cunning Prime Minister, Aristu Jah, and his vast dominions border on those of the warlike Maratha Confederacy to the North, whose leader, the boy Peshwa Madhav Rao II, is a figurehead under the iron thumb of the shrewd Nana Fadnavis. The French and the English East India Companies jockey frantically for power and prestige (but mainly, for profits) with these kingdoms. They each have Residents in place at both courts, and have regiments augmenting both armies. The wily Tipu Sultan, sworn enemy of the English, rules the state of Mysore to the south of the Nizam’s kingdom, and is closely aligned with the French. The Nizam fights the Marathas with French assistance; the English fight Tipu with the Nizam’s assistance. The English regiments of the Nizam overpower his French regiments. The French regiments in the Peshwa army fight under the Bourbon flag; those in the Nizam’s army fight under the banner of the Republic. The English Governor-General does not see eye-to-eye with his own Residents; the Residents coexist uneasily with their own military commanders. In Hyderabad, Aristu Jah is locked in a power struggle with his one-time assistant, Mir Alam; Daulat Rao Scindia vies likewise with Nana Fadnavis for control of the Pune court. Each group has spies in every other camp; secret messages in cipher fly back and forth, reporting feverishly on every development. Every party plots darkly, uses threats, bribes, blackmail, poison and honey traps to further its objectives. In the background, the blind Shah Alam sits on the crumbling Mughal throne of Delhi, which city is effectively what remains of his empire as his regional satraps proclaim their independence; armed men run riot across the land with fire and sword. From their bases in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, the English have commenced oozing into this political abyss from all directions, and it is a matter of time before all of India is in their grasp. Further afield, the Dutch, the Spanish and the Ottomans are in decline; France and Britain are locked in a dire struggle across four continents; America is independent;  General Napoleon has swept to victory in Egypt and is at the very gates of the Red Sea, his eyes firmly set on England’s Indian possessions.

At this crucial juncture, the English Resident at Hyderabad falls head over heels in love with the very aristocratic, very beautiful, very young, very orthodox Shia Muslim and therefore very, very forbidden Khairunnisa, throwing two worlds into political turmoil and putting the closest British alliance in India, and thus their very existence on the subcontinent, in jeopardy. Naturally, five hundred pages later, it all ends tragically for the English beau and his bride, and the orphaned children of the unfortunate union are dragged away across half the world to be brought up in regency England, never again to set eyes on the land of their birth.

Old Hyderabad, circa 1905 (from Vlas Mikhailovich Doroshevich «East and War»). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

This is, and isn’t, the story of the book under review. Underlying the hype and histrionics is a tale that, in many ways, is even more fascinating than that of star-crossed love. It is one of the coming together and commingling of two cultures; of stiff-upper-lipped pukkah sahibs ‘going native’, wearing Indian clothes, smoking hookahs, speaking fluent Persian and Hindustani, growing luxuriant mustaches, making Indian friends, appreciating mushairas and nautch, having Indian concubines and even wives, fathering half-Indian children, converting to Islam or Hinduism, blending in as all invading cultures had before them… as Dalrymple points out, what is surprising is not that this happened (according to the book, one in three Englishmen in 18th century India were involved with one or more Indian women) but that it wasn’t more widespread, and that it isn’t talked about very much: “from the wider perspective of world history, what is much odder and much more inexplicable is the tendency of the late 19th century British to travel to, and rule over, nearly a quarter of the globe, and yet remain resolutely untouched by virtually all the cultures with which they came into contact.”

Dalrymple’s real story plots the course of the changing English attitudes towards their colonial subjects between the 18th and the 19th centuries. From the time of the Governor Generalship of Lord Wellesley, “India was no longer a place to embrace and to be transformed by; instead it was a place to conquer and transform.” Hobnobbing with natives, living lives in a way that was deemed too similar to theirs, counting natives as friends and definitely as family – none of this was acceptable behavior any longer, and Anglo-Indians with even a spot of non-white blood were severely disadvantaged in English circles. Mixed ancestry wasn’t exactly welcomed in Indian circles either. There is also the matter of social class: casual liaisons with native women of a lower class did not raise eyebrows, but neither side considered it cricket for an English officer to have an affair with a lady of standing.

