"If I ever get to see you"

Táhirih Qurrat ul-`Ayn (طاهره قرة العین) is one of the most famous poets of early modern Iran. A practitioner of the Bahá'í faith, she was criticized and persecuted on accounts of her bravery and audacity, and was eventually secretly executed. Celebrated as a martyr for the Bábí movement and for women's rights, she is remembered to this day for her actions and for her poetry. One of her most famous poems, گر به تو افتدم نظر, sometimes referred to as "Chehreh beh Chehreh" in English transliteration, has been set to music and sung by a number of great musicians, including the incomparable Shajarian.

Here is a pre-revolution recording of Shajarian with Mohammad-Reza Lotfi performing the song at the Hafeziyeh, at the Jashn-e Honar-e Shiraz.

Torsors, or when only differences matter

This is sort of random, but I discovered something today that answered a number of questions that bugged me in the past. For instance, I never quite got a handle on the difference between points and vectors when doing linear algebra. So you could subtract two points and get a vector; you could add a vector to a point to get a new point; but you couldn't add two points? Umm what? Something else that used to bug me when I did (high school) chemistry was that when electrons transitioned between (quantized) energy states, the only thing that mattered was the difference between the two states, and not the states themselves. I never really understood these things, but I also never really dug deeply enough to figure things out.

Until today, when I completely randomly came across this truly awesome page on the mathematical structures known as torsors. What in the world is a torsor, and who cares? If you look up Wikipedia, you'll get something along these lines:
A G-torsor is a set X for a group G such that for any x, y in X, there is a unique g in G such that

x . g = y.

Extremely enlightening for the mathematical geniuses among us; for me, a pile of gibberish. What the heck does any of this mean?

Natural versus artificial, part trois (with maps!)

An awesome piece from Wired, this time with some pretty stellar maps, that further call into question the divide between the natural and the artificial. Titled "How Mankind Remade Nature," the article is a summary of two ecologists' proposal that we're really entering a new era, that the Holocene age has passed and that we're now in the Anthropocene age.

To illustrate their point, they have produced a series of maps that are similar to the biome maps you can find in geography textbooks (that classify the earth into rainforest, grassland, desert, and whatnot)—except that they have classified the earth based on actual land use patterns. Two such maps, one for 1700 and the other for 2000, show how much we have transformed the earth in just three hundred years. South Asia is especially vivid on this map. In 1700, it was covered mostly in semi-natural woodlands, which were certainly being used by humans, but only lightly. By 2000, though, almost all of the region was covered with agricultural land. The ecologists have called these new kinds of land uses "anthromes," because they are anthropological biomes.

Such a profound change in the nature of the vegetation and land use (coupled with the staggering loss of ecological diversity that is natural (no pun intended) when woodland is cut down and converted into monoculture cropland), the authors argue, is just as radical than earlier geological transitional periods.

Natural versus artificial, part deux

This 2003 article in the Atlantic by Charles C. Mann raises the truly fascinating question: is the Amazon rainforest a human artifact?

Mann begins in the grasslands of the province of Beni, Bolivia ("about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat"), where one can find

an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is [archaeologist Clark] Erickson's belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. [Anthropologist William] Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

Absolutely incredible! And apparently this is by no means an isolated incident in the Americas. A new school of ecologists and archaeologists and anthropologists holds, very controversially of course, that "Indians were here far longer than previously thought, … and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind."

Needless to say, this is utterly at odds with the image of the Native American presented to me in school textbooks. There the impression is created that Native Americans (who are conveniently classified into one bucket, while the incoming Europeans are carefully distinguished on the basis of nationality, at the very least) were some sort of noble savages who lived in complete harmony in an eternal present with pristine nature. This was convenient because, on the one hand, it served to show the evil of the white man destroying this beautiful, naïve, gentle, harmonious culture, and on the other, it served as an implicit justification for the fact that the European strive for progress and perfection would lead to the overwhelming of these people who were frozen in time.

This article showed me just how incredibly simplistic and ridiculously wrong my understanding of the native inhabitants of the Americas was. Just like humans anywhere else, they were smart and sophisticated manipulators of their environments; it's just that they did so in ways so radically different from anything the Europeans had seen before that they naturally assumed that what they saw was wilderness. That, and the fact that European-transmitted diseases often travelled far, far faster than the Europeans themselves, so that even in those cases where Europeans did come into contact with Native Americans, they were likely encountering severely attenuated cultures on the verge of collapse.

The article also fascinatingly points out that this new picture of Native Americans undermines one of the cornerstones of (certain branches of) the environmental movement: that there can be "untouched" nature, and that our goal should be to restore our damaged environment to this state. But what this article suggests is that there never was such a state, and that our efforts to do so are quite artificial indeed. Or, to put it differently, and to reinforce the point I made a few days ago, the line between the natural and the artificial is rather artificial!

