The Rage Against History

It is only rarely that this web log hosts an article by another author, but the following article by Emeritus Professor Clive Kessler, an Australian academic, is worthy of reposting here because it articulates much of the thesis proposed by the present author in various of his previous posts and writings elsewhere. This thesis is the 'Rage Against History' thesis which Professor Kessler uses to analyse contemporary Mahometan jihadism and which the present author has used as a more general tool for understanding Islamic/West tensions in all their manifestations. Professor Kessler's position is correct, as far as it goes, but to it we must add the observation that Islamic/West conflicts are, in reality, "a battle raging in a single system", as the Algerian scholar Hichem Bait once remarked. Much of Western history has been a "rage against history" too. Indeed, it is exactly this rage that has shaped modernity. It extends, that is to say, far deeper, and with many more subtleties and permutations, than Professor Kessler intimates in this article. 

The Crusades, for instance, were a "rage against history" in defiance of the fact that Islamic civilisation was, in the Middle Ages, vastly superior to Christian civilisation on almost every count. Christians found such an historical situation intolerable. Thus the rage. But now, as Kessler right observes, the tables have been turned. He coins the useful term "post-Christian Christendom" in this article - for it was by transcending its own Christian identity that "Christendom" (i.e. Europe) was able to outmanoeuvre the Mahometans and set history right again - an extraordinary ironical outcome. The 'Rage Against History' occurs when a civilisation - Christian or Islamic in these instances - feels that there is a profound dissonance between earth and heaven, when history and destiny are at odds. How could God tolerate the Mahometan Infidels - followers of the blasphemous pretender, Mahomet - ruling the world and humiliating the Christians? The Crusades, the Reformation, many upheavals in European history are a rage-filled response to this travesty. 

But, as Professor Kessler correctly observes, this same rage now infects the Islamic world, for Christian Europe triumphed, the great empires of Islam fell into terminal decline, and now the Muslims feel aggrieved that heaven and earth, history and destiny, are out of step. Jihadism is exactly a rage-filled response to that. How could Allah tolerate the Christian Infidels - idolators who worship a man as a God!, or who in their modern decadence worship no god at all - ruling the world and humiliating the blessed Ummah? Is it not written that the Prophet's Ummah is destined to be the best of peoples? The question for contemporary Mahometans is how to set history right again. This is the context - the 'Rage Against History ' - in which the jihadism phenomenon needs to be seen. It is a mirror image - an historical recoil - of the same phenomenon that drove the 'Cordoba Martyrs' in the Middle Ages, when Christians in Spain on suicide missions would walk into mosques and denounce the Prophet of Islam, or when Crusaders, marching overland from Europe, were reduced to cannabalism such was their rage against the Saracens. 

In his own work the present author has expanded the 'Rage against History' to a general thesis of Islamic/west interaction. He is happy to find the consonant views of Professor Kessler, who gives the thesis a more limited scope and is here concerned with the "national challenge" in Australia. Let it be noted that insightful, intelligent commentary on these matters from academics is very rare. Our universities are now infected with the sort of activism that produces brainless terms like 'Islamophobia'. While there are points in this article with which the present author might disagree, Professor Kessler is a welcome voice of insight into both Islam and history and also a welcome voice against the politically correct academic mindset that is destroying universities and preventing academics - like politicians and other commentators - from offering astute and useful analysis of these issues. 

The article below first appeared in the New Mandala website hosted by the Australian National University and was reprinted by the Australian newspaper. 

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ISLAM CANNOT DISOWN JIHADISTS DRIVEN BY RAGE AGAINST HISTORY

The Ottawa parliament, the Lindt cafe, Charlie Hebdo and so many others, too. These are all separate incidents, but they are all part of the same global phenomenon. They are expressions of a rage against history that lurks within modern Islam and is animating militant Muslims worldwide. It is a rage that has its source within the wounded soul of contemporary Islamic civilisation.

The Muslim religion and its social world have an intensely political tradition. It has always been so, going back to Mohammed’s dual role as prophet and political leader in the original Islamic community in Madina from AD622 to 632. Within a century of Mohammed’s death his small desert polity, in what is now Saudi Arabia, had become a vast transcontinental empire. And in a succession of different political frameworks (“caliphates”), the community of Mohammed’s faithful continued to live in the world on its own founding assumptions.

For 1000 years, Islamic civilisation flourished. Not only able to live in the world on its own terms, it could also set those terms to others who came within its orbit. It was to be accepted by all, lovingly or in obligatory submission. How has the world of Islam justified this to itself?

Religiously, Islam sees itself as the successor to the Abrahamic faiths of ethical, prophetic monotheism. It sees itself as completing Judaism and then Christianity: faiths of the “peoples of the book”, or genuine scripture. Completing, but also repairing and then superseding those earlier revelations, making good their limitations and deficiencies.

What deficiencies? First, those earlier revelations, so mainstream Islam holds, were incomplete. And second, in their human transmission, what God had revealed through them had been distorted and corrupted by its custodians, the rabbis and priests. Islam sees itself as complete because it sees itself, unlike Judaism and Christianity, as equipped with a fully developed social and political blueprint, a divinely prescribed plan for the organisation and political management of society.

For this reason, its mainstream scholars have long held, Islam incorporates and carries forward all that is right and good in Judaism and Christianity. And what is not good or authentic, Islam rejects; what it has rejected is simply wrong. Obsolete: relics from an earlier era of human spiritual and social evolution.

This was not just religious doctrine; these ideas informed and even defined the historical civilisation founded on Islamic faith. But this attitude or worldview could continue undisturbed only so long as it was not evidently counterfactual. So long as the worldly career of Islamic civilisation remained a success story.

