The First Empire in Subcontinent, Johnny Deep and Amber Heard, Common Law, Weed and Ms Marvel
The First Empire In Subcontinent
The Mauryan empire was founded by Chandragupta Maurya, who succeeded to the Nanda throne in c. 321 bc. He was then a young man and is thought to have been the protege of the brahman Kautilya, who was his guide and mentor both in acquiring a throne and in keeping it. This is suggested by a range of stories that relate his rise to power, particularly from Buddhist and Jaina texts, as well as by the play Mudrarakshasa by Vishakhadatta, which, although written many centuries later, still supports this tradition. […] Once the Ganges Plain was under his control, Chandragupta moved to the northwest to exploit the power vacuum created by Alexander’s departure.These areas fell to him rapidly, until he reached the Indus. Here he paused, as the Greek Seleucus Nicator - the successor to Alexander - had fortified his hold on the area. Chandragupta moved to central India for a while and occupied the region north of the River Narmada. But 305 b c saw him back in the northwest, involved in a campaign against Seleucus, in which Chandragupta seems to have been successful, judging by the terms of the treaty of 303 bc. Some Seleucid territories that today would cover eastern Afghanistan, Baluchistan and Makran were ceded to the Maurya. With this, the routes and nodal points of the northwest region shifted from Persian-Hellenisticto Mauryan control, a shift from one to the other of the major states of Iran and northern India becoming a pattern in the history of the region. Given this historical reality, the notion of some dynasties being ‘foreign’ would possibly have been unfamiliar to the people of the northwest, who were themselves of varying cultures. In return for the territory ceded, Seleucusobtained 500 elephants, a belief in their effectiveness in campaigns being axiomatic in Hellenistic military strategy. There was also an epigammia - a marriage agreement - which has been interpreted as a possible marriage alliance between the two royal families. But it could also have referred to the legalizing of marriages between Hellenistic Greeks and Indians living in the cities or as part of the garrison settlements in eastern Afghanistan.The territorial foundation of the Mauryan Empire had been laid, with Chandragupta controlling the Indus and Ganges Plains and the borderlands- a formidable empire by any standards.Campaigns in the ancient world were not merely a mechanism for acquiring more territory. They were frequently enterprises motivated by considerable diplomatic play, as well as a search for economic advantage. Diplomacy took the form of relationships with neighbours and was later to provide the basis of the theory of mandala - the circle of diplomacy involving allies and enemies. The economic advantage was more visible, not only in the nature and location of the territory to be conquered and its resources but also in the nature of the campaign. Large-scale campaigns against wealthy neighbours were a source of booty, as well as the taking of prisoners-of-war who could be used as labour. Campaigns have therefore been more than matters of military concern. The campaign against the Seleucids was to wrest Gandharafrom them, as it had yielded impressive revenues since the time it was part of the Achaemenid Empire. It was also linked to the land routes to west Asia. The acquisition of central India meant access to the peninsula, another area with resources as yet untapped by northern powers.Despite the campaign, there was considerable contact of a friendly and inquisitive nature between the Mauryas and the Seleucids. Chandragupta is referred to as Sandrocottos in later accounts and is said to have met Alexander as a young man. In the eighteenth century William Jones identifiedSandrocottos with Chandragupta, which provided a clue to Mauryan chronology. It is possible that as a result of the marriage alliance one of the daughters of Seleucus came to the Mauryan court at Pataliputra, in which case a number of Greek women would have accompanied her. An exchange of envoys between the Mauryas and the Seleucids, and with the Hellenistic states further west, was initiated, accompanied by an exchange of gifts(which included potent aphrodisiacs!). Pataliputra welcomed visitors and the city administration had a special committee to look after their welfare.Seleucus’s envoy, Megasthenes, is said to have spent time in India and left an account entitled Indica. Much of this account could have been gathered from conversations and travellers’ tales, rather than from personal knowledge, and some of his contemporaries doubted that he spent time at Pataliputra.The Jaina tradition claims that towards the end of his life Chandragupta, by now an ardent Jaina, abdicated in favour of his son Bindusara and became an ascetic. Together with one of the better-known Jaina elders, Bhadrabahu, and other monks he went to south India, and there he ended his life by regulating slow starvation in the orthodox Jaina manner. A site close to the Jaina centre of Shravana Belgola in Karnataka is associated by local tradition with this story.Bindusara succeeded in about 297 bc. To the Greeks, Bindusara was known as Amitrochates - perhaps a Greek transcription of the Sanskritamitraghata, the destroyer of foes. Apparently, he was a man of wide interests and tastes, and it is said that he asked the Greek King Antiochus I to send him some sweet wine, dried figs and a sophist. Buddhist tradition associates him with an interest in the Ajivika sect. A Tibetan history of Buddhism, written many centuries later, attributes to him the conquest of ‘the land between the two seas’ - presumably the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.This would suggest that Bindusara campaigned in the Deccan, extendingMauryan control as far south as Karnataka. The recent discovery of Ashokan edicts at Sannathi in Karnataka, similar to those found at Kalinga in Orissa and issued after the Kalinga campaign, raises the question of whether this region was conquered later by Ashoka, rather than by his father Bindusara; or were these edicts located at this site by mistake? Early Tamil poets of south India speak of Mauryan chariots thundering across the land, their white pennants brilliant in the sunshine. Yet there appeared to have been friendly relations with the chiefdoms of the far south. At the time ofBindusara’s death in c. 272 bc, a large part of the subcontinent had come under Mauryan suzerainty. One area that was hostile, possibly interfering with Mauryan commerce to the peninsula and south India, was Kalinga on the east coast (Orissa). Its conquest was left to Bindusara’s son Ashoka, whose campaign in Kalinga was more than just an event of military significance.