Natural versus artificial

This is a truly great article (yes, I occasionally read Esquire for the articles, and no, you may not parse that any way you like!) by Tom Junod on humans and ants. What I love most is the manner in which the author elevates his personal experiences in a house infested by Argentine ants to the level of a cosmic struggle (which, admittedly, it must be for him and his family), and in doing so, casts light upon the unilluminated corners of our musings on society, complexity, and consciousness. In brief, the author points out that "[E.O. Wilson's The Superorganism] proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so."

This kind of emergent complexity means that the ant colony as a whole is infinitely more intelligent than any single ant, or even a small collection of ants. The whole in this case truly is bigger than the sum of its parts, and no mereological reductionism can explain precisely "where" the "intelligence" of the ant colony resides. This is the kind of thing that makes me question naïvely reductionist theories of consciousness even when applied to the human mind.

Douglas Hofstadter's awesome Gödel, Escher, Bach has an excellent interlude called, if I remember correctly, "Ant Fugue." It deals with precisely the same situation, and indeed Hofstadter uses this as a way to argue for his own perspective on complexity and consciousness. But for now, another pretty cool excerpt from Junod:

The worst part about discovering that the ants in your house are actually emissaries of the enormous teeming brain in your backyard — is that it worsens the other worst parts, of which there are many. For example, I have found ants in my underwear. Lots of them, which I didn't find until I put the underwear on. As a person who has had ants in his underwear, however, I have to say that what makes their presence particularly irksome is not the momentary discomfort but rather the knowledge of why they're there. They're not just passing through, you see, on their way to somewhere else. They're not in your underwear by accident. They're nation-building. They're extending the range of their civilization, and they're doing it in your drawers.

Speaking of which, Abstruse Goose has a very insightful point to make on the distinction between "natural" and "artificial".

On Pūrva Mīmāṃsā

Prof. Francis Clooney's article "Why the Veda has No Author" [1] is an excellent survey of the early work of the Hindu school of thought known as (Pūrva) Mīmāṃsā. The word pūrva also means "early" or "prior", but Prof. Clooney's reference here to the "early work" does not mean the distinction between (Pūrva) Mīmāṃsā and Uttara Mīmāṃsā, better known as Vedānta, but to the historically earliest work done by scholars who identified themselves as Mīmāṃsakas: Jaimini, the 2nd century BC author of the Pūrva-mīmāṃsā-sūtra, and Śabara, the great commentator who came four hundred years later. This is important because the school of Mīmāṃsā later splits into two traditions, the Bhāṭṭa, deriving authority from the formidable Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, and the Prābhākara, from Prabhākara Miśra. (The initial long 'ā' in the names of the schools, as opposed to the short 'a' in the names of their founders, is not a typo but a well-established Sanskrit grammatical phenomenon known as vṛddhi. In this particular case, vṛddhi is effected by the use of the so-called aṆ suffix, which has the sense of "descendant" or "offspring".)

Prof. Clooney notes that Mīmāṃsā is

"a worldview and mode of inquiry that developed in a context of reflection on the meaning of the action of sacrifice. In Mīmāṃsā, notions such as "God," the "sacred text," the "author" and the "anthropocentric ordering of reality" were already subjected to a radical critique more than two thousand years ago, and the primary vehicle of this critique was an uncompromising commitment to a reworking of religious discourse on a ritual basis." (p. 660)

The earliest textual evidence for this particular Weltanschauung is Jaimini's Pūrva-mīmāṃsā-sūtra, which, as Prof. Clooney notes, argues that

"[1] religion includes meanings and values appropriate to human beings, but the sum of its meaning necessarily exceeds the human perspective;

[2] the sacred Sanskrit-language Scripture known as the Veda is not a 'book' to be read, nor a source of information about a world exterior to itself; and

[3] the Veda has no author, no meaning beyond the words and the sacrificial intentions themselves; one cannot appeal to a pre-verbal intention to get beyond the words." (p. 660)

The Mīmāṃsakas operated in a religious world dominated by "two interconnected systems", that of the "traditional sacrifices, which had been practiced and described even a thousand years earlier," and that of the "Veda, the totality of the texts relevant to the sacrifices" (p. 661). This dynamic duo of text and ritual, each highly structured on its own and also deeply linked to the other, was what the Mīmāṃsakas investigated and defended against all attacks, both from within the "Hindu" system, such as the Naiyāyika natural theologians, and from without, such as the Buddhists and Jains. A large part of the Mīmāṃsā enterprise thus boils down to a sophisticated process of exegesis whose initial motivation was to understand instructions for the performance of ritual, but whose eventual scope broadened to pretty much any situation where texts were read and actions were performed.

