Tomichan Matheikal's blog

One of the histories of my family, written by a cousin of mine, traces the roots of the Matheikals to one Namboothiri family that was converted to Christianity by none other than Saint Thomas, disciple of Jesus. When I pointed out to the writer that there was no clear historical evidence of Namboothiri presence in Kerala until about the 8 th century CE, his answer was that available family legends formed the basis of his claim. There are many Christians in Kerala who make similar claims: that their ancient ancestors were Namboothiris (Brahmins) converted by Thomas. There is a faint possibility of Thomas, disciple of Jesus, having come to Kerala. There was active trade between Kerala and Rome in those days. Pliny the Elder (1 st century CE), Roman historian, mentions Kerala’s spices, pearls, and ivory, in his work Natural History . He was actually complaining about Rome’s loss of wealth due to its imports from India. There are travelogues that describe trade routes between Europ...

Republic Day gave me a holiday after a long time. I used it for cleaning up my personal library. One of the tragic fates of books is they don’t stay with you for long. I lost most of my books because of the changes of my job-places. When I left Shillong in 2001, I left most of my books behind; I sold them to a college library. It wasn’t easy to transport things from the Northeast in those days. Moreover, my psychological condition was worse than my economic condition at that time and I sold whatever I could in order to get away from a place that had become a veritable hell for me. A few books were carried, however, to Delhi, my new place. I was going to Delhi without any hope. Nobody had offered me any job there. Maggie’s brother was there and he said, “Come if you wish.” He was more than kind. Magnanimous. Probably, he was concerned about his sister. I couldn’t obviously carry too many things to my brother-in-law’s flat in Delhi. That’s the major reason I got rid of my books. Bu...

  Book Review Title: Aryans: The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth Author: Charles Allen Publisher: Hatchette India, 2023 Pages: 387 This is a book that has the potential to enrage the Right wing of India. It subverts the entire attempt of Modi Inc to arrogate the roots of Aryan racehood to India. The Aryans did not originate in India, this book asserts with sufficient scientific proofs. They came to India across the Himalayas in a very natural process of migration. All migrations were not invasions necessarily. But all successful mass migrations do affect the native population adversely one way or the other. The Harappan and Mohenjo-Daro civilisations had nothing to do with Aryans unless we consider the possibility of their being driven to extinction by the Aryans. This the 26 th and the last book of Charles Allen, a traveller, historian and scholar on India. Allen – who says that his very name comes from the word ‘Aryan’ – died in 2020 without completing thi...

Psychologically healthy people live in the present. Many of the others live in the past. They carry history on their backs like those molluscs that carry their shells on their backs. When obstacles present themselves, these people will withdraw into history’s shells saying things like: Remember our ancient glorious history when we were nation of whatever . The plain truth is that if we look back at our real history, there is more to be ashamed of than to be proud of. Most nations have traversed inglorious paths to become what they are today. A lot of blood was spilt, women were raped, the poor were exploited and oppressed inhumanly… Even the scriptures were written to uphold the interests of certain groups only. Even our gods were subhuman! But history is often what we fabricate. For example, the entire three centuries of the Mughal reign in India can be just erased as the new history textbooks in schools are doing. Certain people whom India regarded as villains are now heroes in...

Book Review Title: Conversations with Aurangzeb Author: Charu Nivedita Translated from Tamil by Nandini Krishnan Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 335 History claims to give us truths and fiction really gives us glimpses into truths. Tamil novelist Charu Nivedita’s Conversations with Aurangzeb is in fact history masquerading as a novel. It is fiction inasmuch as Aurangzeb makes an apparition through a medium to the narrator who is a writer doing some research for his next novel. But it is not a novel because there is nothing that can be called a plot. It’s all conversation between the narrator and the spirit of the Mughal emperor. Occasionally a few other characters make their appearances, but they don’t add anything to the plot. How much can we trust history? This is the question that the writer explores in this novel. It is a cliché that history is written by the winners. It gets rewritten when new winners emerge. For example, India’s history is being rewritt...

Image from Telegraph Book Review Title: Smoke and Ashes Author: Amitav Ghosh Publisher: HarperCollins, 2023 History can be viewed from diverse perspectives. Academic historians usually look at it from political perspectives. As a result, we get very blinkered views of the past. Rulers do not constitute history. In fact, too many of them have been blatant exploiters of the common people to whom history should rightfully belong. The rulers, more often than not, snatch history ruthlessly from its real inheritors. Literary novelists give us better history than academic historians. Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy comes to mind immediately. Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy is another commendable example. History comes alive in the hands of such writers as Mantel and Ghosh. What if they actually write history instead of novels? And that is exactly what Ghosh has done in Smoke and Ashes . Smoke and Ashes views history from a totally unexpected angle: opium. “Only by recognizing th...

Book Review “The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause.  It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.” Captain Chillingworth of the ship Ibis utters those words in Amitav Ghosh’s novel, Sea of Poppies .  The novel is about power and how different people wield it over others as much as it is about the powerless who are destined to suffer the oppressions.  The novel presents a part of the India in the 1830s.  The British have become very powerful in India and they control the trade too.   As Benjamin Burnham, one of the traders in the novel, says, trade indicates the “march of human freedom.”  Even slave trade is part of that glorious march.  According to Burnham, the white man gave freedom to the African ...