White Mughals is more than a portrait, it is a palimpset. Superimposed on these two storylines is yet another one – the overarching one of life in general in fin de siecle Hyderabad between the Mughal Empire and the British Raj. Piecing together details from copious volumes of personal and official correspondence of European travellers, travelogues and diaries, Ghulam Hussain Khan’s Gulzar-e-Asafiya, Mir Abdul Lateef Shushtari’s Tuhfat-al-alam, and dozens of other sources, Dalrymple is at his best when he describes places as they must have looked in those days. Shushtari, an aristocratic Irani who traveled to India at the time, wrote a not too flattering account of the Nizam’s kingdom: “To survive in Hyderabad you need four things: plenty of gold, endless hypocrisy, boundless envy and the ability to put up with parvenu idol-worshippers who undermine governments and overthrow old families.” (So, not a lot has changed in all these years). But Dalrymple clearly has a much higher opinion. Lovingly, and backed by precise research, he recreates the Hyderabad of the festivities and ceremonies during the Muharram holidays, the Hyderabad of the narrow inner gullies, the water fountains and private mangrove parks with peacocks and deer, the flourishing grand bazaar outside the Char Minar. He also describes Calcutta, Madras and Masulipatnam, but with less affection. People with any connection whatsoever to the old city of Hyderabad will find it eminently worth their while to read this book, but others have good reason to read it as well.

“Diaries,” says Dalrymple, ” and especially travel diaries, often reveal as much about the writer as the place of person written about.” This is equally true of histories and historians. White Mughals tells us quite a bit about Dalrymple, who, like his protagonist, has decided to devote a significant portion of his life in India. Based on the evidence, it is hard for me not to like him or to agree with his warmly liberal politics.

“At a time when respectable academics talk of a Clash of Civilizations and when East and West, Islam and Christianity, appear to be engaged in another major confrontation,” writes Dalrymple, and this is in 2002, mind, “this unlikely group of expatriates provides a timely reminder that it is indeed very possible – and has always been possible – to reconcile the two worlds.”

In addition to being a love story, a political thriller, an espionage drama and a slice-of-historical-life vignette, the White Mughals is a parable for our times, and a paean to racial and religious reconciliation.

What’s in a name, you say? Well, for one, some are more important than others. William Shakespeare’s, for instance, is a name that has launched a thousand books, movies, papers, theses, articles, university courses and lecture series. Marjorie Garber, who has made a very successful career out of popularizing Shakespeare at Yale and Harvard, lists 28 pages full of ‘Suggestions for Further Reading’ at the end of her book, thus establishing it as an introductory text to Shakespeare’s plays as well as to the plethora of literature surrounding them.

This isn’t my first Shakespeare-expounding treatise – a few years ago, I read Harold Bloom‘s Invention of the Human (reviewed here) just before I read the plays themselves. It was Bloom who helped me wade through the plays (like a ghostly Virgil  leading Dante through the circles of Hell, only in a good way) - and now, my familiarity with the plays, in turn, has helped me navigate Marjorie Garber’s book. In general, Bloom’s views were more extreme, and he expressed them with more superlatives and bombast, and he brooked no doubt or opposition to his views. Garber, on the other hand, is more comfortable with ambiguity, is tolerant of opposing views, and treats the plays as ‘living works of art’ that can and must be interpreted differently with every passing generation. “The ambivalence and ambiguity that emerge from a reading or staging of the play,” for Garber, “are not a sign of its failure, but rather of its signal success. The play produces upon its audience the effect that it also instates and describes in its characters.”

Scenes from the Hindi film Angoor, which is, after all, Shakespeare...(courtesy filmnirvana.com)

Therefore, rather than to try and guess the intentions and argue the morality of William Shakespeare the 17th century man from the vantage point of 20th century society (was he anti-Semitic in Merchant of Venice, racist in Othello, chauvinistic in The Taming of the Shrew, or imperialist in The Tempest?), she takes the plays for exactly what they are – stage productions to entertain an Elizabethian and Jamesian audience – and concentrates on the characters (and their relationships), the language, the structure of the plays, the historical backdrops, and a few familiar themes across plays – cross-dressing women, or in general, women who talk about acting like men (Garber never fails to remind us at every such point that all female roles were played, in that age, by cross-dressing boys), madness (King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth) which she explains rather nicely as a dramatic device that allows the victim to speak the truth - and be disbelieved; and the recurrence of certain character types across plays - for instance, she points out how Iago, Richard III, Bolingbroke, Hotspur, Prince Hal, Octavius Caesar, and Edmund are identical in  that they are all pragmatic, uncompromising and coldblooded men of action, while Richard II, Anthony, King Lear, Henry IV and Edgar are all thinkers and romantics, people with a conscience, who talk incessantly (and brilliantly) but don’t do an awful lot. (Hamlet, she says, is a bit of both; he soliloquises throughout the first half, but has no delusions about himself or anyone else, and when he finally gets to work in the second, he is as much a man of action as anyone else)

Sprinkled throughout Garber’s text are tidbits of interesting historical trivia. For instance, that Henry VI Part 2 was initially published as ‘The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster’ (possibly making Henry VI Part 1 the world’s first prequel ); that the Globe Theater burnt down during the first staging of Henry VIII; that there were very few history plays before 1588, when the Spanish Armada was defeated by English ships, but nearly 200 were written and staged between then and the turn of the century, an indication of the new, growing nationalist spirit sweeping through the country.