And it was, for 1000 years. Islam survived the challenge of its great trans-Mediterranean civilisational rival, the world of Christendom, withstanding even the era of the Crusades. But eventually it succumbed to what we might call “post-Christian Christendom”, or Europe and the Western world.

The long crisis that the Islamic world, in the form of the Ottoman Empire or caliphate, entered was dramatically signalled at the end of the 18th century by Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt. During the following century, the world of Islam was overwhelmed. Its collapse and humiliation was accomplished by what we now call “modernity” — social, economic, administrative, technical, military, intellectual and cultural. It was defeated and routed by the application of modern attitudes and techniques, born of the Enlightenment and the new scientific revolution, that the European powers commanded and developed and began to deploy ever more thoroughly. And which the world of Islam lacked.

By the late 19th and early 20th century, much of the Islamic world had fallen under European colonial domination. It was dismembered and parcelled out among different Western powers — notably France, Britain, Italy and The Netherlands (also Russia).

No longer able to live in the world on their own terms according to their blueprint, the lands of Islam fell under derivatively foreign legal systems. They ceased to live, wherever they once had, under Islamic law, the Shariah.

This defeat was humiliating. The world of Islam was wounded at its core. This would have been a painful experience for any once-proud but now enfeebled civilisation. But for Islam it was more, and worse, than that. It was more and worse because of its long ­history of worldly success and its conviction of entitlement, an assurance vouchsafed by God, that Islam would forever be in charge.

The sudden lack of congruence or “fit” between this conviction of Islam’s civilisational primacy, with its assurance of enduring political ascendancy, and the abject condition of its lands under colonialism inflicted a deep wound within the heart of the modern Islamic world.

It posed a conundrum: if Islam alone were the completed and perfected religion of God — and if its political completeness was the basis for its long-lasting worldly success, which itself was proof of its religious superiority — then why was it now so comprehensively defeated and impotent? What had gone wrong?

The history of modern Islam has largely been the story of failed attempts to overcome this cognitive dissonance. This has taken many forms. First, religious modernism and reform. Then, fitted with an Islamic face, all of the modern age’s great new ideologies were repackaged and trialled for Muslims in Islamic terms: liberal constitutionalism, nationalism, socialism, secularism, statism and military authoritarianism. All failed to deliver what was hoped of them: a restoration of power and sovereignty and dignity.

Out of their failure came a new but old approach: a return to religion, to the belief that Islam is not the problem but the solution. That Islam has not failed the world’s Muslims but that they have failed Islam, failed to understand and live by it properly. For some, back to the Shariah. For some, even, restore the caliphate, a form of Islamic sovereignty capable of enforcing the Shariah.

This is the basis of the reaffirmation and religious resurgence of Islam during the past half-century — to restore Islam and Muslims to their rightful historical standing. Resurgent Islam, in its benign and also its more activist and militant forms, is the latest attempt to heal this deep wound. This frames the religious and historical consciousness of most believing, loyal and sensitive modern Muslims, moderates and radicals.

Though they may be only a minority, the radical Muslims, or militant Islamists, do not merely feel the pain of this wound. They also seek to act forcefully to “set things right again”, driven by a conviction that “history has taken a wrong turn”. This is the “rage against history”.

The violent restorationists of Islam’s glory may be marginal, even outsiders, to mainstream Islam. But that is no basis for mainstream Islamic society and its leadership to reject and disown them as “not us, and not our problem”.

What the jihadi militants do is done explicitly in the name of Islam. They find, and not capriciously, justification for what they choose to do within the sacred and historical traditions of Islam, within some authentic parts of that tradition at least. And they are responding to and acting on a profound sense of crisis and grievance that lies within the heart of modern Muslim historical experience.

It will simply not do to cut these violent people loose, allowing them to do as they please, by saying “what they do has nothing to do with Islam”. It has everything to do with Islam. There is no other way to explain it . What the violent militants do may have little to do with “Islam as decent, progressive people choose to understand it”. But it exists within, feeds off, and is explicable only within Islam and Islamic terms.

Those Muslims who wish to repudiate the action of the militants must assert themselves emphatically within Islam. And they must assert their control over how Islam is seen by their non-Muslim fellow citizens, over its “brand”.

Simply acting “behind closed doors”, with intra-community diplomacy, will not suffice. True, there is no way this will be solved without Muslims playing the primary role, but this is not just an internal problem. What goes on in the world of Islam today, as recent gruesome events worldwide have repeatedly shown , is everybody’s business.

An adequate Muslim response cannot rest solely on issuing fatwas and similar religious condemnations of the militants and their atrocities as an offence against Islam. What they do is an offence, and much worse, against all of us.

The Islamic community leaders must do more. They must constantly deepen their own and their community’s commitment to modern, liberal, democratic and pluralist values, principles and forms of action. And others, their fellow citizens, have the right to expect and ask this of them.

After the Lindt Cafe and the terrible events in Paris the question must be posed: “And what do we need to do now?” There are two parts to the answer.

One part has to do with Muslims. Nobody wants, or should want, to see our Muslim fellow citizens — as a group, or “picked off” as individuals on public transport or in the street — targeted, scapegoated, vilified, marginalised or isolated. We don’t, or should not, want that to happen to them for their sakes, and also for the sake of Australia. Neither the society as a whole nor any part of it stands to benefit should that kind of division, antagonism and scapegoating occur, or be condoned. So, if people want to do the hashtag “I’ll ride with you”, wave pens or proclaim “Je suis Charlie”, fine. However sentimental and inadequate, it is a nice gesture of inclusion, of human fellow feeling, a good symbolic (and also practical) affirmation of common citizenship and humanity.