Book Review “... corruption rife, mafiosi officially in parliament, tax dodgers in government, and the only ones to end up in prison are Albanian chicken thieves.  Decent people will carry on voting for the hoodlums because they won’t believe the BBC, or they don’t watch such programmes because they’re glued to something more trashy...” The bizarre has become the normal.  That’s what Umberto Eco’s latest novel, Numero Zero , from which the above quote is taken, seems to imply.  It is a slim novel (190 pages) with a scanty plot .  Commendatore Vimercate is an entrepreneur who “controls a dozen or so hotels on the Adriatic coast, owns a large number of homes for pensioners and the infirm, has various shady dealings around which there’s much speculation, and controls a number of local TV channels that start at eleven at night and broadcast nothing but auctions, telesales and a few risqué shows...”  He now wants to start a newspaper, or pretend to do s...

English philosopher, C E M Joad, defined civilisation as thinking new thoughts, making new things, and obeying the rules for the smooth functioning of the society.  Yet we don’t find such people in our history books.  Our history books are filled with people who killed others, conquered their lands, and imposed themselves on other people.  How many Indians have heard of Satyendranath Bose though there is a subatomic particle (Boson) named after him?  How many Indians are ready to recognise the name Ali Akbar Khan though he is known to the world as the Indian Johann Sebastian Bach?  Why does the genius of a Shakespeare get eclipsed by a Queen Elizabeth in history books though Shakespeare’s contribution to civilisation far outweighs that of the Queen?  These are some of the many thoughts that crossed my mind as I read the very long article by A. G. Noorani, ‘ India’s Sawdust Caesar ,’ in the latest issue of Frontline .  “A year and a half aft...

Fiction Mr Padgaonkar was having his usual Scotch whisky on rocks when his mobile phone rang its calling tune of Rang de Basanti .   A call that cannot be ignored.   Not by the editor of the leading national newspaper.   A call from the PMO.   “Cut it out,” ordered the speaker. “I will,” said Mr Padgaonkar with the obedience of a defiant school student in front of his most favourite teacher. The Prime Minister’s Office had taken note of a news item on the newspaper’s website announcing the rewriting of the country’s history by changing the heads of ICHR and NCERT.  The office didn’t want it to be news; it was a clandestine affair which was meant for today’s students and their teachers. “All the advertisements...” “... will be cancelled.  I know.  Cut out that shit,” asserted the editor.  “I know the business.”  He has been running the business for more years than the Prime Minister had run politics even in his own s...

Book Review This is primarily a novel about the Nazi Germany during the Second World War years.  It tells the story of a young girl named Liesel who loses her mother and brother when is she is only 9 years old.  Her brother dies and her mother is taken away by Hitler’s people as she is a communist.  Liesel is handed over to Hans and Rosa Huberman.  She is the titular book thief and the first book is stolen during her brother’s funeral.  Symbolically, the book is A Gravedigger’s Handbook .  Her foster father will teach her how to read and she will steal a few more books eventually. Hitler’s Nazis burnt books which were seen as opposed to their interests.  The Nazis created their own history, myths and illusions.  Hitler was a powerful orator who hated one particular community of people whom he sent to their death brutally.  Death was ubiquitous in Hitler’s Germany.  No wonder, Death is the narrator of Markus Zusak’s novel....

A few weeks back the RSS mouthpiece in Malayalam, Kesari , published an article, by a man who contested the last elections on a BJP ticket, in which the writer argued that Nehru should have been the more appropriate target of Nathuram Godse’s bullets than Gandhi.  The article went on to heap as much ignominy on Nehru as possible. The Sangh Parivar could never accept people like Gandhi and Nehru whose vision was extremely inclusive.  The Parivar’s own vision was not only exclusive but also filled with hatred for people professing religions other than Hinduism.  BJP ad on the Maulana's birth anniversary Mr Narendra Modi is shrewd enough to realise the danger that underlies such a constricted vision.   Gandhi and Nehru were (and they still are) highly admired far beyond the borders of Hindutva.  Modi as Prime Minister cannot afford to denigrate such figures in other countries at least.  Hence he changed the strategy: he decided to incorpor...

Courtesy: The Hindu 11 – 10 = ½ = 0.5 The equation on the blackboard baffled me as I walked into a classroom where I was given an exam duty.  Somebody had rubbed out something, I thought.  My mind started playing its usual game.  Come on, change it, said my mind. This is how I changed it:  11 – 10 = 1 I erased two figures mentally, the denominator 2 and the final decimal part of the equation.  Such a simplistic solution failed to satisfy me especially since I had a lot of free time in the exam room.  Seeing my solution, Sherlock Holmes would have said, “Elementary, Mr Matheikal.” My mind made the following equation: (11 - 10 ) ÷  2 = ½ = 0.5 That was neat, said my mind.  I had added a denominator 2 to the first part of the equation.     11 – 10 = 1 = 0.5 x 2 What I did was to transpose the denominator 2 to the RHS (right hand side) of the equation. One could go on.  How far you go wit...