For Garber, knowledge of the context is indispensable for an appreciation of the text. Her only pet peeve (unlike Bloom, Garber doesn’t have a long list of dislikes) is people who quote Shakespeare from a book or website of quotations, without any context or having read the plays themselves. She warns them about Shakespeare’s tendency to put quotable platitudes into the mouths of characters whose actions don’t actually fit the words they speak. We tend to forget (or ignore, or not know) that it was the villainous Cassius who pioneered the ‘lean and hungry look‘, the murdering Macbeth who was first described as being ‘full of the milk of human kindness’, the shamelessly immoral Iago who protests,’he who steals my purse steals trash…but he who filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed‘, and it was the pompous, prolix Polonius who first declared that brevity is the soul of wit. And when Juliet sighs,  ‘What is in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,’ she realizes what her modern echoers don’t – that a name is, in fact, all-important (and so, she says, wherefore art thou Romeo? Which of course means, why -not where, as commonly misconceived- why are you Romeo, and not of some other name). By not knowing the context, we risk conveying the opposite of what we mean, at least to knowledgeable and pedantic listeners. The joke would then be on the unwitting quoter, insists Garber. Sadly, few – far too few – would know Shakespeare’s original intentions well enough to snigger with her. Besides, a cogent case could be made that it is not Juliet or Iago or Lady Macbeth who is being quoted, nor even Shakespeare, but that over time, these aphorisms have become part of the fabric of our culture and of language itself, and have dusted off their original context long ago.

A writer’s greatest achievement is when his words cease to be his alone, and become idioms that belong to the world at large; as public memory fades of him as the original craftsman of those aphorisms, so, Phoenix-like, does he emerge as an immortal author of language itself.

What is in the name, I wonder again. Why is this book called ‘Shakespeare After All’? Perhaps it is because Garber talks about something that we are – or should be - all familiar with, and should not see as a distant, obscure object (as in, it’s only Shakespeare, after all). Or perhaps it is because she attempts to explain the marvels in the text by pointing to the genius of the writer (as in, don’t be too surprised that it is brilliant – after all, it is Shakespeare, you know). But above all, I think, Garber means to talk about Shakespeare’s relevance in today’s world; I’d like to believe that Garber means to talk of Shakespeare After All These Centuries. In doing this, she is ultimately in complete agreement with Bloom’s conclusion as well: that Shakespeare is modern – incredibly, unbelievably modern – in language and characterization, and this is largely because in many ways, it was because of him that we speak and think like we do.

I have been assured by reliable sources familiar with the matter that Video killed the Radio Star. Opinions differ, however, on who killed the Video Star – Robbie Williams blames Reality,  Jay Leno is more specific and points the needle of suspicion directly at Jersey Shore, but Drop Dead, Gorgeous  makes out a persuasive and very loud, if not particularly coherent, case that it was actually the Internet that perpetrated the foul deed. While investigations are ongoing, I think the Internet is at the very least what the police call a Person of Interest, because one thing is dead certain: the Internet has ‘previous’ in this regard (as I believe the industry phrase goes). The Internet, in fact, is wanted for questioning in the sordid matter of the demise of an entire genre of books, and so would have to produce a cast iron alibi in order to avoid being Rounded Up as a Usual Suspect.

The Video Star death, though undoubtedly a celebrity case, means very little to me: this post is about the other crime. I own several of these butchered books, these corpse-like corpuses, these tomes fit for tombs. They are dictionaries, travel books, restaurant guides, even a bookful of Beatles lyrics; books whose position of pre-eminence in my mental scheme of things has been severely compromised by the advent of Google. Leonard Maltin‘s 1999 Movie & Video Guide and Halliwell’s Who’s Who in the Movies languish lifelessly on my shelves, done in by iMDB. And then there is the book under review, a cut above the rest mentioned in the intellectual stakes, but rendered redundant with equal ruthlessness by Wikipedia.