But just because these paltry things may make some of us feel good should not persuade us that this is the core of the problem or its principal remedy. The second part of the answer has to do with the faith-based community of Islam.

What this means is that, if we are to try to minimise the occurrence of such episodes, we need to understand them better. To do that, the main task is not to follow the all-too simplistic approach of the “counter-terrorism” and “de-radicalisation” experts who, as social psychologists, treat the problem as basically one of individual psychology (perhaps in a “group context”).

Approaching the problem as if it might be treated in that way appeals to the politicians because it suggests or holds out the hope that some direct remedy or technical fix is available.

But ultimately, the problem here is not one of fragile, malleable — but remediable — individual psychology. It has to do with the Islamic historical tradition: with its inherent tensions, its unresolved problems, with what it finds difficult to acknowledge and resolve within itself.

Whether “legitimately” or not in the eyes of more decent folk, that is where the militant and ­violent activists look to, where they draw their motivation and justification.

It is from their reading (or mis-reading) and their use (or misuse) of Islam’s civilisational transcript that these monsters draw their inspiration, as well as the supposed justification for their appalling ­actions.

If such things happened only rarely, what we all face would be a different matter. But it is not uncommon. It is not even some sort of “groundhog day” affliction, an annual cause of occasionally returning distress.

It has become constant and recurrent: nonstop in Syria and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East such as Yemen, and beyond as with Boko Haram in Nigeria and in Somalia and Kenya, and with the mass slaughter of schoolchildren by the Taliban in Pakistan; and now, all too frequently, it is repeated closer to us, whether in a museum in Belgium, in the Ottawa parliament, in Sydney’s Lindt Cafe or in Paris.

It floods in upon us, like US basketball games or our one-day international cricket matches over the summer. You barely have the time to think about the one that has just happened than there is another one, scarcely distinguishable from its predecessor, demanding your attention. It just goes on.

Parents and communities, including community schools and educators, that have not thought this problem through adequately themselves are in no position to guide and educate their children and younger generations on how to manage this crisis within the Islamic world.

It is the problem of getting a faith community to acknowledge the equivocal and dubious, as well as the glorious and heroic, components of its own heritage.

“Treatment” at the individual level can never succeed unless this deeper, even fundamental, problem of the Islamic faith community in Australia and globally is acknowledged — by Muslims, starting with their educational and moral and political leadership, and by others, notably our nation’s “opinion-leaders” and politicians.

We should and must be welcoming and inclusive towards all our citizens as part of, and who wish to share in, our processes of democratic sociability, including (no more or less than anybody else) our fellow citizens of Islamic religious, historical, cultural and civilisational background.

No more and no less … and with no uniquely reserved “Islamophobia” card to play.

Remember: a phobia is an ungrounded and unfounded, an irrational and an obsessive attitude, a pathology. People these days alas have genuine grounds to feel apprehensive.

So, please, no more using — or putting up with — the catchcry of “Islamophobia” as a specially ­protected moral bludgeon to ­silence all serious, responsible discussion of the Islamic tradition and history.

We are all in this appalling situation together. We must think and act accordingly, our national political life and debates must reflect that fact, and our national political leaders must face the matter squarely and not be content with unhelpful banalities and misleading platitudes.

We should no longer be admonished by a responsible minister that Islam is simply “a religion of peace … and anybody who suggest otherwise is talking arrant nonsense”.

We need far better than that if we are ever to face and overcome this national challenge.

What the British Did For Buddhism

The feet of the Boodha at Boodha Gaya, an iconography that predates physical representations of Boodha Sakyamooni. 

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I would to-day, in these columns, respectfully invite the vast and intelligent British public to forget, for a little while, home weather and home politics, and to accompany me, in fancy, to a sunny corner of their empire... and will also show them how the Indian Government of Her Majesty, supported by their own enlightened opinion, might, through an easy and blameless act of administrative sympathy, render four hundred millions of Asiatics for ever the friends and grateful admirers of England. . .

- Edwin Arnold, 1893

Some splendid years ago the author had the opportunity to visit the magnificent and massive basalt tantric Boodhist complex at Borobador in Java. The story of the complex is a famous one. After the Mahometan conquest of the Indonesian islands, which entailed the savage eradication of both Boodhism and Hindooism in every guise, the great stepped temple at Borobador fell into complete obscurity and was swallowed by jungle and buried beneath volcanic ash. It remained that way for centuries. It was only after the British took control of Java for a brief tenure of colonial rule under Govenor-Gneral Raffles that the temple complex was accidentally rediscovered. British explorers, penetrating the dense jungles of the island, chanced upon the remnants of the temple and thereafter cleared the copious vegetation, tonnes of dust and yards of rubble under which it had been concealed. The Mahometans had no use nor recollection of it. It was British archaeologists who brought this extraordinary architectural gem, an encylopedia of Boodhist iconography in stone - in fact, the largest and most intact Boodhist temple outside of Asia - once again to the light of day. 