— The Emergence of Empire: Mauryan India C. 3 2 1 - 1 8 5 BC (from Early India by Romila Thapar)
Try to grasp the extent and vastness of this empire. If you remember, this map existed in our textbooks, we studied emperor Ashoka in detail and also Chandragupta Maurya. How then do you believe when members belonging to the govt and media lie to you about how our textbooks only talk about Mughals and not other empires? Our textbooks in fact go about Indian history in sequence, first come Mauryans and then others and at one point the Mughals and later British and finally our independence movement. How many of us regularly lamented history classes, and frowned over the need to study dead kings and queens who walked this earth thousands and centuries ago? We never liked history lessons, and since we didn’t pay attention, and since it now suits our biases and the political worldview of feeling victimized, we now go along with obvious lies. You can pick a school textbook, and your media and anchors can do it quickly and debunk this lie once and for all but they don’t (and they won’t). They fuel this charade. This furthers the victimhood of the majority community and others, and threatens and puts at risk the minority community. The divide and rule polity gets strengthened every day by these lies and we just conveniently play our part in it. Just so you know, Akbar and Ashoka are written in a good light in our textbooks, Mohammed Ghori, Aurangzeb, Tughlaq etc aren’t. Our textbooks do mention the plunder of the Somnath temple. It appears many of us just diod’t pay attention then but are paying unwanted attention to falsified syllabi spewing from Whatsapp.
Anyways, the book by Thapar is a good start to acquaint yourself with Indian history which not-so-surprisingly severely deviates from what’s being taught and forwarded in Whatsapp University.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard
There are ambiguities in the sordid conflict between the divorced actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, but some things are clear.
Depp texted a friend that he wanted to kill Heard and then have sex with “her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she is dead.” There is a video of Depp smashing kitchen cabinets while Heard tries to calm him, saying, at one point, “All I did was say ‘sorry’!” In an audio recording, she tells him to go put his “cigarettes out on someone else,” and he responded, “Shut up fat ass.”
He admitted to head-butting her, though he said it was an accident. When Heard went to court to get a domestic violence restraining order against Depp, she had a bruise on her cheekbone from where she said he threw a phone at her.
In 2018, The Sun, a British newspaper, called Depp a “wife beater,” and he sued for libel. Proving libel is much easier in Britain than in the United States because there the burden of proof rests with the defendant. Depp lost his case. A judge, evaluating 14 incidents of Depp’s alleged abuse of Heard, found that 12 of them had occurred and concluded that The Sun’s words were “substantially true.”
Now Depp is suing Heard in Virginia for $50 million, saying that she defamed him when she described herself, in a Washington Post opinion essay that didn’t mention Depp, as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” His case seems absurd since even if he were entirely innocent, the British verdict was well known, and Heard was referring to what she symbolized, not what she allegedly endured. (She is countersuing for $100 million.)
— Amber Heard and the Death of #MeToo (May 18, 2022)
By now, you of course know what happened in the Virginia case. Unlike in the UK, Depp here, one can safely say, won. The matter at hand was similar in UK and US but plaintiffs ran out with two diagonally different verdicts. Why is that? Lawyers can well discuss the case, what I wanted to mention was how the burden of proof in such cases differs between US and UK. Mind you, we in India largely follow principally the laws and systems followed by the Brits. So in the UK, if someone publishes something about you and you consider that as a lie (and defamatory) and say so then you are by and large believed for your innocence. That is, to begin with, it is believed that you, against whom the accusations are made (or published) are speaking the truth and the paper that published those ‘lies’ is lying. In simple words, you are believed to be innocent until proven guilty. If someone alleges something about you then it is not for you to spend your time and prove your innocence. The courts and system assume you are innocent to start with. They expect or require the party that makes those allegations against you to prove those statements. The burden of proof is on the accuser and not the accused. So for example, if the police catch you on the street and say to the world that you are a terrorist or a rioter then the police have to prove their statement. You don’t have to do anything. You can say the police are lying and we are bound to believe you. Until police can prove otherwise. Until then you can carry on with your life as is. Bail is therefore considered the default in these matters. Because if you are innocent it makes sense not to punish you. After all, the police or state can always prove your crime if indeed there is a crime to be proved and when that happens state can always get to you and act against you. This is also called the system of common law. Read the below text from Aakar Patel now.