Turning again to Prof. Clooney, "each generation of Mīmāṃsakas sought to elaborate more and more sweeping rules by which to govern the preceding set of meta-rules, although the search for generality was constantly subverted by the precise demands posed by the concrete ritual situations to which the interpreter eventually would have to return" (p. 662). It wasn't that the Mīmāṃsakas formulated ritual handbooks (those had been composed and circulated possibly a thousand years before Jaimini); what they were concerned with was a process closer to what we might consider legal reasoning. (Don Davis's new book, The Spirit of Hindu Law [2], constructs a useful analogy between Mīmāṃsaka thinking and the complexities of navigating the US tax law system.) In the process, they also defended particular positions within the philosophy of language—but always with an eye to preserve the integrity of the sacrifice.

More interestingly, from our perspective outside the dynamic dyad, the Mīmāṃsakas also asked and answered (to their satisfaction, at least) questions regarding the underlying assumptions of their worldview, about "the overall purposes of sacrifices, or the basis on which one can say that the Vedic scriptures are absolutely true, or the manner of verifying the efficacy of sacrifices" (p. 662). This was all the more important because the great rivals of the Brahminical orthodoxy were the Buddhists and Jains, who questioned (as we might today) the whole purpose and efficacy of the Vedic sacrificial system.

Prof. Clooney points out insightfully that

"Mīmāṃsā's response to the whole range of criticisms was to rethink its world without reliance on any single viewpoint, effectively undercutting the possibility of a single perspective. It sought a justification for sacrifice that needed no external validation, either from active gods or satisfied humans, and that required the positing neither of any supernatural realities nor a reliable world order beyond that of good Sanskrit texts, well-performed sacrifices, and a set of rules for integrating the two.

"Jaimini and his commentator Śabara primarily were concerned with achieving a right understanding of the rules of sacrificial action and sacrificial text so as to ensure that what one saw and heard at a sacifice would cohere—be intelligible—regardless of what anyone might say about it from some particular perspective. In discovering these rules they sought to repplace the 'laws of the cosmos' with the 'laws of language and ritual,' and reliance on gods and humans (as norms for meaning) with an appreciation for the harmony of text and action (and everything accompanying them, even in orthodox society as a whole) that underlay the well-wrought sacrifice." (p. 663)

Read the rest of the awesome article to find out more about the Mīmāṃsā worldview, and what it may mean for us today when we no longer follow the Vedic system of sacrifice.

<UPDATE>

I simply had to include this line from the article that compares the Mīmāṃsā exegetical enterprise to Foucault:

"The Mīmāṃsā theory of authorlessness [apauruṣeyatva; emphasis in the original], with its underlying concern to 'liberate' the sacred texts from its author, approaches Michel Foucault's influential interpretation of the common (though not universal) way in which the author-function is used as a societal tool to restrain language, assign responsibility, and confine the meaning of texts. Foucault shows how this author-function … actually restricts texts by ordering them to a designated author, whose intentions determine what the texts are allowed to mean … [Mīmāṃsā] decided that reference to the author as the privileged source of meaning limited the Veda, cut it off from its ritual context, and made it liable to the mistakes and limitations of the author."

</UPDATE>

References
[1] Clooney, Francis X. "Why the Veda Has No Author: Language as Ritual in Early Mīmāṃsā and Post-Modern Theology," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Winter), pp. 659–684. Available here from JSTOR.

[2] Davis, Jr., Donald R. The Spirit of Hindu Law. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Available here from Amazon.

A beautiful verse on Kṛṣṇa (but what does it mean?)

This is a gorgeous verse on Kṛṣṇa, in a style that I've never seen before.

mand(r)a-kvāṇita-veṇur ahni śithile vyāvartayan gokulam
barhâpīḍakam uttamâṅga-racitaṃ go-dhūli-dhūmraṃ dadhat |
mlāyantyā vana-mālayā parigrahaḥ śrānto 'pi ramyâkṛtiḥ
gopa-strī-nayanôtsavo vitaratu śreyāṃsi vaḥ keśavaḥ ||

The version that Michael Coulson cites in Teach Yourself Sanskrit to illustrate the meter (the awesomely named Śārdūlavikrīḍitā) uses the word manda; another version of the verse I found online here (which claims that this is from the Subhāṣita-ratna-kośa anthology of Vidyākara, who attributes it to a certain Śubhaṅkara) uses mandra. The Padyāvalī of Rūpa Gosvāmin (available here) also cites the verse with the word mandra, and opens it with the context atha sāyaṃ Harer Vrajâgamanam. I'm going to try to translate it thus:

The day slackens—
His flute's music slow and soft, he circles Gokula,

        embraced by a garland of withered wildflowers,
        the crest-jewel peacock feather adorning his head all red from the cows' dust,
        tired, and yet beautiful to look at:
May Keśava—
        the delight of the gopīs' eyes!—
bestow felicity upon us!

