I am mimicking the title of William Dalrymple’s (Willy D from here on) “The White Mughals” to write this brief note on Col. Colin Mackenzie (1754-1821), the first Surveyor General of India. I came across Col. Mackenzie's name as I was looking up information on Ahobilam, a South Indian temple town. An article on that town mentioned a Ahobilam “Kaifiyat” (Arabic for "narrative") - a digest from "kaviles" or village archivists working under Mckenzine, containing information on the political, social, religious and other conditions of the villages in Deccan - found in the State Archives in Hyderabad, which records (echoing Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri poems: "scratch a rock/ and a legend springs") the mythologies of Ahobilam.

Col. Mackenzie was a Scotsman (as many British of the Raj were), who went to India as a part of the Madras Engineers when he was at an advanced age of 28. There he developed deep interests in the fields of Indian history, religion, philosophy, art, ethnology, folklore and mathematics. After the defeat and death of Tipu Sultan in the Battle of Seringapatam, in which Mackenzie took part, he conducted a large scale survey of the Mysore / Deccan region. Apart from mapping Mysore (the predominant concern of Kim's 'Great Game'), this survey is said to have employed a massive team of draughtsmen and illustrators to collate material on historic architectural sites, Hindu caste customs, folk tales, plant life etc.

While I am sure this collection and Col. Mackenzie's life await discovery by someone who wants to go Willy D's route (aside: for some reason I harbor this feeling/notion that if a 'native' did what Willy D has done with Indian history in his books, the native's work may have never become such a hit), the helpful folks at the British Library have made available in their online archives few peices of the Mackenzie collection. The maps and drawings Mackenzie’s survey produced when he stumbled upon the forgotten ruins of the great Buddhist town Amaravati on the banks of River Krishna are worth taking a look. The question to ponder is do examples such as Col. Mackenzie somewhat support the thesis of Emprie apologists that its representatives also brought their Enlightenment driven minds to play in the darkness of the East, and were more that simple agents of "guns, germs and steel"?

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Another not to be missed visual treasure box is the British Library's Images Online page, where you can spend many happy hours exploring "thousands of images from the British Library’s unparalleled collections." Here are some finds:

View from Malabar Hill. Where the hell are the buildings, the slums, and the madness of Maximum City! Another view of Bombay Tank in the Shiva Temple, Chidambaram, Madras Pagoda at Ramisseram aka. Rameswaram

When folks, who were considering to make a move to United States either to attend grad school or to take a better paying job, used to ask me what such a move could entail, I often pointed them to Robert D. Putnam 's bestselling, and very well written book ”Bowling Alone”. In that book, Putnam chronicled the steep decline he observed in the density of connective webs into which people integrate themselves here in the United States, as well as the consequent decline in social capital.

After fortuitously reading this book about four years ago, I also recalled a line from a conversation I had with an uncle on the eve of my departure to the United States. He said, "You go there, make enough money for ten or so years, and then come back here (to India) to live." I asked him why did he think this was the best strategy? He replied, "When I was there a decade ago, I saw through the trick they sell you there - you will have a whole lot of freedom to build a gold cage for yourself, but it will still be a cage." At that point in time, since I was living in a desi graduate student ghetto, and was struggling with the sense of alienation that came with the inability to fit myself into the larger world here in the USA, his words seemed to be prophetic.

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Apart from those times when I have found myself in "relationships" (linguistically, it is interesting to note that word “relationship” has primarily come to mean a romantic engagement of some sort with another person), this feeling of being "lost in translation" (a gem of a movie too!) has never departed. I am not saying this is the case (or will be the case) with every person who roughly has my profile – middle class, educated Indian immigrant. On the contrary, taking an example from my immediate family, I see how my sister and her husband have managed to successfully create for themselves the kind of extended social network which keeps their social capital from taking a nosedive. Yet, the cost is that their network necessarily mimics a version of life from back in India, i.e., while situated in America, it is exclusively Indian.

While I sometimes find in myself a desire to plug back and become a node in such a network - for all their random joke-y interminable adda sessions, late night card games, communal road trips, spontaneous lunch/dinner invitation to friends' places, etc - I also realize that my rootless cosmopolitanism with its desire to engage with a larger world will soon chafe at the boundaries of interests, sympathies, concerns etc that such bubbles contain themselves in. At the same time, my past attempts to integrate myself with a large and more diverse (in terms of race, class, culture etc) social ecosystem here haven't produced the results I desire. Perhaps I should modify that some what, and say “amorphous” results because the results I desire are also products of ‘the anxiety of choice’. In other words, I am aware that in the process of rejecting boundaries of bubbles, I am demanding a very “tailored choice": to be the part of a close knit group that comes from three or four different geographical locations, that is promiscuous in tastes of cuisine and wine, that is engaged with the world at levels higher that the pursuit of "happiness” (a code word for money), that is investigative and curious in attitude, that reads etc. And this brings me back to the opening Woody Allen’s monologue in “Annie Hall”: “I don’t want to belong to any group that will have me as a member.”