The Mahabhodi Temple

An eventuality similar to this, but even more auspicious, also occurred in the Indian state of Bihar, not far from the undistinguished town of Gaya. In 1810, the explorer and geographer Mr. Francis Buchanan, pushing his way through tiger-laden jungles near the river Falgoo, chanced upon a huge abandoned temple that had been devoured and buried by vegetation and silt. It was of no interest to the local Hindoos who could relate very little about it. But Buchanan quickly determined that it was a Boodhist complex from a very early date and he surmised, correctly, that it had been left to ruin after the decline of Boodhism in the Indian subcontinent in the Middle Ages. Indeed, he determined that this was none other than the long lost Mahabodhi Temple, once revered by Boodhists as marking the very place that the Boodha, Sakyamooni, achieved Enlightenment under the Peepel Tree. It had once been a place of Boodhist pilgrimage. Even more, it had once been regarded as the very centre of the Boodhist cosmos, the pivot of the Boodhist world, the axis of Boodhist spirituality. As in Java, the temple had fallen into disuse after the Mahometan invasions had eradicated the Boodhist faith. Neither the Mahometans nor the Brahmins cared for it. It was lost and forgotten.*

(*This is disputed by the Hindoos. They point out that after the departure of the Boodhists from the Gaya region, the local Brahmins gave the temple at least residual occasional care for several centuries.) 

A representation of the Mahabodhi Temple as it was found by Buchanan.

Subsequently, decades later, the British led the archaeological survey of the site and then its restoration. They determined that the temple had been built in the time of Ashoka in the third century BC, which made it one of the earliest surviving examples of Indian religious architecture. From inscriptions, coins and other evidence, they pieced together the history of the place and - with the assistance of Boodhists from Burma - cleared, cleaned and rebuilt it, returning it to its original purpose. A first restoration was somewhat shabbily done, but a second effort led by Sir Arthur Cunningham was more perfect. Cunningham wrote a thorough account of the complex which he published in 1892. His work led the restoration of this sacred place to the Boodhist religion. 

The restored temple. The four corner towers are controversial. Some believe they were not a feature of the original complex. 

Floor plan of the temple complex. 

Unfortunately, though, in law the site belonged to an Indian Mahant, and as soon as the British cleaned up the buildings it was reclaimed by the Hindoos who pretended to be puzzled by its iconography. (There is a nearby Shiva Temple and the Hindoos furthermore attempt to appropriate the Boodha as an incarnation of Vishnoo.)  This situation was what greeted the zealous Ceylonese Neo-Boodhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala who went there on pilgrimage in the late 1800s. Along with the British Theosophists, and the ager support of the Orientalist Mr. Edwin Arnold, he founded a movement to restore the site once more to Boodhism and to remove the Hindoo intruders. Since the Mahant owned the site (part of some 11,000 acres of land he owned around Gaya), and since possession is nine tenths of the law, a protracted legal battle ensued and continued right through until after the end of British rule. In 1949 Hindoos and Boodhists were given equal rights over the site and it was again open to Boodhist pilgrims. This was not, and still is not, an entirely happy situation, but the temple is now also under the protection of UNESCO and so the unimpeded access to it by Boodhist pilgrims is guaranteed.* 

(*Disputes concerning the use of the temple are on-going. There is a Shiva lingham at the site that Boodhist purists seek to have removed. But as the present author saw for himself, the nearby Shiva temple complex is now abandoned. The Boodhist revival has displaced the Hindoos, perhaps unfairly. Boodhists can be difficult.)

Thus here, as in Java, the British colonialists rediscovered and then restored a major site of Boodhist sanctity. The importance of the Mahabodhi Temple for Boodhists can hardly be over stated. This is the very place where the Boodha achieved liberation from the round of existence. In fact, in Boodhist theology, it is said that all Boodhas of every era - past and future - attained liberation at this place. For Boodhists it is synonymous with nirvana. It is the place of ultimate sanctity. It is to Boodhists what Mecca is to Mohametans and what Kashi is to the Hindoo. In this, as in other ways, the British rule of India has allowed the restoration of Boodhism in its historical homeland after the ravages of the Mahometans and the chauvinism of the Hindoos in earlier times. 

The author has been in Boodha Gaya - the small town that now surrounds the Temple - for several days. The weather is warm; the shade of the Peepel Tree is soothing. On the road in is the sign 'Welcome to Bodh Gaya, the Spiritual Centre of the Buddhist World'. It was the British, let it be known, who gave the Boodhist world back its spiritual centre. Some photographs of the temple as it is today are to be viewed below.

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We note that Boodhism, from the outset, was essentially anti-Brahminical. ("Not by birth" - tell it to the Dalai Lama!)

Yours

Harper McAlpine Black

Himalayan Swiss Chalet Gothic

In order to administer their great Empire of enlightened paternalism the British had to meet the formidable challenges of the Indian environment. It is said that the average lifespan of an English gentleman living in Calcutta and working for the East India Company, or later the Raj, was merely two or three monsoons. Evidence of this is plain enough in the Park Street South Cemetery. Grave after grave speaks of men – and many women too – who came to work in India and who died at an early age, usually from malaria or dysentery. The English found the heat and grime and dirt and disease of India almost unbearable.

Accordingly, they had to adopt strategies to ameliorate their situation and to overcome the challenges they faced. One such strategy was the institution of the hill station. In order to escape the conditions of the Indian plains they found cool places in the hills to which they could retreat. These were places, moreover, where they could re-create vestiges of English life as a means of preserving their own institutions, codes of civility and sense of identity amidst the exotic chaos that was India. The British hill stations were tiny enclaves of England transplanted to the cool hills of the Indian sub-continent.

On the plains, the British developed a distinctive architecture. They fused classical (Graeco-Roman) styles with many features adopted from Mahometan buildings. The Moghuls before them had developed imperial public buildings that would remain relatively cool in the scorching summers. The English took some of these features and blended them with their own architecture creating a unique Anglo-Saracen style that can be seen in such buildings as the India Museum – formerly the Royal Asiatic Society building – in Calcutta, and many other examples. Although undoubtedly British and European these buildings have broad porticos and walkways that create shade and cool spaces after the manner of Islamic buildings.