Śreyas is a difficult word to translate. It conveys all manners of positive qualities—"virtue," "blessings," "good," "happiness," possibly "excellence".

I'm curious about the possible theological implications of such a depiction of Kṛṣṇa. What does it mean to depict a form of God (and at least for Rūpa Gosvāmin and many modern Hindus, the supreme form of God) in this particular mode? This is a very human portrayal of Kṛṣṇa, much more so than those of Kṛṣṇa as a playful child or a beautiful young man, and associates with him the human qualities (some would call them "failings") of exhaustion and dustiness; even the flowers he wears are withered. And despite all of that, he is gopa-strī-nayanôtsavaḥ, the limitless joy and exultation of the eyes of the lovely women of Vraja. Why? How? What does this mean?

One possibility is that the composer was simply building poetically on the image of Kṛṣṇa the cosmic cowherd, but that just doesn't seem as interesting to me. What is really interesting is the phrase śrānto 'pi ramyâkṛtiḥ / gopa-strī-nayanôtsavaḥ, where the presence of the particle api suggests that the verse really is intentionally drawing a contrast between the fact of Kṛṣṇa's "objective" tiredness on the one hand and his "objectively" beautiful form that is "subjectively" delightful to the gopa-strīs. Is it that they are willing to overlook Kṛṣṇa's "faults" because of their love for him? Or is it that Kṛṣṇa chooses to manifest as a tired cowherd for the sake of "realism," for the sake of the milkmaids who know no other life? Perhaps what is mundane and prosaic for those of little faith is in fact what is truly transcendental for those of faith.

(An expanded version of this Swadharma post)

PS: For those of you who care, the meter Śārdūlavikrīḍitā ("playful like a tiger"?) is defined thus:

sūryâśvair yadi māt sa-jau sa-ta-ta-gāḥ Śārdūlavikrīḍitā

In other (non-)words, — — — x x — x — x x x — / — — x — — x — (where the / marks a caesura). Best of all, in the tradition of Sanskrit meter, the definition of a meter is offered in the meter itself!

"The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier"

I really enjoyed reading Richard Eaton's The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier. It is a fairly short book, at least by academic standards and certainly given the vast scope of the topic. For Eaton tries (fairly convincingly, I thought!) to answer a huge question: how did Islam take root so deeply and so (relatively) quickly in Bengal? [I should note that I don't currently have the book on me and so am writing this from memory, without citations.]

The question is definitely worth asking. As Eaton points out, Bengalis constitute the second-largest ethnic population of Muslims in the world, after Arabs. ("Indonesian", and "Bangladeshi", are nationalities, not ethnicities.) But Islam has been present in some parts of Bengal for less than 500 years. How did it so thoroughly become part of the landscape?

Eaton organizes his investigation around the concept of the frontier: the dividing line, the boundary between two domains that vary in a certain way. In the case of Bengal, he posits the existence of three different types of frontiers that intersected and interacted in fascinating ways: geographical, cultural, and political. With regard to the particular timespan he looks at, this manifests in the form of four different frontiers: the line that divides settled agriculture from forest; the line that separates Sanskrit(ized) civilization from non-Sanskrit(ized) civilization; the line between Islamic and non-Islamic civilization; and the line that divides Turko-Afghan (Islamic) political dispensations from the "Wild East".

Eaton tackles four of the most common theories about the Islam(ic)ization of Bengal, and discusses why each of them fails to explain the situation in its entirety. These theories are (I don't remember the exact names Eaton gives these theories):

