Nowherelands: Lost Countries of the 19th and 20th Century
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- ALWAR
- Potty Princes and Sweet Dessert
- Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore (1903): Winter India Kalakand
- EASTERN RUMELIA
- Drawing-Board Country
- Alf Grannes, Kjetil Rå Hauge Siri Sverdrup Lunden (1981): Som fugl Føniks, Bulgaria gjennom 1300 år Francis van Wyck Mason (1950)
- ORANGE FREE STATE
- Hymn-Singing and Racism
Julio Flórez (1988): Poesia escogida, new edition José Vicente Ortega Ricaurte & Antonio Ferro (1981): La Gruta Simbólica Per Buvik (2001): Dekadanse Carlos Gardel: Mis flores negras Melancholy music from string instruments issues from the crypt. Birds ruffle their wings in the cypresses, fireflies swarm about and the moon lights up the marble gravestones LUIS MARIA MORA
Potty Princes and Sweet Dessert The text on the stamp from 1877 is in the Indian script called devanagari. At the top, it tells us we are in Alwar, a princely state roughly the size of North Yorkshire. At the bottom, the stamp shows the postage, followed by the figure 31, which is a mystery. It is probably a question of the die having been made in 1931 according to the Hindu calendar, which is equivalent to 1875 in the Gregorian calendar. But this means that the stamp is not printed until two years later. The motif is a traditional push dagger known as a katar, with an H-shaped hand-grip and a triangular blade, forged into a single piece. This is a reference to the legend of a previous prince, who escaped from four assassins by seizing a katar from the belt of their leader using only his toes and then stabbing him in the stomach. This pretty much captures the essence of the princely state of Anwar. It is a place whose deeply ingrained traditions of treachery and arrogant violence make the adventures in the Arabian Nights look like non-fiction. The backdrop to all this was the emergence of India’s so-called princely states. Once again, it was the British who were pulling the strings. The East India Company was the east’s answer to the Hudson Bay Company in North America. It was a purely commercial concern set up in the 1600s by the British aristocracy and wealthy merchants. Its aim was to bring goods such as cotton, silk, indigo dye, spices, tea and opium home from the Far East. The British state was scarcely involved and the company had plenty of leeway to maximise exploitation without any ethical or diplomatic restrictions. It set up private armies of thousands of men and an administration that kept whatever remained of local autonomy in check. In India, the East India Company governed over sixty per cent of the area on its own, while the rest was organized into princely states. The first princely state to sign a treaty of co-operation was Alwar – then called Ulwar – in 1803. Its Maharaja, Bakhtawar Singh, led a dynasty descended from the Rajput warrior caste. We may assume that the arrangement suited him, as the treaty secured him a large income while placing him beyond the reach of possible challengers to the throne. The company had his back. Even so, the Maharaja felt insecure enough to opt to settle scores with all the Muslims in the area in 1811. He burned their mosques and systematically chopped off noses and ears that were then sent by the crate-load to Muslim princes elsewhere in the region. The bones of those he killed were also dispatched out of the country.63 The East Indian Company became uneasy, foreseeing prolonged problems with the Muslims, who made up a large share of the population in many Indian states. After threats from the company army, Bakhtawar Singh gave in and agreed that there would be no repeat. By way of consolation he was permitted to rename Ulwar Alwar, thereby advancing the princely state’s position not just in the alphabet but also in the queue for many of the bureaucratic processes then under way in India. Despite increased demand for colonial goods throughout Europe, the management of the East India Company eventually ran into major financial problems over the course of the 1800s. And after a series of catastrophic famines caused by the company’s insistence on switching from grain to opium crops, a rebellion flared up in 1857, rapidly spreading to large areas of the Indian continent. The 280,000-strong company army found itself in trouble and the turbulence died down only in 1858 after the British government stepped in and nationalized the company. The fact that the hegemony thereby shifted from corporate imperialism to state imperialism meant little to the Maharajas in Alwar and the other princely states. They may have had to quieten down a bit, but the power structures remained the same as before. Towards the end of the 1800s, an American called Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore travels through Alwar. And like so many other foreign tourists, what she’s interested in is the fairy-tale culture of the princes, with all its excesses of wealth and splendour. Some years earlier, Jai Singh Prabhakar Bahadur has inherited the throne. In contrast to his predecessors, all of whom sported luxuriant, dyed beards, he looks more like a European: he has only a thin moustache and is otherwise clean-shaven. But his eyes glow with exoticism and he is dressed up in full regalia of silk, gold and diamonds, far outshining his peers in other princely states. The tourists are overwhelmed. Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore tells of processions of three hundred singers, who always follow the prince’s elephant wherever it should roam. She tells of the castles with huge chambers made of solid marble and furnishings of pure silver; of landscape gardens overgrown with rare orchids. She tells of tame tigers and blue parrots that recite full sentences in Rajput, of the stables with five hundred horses and forty elephants, ‘tramping and swinging their trunks in idleness for the honour and glory of the raja’.64 Back at the hotel beside the train station, she takes tea with her travelling companions. And she orders kalakand, a local cake made by warming up milk in a large pan until it thickens and then adding sugar and dried fruit. In the room, she finds a sign that spells out the dark side of the princely state: ‘Visitors will please not beat the servants, but report them to the manager, who will punish them.’65 She is introduced to the so-called begar system, whereby anybody who is not a member of the aristocracy must contribute their unpaid labour for at least a month of every year. The prince himself decides when the work will be done. Women are summoned to the palace with no regard for their own domestic duties, and men must leave their own crops to rot in the fields while they harvest the prince’s opium plantations. At the same time, taxation is heavy, and extraordinary taxes may be imposed without warning if a princess is to marry or if the prince buys himself a new elephant or a car. Over time, Jai Singh Prabhakar Bhadur buys a great many cars on his constant trips to Europe, and they are always luxury cars. After being insulted at a Rolls Royce showroom in London, he buys six of the company’s most expensive models and, on returning home, has them refitted to serve as rubbish trucks – to the despair of the car company, which rapidly loses contracts throughout the region. [1877: Stamp with a Katar dagger and text in devanagari script.] On one occasion when he was dissatisfied with the horses during a local polo tournament, he had them burnt alive on the polo field after soaking them in petrol. This tests the British officers among the public to their very limits,66 and when it later transpires that he has used small children as live bait during his regular tiger hunts, this is the last straw for the British. The Maharaja is removed from office in 1933 and replaced with his cousin, Tej Singh. He moves to Paris, where he spends his last years wearing gloves to avoid coming into physical contact with white people. Tej Singh Prabhakar Bahadur was not as savage as his predecessor, but his arrogance was intact, as was his absolute lack of interest in social improvements: ‘We are the sons of the Sun God. The people are our children. The relationship is that of father and son. There is no mention of reforms in the Holy Book.’67 It all came to an end in 1949 anyway, when Alwar was incorporated into the far more democratic Indian Union. But Tej Singh Prabhakar Bahadur didn’t give up without a struggle, largely at the expense of the democratically inclined Muslims in the area. Over the course of six months, almost all of them were thrown out. Tej Singh Prabhakar Bahadur himself went back to Delhi, where he lived comfortably on his savings until his death in 2009.
The people are our children. The relationship is that of father and son. There is no mention of reforms in the Holy Book TEJ SINGH PRABHAKAR BAHADUR
1.5l milk 100g sugar 1 tsp saffron 2 tbsp vinegar Dried fruit (garnish) Preparation: Boil the milk and stir in the sugar and saffron. Keep boiling until the milk has halved in volume. Set aside 150 ml and add vinegar to the rest, cooking it for a few more minutes whilst stirring slowly until the milk curdles. Set the pan to one side and let it rest for fifteen minutes. Drain off the liquid and carefully knead the curd that has formed. Warm up 100 ml of the milk you set aside and add the curd. Once the milk has been soaked up and the mixture has thickened, pour it into a bowl and put it in a cool place. Before serving, pour the last of the milk over the top, then sprinkle the milk cake with chopped dried fruit.