The Internet as mass murderer - courtesy io9.com

These Henchmen of the Internet have employed two weapons in this war of extermination. The first is their ability to update content dynamically, which print media can’t. Restaurant guides are a case in point, as I am sure any of you would testify who have ever landed up armed with great expectations and a well-thumbed guide at the address of a purported purveyor of the best pierogi outside of Poland, only to find that it has long been supplanted by a cheesy pizza joint run by a fat guy named Charlie. The second weapon is a potent combination of search capabilities and hypertextual linkages, that make it possible for someone to zero in, in a matter of seconds, on one particular line in a 2000 page book, without the furrowed brows, pursed lips and furious flipping back and forth of yore. We’re all clickers now, not flippers. The Oxford Companion is a victim of the second weapon. With over 2,000 entries from Abortion to Zeus, it is not designed to be read from cover to cover at a sitting, or even a dozen sittings, but to be referred to and linked with other pieces of information. These, unfortunately, are activities that it cannot perform with the same felicity with which the Internet can.

Never mind. Meticulously put together by a team of 300 scholars under the editorial team of Hornblower and Spawforth and presented in alphabetical order, this is a splendid, staggering, awe-inspiring labor of love. The tone is authoritarian, informative and never dry, whether while tackling biographical subjects like Sophocles or Hannibal or mythological ones like Oedipus or Heracles, or even when commenting on other aspects of civilization, like housework, coinage and agrarian law. Sad but true, that only die-hard afficionados of classical studies, and other assorted utterly jobless types, especially ones with dodgy internet connections, will consider it a worthwhile pastime to reach out once in a while for this weighty volume and rummage through its pages in aimless search of information about the life of Cleisthenes or the role of sacrifice in Roman religion. Interesting, that schoolkids these days would rush, not to this book but to Wikipedia, to settle arguments regarding social attitudes towards homosexuality in ancient Greece. (Of course, the Wikipedia article in question dutifully names Hornblower, Simon and Spawforth, Antony as sources, but that’s besides the point). Incredibly fascinating, that the the Oxford University Press, an organization associated with the most rigorous pursuits of knowledge since the days of William Caxton and the first printed books, will soon be trumped by the new-fangled science of crowdsourced content. In balance, this democratization of knowledge is a very good thing, but instead of a few elitist people knowing a few esoteric things (but knowing them from the experts and so knowing them thoroughly), we now have a huge number of people knowing a huge number of things, but not with the same level of certainty, because you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet, even on Wikipedia. So there’s much that we’ve gained in this process, but we’ve paid a price as well.

Regardless of whether the change is for the good or the bad, one thing is certain. Most deaths are a pity, but some are genuine tragedies. The very thought of this book going out of print, and over a generation or so, ceasing to exist even in public memory – to me, that thought is heartbreaking. It feels as if an entire civilization is about to crumble and disappear into ashes and dust – and I don’t mean the Greek or Roman ones.

Like most other people on Earth, Borges had a fascination for fantasy; like most other librarians, he had a compulsion for cataloguing; like most other academicians, he felt obliged to scrupulously cross-reference his sources; but like most other philosophers, he recognized the futility of attempting to prepare an exhaustive list of an infinity of things. And like most other great story-tellers, Borges was a great liar.

The most striking thing about the skilfully mendacious is that almost everything they tell you is perfectly true. Most of it is what you already know to be true, and you can ascertain the veracity of the rest by looking up the sources that they diligently provide. It is only when they have lulled you thus into blind credulity that they slip in the little invention that looks indistinguishable from the rest but which you wouldn’t dream of checking up on.

This is always the case with Borges, except that he doesn’t beguile his readers into gullibility as much as bludgeon them into belief with his encyclopedic knowledge of the literature, mythology and philosophy from around the world. He can quote from Homer and Horace, the Torah, the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, the Book of the Dead (both Egyptian and Tibetan), the Eddas, the Upanishads, from Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes, and also from Poe and Chesterton. But for all the world’s wisdom pouring out of his works, the best thing  about Borges’ fiction is his wildfire imagination - his experiments with truths, half-truths and untruths in different proportions. Once, in Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, he had invented a single fictitious entry in an out-of-print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Here, he gives us an entire encyclopedia of imaginary beings.

Iungentur iam grypes equius, said Servius, and in time, this is what it became...The hippogriff, as imagined by JK Rowling (Courtesy www.harrypotter.wikia.com)

At the very outset, Borges declares:

 The title of this book would justify the inclusion of Prince Hamlet, the point, the line, the plane, the hypercube, all generic nouns, and perhaps, each one of us and the divinity as well. In sum, virtually the entire Universe. We have however abided by that which is immediately suggested by the phrase ‘imaginary beings’, and have compiled a volume of the strange creatures that man’s fantasy has engendered throughout time and space.