• The Immigration theory: often espoused by the Muslim ashraf élite, and of particular interest to those who supported the creation of Pakistan, this posited that the Muslims of Bengal were non-Bengalis who immigrated from Central Asia or Arabia to the region.
• I'd like to know where you'd find a hundred million Central Asians who somehow migrated across the Indo-Gangetic plains, leaving no traces anywhere! This theory simply cannot explain the adoption of Islam by enormous swathes of the agrarian and artisanal classes.
• The Patronage theory: according to this, the people of Bengal converted to take advantage of the superior patronage afforded to Muslims over Hindus by the Muslim political dispensations that governed the region for five hundred years.
• Eaton notes that although Mughal and pre-Mughal rulers did offer more concessions to Muslims than to Hindus, there was absolutely nothing in early and middle Mughal administration that suggested that the empire saw it as its mission to convert people to Islam.
• Furthermore, this does not explain the vast difference in the rate of adoption of Islam between Delhi and Dhaka; surely whatever patronage one could gain by becoming Muslim would be even more concentrated in the heart of the empire than on the frontiers! This too cannot explain the vast scale of conversion.
• The Sword theory: a favorite of the Hindu right-wing and of some colonizing Orientialists with their own axes to grind, this is the age-old claim that Muslims converted vast populations under threat of execution.
• This is so deeply biased and flawed that I don't know where to start.
• It ignores the basic theological problem that you cannot become a Muslim under duress.
• It ignores historical facts about conversion from Spain to Iran (all through the region, it took hundreds of years before the majority of the population converted to Islam).
• It ignores the particular geographic distribution of Hindu and Muslim populations in Bengal.
• And finally, it cannot explain why, if conversion by the scimitar was indeed the case, Delhi was probably 80% Hindu in 1947.
• The Emancipation theory: popular within a few different circles (Muslims justifying the two-nation theory, Hindus of various castes arguing for against the caste system, British colonizers and Orientalists, etc.), this argues that Islam uniquely offered a liberating escape from the crushing shackles of the Hindu caste system.
• Unlike the other three theories, this has the "virtue" of at least pretending to address the question of the sheer extent of Islamization in Bengal. At least at first glance, it's plausible that Bengali peasants, in a collective act of rebellion against the evils of the Hindu caste system, decided to convert en masse to socially egalitarian Islam. This too, however, fails to explain the matter.
• For one, there is no evidence that oppression of the peasantry was that much worse in Bengal than, say, in South India (or, for that matter, that the Bengali peasant is somehow that much more capable of carrying out a collective f***-you in this fashion).
• More interestingly, Eaton shows that the areas with the deepest levels of adoption of Islam in Bengal all lie beyond the Sanskritic frontier, in places where there was little to no social stratification—in other words, not only is it not true that Bengali peasants converted to "escape" the caste system, but in fact Hindu-ized peasants were less likely to convert to Islam after all!

Eaton acknowledges that each of these theories may explain a few aspects of the spread of Islam, but points out that they cannot explain the situation in Bengal individually and collectively. Eaton's own explanation combines the ideas of the frontiers to come up with an answer.

• Geographically, the forces of nature have played a hugely important role in encouraging eastward migration. As the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta—perhaps the most fertile soil on earth—shifts eastwards, the soils on the east gain in fertility while the western regions show lower collectivity. There is, in other words, a general tendency for cultivators to migrate eastwards, converting dense jungle to green paddy fields.
• Culturally:
• Sanskritic civilization, in its competing Brahminical and Buddhist forms, showed a general eastward tendency right from Vedic times. Enormous work has been done on Vedic, Sanskrit, and Pali sources that all show that these two interrelated cultures constantly pushed eastwards from the time they entered South Asia. At the time of the arrival of Islam, this eastward migration had pushed all the way to somewhere near the current border between West Bengal and Bangladesh. This set up resilient social structures and encouraged groups to settle down and practice intensive agriculture.
• Islamic civilization was often spread by Ṣūfī orders in the region. Charismatic religious leaders were able and willing to penetrate impenetrable tropical jungles, thus bringing a religion of the Book to the aboriginal inhabitants and encouraging them to settle down. They were able to organize these communities to take up the incredibly brutal task of clearing dense, dangerous jungle and making it uniquely suitable for rice and jute cultivation.
• And politically, a variety of responses can be seen.
• The earliest Islamic administrations were essentially tiny groups of Turkic horse-lords who were most concerned about establishing their actual power in the region.
• This was followed by a few Bengali Islamic political dispensations that took in an increasing number of Bengali converts to Islam.
• For the Mughals, who are the last major political force Eaton examines, Bengal was mostly a wild frontier region where they were willing to let local entrepreneurs, whether Hindu or Muslim, take on the risk and reward of trying to bring the jungle under cultivation (a process that naturally produced enormous revenue gain for the empire). They thus provided the financial and administrative backing required to bring civilization to wild eastern Bengal.

In other words, the four distinct frontiers of the early Islamic period in Bengal were essentially consolidated into a single line: the line that separated Mughal, (mostly) Muslim agriculturalists from jungle-dwelling tribes worshipping indigenous gods.

It goes without saying that all of this is a highly over-simplified account of a complicated (but always clear and engaging) narrative that is backed by recourse to extensive quantitative sources. Eaton's book is a delight to read, and it's absolutely fascinating to see the complex forces at play over the course of history in this region. A wonderful read.