In the hill stations, however, there was no need to appropriate Saracenic styles. The cool environment meant that the British could confine themselves to European architectural modes without exotic oriental elements. In keeping with the function of the hill stations, moreover, these were private rather than public buildings and so there was more scope for individuality and personal expressions of taste and wealth. The challenges were different. There were two main ones. Firstly, the hills tended to be very steep, quite unlike the English landscape. And second, the whole environment was prone to earthquakes from time to time, a danger with which the English were not accustomed. Hill station architecture had to be adapted to these factors.

In the first place, the Victorian gothic cottage or manor house was blended with styles and modes more adapted to steep hills, specifically to Scottish baronial architecture. But this proved to be prone to earthquake. The Scottish baronial building is made of heavy stone and is several floors high. Through tribulation the British learnt that this was not well suited to an earthquake zone. Instead, they also turned to the Swiss chalet and blended elements of Swiss wooden architecture with English gothic styles. Thus they created a distinctive hill station architecture, the so-called Himalayan Swiss Chalet Gothic.

This is the type of architecture that one finds still in the Indian hill stations - Himalayan Swiss Chalet Gothic - although much of it is in advanced disrepair today. There are some well-preserved examples, but the modern Indians often show a blithe disregard for the heritage of the Raj era (and indeed for heritage in general). Worse, as well as suffering appalling neglect, Raj architecture has been crowded out by the tasteless inhuman concrete monstrosities (and earthquake death-traps) that are typical of post-colonial Indian building.

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Below readers can find a pictorial essay of such Himalayan Swiss Chalet Gothic buildings as the present writer was able to observe in Darjeeling, the great hill station once attached to Calcutta. The town was first settled as a sanitarium for British soldiers recovering from malaria, but later became the celebrated site of the British tea industry. It is now populated by Nepalis and Tibetans and Gorkas and, while still charming and a place of great beauty, much of its architecture, alas, has suffered the fate mentioned above.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

De Koros - a Buddhist Saint

Just outside of Darjeeling, on a downhill road towards the tea gardens and army base at Lebong, is the old cemetery once used by the English and other Europeans in the time that the town was the primary summer hill station of the British Raj, then centred in Calcutta. The cemetery is small and these days untended, except for the quite prominent grave marker of the Hungarian linguist Alexander Csoma de Koros which, when the present author visited the site, had been recently cleaned, cared for and decorated. There is an informative plaque there commemorating de Koros' life and work and explaining that the grave had been established by the Royal Asiatic Society and had been tended by money from authorities in Hungary. 

As well as this, closer into town, just around the bend from the Raj Bhavan (the Maharaja's winter residence), there is another marker also tended by Hungarian authorities, this time an abstract wooden statue (pillar) in the Boodhist manner dedicated to de Koros and standing among a row of statues to other notable citizens of the town. De Koros, therefore, has two markers dedicated to him and both are looked after by authorities in far away Eastern Europe. It comes to pass, in fact, that Hungarians not only tend these markers but are known to travel here in order to visit them, such is the repute of de Koros in his native land. He is regarded as one of the great sons of the Magyar people and his grave in Darjeeling is a place of solemn pilgrimage for Hungarians. 

The esteem in which he is held is not limited to his fellow nationals, however. De Koros is a hero in Hungary, but in Boodhist Japan he is nothing less than a Bodhisattva, which is to say a saint of the first order, a semi-divine being who has attained liberation but vowed to remain in the wheel of existence in order to assist other sentient beings to the same end. He was given this status by the Boodhist authorities in Japan in 1933. On the occasion, a large statue of him sitting in the lotus position was installed at the Tokyo Boodhist University. See thus:

So who, exactly, was Alexander Csoma De Koros and what did he do to deserve such high praise and sanctification? He is not a well-known figure in the Anglosphere outside of the narrow field of Tibetan linguistics and other obscure byways of academia. His hagiography is as follows:

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Born in Koros, Transylvania, in the 1780s - the exact date is disputed - he was a painfully shy and inward character who devoted his life to the study of languages, for which he had an unusual gift. By the time he was in his mid twenties he had acquired mastery of over a dozen languages including English, Latin, Greek, and others more exotic. In 1820, just in his forties, he set out to travel eastwards, his reason being to trace the origins of the Hungarian language in the Orient. We have a full account of his travels in the form of a letter he composed at one point, since he travelled without official sanction and was sometimes questioned about who he was and what was his purpose. He travelled largely on foot, walking from Constantinople overland to British India. There he met the explorer William Moorcroft with whom he travelled to Ladakh in order to investigate the languages of Tibet. Moorcroft assisted him and wrote him a recommendation which he needed at a later point because he was detained by the British on suspicion of being a spy. This matter was resolved, however, and the British then offered him every assistance. A Captain Kennedy, who first took him into custody, wrote of him that he "... declines any attention that I would be most happy to show him, and he lives in the most retired manner.” 

This retired manner was his most notable trait. He devoted himself entirely to study and otherwise lived as a hermit. In Ladakh, however, he was tutored by a Lama named Sangs-Rgyas-Phun-Tshogs and quickly mastered the Tibetan tongue, one of the first Europeans to do so. He furthermore immersed himself in the esoteric teachings of Tibetan Boodhism by reading the two great encyclopaedias of Lamaism,  the one hundred volumes of the Kangyur, and the two hundred and twenty-four volumes of the BsTangyur. The Tibetans gave him the name Phyi-glin-gi-grwa-pa, meaning "the foreign student". Tibetan Boodhism became his great love. He had set out in search of the roots of his own language and instead found a spiritual tradition high in the Himalayas. Mr. Edward Fox wrote an account of this journey in the 2006 book The Hungarian Who Walked to Heaven. 

