Book Review: “565: The Dramatic Story of Unifying India” by Mallika Ravikumar

When the British decided to partition their Indian colony and exit the sub-continent, the fate of five hundred odd Princely States hung in the balance. Many of the Kingdoms were powerful, with standing armies and did not like the idea of joining either India or Pakistan. From the point of view of Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru, allowing a bunch of independent principalities to fester inside the Indian Union was not an option at all. So, Home Minister Sardar Patel and a small, but very competent team rolled up their sleeves and got down to the mammoth task at hand. When Patel asked Lord Mountbatten to help him win over the various Indian prices and convince them to join the Indian Union, Mountbatten agreed to help, provided Patel agreed to his conditions. Patel agreed, provided he got a basket of apples. A basket of 565 apples to be precise.

The story of how Sardar Patel and his team convinced a motley bunch of egoistic and truculent princes to give up their independence and join the Indian Union has been described in a few history books in summary fashion, but, now, for the first time, a well-known Indian fiction writer has brought to life the story of how “more than 500 princely kingdoms were threaded together into a union – in record time and against all odds – to create the India we now have”. Mallika Ravikumar calls her book a “work of creative non-fiction, inspired by real events in history and rooted in research.” I don’t think there can be a better description of 565: The Dramatic Story of Unifying India. Ravikumar acknowledges that she has taken creative liberties in the writing and presentation of her book, all in good faith. At the end of every chapter, a “Did It Really Happen This Way?” section details Ravikumar’s sources and delineates a boundary between what definitely happened and what probably happened.

565: The Dramatic Story of Unifying India has thirteen chapters, each dealing with a significant or interesting integration, ranging from Travancore to Hyderabad and Kashmir. Each of these chapters can be read independently as a separate story. Every chapter is full of twists and turns that keeps the reader engrossed. More importantly,  565: The Dramatic Story of Unifying India is set in an era when, in every princely state, the ruler was considered divine and the will of the people was unimportant, something unthinkable today. Many Princes did not want to give up their rights and privileges, though some did do so willingly.

Ravikumar writes in elegant, but simple prose that is an excellent conductor for the electric thread that runs through 565: The Dramatic Story of Unifying India. Each of the thirteen chapters is a treasure trove of historical anecdotes, thrillers that can put the best of Hollywood or Bollywood in the shade and sagas of courage and sacrifice, all of which combine to make the book unputdownable. One just gallops from one chapter to another and before one realizes, this book comes to an end, making one want for more. At the end of the twelfth chapter (The integration of Jammu and Kashmir) when an Indian air force  Dakota piloted by Wing Commander Bhatia hovered over Srinagar, verified that the crowds surging towards the dusty and unkempt airstrip at Budgam airport were locals waiting to welcome Indian troops and not Pakistani raiders looking to ambush, and disgorged Lieutenant Colonel Rai and his men amidst delighted shrieks of ‘Khushamdeed!’, I thought Ravikumar’s story telling couldn’t get any better, but it actually did.

I used to think I knew everything significant about the happenings in 1946/47, but I didn’t know that the Nizam of Hyderabad tried to purchase Goa from the Portuguese so that Hyderabad could have a seaport or that three young members of the Arya Samaj (Narayan Rao Pawar, Gandaiah Arya and Jagdish Arya) made an abortive attempt to assassinate Sir Mir Osman Ali Khan Siddiqui Asaf Jah. I knew nothing at all about Tripura and it was a revelation to find out how selfish Prince Durjoy Kishore and Diwan Mukherjee took the support of the Muslim League to try and wrest Tripura for Pakistan. However, Maharani Kanchan Prava stood firm and ensured that her late husband Maharaja Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya Debbarma Bahadur’s wish for Tripura to join India was implemented.

In addition to big stories, one also gets to know a lot of trivia about that era. Did you know that the head of a province of British India too was referred to as “Prime Minister”? Thus, Balasaheb Gangadhar Kher, Prime Minister of Bombay until 1950, when the Constitution of India was adopted. I don’t want to divulge too much info here and ruin the book for you. Go on, do read 565: The Dramatic Story of Unifying India and find out how Sardar Patel bagged a basket of 565 apples for India.

A few takeaways from William Dalrymple’s “The Golden Road”

 

This isn’t a review of William Dalrymple’s latest offering “The Golden Road”. Rather, the notes below are merely jotting from a jumble of thoughts (in no particular order) in my head after I finished reading yet another magnificent tome from a person who is probably the finest modern-day historian, with an India focus.

