Russell, Menon & Kumar

Bertrand Russell and India

It was a siege of sorts. We were tucked away in our hostel rooms due to a ruckus between the locals and the students and for a week or so, we were stuck in our hostel, with no classes. It all started with somebody assaulting somebody and many other bodies joining the fracas, like most thallu cases. The college ground to a halt, doors were boarded, and the Regional Engineering College at Calicut was shut down for a while. But naturally, we had to find ways of making merry in these newfound holidays. I possessed a cassette tape recorder, a great novelty in those days! I had convinced my friend the late IM Sankaranarayanan to part with two of his precious Mohammed Rafi LP records for a few hours, so that I could copy a selection to a cassette tape.  The copying was done with during this holiday and the cassette was played back and forth, for hours. One song stood out - ‘Aaj ki Raat yeh kaisi raat’ – a melodious and romantic number.

Vyazhavattom - The 12-year cycle in Kerala

 The Duodecennial concept of Malabar

Most youngsters from the present generation would hardly have come across these terms or their significance in their studies, though they may have heard it from elders. In the past, however, it was quite important and was implemented across diverse areas, such as determining the completion of a sovereign’s rule or even the duration of a legal contract such as a lease of property. It was (and is) commonly used in astrology, which the superstitious (if you wish to term them so) Malayalee was very particular about. Let’s take a look.

Guruvayur – A peep into its history

Most people have only a vague concept of the temple’s history. I thought it would be a good idea to provide a brief overview based on the perusal of historic records, primarily the many papers and books authored by an early Malabar chronicler, KV Krishna Ayyar. Some years ago, I had written about the involvement of the Dutch and Hydrose Kutty Moplah, in the temple’s history. This will overlap and cover earlier aspects and take you through a few of the changes after Malabar came under the British administration. So, this article will take you through some early surmises, the Dutch and Mysore periods, and eventually the golden days under the Zamorins of Calicut, who incidentally are still the main trustees. We will also quickly check out what Ayyar termed the Guruvayur Cult.

Kurt Tank – The legendary test pilot and aircraft designer

 And the Marut HF 24 project at Bangalore

Prof. Dr. Dipl.-Ing. Kurt Waldemar Tank was not only a brilliant German engineer and designer of many successful aircraft that flew in the Second World War but was also a competent test pilot. Responsible for the designs of the Fw 190 fighter, the Ta 152 fighter interceptor, and the Fw 200 long-distance Condor, Kurt led the design department at Focke-Wulf which manufactured these aircraft. While the Fw 190 fighter (over 20,000 were produced) was considered one of the finest flying fighters of its time, Tank also pioneered nonstop transatlantic air travel with his Condor aircraft. After the war, he moved to Argentina, building their first fighter jet, the Pulqui II.

Col. Manakampat Kesavan Unni Nayar (1911-50)

A Revered War Correspondent

This young daredevil from Parli, near Ottapalam, charmed men and women alike, hobnobbed with royalty, prime ministers, presidents, Nobel prize winners, and generals, was articulate and not only spoke well, but was also a popular writer, a journalist, and a news reporter before ending up with the Indian army. A dapper and handsome, young man, he was liked by everybody he came across. Courting death, he was present in every war zone, be it in Africa, Europe, Kashmir, Burma, Indonesia, China, or Korea, reporting fearlessly. He was none other than the Col Unni Nayar, Unni to many, Baby to his friends, Kesavan to some, and Nayar to others. He was the lone Indian who lost his life during the Korean War of 1950 when his luck ran out.

M Sivaram – The Consummate Journalist

SE Asia’s roving newshound

News used to be reported from the source with engaging text by journalists, and the challenges they faced and the risks they took are fodder for so many thrilling tales. These days, however, distant back offices help complete news bits with little personal involvement, and pretty soon we will see AI engines churn them out instead. Perhaps it is time to take you back 80 years and get to know a journalist who lived through two world wars and delivered news articles from many locations under duress. This interesting gent who evoked envy and grudging admiration among his peers and juniors, and delivered many a scoop in the 40s and 50s, was none other than Madhavan Sivaram, the intrepid journalist and author of many seminal works from his time.