<UPDATE>

In his article "Islamic History as World History," Eaton notes that his idea—that Islam was able to acquire its deepest footholds in eastern Bengal where Sanskritic civilization had had a minimal presence—seems to hold for other parts of the region too.

Recent research suggest that the growth of sedentary agriculture in lightly Hinduized regions of India will tell us more about conversion than will the movement of medieval armies. For in both wings of India that became Muslim-majority regions—Bengal in the east, Punjab and Sind in the west—the growth of Muslim societies correlated with the adoption of sedentary agriculture. And both regions were still frontier societies where Hindu religious values and the hierarchic social ideals of Brahmin priests had not yet deeply penetrated.

Now in the same article, a few pages earlier, Eaton does note that "in 711 [Muslim navies] conquered and occupied the densely-populated Hindu-Buddhist society of Sind." He also writes more generally about the particular experience of Islam in India:

Where India is concerned, two lines of historical enquiry are discernible, one of them intellectual, the other social. The former consists of efforts to unravel the complex and fascinating ways that Muslims hailing from points to the west came to grips intellectually with India's highly developed Hindu-Buddhist systems of religion and thought. Arab rule in eighth century Sind having weakened and died [emphasis mine], it was left to Persianized Turks to establish a permanent Musli presence in India from the thirtheenth centuru. But what would the new ruling class, itself only recently converted to Islam in Central Asia, make of the land of the Buddha, Śiva, and the marvelous incarnations of Vishnu? And to what extent would Islam adapt or change in order to find for itself a niche in India's rich cultural universe?

The two points about Sind in this article suggest that the Islamization of Sind is a bit more problematic than a simple correlation with sedentary agriculture, but since I know nothing about the history of the region I will refrain from saying anything further on the topic and sounding like a complete idiot.

</UPDATE>

The reliability of textual transmission

In his article "Unfaithful Transmitters" [1], Patrick Olivelle takes to task those modern philologists who roundly criticize ancient and medieval Indian scholars of the Vedas for introducing changes into the texts, but who then themselves introduce changes, often without noting them, directly into their editions of works. Olivelle in fact shows that the ancient commentators were far more unwilling to introduce changes into the texts, and were also unwilling to impose a Pāṇinian model of correctness (which, in any case, they would have known "a bit better than modern Western scholars," in Olivelle's words) onto the older Vedic text.

Olivelle observes at the end of the article:

"In ancient and medieval India texts were transmitted and preserved by copying onto manuscripts and by memorization, which is a lost art today. The copying of texts introduced errors through negligence or misreading the exemplars and sometimes through deliberate emendations … Error or emendation was limited to a single manuscript and to others for which it served as exemplar … An error or emendation introduced into a printed edition, unlike its manuscript counterpart, is reproduced in every single specimen. Given the expense of publishing, moreover, once an ancient text has been published, it is unlikely that a new edition would be forthcoming soon or ever. The responsibility, therefore, of a modern editor to ensure the faithfulness of transmission is a thousand times greater than that of a scribe."

My including all this context ("con-text"?) was merely a pretext ("pre-text"?) for noting down these two verses with which Olivelle closes his article. They were traditionally written by scribes at the end of manuscripts.

bhagnapṛṣṭikaṭigrīvaḥ stabdhadṛṣṭir adhomukhaḥ |
kaṣṭena likhitaṃ granthaṃ yatnena pratipālayet ||

yādṛśaṃ pustakaṃ dṛṣṭvā tādṛśaṃ likhitaṃ mayā |
yadi śuddham aśuddhaṃ vā mama doṣo na vidyate ||

Olivelle translates them:

With great trouble I have written this book,
My head bent low, with unwavering eyes,
I have broken my back, my hips and neck;
So be diligent and take care of it.

I copied exactly
What I saw in the book;
Whether it's right or wrong,
I am not to be blamed.

On the topic of Vedic memorization, a number of different patterns of recitation (pāṭha) were memorized to eliminate accidental (or deliberate) modification of the text.
1) The standard recitation with sandhi rules applied, and which is what is usually heard in religious contexts, is the saṃhitā-pāṭha.
2) The recitation pattern in which every word (pada) of the Veda is recited individually and separately (but in the same sequence as the saṃhitā-pāṭha) is known as pada-pāṭha.
3) Following this, many increasingly complicated patterns of word-by-word recitation exist, of which the basis is taken to be krama-pāṭha, in which words are recited in pairs: x1; x1 x2; x2 x3 … etc.
4) - 11) The eight variant (aṣṭa-vikṛṭis) pāṭhas built off the krama-pāṭha are defined in a verse:
jaṭā mālā śikhā rekhā dhvajo daṇḍo ratho ghanaḥ |
aṣṭo vikṛtayaḥ proktāḥ krama-pūrvā manīṣibhiḥ || [2]