So it is just an anthology of strange creatures created across cultures and history. Or is it? If there’s anything Borges has taught us, it is that there are several levels of imagination and reality (I am thinking of The Circular Ruins, and the Golem). Beyond the imaginary lies the imagined to be imaginary – in addition to the categories he does mention in the quote above, I am almost certain that there is one more kind of imaginary being included in the title of the book: one not merely collected by Borges from the writings of others, but invented by him for the occasion. Is it the A Bao A Qu? The borametz? The fastitocalon? The zaratan? Or maybe the bizarre fantasy creatures that he insists were created by Poe, Kafka, Swedenborg, CS Lewis, Lotze or Etienne Bonnot de Condillac? Surely – surely! – he made up the Lamed Wufniks. And I refuse to believe in this creature, even as an imaginary being:

“Among the fish of the region is the Upland Trout, which builds its nests on trees, flies pretty well, and is afraid of water”

Or maybe the animals are all bona fide (apparently they are, every one of them, or at least as bona fide as imaginary creatures can get), but he only lies about the sources he quotes. Maybe there is just one line out of place in the whole book, a private joke that will remain unexplained for posterity – with Borges, we will never know. He revels in quoting classical sources for everything – sources that the casual reader is unlikely to verify. Lesser writers may use a hippogriff in their stories; only Borges can trace its origins to a line in Virgil, a Latin epigram attributed to Servius, and a creature mentioned in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which he proceeds to quote extensively.

In fact, the more commonly known the creature is, the more pains Borges takes to dig out its entire history for our benefit. The Hydra, he tells us, finds mention in Diodorus, Apollodorus, and, of course, Robert Graves; the Dragon in Pliny, Homer, St. Augustine and Konrad von Gesner; and as for the Phoenix, Borges trots out Herodotus, Tacitus, Pliny, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Pellicer, Quevedo, Milton, Lactantius, Tertullian, St. Ambrose and Cirilus of Jerusalem as our primary sources for information about the fire-breathing scaly beast of legend. Is Pellicer even a real name? (Apparently, yes) And when Borges says Lactantius mentions it in a particular chapter of a particular work, how can we be sure that it isn’t in a different chapter? And was this Cirilus from Jerusalem at all, and not from Jericho? (nope – Jerusalem it is)

The liar’s perfect trick is to fool you into calling his bluff when he is actually telling the truth. Or is it? I have heard that ancient cartographers would guard their works from plaguirization by introducing an inconsequential untruth into it: a minor river whose course has been diverted a few miles from its real path, a tiny speck of a village that does not exist in reality, a stetch of a certain road between two towns missing completely from the map. This feature would be known only to the author and to his publisher, and anyone who copied the author’s work verbatim and passed it off as his own, could easily be found out. Thus, it was this tiny falsehood that governed and protected the larger truth, and it would be the cartographer’s greatest achievement, the finest expression of his imagination and his art in a life devoted to mindless reproduction of reality, and yet, tragically, it would be an achievement that he could never discuss with others, a secret that would die with him.

I never did get to the bottom of where Borges’ trademark deception lay in this book. Perhaps there wasn’t any, and if so, he has still managed to deceive me, by convincing me that he had hidden at least one untruth in the book. Or perhaps the deception wasn’t in the book as much as on its cover page. Who is his mysterious co-author, Margarita Guerrero? A comprehensive search of the internet yielded dozens of Margarita Guerreros, but the only one that is remotely a possibility is an Argentinian dancer and photographer whose real name was Grete Stern - and her only connection with Borges seemed to be that she photographed him once. Is her co-authorship then, Borges’ contribution to the collection?

Over the last 25 centuries or more, the ancient schools of Varanasi must have taught millions of students, immersing them, not just in the Ganga, but also in the knowledge of classical religious and secular Samskrut texts. Kshiti Mohan Sen was one such student at Varanasi during the closing years of the 19th century. It wasn’t uncommon for young men from distinguished Bengali families of that era to pursue scholarly proficiency in every field, and while most went on to become lawyers, doctors and politicians of repute, there were several whose patriotic inclinations led them on a quest to know more about their own country’s history and culture. More unconventional than most, Kshiti Mohan proceeded to augment his studies in Varanasi with extensive travel around rural India, acquiring in the process, a solid grounding in folk literature, legends, songs and oral traditions – at a time when they were unfashionable in intellectual urban circles. In this manner, he became a formidable expert in all aspects of Hinduism – its regional and class-based variations, its past and present manifestations, its urban and rural forms.