1. Between 250 BCE and 1200 CE, India was the world leader in knowledge, ideas and soft power and people in South-east and Central Asia and even China, admired India. India offered to the world its religion, art, music, dance, textiles, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine and the world lapped it up.

2. After Rome captured Egypt, for 300 years after that, a Golden Road of the open oceans caused Indian exports to flow to Rome and resulted in a drain of Roman gold/wealth into India. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, this Indo-Roman trade ceased and Indian businessmen began to focus on South East Asia. Across South-east Asia, Sanskrit became the lingua franca for the elites, who also adopted the worship of Hindu gods.

3. Buddhism became a pan-Indian religion under Emperor Ashoka and then spread into Sri Lanka, Tibet, China and Korea. Buddhism became popular, first with the merchant class, then with the ordinary people of South-east Asia. Theravada Buddhism remains the dominant religion today in much of that region. China has the largest number of practicing Buddhists in the world.

4. During the Indian era, there was a steady trickle of Indian preachers, artists and even doctors to China, which came increasingly under India’s spell. Wu Zetian, founder of the Wu Zhou dynasty, who ruled China for 45 years, was an admired of many things Indian. She officially elevated Buddhism above Taoism

5. Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) the Chinese traveler came to India for a 17-year, 6,000-mile journey, mainly to the great Indian centres of learning. Of this, he spent 5 years in Nalanda.

6. Nalanda was the best University in existence at that point in time. According to Xuanzang, lectures at Nalanda were given in a hundred different halls each day. The students studied diligently without wasting a single moment. They studied the texts of the different schools of Buddhism, as well as the sacred Vedas, logic, Sanskrit grammar, philosophy, medicine, metaphysics, divination, mathematics, astronomy, literature and magic. Nalanda’s library was nine storeys high and contained three divisions: the Ratnadadhi, the ‘Sea of Jewels’, the Ratnasagara, the ‘Ocean of Jewels’, and the Ratnaranjaka, the ‘Jewel-Adorned’. Any manuscript could be borrowed, though Nalanda regulations held that it must be stored in the niche in the monks’ cells next to the square central courtyard.

7. The great Khmer King Jayavarman II who united Cambodia, set the foundation of the Angkor period. Suryavarman II built the Angkor Wat, the largest Hindu temple in the world, dedicated to Lord Vishnu. The Khmers were allies of the Cholas and Jayavarman, Suryavarman et al were largely influenced by Indic values.

8. The rulers of Srivijaya (based in modern-day Indonesia) tried to double-cross the Cholas and Rajendra Chola retaliated by sending a Chola armada all the way to Sumatra, possibly in a joint operation with the ships of the Tamil merchant guilds.

9. The powerful Chief Vizier of Baghdad, Khalid ibn Barmak, was a Buddhist convert to Islam. The the Barmakids were an important Buddhist family from Balkh, which converted to Islam and became prominent members of the Abbasid court in the second half of the 8th century.

10. Genghis Khan’s campaign in Central Asia caused tens of thousands of Persian-speaking refugees to flee from to the plains around Delhi. As a result, Delhi became one of the world’s biggest cities and the centre of a cosmopolitan, culturally Persianate sultanate, full of learned madrasas staffed by refugee scholars, sheikhs, artisans and poets who had fled from Central Asia. Sanskrit and its vernacular derivatives Khari Boli, old Punjabi and Braj Bhasha, continued in use, but Persian became the court language as well as the language and diplomacy.

11. Invasions by Turks and Afghans did result in the destruction of many Hindu temples and Buddhist monastries, some of which were repurposed as mosques. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Indian school textbooks and most academic histories were written by left-leaning historians who underplayed the violence and iconoclasm that came with the Turkish invasions, partially in the interests of what they saw as ‘nation building’ following the terrible inter-religious violence that had taken place during partition.

12. It is unclear if Nalanda was burned or destroyed by Islamic invaders. However, it is a fact that Nalanda’s near neighbour, the great monastery of Odantapura, was destroyed by Bakhtyar Khalji’s Turkish troops. A similar fate was visited upon the monastery of Vikramashila.

These notes are not meant to be a summary of The Golden Road and do not even capture the essence of this wonderful book which runs to a little over 600 pages, of which, endnotes take up around half the space. Please do read The Golden Road yourself to appreciate it properly. The Golden Road is available on Amazon.