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It was these reflections held in my brain, which spied, and right away picked up, an article titled “Isolated Americans trying to connect” on the Yahoo News page earlier this morning. This article synthesis numbers, sociological studies, stories from the grapevine etc in an attempt to gauge the current level of social capital. I won’t comment on the stories told, except to note some of the more interesting statistics presented in this article:

”The trend toward isolation surfaced in the last U.S. census figures, which show that one-fourth of the nation's households — 27.2 million of them — consisted of just one person, compared to 10 percent in 1950.”

”the average American had only two close friends in whom they would confide on important matters, down from an average of three in 1985. The number of people who said they had no such confidant soared from 10 percent in 1985 to nearly 25 percent in 2004; an additional 19 percent said they had only one confidant — often their spouse.”

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It gives me something to think about, that golden cage, as I recall these lines from Adonis, one of the stars of contemporary Arabic poetry:

"Coming to this land Is an ode Not a litany."

Before I turned quasi-Buddhist and all that as I grew into my semi sober capitalist adulthood, I had very big crush on armies, and war fighting. I suppose this has always been stage of development in boyhood, in which boy playing out their fantasies of imagined dangers and easy heroics. My setting was a ditch at the back of my parents' home. They needed dirt to level something or the other elsewhere as a part of some home improvement project, and this left me with that ditch at the back, under the shade of a couple of coconut palms, and a lemon tree. This was in eight-ninth grade.

So in the years when kids (or in marketing speak, tweens), here in the US, busy themselves in the various protocols and rituals of adulthood, I was in that ditch, literally, playing with dirt. I fashioned elaborate structures, battlements, roads, etc; the wonders that can be wrought from some water and clay. The scenarios that were played out were numerous, starting with battle scenes from Tolstoy's "War & Peace", the various useless wars India and Pakistan fought in the last sixty or so years, and of course the crucible of World War II with settings borrowed from the large dose of war based pulp fiction - Alistair MacLean's "Guns of Navarone" comes to my mind right away - I was eagerly consuming around that time. At that them I also harbored not an insubstantial dream of getting into the Indian Military's equivalent of West Point, N.D.A aka National Defense Academy (visit to read some florid prose on the intro page, such as "The intrepid cadets of yesteryear have not only proved their mettle as military leaders in combat but also blazed a trail of glory in several other fields across the national firmament." - how can a mere boy resist this!).

Sadly, much of this mental predilection was cured by a compulsory year long spot of N.C.C which every male freshman at the college I went to had to undergo. Undergoing endless drilling with a surprisingly heavy Enfield rifle in hot and humid Bengal weather, taking a dump in a trench latrine, going on a run at the crack of dawn followed by a dose of group calisthenics on Saturday mornings, having a shotgun nearly kick in the ribs as well as induce temporary deafness in those few comically bad shots I had to take at supersonically fast clay pigeons in a skeet shooting exercise etc pretty soon quieted all this ardor for war business in the mind's Western Front.

Yet I suspect this war virus still lurks somewhere around inside my head for I still eagerly read about armies (recent read: the well written and recent survey on the spread and reach of the US military in Robert Kaplan's "Imperial Grunts"), histories of past battles especially World War II (a recent post on this), and track the latest weaponry and gizmos at Jane's. The only way I can explain this internal contradiction is by pointing to the amazing amount of violence in the work of scholarly J.L. Borges - his knife fights and toughs are very beautiful.

[Aside/Request: Can any historian reading this point me to a good reference on the history of the British Indian Army, which comprehensively cover the various wars Indians fought for the Empire? It would be a great help. I am specifically interested in the role of the Sikh regiments that fought in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion. Thank you.] ...

Given this, I feel great affinity to the subterranean person called Gary Brecher who writes a very witty bi-monthly column called "War Nerd". I would recommend it to anyone else that likes having some war in their reading trail mix. Here are some fine excerpts from an old column on that old Kargil business at the Kashmiri LOC:

"Naturally, there were casualties on both sides -- and when the Pakistanis handed back the Indian dead, the corpses were mutilated, eyes and penises missing. At least that's the way the Indian newspapers told the story. Who knows if it's true? What we're dealing with here is good old war propaganda, and nothing gets the home folks excited like mutilated corpses. It goes all the way back to the Iliad, with Achilles dragging Hector's body around tied to the back bumper of his chariot.”

"And the Indian press pushed the Kargil story as hard as it could. India is a huge, messed-up country with more than a billion people speaking more different languages than there are in all of Europe. You have to work damn hard to keep a place like that united, and the simplest way is to get them mad at somebody across the border. Kargil was like the Alamo for Indian propaganda -- kind of a sacred last stand."

"By the time the Indian Army spotted these mysterious infiltrators, they were dug in on the high ground. Not a good position to be in, if you're the Indians -- kind of like Bunker Hill, if it was on top of Mount Everest. Attacking uphill in air that thin, while the defenders shoot and shell you -- man, that's my idea of hell."