Since Hinduism has always been a composite entity, meaning many different things to many people, and not just something set down in a definitive book which is interpreted by a single priesthood, Kshiti Mohan’s is perhaps the only true method to master Hinduism, to know it formally from end to end – as opposed to having an intuitive but partial knowledge of it, which a billion people do today. It is surely no coincidence that the legend of the Six Blind Men and the Elephant is at root an Indian legend, occurring in Jain, Buddhist, Sufi and Hindu folklore. Perhaps the legend even refers to Hinduism’s six schools of philosophy. No matter – trunk to tail, the Hindu elephant has few secrets from Sen.

While adequate information is not easily available, I believe this slim volume was published either postumously, or towards the very end of his life, well after his stint as Vice-Chancellor of Viswa-Bharathi University at Santiniketan.

The Six Blind Men of Hindostan (Courtesy Wikimedia, From Martha Adelaide Holton & Charles Madison Curry, Holton-Curry readers, Rand McNally & Co. (Chicago), p. 108.)

What did I gain from the reading of this book? Not a whole lot by way of new knowledge, as it is a very basic introduction aimed at foreigners with no prior background. But it was made worthwhile, nevertheless, by Sen’s fascinating reports of philosophical conversations with itinerant Baul singers, his interesting historical vignettes, and a handful of historical hypotheses about the evolution of the religion. I particularly liked the part where he traces the trajectory of Hinduism from Vedic polytheism to Upanishadic monotheism to Puranic polytheism to Advaita monism to Bhakti-era polytheism. As a result, today’s Hindu can believe in idolatrous polytheism while simultaneously believing in a single omnipresent formless God-spirit; his belief in heaven and hell coexists comfortably with that in re-incarnation. History, says Sen, can explain these paradoxes. By providing a historical basis to these changes, Sen manages to convey what we don’t usually realize: that most religions, and definitely Hinduism, are not static entities, and in order to understand what they are, you need to understand the chaotic and creative process of interactions with other schools of thought by which they evolve.

For a long time in its history, Hinduism remained ignorant of the existence of other religions, and even ignorant of itself as a religion (manifesting as a set of common beliefs and customs instead). But then foreigners came in contact with it and named it, and in doing so, ‘created’ it as a single religion. Hinduism has remained acutely aware of foreign religions ever since – transforming itself by borrowing liberally from each of them (from Buddhism, Jainism, and Islam), and influencing them, in turn. Sen delights in documenting these influences – I found it significant that the cover page of my edition of this book depicts Vishnu flying on Garuda, a Mughal-style painting that is part of a collection exhibited in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin.

It is curious and unfortunate that the educated yuppy class in today’s India, a class that has no excuse whatsoever for ignorance, is perhaps most ignorant about the history of Hinduism – and about the man who devoted his life to knowing it. I confess I woul never have heard of him or this book if not for their mention in The Argumentative Indian, the best-seller penned by his celebrity grandson, Amartya. But I am not alone in this. Acharya Kshiti Mohan Sen is not a household name in India these days, even among those who (unlike me) profess a deep and abiding faith and who wear their Hinduism angrily on their sleeve. Perhaps it is just as well – he comes across in his book as inclusivist and liberal, and deeply respectful of other cultures, and I somehow feel he may not quite have enjoyed their attention.

Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize. Paul Erdos and Andrew Wiles never won the Fields Medal. Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar – and Italo Calvino ranks pretty high on my list of noteworthy writers never to have got the Nobel Lit nod. My first reaction to Calvino – not just the first time I read a book of his (If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, in November 1998) but every time I begin one of his books – is one of sudden delight. After the first time, I have always had high expectations from his books, and not once have they failed to exceed them. This is because Calvino is possibly the best teller of stories there has ever been, with the possible exception of the anonymous authors of A Thousand and One Nights and of the Mahabharata.

A different sort of Cosmic Comic...Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

If you think that was a tad hyperbolic, well, it probably was (I have been assured by reliable sources that excess necessarily succeeds) but consider the book under review. It is as if someone threw down a challenge that it would be impossible to write a collection of stories of literary merit, each of which starts with a bizarre prefacing paragraph like:

The planets of the solar system, G. P. Kuiper explains, began to solidify in the darkness, through the condensation of a fluid, shapeless nebula. All was cold and dark. Later the Sun began to become more concentrated until it was reduced almost to its present dimensions, and in this process the temperature rose and rose, to thousands of degrees and the Sun started emitting radiations in space.

Or

The first vertebrates who, in the Carboniferous period, abandoned aquatic life for terrestrial, descended from the osseous, pulmonate fish whose fins were capable of rotation beneath their bodies and thus could be used as paws on the Earth.

Or

When the galaxies become more remote, the rarefaction of the universe is compensated for by the formation of further galaxies composed of newly created matter. To maintain a stable median density of the universe it is sufficient to create a hydrogen atom every 250 million years for 40 cubic centimeters of expanding space.