Conceição – Our new book

 The Sad Story of the Conceição – Published by the Chagos Conservation Trust (CCT)

Sometimes I wonder at the surprising turns that life takes. I was researching for material to add meat to the article that I was preparing on Deigo Garcia and chanced upon a site related to the Chagos Archipelago, where I found an old copy of ‘Chagos News’. In there, I did not find much on Diego Garcia as such, but I chanced on an article by Nigel Wenban-Smith, on the sinking of an India-bound Portuguese Nau called Conceição (Conception) in 1555. Intrigued, I read it up and when I saw that it was about a shipwreck among those islands, I became very interested, desiring to get to the bottom of the story. This was in my wheelhouse, so to say, and melded with the many Portuguese studies I had made, while at the same time being on the fringes of the Diego Garcia research. I obtained a copy of the survivor Rangel’s account of the shipwreck in Portuguese, but an online translation did not prove to be very helpful.

As I had worked on a couple of shipwreck stories before this, I had a vague idea of the sailing routines and how complex it was in those days. Remember there was no GPS, no good maps (it was just 7 years after Vasco Da Gama had made it to Malabar), or dependable sailing instructions to Cochin. Sailing was still done using celestial navigation, with astrolabes, and assisted by clues provided by mother nature (color of water, flight of birds, etc.). I decided to contact the author of the article in the Chagos News and was pleasantly surprised to receive a detailed and quick reply from him, stating that his research into the wreck was incomplete and wondering if we could make something out of it, together. Preying on his mind was a question - did the ship get wrecked in the Chagos or further North?

Without hesitation, I agreed, and this was amid the Pandemic years, July 2021, to be precise. The subsequent long-distance collaboration across the Atlantic, over 120 emails, resulted in our ending up as coauthors of the newly published book – The Sad Story of The Conceição.

A bit about Nigel my coauthor - Nigel Wenban-Smith’s career in the British Diplomatic Service (Ireland, Belgium, Canada, East Africa, Malawi) included a spell as Commissioner for the British Indian Ocean Territory in the early 1980s. This sparked his interest in the conservation of the Chagos Archipelago, which led to his involvement, after retirement, in the Friends of the Chagos (now the Chagos Conservation Trust), including six years as its chairman. Over the past decade, he has turned his attention increasingly to the archipelago's little-known history.

While Nigel concentrated on a proper translation of Rangel’s account and the arrangement of the book itself, I provided the background to the voyage, the portions connected to the Portuguese trade with Calicut & Cochin, the India run, the establishment of Estado da India, etc. Careful checking of the account of Rangel and the maps of that period, to zoom in on potential locations where the ship was wrecked, became our final task.

The Chagos News (Feb 2023) introduced the upcoming book thus - The earlier Chagos: A History, explained: “Unfortunately, Jesuit records shed no light whatsoever on where exactly the Conceição went aground, how the survivors found their way to India, or how many perished”. The new book brings new clarity to those far-off events. And the survivor Manoel Rangel’s hardships and courage in tackling them provide a fascinating read in their own right – his account also offers clues as to the wreck site…

However, as in all good detective stories, his clues point in different directions, while learned commentators disagree with one another on practically every point. To thicken the plot, modern experts, deeply familiar with the seas concerned, pounce on each solution the authors propose. As if this were not enough, Rangel’s numbers challenge Manmadhan and Wenban-Smith’s attempt to provide an accurate body count.

I am sure readers will share our excitement as we follow the course of the ill-fated ship and the travails of its hapless passengers.

The book will soon be available for purchase in the UK, please visit the Chagos Conservation Trust website below. Presumably, it will be available in India and the US, sometime in the future. Check for ordering at – Link and Link

We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it. 

A note about the Chagos Archipelago - Chagos, about 315 miles south of Maldives, was forgotten for a while, after the Cold War. But its importance is growing due to changing geopolitical balances, while at the same time, the actions of the British in the past are being questioned, especially the fate of the native Chagossians who were expelled and relocated to Mauritius. Britain was gradually dismantling its empire in the 60s and during discussions over the independence of Mauritius, they acquired 58 remote islands comprising the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius. This then came to be known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Between 1968 and 1973 the island population was expelled, and the area was leased to the US. The Chagos Islands were a strategic spot from which they maintained a strategic presence in the Indian Ocean. Diego Garcia, the largest, is now an American military base. While the UK represents the territory internationally, Mauritius is emphatic over their claims on the islands as well as compensation for the expelled Chagossians. These matters continue to be discussed, disputed, and contested.