De Koros spent many years compiling a dictionary of Tibetan and an account of Tibetan grammar and when this work was completed he headed for Calcutta to see it published. There he was welcomed by the Royal Asiatic Society who unanimously inducted him as an honorary member and organised a stipend upon which he could live. From 1839 to 1842 he worked as a librarian for the Society while his dictionary, grammar and other works were readied for publication. (Having established that this vagabond with a strange European accent was not a spy, the British were remarkably supportive and encouraging to De Koros, let it be said.)

Then, in 1842, he determined to set out for Lhasa. This journey was interrupted, however, when he contracted malaria. He was on his way to Lhasa when he died of fever in Darjeeling on April 11 1842. Thus was Darjeeling his last resting place, and thus he is today a celebrated figure in the town. 

De Koros, then, is, in the Buddhist firmament, a scholar saint. His claim to sainthood is founded in his extraordinary dedication to learning. (There was once a time when extraordinary intellectuals qualified as saints. Alas, in our own time, it is only do-gooders and social workers who qualify.) His story is one of a remarkable journey, as if he was drawn across the world, to the very roof of the world, to his destiny. A map of his travels - one of the most extraordinary intellectual and spiritual adventures ever undertaken by a European Orientalist - is illustrated below:

Yours,

Harper Mc Alpine Black

Mr. Pallis of Kalimpong

Among the silliest things His Holiness the Dalai Lama is inclined to say to fawning cameramen these days is that Boodhism is not, whatever else it might be, a religion. No? Well, what utter nonsense! It is an assertion that is plainly and demonstrably untrue. What is one to make of a religious leader who wants to say that his religion is not a religion?

The present author was reminded of this bizarre distortion while sitting in a shared jeep on the road to Kalimpong recently, squeezed in against an overweight Tibetan monk in maroon robes on his way to the same destination. At every point that the jeep (an eight seater carrying fourteen people and two chickens travelling on precipitous roads with four bald tyres) went past any even slightly Boodhist landmark – a grave, a stupa, a flag, a monastery, a road to a monastery – the overweight monk raised his hands in a gesture of fervent prayer, closed his eyes and muttered solemn incantations in Tibetan. One wonders exactly what game the Dalai Lama is playing, but on such evidence Boodhism sure looks like a religion to this author!

Accordingly, this author was expecting Kalimpong to be a hotbed of the aforementioned religion, and the presence of the monk on the journey promised it to be so, but in fact, on arrival, the town hardly presented a Boodhist face. It so happens that the monasteries there are on hilltops well out of town, and in town itself there is little obvious evidence of the Boodhist presence. The author only had five or six hours to look around, but during that time he encountered two splendid Hindoo mandirs, an elegantly bulbous green Mahometan mosque and a stately but stern Scottish Church. There were no maroon monks about nor anything else that was overtly Boodhist save a few prayer flags here and there and an old sign to the Tibetan Medicine And Astrology Centre.

This was somewhat disappointing because the author had journeyed there under the impression that Kalimpong – about two hours drive through the hills and forests from Darjeeling – was, or is, a major Boodhist centre. It certainly has that reputation. Clearly, though, this applies to the caliber and renown of the near-by monasteries and not to the town itself. A former British hill station with its share of remaining British architecture, it is unfortunately somewhat over-run with Indian commerce. The streets are busy and congested, noisy and cluttered, much like any Indian town. Moreover, the author was there just in time to witness a large street demonstration of local rabble agitating for Kalimpong’s administrative independence from Darjeeling and West Bengal. Standard Indian stuff.

The other reason the author had reason to suppose that the town would offer a distinctly Boodhist ambience, was that it was formerly the home of the traditionalist writer on Boodhist matters, Mr. Marco Pallis. Mr. Pallis is the author of several excellent books, two of which the present author has read and very much valued, namely, Peaks & Lamas, and A Buddhist Spectrum. The former is a celebrated account of the Tibetan world that Mr. Pallis encountered in the mid-twentieth century. Rousing. Inspiring. It was one of the first authentic accounts of the Tibetan tradition written for European readers and remains one of the best. 

The latter – which this author found more useful to his particular needs – is a perspicuous and highly lucid account of the great variety and types and sects and schools of Boodhism, from the Tibetan to the Pureland. As the title suggests, Mr. Pallis proposes that Boodhist religion – yes, it’s a religion! - constitutes an entire spectrum of positions, and he sets out to inform his readers of the great wealth and variety of the same. It is a book that the present writer recommends without hesitation. Indeed, it stands as one of the very best books on Boodhism in general, in his opinion. Readers will certainly learn more from reading Mr. Pallis than from any of the volumes of sentimental tripe to which His Holiness the Dalai Lama has seen fit to attach his name in recent years. Pallis is an excellent writer. His work does due honour to the beauty and wealth of the entire Boodhist tradition and to Lamaism in particular. 