Or that someone challenged Calvino to write about characters with names like Qfwfq, (k)yK and G’d(w)ⁿ, who lived at the time of the Big Bang (and so were all squashed into a single point) or when the stars were moving away from each other, or when the planets were forming – clearly unimaginable characters existing in impossible circumstances, for most of the story-writing world, but not for Calvino.

Calvino uses all of infinite Time and Space as backdrops for his tales, and shapes characters out of wisps of ethereal, eternal  material; but then he gives them thoughts and emotions along with claws and tails. Several of them have not yet evolved eyes, but they feel jealousy, insecurity and shame, they love and fear, and some of them have a powerful sense of beauty and identity. Incredibly, he makes them credible. However incongruous the situation and whatever weird species the characters belong to, Calvino can grab your attention and your empathy, and hold them for as long as he likes, and he always – always – has something interesting to say about the human condition.

 Calvino’s overarching theme (I think) is that of a growing sense of loneliness and alienation in a rapidly expanding world, of faint and futile hope of finding a kindred soul among billions of strangers, of the sensation of being torn apart from everyone else by violent forces. In other words, Calvino uses modern science to weave fables relevant to modern life.

Amalgamating astronomy and philosophy, fusing farce with fantasy and physics with psychology, Calvino’s collection is a glorious confusion of categories.  Is it science? Is it fiction? Is it science fiction? Is it absurd? Is it profound? All I can confirm is that it is aptly titled: it mixes the cosmically sublime with the comically ridiculous. It is pure Calvino, like every one of his books – of which I understand there are only 17. I despair of the day in the not too distant future that I will run out of Calvinos to read. How I wish he’d continued to live and write beyond the age of 62. And maybe then – who knows? He may even have won that Nobel Prize.

Alabi’s World (Price, Richard)

 I have come to understand how societies decline or come into being; and to realize that those great historical upheavals, which, when one reads about them in the textbooks, appear to be the outcome of anonymous forces working in profound obscurity, can also, in a moment of lucidity, be brought about by the vigorous determination of a handful of talented young people.

• - Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

“The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without  history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments…”
- TS Eliot, Little Gidding

The years between 1760 and 1820 are a historian’s delight. They encompass the careers of Napoleon Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Catherine the Great and Simon Bolivar. Wars were waged between mighty nations, treaties signed, maps redrawn. Entire continents were lost by superpowers, even while others were being colonized. Two bloody revolutions shook the very foundations of society, as did a bloodless (Industrial) one, which exploded to life during this very period with Crompton’s Spinning Mule and Watt’s Steam Engine. Science made gigantic strides during these years, with seminal contributions from Lavoisier, Gauss, Fourier, and Laplace. Rousseau’s Social Contract saw the light of day at this time. So did Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. So did the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the United States Bill of Rights. Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn were in their pomp during this period; so was Francisco Goya. William Wordsworth was in full flow, as was Johann Wolfgang Goethe. The New York Stock Exchange came into existence in this era. The London Stock Exchange quickly followed suit. Lloyd’s of London was instituted in Cornhill – and the world of business was never the same again. In short, much of what we know and are today had its origins in this time period.

Nevertheless, Richard Price turns his back on all this action, and trains his spyglass instead on to a tiny community at the outer edge of nowhere. Suriname is a small country – in fact, the smallest independent country in South America – with a population of less than half a million souls. This tiny population is incredibly diverse, and includes people of Amerindian, Dutch, African, Indian, Indonesian, Chinese, Jewish, Lebanese and Brazilian origin. Barely a tenth of the total is made up of Surinamese Maroons.  One of the six clans of Maroons are the Saramaka, numbering some 22,000 individuals today, and it is a small portion of their history, roughly covering the period between the years 1760 and 1820, that is traced by Price in this extraordinary book.

Field Work: Funeral Ceremony of a Saramaka chief, 1989 - courtesy www.RichandSally.net

Mind you, the Saramaka are an interesting people. They are descended from African slaves who escaped from the coastal plantations of Dutch colonists in the 17th and 18^th centuries and fled to the dense jungles of interior Suriname, where they organized themselves into villages and clans, and fought a bitter war of attrition against the colonists, eventually winning the right to operate a semi-independent state-within-a-state. They spent the next two centuries in a state of uneasy peace with the Dutch government in Paramaribo, never assimilating with the Dutch or Creole way of life, and according to many accounts, continue to have their own unique customs and culture – and continue to be a severely marginalized jungle community even after Suriname won its independence from the Dutch. The years covered in this book are the first sixty of their sovereign existence in the jungle villages, during which many of their customs, traditions, superstitions, folklore, language and identity evolved.