India follows the system of common law, introduced to it by Great Britain. However, it has introduced some innovations in its laws as an independent nation, and one of these is to reverse the burden of proof. In several criminal laws in India, and especially those which have been enacted or brought into force after 2014, there is a reversal of the burden of proof. This means that there is a presumption of guilt. The State now assumes that you have done something wrong, and it is for you to demonstrate your innocence.
This is the opposite of normal criminal law. For instance, if someone is found with a knife next to a corpse, it is for the State to prove that the person committed murder. However, there are laws in which the State begins with the assumption of guilt. The National Register of Citizens in Assam is one such instance. All individuals in Assam had to submit government documents which showed that their ancestors had been in Assam as citizens before 1971. Those who could not have to line up before government tribunals and prove that they were legitimate. If they could not, they were locked up. Hundreds of people are in jail today because of this and more jails are being constructed.
India has enacted the so-called “freedom of religion laws” in several BJP-ruled states, reversing the burden of proof for conversions. The law was first passed by Uttarakhand in 2018, and then came the Himachal Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act 2019, Uttar Pradesh Vidhi Viruddh Dharma Samparivartan Pratishedh Adhyadesh 2020 (Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance), Madhya Pradesh Dharma Swatantreya Adhyadesh 2020 (Freedom of Religion Ordinance) and Gujarat Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Act, 2021.
These laws virtually criminalise marriage between Hindus and Muslims. They say that if anyone converts before or after marriage, then the government will declare the marriage null and void, even if there are children. The burden of proof to show that the conversion was not fraudulent, through undue influence, or coercion is on the spouse and the family that the person is marrying into. Those who change their faith without an application to the government are sent to jail. The other unique thing about these laws is that they do not apply to Hinduism. The original law in Himachal Pradesh says that “if any person comes back to their ancestral religion”, then this shall not be deemed as conversion. The law does not define what “ancestral religion” means, but its meaning is clear: those who convert to Hinduism will not be punished.
Another set of laws, also passed after 2014, reverse the burden of proof on cow slaughter. The laws were also passed by BJP state governments. They are the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act 2015, the Haryana Gauvansh Sanrakshan and Gausamvardhan Act 2015, the Gujarat Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act 2017, and the Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Act 2020. The burden of proof is reversed and if one is accused of killing a cow or possessing beef, then it is for the individual to show that they did not kill the animal or that the meat in their fridge is not beef.
Gujarat’s punishment for cow slaughter, which is an economic crime in India because it aims to protect animal husbandry, is life in jail. No other economic offence draws this sentence. In 2019, under the new law, a Muslim man was sentenced to 10 years in jail after he was accused of serving beef at his daughter’s wedding. The police could not prove that this had happened. In that case, the judge said, it was for the man to prove that he was innocent. Because it was not possible to test food that had already been eaten, the court sent him to jail.
— Aakar Patel | ‘Presumption of guilt’ violates a key principle of common law
Do you see the problem we, by our silence, and our elected government by design have created?
Now
take
a
deep
breathe
And observe this image for a few seconds, ten, nine, eight…
How to Meditate
Did You Know?
None of the Mughal emperors ever went on a Hajj pilgrimage instead, they patronised local traditions of Islam here. In fact, Aurangzeb once sent a delegation of women (yes women!) from his court to Mecca and the governors of Mecca simply asked them to leave because they weren’t happy with the traditions (Indian version of Islam) that Mughals were patronising in India.
‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ Is Really a Thing
Children’s behaviour may suffer from a lack of access to outdoor space, a problem heightened by the pandemic.
I rediscovered Vimeo recently and found these two videos that I liked years ago. Maybe they will interest you too.
And finally, some of you might already know, there’s a new superhero on the block. Our own desi avenger who speaks our language, whose parents behave and talk like ours, they dress like people around us and like what we like, yes, the new avenger Ms Marvel is a Shah Rukh Khan fan among other things! But that’s not all. The just-released show is being talked about just everywhere now. Ms Marvel now is not only the highest-scoring Disney Plus MCU TV series with its 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, but that score also puts it above every MCU movie as well. What I really liked about the show and character though was how this wasn’t just done to target a particular audience just by creating a new character like how it’s usually done. The original comic book character, to begin with, was written and based on stories by a Pakistani and many on the show including Iman Vellani who plays Ms Marve are from or related to Pakistan including some directors, writers and producers. So they get many subtleties and intricate details about our homes and what we gossip about, just kinda right. At the end of the first episode, they even have a nice rap song, in Urdu!
That’s all for this one. The monsoon is almost here and so are covid-19 cases that seem to be rising even before it, meaning they will rise even more hereafter. So keep yourself safe, and get back to wearing masks and washing hands frequently.