He lived in Kalimpong in the 1950s. At the time it was an enclave to which Tibetans were escaping from the overbearing moves of the communist Chinese in Lhasa and thereabouts. He there became familiar with members of the Dalai Lama’s family and other Tibetan dignitaries – he was a very well-connected man and possibly the foremost Tibetologist of his time. He was a mountain climber, too, and an accomplished musician, and a linguist, amongst other things. The Traditionalists (so-called) were not generally well-disposed to Boodhism at first, since the pneumatic leader of the Traditionalist ‘school’ Mr. Rene Guenon – a vedantist – once dismissed it as a “Hindoo heresy”. More than anyone else, Marco Pallis worked to challenge this one-sided miscalculation. One wonders what he would make of the decidedly non-traditional New Age direction in which the Fourteenth (and last?) Dalai Lama has taken Tibetan Boodhism of recent times? The present writer spent a pleasant and useful day enjoying the environs in which Mr. Pallis had lived and worked, even if the atmosphere was not nearly as Boodhist or as traditional as he had understood.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Synagogue with No Jews

One of the hidden treasures of old Calcutta is the Maghen David synagogue along with the remains of the Neveh Shalom Synagogue immediately next door. It is located just north of the area known as Old China Bazaar, which is no longer a China bazaar, and similarly, the area that once housed the Jewish population of the city no longer boasts any Jews. Once, it is reported, there was a sizeable Jewish presence in the city - many thousands - and the remaining synagogue is evidence of the fact. But, just as the Chinese population has dwindled to nothing, so too the Jews. Today, the present writer was informed, there are no more than about twenty Jews resident in Calcutta, too few to constitute an active congregation of observant worshippers. Accordingly, the synagogue lays idle, although it is fully preserved. It is hidden behind rows of street vendors and the mad bustle of the modern city. It is difficult to locate, and the entry door even more so. The writer tried several entry ways, all of them barred up or barricaded, before finding an iron gateway that opened into the yard of the synagogue. It was padlocked, but a young Hindoo motioned to come forward and wait and in due course a Mohametan fellow emerged from inside with the keys. 

It is the irony of the Maghen David synagogue that, these days, there are so few Jews in Calcutta that the building has to be minded by a Muselman. He was happy to open up the building, turn on the lights and give a tour, explaining a few points of history in his broken English. There is an old Jewish lady of Calcutta, he said, who has been resident since before Partition, and she visits the synagogue every sabbath, largely to check upon it and to ensure the building is still intact. There are not enough Jews to form a quorum, though. Two copies of the Torah lay unused behind curtains. In every respect, though, the building is in magnificent condition - the synagogue with no Jews. It was built in 1884 at the sole expense of Mr. Elias David Joseph Ezra, Esquire, on the grounds of the older adjoining synagogue, the Neveh Shalom, as an inscription at the entry way explains. 

There is a large sign at the entry way explaining that photographs are strictly forbidden, but the young Muslim who allowed the present writer into the building insisted. "You take picture," he said. "May I?" "Yes, yes." He received twenty rupees for his trouble. Some of the resulting snap shots are below. (Click on a picture for a larger view.) 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

Mircea Eliade of 82 Ripon Street

Leaning against the walled edge, I looked down into the courtyard. I remembered the day I had seen Maitreyi stretched out on the steps, laughing - a day which had seemed to last for several years. Years had also passed since Maitreyi had come to ask me nervously, "When will my father be back, please?"... I did not understand her. She seemed a child, a primitive. Her words drew me, her incoherent thinking and her naivete enchanted me. For a long time, I was to flatter myself by think­ing of our relationship as that of civilized man and barbarian...

From BENGAL NIGHTS, Mircea Eliade

Once the ‘City of Palaces’, the ‘London of the East’, much of Calcutta – 70 years after Indian independence – is in advanced decay. The colonial buildings of the city are rotting from sheer neglect. A prime example is 82 Ripon St., formerly a large, elegant, colonial boarding house at which the great scholar of religion, Mr. Mircea Eliade, was resident during his eventful but personally tragic sojourn in the city in the late 1920s. The present writer made the journey down to Ripon St. on foot yesterday and found the residence in complete disrepair. It is still there, but now boarded up, and occupied by families of poor people who elsewhere would be described as ‘squatters’. It is a sad spectacle and underlines the melancholy story of Eliade’s time in the city. It is a story worth relating, since readers may not be aware of it.

Eliade had been invited to Calcutta by the foremost Indian scholar on Samkhya Yoga, Mr. Sarundranath Dasgupta, author of a voluminous and prestigious history of Indian philosophy, and one of the most important and most celebrated Indian scholars of his day. Young and brilliant, Eliade took a room at 82 Ripon St., then owned and managed by a Mrs. Perris, and from there attended Dasgupta’s lectures and received personal instruction in Indian languages. At this Eliade excelled. It is said that he acquired Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali concurrently in a matter of months and showed such promise that Dasgupta embraced him as a protégé. Once or twice a week he would travel from Ripon Street to visit Dasgupta’s home and there began assisting the Indian scholar’s young daughter, Maitreyi Devi, herself a poetess, in the arduous task of compiling an index for her father’s masterwork.

A terrible misunderstanding followed. Dasgupta saw the European student as a vehicle for relocating his family to Europe. The political situation in India was increasingly agitated and Dasgupta needed medical care difficult to access in India. Accordingly, he set about “adopting” Eliade and approached various contacts in Europe using Eliade’s name. To this end, he invited Eliade to move from the boarding house in Ripon Street and to take up residence in the Dasgupta household in a role that Eliade described as “his favorite pupil and, in a certain sense, his adoptive son.”