'Braid', 'garland', 'topknot', 'line', 'banner', 'stick', 'chariot', 'cloud' / 'dense':
The wise speak of the eight variants descending from krama. (My rough translation)

Of these, the ghana-pāṭha, which is so hard that someone who mastered Vedic recitation in this style was awarded the title of ghana-pāṭhin, is as follows:
x1 x2; x2 x1; x1 x2 x3; x3 x2 x1; x1 x2 x3 … [3]

And finally, on the topic of manuscript emendations, a slightly irreverent but nevertheless funny joke that a friend (who shall remain unnamed) once sent:

A new monk arrived at the monastery. He was assigned to help the other monks in copying the old texts by hand. He noticed, however, that they were copying copies, not the original books.The new monk went to the head monk to ask him about this. He pointed out that if there were an error in the first copy, that error would be continued in all of the other copies.

The head monk said, 'We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son.' The head monk went down into the cellar with one of the copies to check it against the original.

A few minutes later, there was a gasp from the cellar. The new monk ran downstairs to find the head monk, pale and shaking, staring at one of the original texts in horror.

"What's wrong?" the new monk demanded.

"Celebrate?!? It says CELEBRATE?!?"

< UPDATE >

I learned only today while reading Don Davis' The Spirit of Hindu Law that the word vikṛti, which I translated above as "variant", is in fact a technical term that derives from the earliest accounts of Vedic ritual. Apparently the universe of the Vedic ritual is structured around a single archetypal sacrifice, with all others being derived as ectypes of this one sacrifice. Of course, substantially complicated sacrifices often become archetypes of their own, but everything is ultimately dependent on the one basic archetype. The archetype-ectype distinction is noted in the ritual handbooks by the dyad prakṛti-vikṛti. The great benefit of structuring the ritual universe this way was that scholars only had to give detailed accounts of archetypal units; for the ectypes, it would then suffice to merely note the differences from the archetype.

Because of its compactness, this Vedic structuring principle was heavily utilized in other spheres of intellectual activity, including jurisprudence (where the idea of debt and its repayment is the archetype from which everything is explained), Vedic recitation (as shown above, where the krama-pāṭha is the archetype for the aṣṭa-vikṛtis), and social dharma (where the rights and responsibilities of the Brahmin male form the archetype for all of society). Indeed, this structure is so pervasive that the ritual handbooks' use of the prakṛti-vikṛti dyad must itself be seen as a prakṛti for all other ectypal uses of the dyad in other spheres of intellectual activity!

< /UPDATE >

References
[1] Olivelle, Patrick. "Unfaithful Transmitters: Philological Criticism and Critical Editions of the Upaniṣads." Journal of Indian Philosophy 26: 173–187, 1998. Accessible here.

[2] Abhyankar, Kashinath Vasudev and J. M. Shukla, A Dictionary of Sanskrit Grammar (Baroda: Maharaja Sayaji Rao University of Baroda, 1986).

[3] Apte, Vaman Shivram. The Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Accessible here.

Maps are awesome

Maps, maps, maps. I've loved them as long as I can remember. Not mathematical ones (well, those too :D) but cartographic ones. Maps tell us so much about our world that would otherwise be hard to dig up or to describe in words. But like any representation of reality, maps distend and distort and conceal much even as they reveal. The classic example is, of course, the Mercator projection, in which Greenland is almost the size of Africa (when in fact Greenland is smaller than India, which itself is about one-tenth the size of Africa).

This set of maps from the 2008 US Presidential election shows this quite neatly (and awesomely). 

• The first set of maps look at data at the state level.

1. The first map is a simple state-by-state blue/red coloring (a choropleth, as James Fallows from the Atlantic tells us) that tells you whether a state voted for Obama or McCain. 
2. The second is a population cartogram that rescales the size of the states according to their population, and then colors them red or blue.
3. The third rescales the size of the states according to the number of votes each state gets on the Electoral College (which is largely, but not exactly, correlated with the state's population).

• The next set takes a more fine-grained approach, looking at election results at the county level

1. As with the first map, there is first is a red/blue county-level choropleth.
2. Next, a population cartogram colored with county-level election results

• The final set of maps does away with the red/blue binary distinction (not everybody in a certain state, or even a certain county, voted the same way!) and uses a red-blue spectrum to depict just what the ratio of red votes to blue votes was.

1. As before, a county-level election results choropleth using the red-blue spectrum.
2. And a population cartogram coloring county-level results using the red-blue spectrum.
3. And finally, a county-level election results choropleth and a population cartogram colored using a non-linear red-blue color spectrum that uses solid colors for election results that exceed 70% (because there's presumably not much difference between 70% Democratic communities and 90%).