The Ceylon Malayalees

Travails of the Kochiyan…

It is difficult to quantify the waves of migrations between Kerala and Ceylon – Sri Lanka over time, and the lines are quite blurred, but then again, there was a time when the relations between Malayalees and the Sinhalese in Ceylon, became intensely turbulent. Though there is a great similarity in vegetation, thought, customs, and looks, as well as a similarity in cuisines, all of which I can attest to as I have been there, the social gap between these two peoples remained vast, way more than what 100 odd miles between the two lands should account for. Let’s go across the waters and check what lurks behind the mists over the Palk Straits.

The Harmonium

And its checkered history in India

It would surprise many readers that this musical instrument, so common to the music scene today, had such a troubled past. Born in France and further modified to meet Indian requirements at Calcutta, to be mass produced and sold in in the thousands, this humble hand powered instrument had a difficult history, to say the least. So many people have tried hard to erase it off the Indian musical scene, and persons of great repute have been credited in banning it from the AIR for all of 30 + years. John Fielden, John Foulds, Anand Coomaraswamy, Jawaharlal Nehru, Keskar, Rabindranath Tagore, etc. have all been named as the people behind the ban, while the instrument itself not only gained in popularity in the drama stages and music composing studios, but also ported instrumental music and accompaniment from the performing stages to many households.

White and Whitefield

 An Anglo Indian Colony in Bangalore

The story of Whitefield in Bangalore starts with DS White, a resident of Madras, who held the welfare of the marginalized Anglo Indians or Eurasians, wallowing in the twilight period of the British rule in India, close to his heart. A few villages or colonies were created as a home for some of the pioneers, based on a utopian model and after a ‘hunky dory’ period, declined gradually, eventually to be swallowed up by all the development which transformed a sleepy Bangalore, into a much larger and bustling metropolis today, home to the IT sector. Not many know the details of Whitefield, other than the fact that it was one of those Anglo-Indian colonies and hearing often rumors involving Churchill and a girl named Rose Hamilton, who lived in the general vicinity. Let’s see if we can dig out a little more from the tomes of history, trace the founder’s days, the colony’s times - good and bad, and finally whiff past the days that Churchill spent in Bangalore. 

The Heart of Montrose

Madurai’s peculiar connection to Scotland, Logarithms, Colin Mackenzie, and a hero’s heart

Madurai has a great cultural history, and for a long time was Tamil Nadu’s cultural capital, and the ‘Toonga Nagaram, the city that never slept’. It was one of those cities which endured so many rulers and changes, notably by the Kalabhras, the Pandyas, the Cholas, the Tughlaq Sultanate, the Vijayanagar Rayars, the Telugu Nayaks, the Nawab of Arcot and Chanda Saheb, the British East India Company and finally the British Raj. Most would recall it as a Nayak-era temple town on the banks of the Vaigai river, or as a pilgrimage town, home to the magnificent Madurai Meenakshi temple and the Tirumala Naikar temple.

Chat GPT – An interesting demonstration

Newspapers, websites, podcasts, radio news, and TV programs are talking about the pros and cons of Chat GPT. I had just a cursory idea about the whole thing and when my younger son Arun visited us recently, my wife asked him what it was all about. After some prodding, he got on to the site and proceeded with a demonstration of how it works. Below is exactly what transpired, I have not made a single edit anywhere.

Surus and Dali

Dali’s elephants

Surus the war elephant, as some of you may know, belonged to a much older time frame, and its connection to the artist Salvadore Dali, who was born centuries later is quite interesting, to say the least. Some years ago, many news reports were published about the gifting of an elephant to Dali by Air India in return for the little giveaway sculpture designed by Dali. This article will touch upon that event, and also cover some antecedents, Dali’s preoccupation with elephants, and the events which followed the arrival of the baby pachyderm in Switzerland.

Bolgatty or Bastion

The attack at the British Residency – Cochin Dec 29, 1808

As we read in the lengthy article that I wrote some years ago on Velu Thampi Dalawa’s reign in Travancore, and his revolt against the British EIC, leading to his death, there is a mention of the attack by the Travancore Nair’s on the residence of the first British resident for Travancore & Cochin, Colin Macaulay. We will get into the events of that night in more detail and as promised, discuss the details of Macaulay’s escape and the person who helped save him, if only to clear some conflicting information between sources.