Eliade, however, interpreted this gesture differently. It seemed to him that Professor Dasgupta was very deliberately grooming him as a son-in-law and that the father had engineered a situation of intimacy between Eliade and Maitreyi Devi. The two young people worked together in the family library for hours every day and spent more and more time in each other’s company. Then, as Eliade relates it, the inevitable happened, and one day their hands met over a box of index cards and both of them found it impossible to let go. They fell madly in love. Eliade was twenty-three at the time, and Maitreyi Devi sixteen. Living together in Dasgupta’s house, they began a romance which consumed both of them until, on a fateful day in September 1930, Dasgupta discovered what had been going on.

He was enraged. A huge scandal broke. Dasgupta’s own plans came undone. He believed his hospitality had been betrayed. The terrible force of Hindoo propriety had been violated by the foreigner. The very sanctity of the household itself had been violated. The aggrieved father immediately threw his “favourite pupil and adoptive son” out of his house. Crushed, shocked, heartbroken, Eliade scuttled back to Ripon Street before fleeing Calcutta altogether. The love-stricken Maitreyi Devi was shamed and eventually moved by her father into the countryside where she was made to marry a Bengali man.

The matter did not stop there, however. Repercussions – terrible repercussions - continued for many years. Most famously, Eliade later wrote a loosely fictionalized version of the events in a novel entitled Bengal Nights in which he made it clear that his relationship with Maitreyi Devi was a physical one. He portrays her coming to his room in secret in the night. This account was published in Europe but, for various reasons, did not reach Calcutta until decades later, except by rumor. Maitreyi Devi had heard that Eliade had written a novel about their love affair but she did not read it until quite late in life. When she did, in 1972, she was outraged that the novel compromised her virtue. She, in her turn, wrote a rebuttal entitled It Does Not Die, in which she vehemently denies that her romance with the foreign student was ever sexual. There are thus conflicting accounts of the romance, although both Eliade and Maitreyi Devi – who never met again – seem to have both regarded it as the great love of their life up to the day they died. It was a tragic romance of Shakespearean proportions.

Worse, though, it destroyed Dasgupta. His wife had pleaded with him on behalf of Maitreya Devi but, in the role of traditional Hindoo father, he was intractable. This left permanent tensions in his marriage and his family. The work of indexing his book was taken up by another student, a Hindoo lady, Sumara Mitra, to whom the professor drew ever closer. It seems that the scorned and vengeful daughter, Maitreyi Devi, took exception to this working relationship and accused her father of the hypocrisy of having an extra-marital affair. She returned home from the countryside to spy on her father. At one time, it is related, as Sumara approached the family home one day, Maitreyi climbed onto the rooftop and called out to the neighborhood, “Come and see what scandal is happening in our house!” She led a conspiracy against her father, and eventually convinced her brothers of her father’s misdeeds. The sons beat their father up.

Maitreyi Devi also distributed leaflets around Dasgupta’s university denouncing him as an adulterer. She set out to destroy his reputation. She was largely successful. In the process, she also destroyed his health. After a row with his wife, Dasgupta suffered a heart attack and fled the family home to be nursed by friends in a guesthouse at Sanskrit College. When he finally found the opportunity to travel to Europe – this was now after the Second World War – he was estranged from his family and in such poor health he remained bedridden in England for almost five years. Sumara Mitra fled Calcutta with him and they married – although this seems to have been for administrative reasons (and technically made Dasgupta a bigamist).

In any case, Dasgupta’s life was left in ruins. It all followed from the dreadful day he uncovered the love of Mircea Eliade and Maitryi Devi. Events left Eliade and Maitryi Devi as star-crossed lovers, but an even more savage fate befell the hostile father. Readers should be aware that, prior to these events, Professor Dasgupta was a man of extraordinary renown, and not only as a scholar. At a young age he was hailed as a “khokā bhagavān”, a “boy god” and the saint Vijay Krishna Goswami had once declared him to be in that special class of being who remember their previous lives. He was regarded as a person of great spiritual qualities. At one time, when he was young, his father had to take him away from Calcutta to protect him from the crush of people who longed to be in his presence. He was guru to many. Eliade himself, as he makes clear in his autobiography, regarded the professor as his guru, his life-teacher, and speaks of a bond that transcended earthly life. Dasgupta’s knowledge of the Hindoo philosophical tradition was unsurpassed in his generation. He was awarded several PhDs and an array of medals for high academic achievement. He was made a Commander of the Indian Empire, the highest honour of the land.

After the Eliade affair – that tragic and catalytic misunderstanding - and then the scandal involving Sumara Mitra that followed it, orchestrated, it seems, by the mortally disappointed daughter, Sarundranath Dasgupta’s reputation, like his health, was in tatters and it never recovered. He was largely forsaken by the academic world and was then forgotten. He moved to Europe on the eve of independence in circumstances of disgrace and, for whatever reason, modern India has never seen fit to restore his name to its former glory. His work, especially his multi-volume History of Indian Philosophy, endures, but it has never received the recognition it deserves. He was a man eclipsed by events. Poor Dasgupta. These days he is an obscure name from a former era.

This is the harrowing tale of human weakness that the present author had in mind when he stood outside the dilapidated shell of 82 Ripon Street in Calcutta yesterday. These are the events that defined Eliade’s twenty month visit to Calcutta. The events were a full generation ago now. They were immortalized in book and counter-book (and even in a pretty ordinary 1990s film starring Hugh Grant) but they tell a timeless story of love, loss, pride, bitterness, revenge. The pity is that it has faded so completely from the local memory. It belongs to a Calcutta that no longer exists. There seems no readiness in contemporary Calcutta to revive it. It is only because Mircea Eliade went on to become one of the great pioneering scholars of the 20th C. that these events, which are otherwise all too human, like the predations of time itself, mean anything at all.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black