"Inception"

As I mentioned to a friend recently, Inception is likely to be the That Movie of this fall: the movie that sparks off intense, passionate 2 am conversations in college dorms. I'm still trying to digest the movie, but for now, let me just ask the big question: Is the whole movie a dream?

Possible responses:

• Yes
• No
• It doesn't matter
• insert-some-other-response-here

For what it's worth, I thought this graphic was incredibly helpful in organizing the different levels of the movie. (It need hardly be said that you should only open this link if you've already seen the movie. If you haven't seen it yet, go see it!)

Reconciling God and Evolution

This is a short and interesting article by Prof. Sarah Coakley at Harvard Divinity School. She argues that "the three most profound problems for Christian theism since the advent of Darwinism, so profound as to cause many to see Darwinism as a "defeater" of Christian belief" are:

1. "[T]here is the issue of how we should understand the relation of God's providence to prehuman dimensions of creation and their development."
2. "[T]here is the issue of how God's providence can relate to the specific arena of human freedom and creativity."
3. "[T]here is the problem of evil, the question of why what happens in the first two realms manifests so much destructiveness, suffering, and outright evil, if God is indeed omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent."

Her response, particularly to (1), essentially boils down to this: "God is that-without-which-there-would-be-no-evolution-at-all; God is the atemporal undergirder and sustainer of the whole process of apparent contingency or "randomness," yet—we can say in the spirit of Augustine—simultaneously closer to its inner workings than it is to itself." * This allows her to conceive of God as ever-intervening (indeed, without whose intervention at every stage the world would simply cease to be), but whose interventions are masked by the order of the universe (which in itself stems from God).

From what little I know, this view is fairly close to the classical theologians of Islam, particularly Imâm Ghazâlî (without the trinitarian interpretations, of course!). Imâm Ghazâlî in no way denies that the world is orderly and is governed by "natural" laws; what he says, though, is that this order is a contingent one that is sustained by God at every moment. I've always thought that this is a pretty neat way to fully and healthily accommodate scientific investigation of the spatiotemporal universe while not losing sight of religious / spiritual insight. (It's certainly a far more nuanced position than either "it's obvious that a tall old man in a white beard made all this" or "it's obvious that we're nothing more than a handy way to help a few large molecules self-replicate"!)

I'm not convinced by her later argument, that recent discoveries showing the importance of cooperation in evolution help build the case for getting evolutionary biologists and theologians talk to each other. I suspect that given the nature of the scientific method, no dialogue between a scientific discipline and a non-scientific discipline can be well founded on the basis of particular scientific explanations. (All it takes is one paper that shows that what we think is cooperation is really just selfish genes, and poof! vanishes your bridgehead.) No, I think true dialogue must depend on two things:

1. The fact that science and theology are both committed to using reason reasonably to discover something about the world—with the caveat that "world" likely means different things to scientists (probably depending on their institutional and disciplinary affiliation!) and theologians.
2. The fact that it is not particular scientific theories or hypotheses that bind scientists together as a community, but the scientific method per se. In other words, if you want to show that sensible science and intelligent religion are not incompatible, then find a way to accommodate the scientific method into your theology (or vice versa, if you prefer).

In case you think faith and reason are irreconcilable and separated by an unbridgeable gap—welcome to theology! Thinkers affiliated to all the major religious traditions I can think of have invested great efforts into thinking rationally about God and the universe and all that jazz, and I think the modern debate is deeply impoverished by our inability and unwillingness to incorporate their ideas into our discourse. For what it's worth, I think there are at least two solid reasons for encouraging a fruitful dialogue of this sort:

1. Like it or not, the scientific method truly has transformed the depth and breadth of our knowledge of the physical world. It is the single best method we have come up with that explains how the world is (or, more precisely, how the world is not). It would be utter folly for serious modern thinkers to ignore these insights when trying to understand our place in the cosmos—particularly when it is the case that many, if not most, earlier thinkers were willing to do the same.
2. Like it or not, the scientific method alone cannot really offer guidance of any sort—emotional, social, moral, spiritual. And while this does not mean that the only alternative has to be a religious worldview, it does mean that our scientific insights must be contextualized within a broader intellectual framework. What these frameworks can be is up to us—whether we pick mechanistic deterministic nihilism or evanescent illusionary idealism or infinitely fruitful pan(en)theism or whatever else floats our boat—but we need something more.

* This is not a rigorous statement as it stands. The article does a better job of explaining why this may be the case, but also acknowledges that this is but one starting point for a deeper philosophical and theological investigation of a problem that, as is currently being debated, really could do with more sophisticated, more inclusive arguments from both sides.