As interesting as the story is, I can safely say, along with a vast majority of mankind, that the Saramakas of Suriname have had little or no impact on our life today. It is therefore difficult for me (and probably you) to get excited by long and complicated genealogies of Saramaka families, detailed descriptions of their interminable funeral ceremonies, or the many mundane miseries of Moravian missionaries as they struggled, with little success, to overcome the diseases, the searing heat, and the stubborn refusal of most Saramakans to abandon their heathen beliefs.

Yet there are three good reasons for reading this book.

The first is because of the novelty of its form, and the questions that the form raises, about the nature of history. Any good historian consults multiple sources for his story, from which he chooses those that are consistent with each other and his theme. Price has multiple sources for each story, too – but he tries to present it from each perspective in turn, even if that takes away from the smoothness and consistency of the narrative. He uses four primary sources – the oral story-telling tradition among the Saramakas, the diligent journals kept by the 18^th century missionaries who lived in the villages, the journals of the Dutch government officials who negotiated with the Saramaka, and Price’s own imagination, which is based on the knowledge gained during his extensive stay and field work among them, and which he uses liberally to fill in gaps in the many accounts and  to weave them into a narrative.  Thus we are told of not only what the missionaries thought of the maroons and what the maroons thought of the missionaries, but also what the missionaries thought the maroons thought about the missionaries, and so forth. The author’s protests to the contrary, this book is strongly influenced by the postmodernist idea that all discourses are equally valid, and that truth emerges only when you superimpose all perspectives.

Should history be written this way? Is truth not the main concern of history? And if so, is it not better for a historian to present several opinions of each event, Rashomon- style, and allow the reader to ascertain the truth after inspecting them?

In my opinion, it is certainly an improvement over the much lazier approaches of a) going with the victor’s (or the historian’s compatriot’s) version of each story, or b) ignoring views that inconveniently contradict the historian’s own pet theory of what happened.

In balance, however, I find myself agreeing with Eric Hobsbawm (whose ‘On History’ discusses Price’s book and historiographical style in depth) that to merely present all views is, in some sense, to abrogate one’s responsibility as an expert. Sure, there is no single version of the truth – but like a doctor, or a policeman, or an auditor, a historian has the moral responsibility to be knowledgeable, to analyze the different versions, and decide for his readers what exactly happened. In my (possibly unfashionable) opinion, a historian simply has to take sides.

On the other hand, one could argue that history is not a collection of simple facts, and that “what exactly happened” cannot be understood except as an multi-vocal, multi-perspectival cacophony. And on the other, other hand, making sense of this cacophany is exactly what you pay a historian for, otherwise the entire lot of them could be replaced by the internet. And so on. Anyone who is interested in this debate will find ‘Alabi’s World’ an intriguing experiment.

Two, the book will fascinate those who are interested in the evolution of culture and traditions. Robert Graves hypothesises, in his Greek Myths, that when two cultures suddenly begin interacting closely with each other, societies go into churn, and it is out of these epic conflicts that entire systems of mythologies emerge. For most societies on earth, sadly, that point of origin is lost in the remote mists of time, and we may never know them for sure. Here, however, is that most uncommon of things, a recorded social experiment, where, by a curious sequence of events, a new race has been created and their stories documented as legend. Studying them could help understand how human attitudes and beliefs evolved in other societies as well. For just one instance, Price tells us that the Saramakan religious syncretism and even incorporation of Christian components into their religion is a natural survival response of an politically weaker culture to the proselytizing efforts of a politically stronger one. I wonder if the similarly tolerant and syncretic Hindu faith became that way as a survival tactic when confronted with wave after wave of external aggressors intent on conversion.

Finally, this is a history of a ‘people without history’, as Eric Wolf called them. What we generally read as world history is notoriously Eurocentric. Convention has it that Napoleon, Nelson, Washington, Jefferson, Catherine and Bolivar made history and did important things, while people like the Saramaka didn’t do historical things, and so had somewhat inferior identities. As Europe colonized the world, the European version of what subjects were appropriate for history books colonized the world of ideas, but it is time now for some of us to reclaim our identities and our own idea of national history, which for many of us is ultimately about oral traditions and folktales passed on from one generation to the next. It isn’t right for the writers of history on the winners’ side to determine who was right and who wasn’t, and it isn’t right for them to decide what is historical and what isn’t. Alabi’s world is every bit as important to the Saramaka, as George Washington’s to the Americans.

And if you are neither American nor Saramakan, but you call yourself a student of world history, maybe you should read both.