Drawing-Board Country The Balkans have always been an unsettled region. At the end of the 1870s, conflict breaks out again, this time in the areas down towards the Black Sea in the east. International diplomacy proves all but useless and several of the great powers in the West send in agents, partly to try and influence the situation and partly to get some idea of what’s actually going on there. The same setting – if a little closer to our own times – is used in Francis Van Wyck Mason’s novel, Dardanelles Derelict. It opens with two American agents in parachutes above a snowbound mountain landscape: one is Hugh North, a James Bond-style character who appears in several of Wyck Mason’s action novels, and the other is the female agent, Jingles Lawson. They have disguised themselves in advance as farmers, and North has to wear a wig because the men in the area never cut their hair. Meantime, all other bodily hair is shaven off, also in accordance with local tradition, ‘apparently to ward off vermin’, says a blushing Jingles. In addition, the agents have rubbed snuff into the corners of their eyes to make them look inflamed, and they have been given clear orders never to blow their noses on anything but their fingers. Although Wyck Mason’s training as a historian probably guarantees the authenticity of these details to some extent, you get the sneaking feeling that the dramatics have got a bit out of hand here. In the 1870s – as so often both before and since – it was all a matter of the great powers jockeying for position, far above the heads of the local populace. Russia had set itself the goal of conquering the territory it needed to secure its access to the Mediterranean. To achieve this, it had to drive out the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire was established by a clan of Oghuz Turks and passed its zenith in the 1600s, when it ruled over an empire that encompassed the Mediterranean in both south and east, and stretched across Asia Minor as far as the Indian Ocean. After a couple of centuries of stagnation, the empire was beginning to fall apart. Russia saw its chance in 1877. It intervened and easily won the area it had been eyeing. The Treaty of San Stefano a year later established the creation of a Russian-dominated Greater Bulgaria, which would stretch as far as the harbour town of Thessaloniki by the Aegean Sea. The other great European powers, which had stayed on the sidelines until then, became increasingly uneasy about Russia’s greater influence in the area. Great Britain, France, Italy and Austria-Hungary therefore refused to accept the treaty. The German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, took it upon himself to serve as arbitrator and during the summer of 1878 the Treaty of Berlin was drawn up. In this treaty, Russia’s spoils of war were drastically reduced. After stern threats, the Russians signed anyway. Bismarck noted the solid contribution of the British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli: ‘That old Jew. What a man.’68 Admittedly the Russians retained a certain influence over part of Bulgaria in the north, while Macedonia in the south would remain under Ottoman rule. In order to secure a peaceful coexistence, a separate autonomous zone was to be established between the two. On the suggestion of the British, it was called Eastern Rumelia. It would cover the area between the Black Sea in the east, the Balkan Mountains in the north and the Strandzha Massif in the south. The Ottomans would retain a kind of administrative authority, but only on condition that the new country had a Christian governor. Absolutely no effort was made to take into account ethnic and political relations in the affected areas. The whole thing was nothing but a drawing-board plan, and even the British Foreign Secretary Robert A. T. Gascoyne-Cecil admitted it had some shortcomings: ‘We shall set up a rickety sort of Turkish rule again south of the Balkans. But it is a mere respite. There is no vitality left in them.’69 But the Ottomans were satisfied and gave Great Britain the island of Cyprus as thanks for its support. Austria-Hungary, meanwhile, received the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Naturally enough, Russia was not as satisfied with the result, although it had at least managed to ensure that the new prince of what was left of Bulgaria in the north would be selected by Tsar Alexander II. He chose a nephew of his German wife, also called Alexander. When he went on to appoint a Russia-friendly minister of war as well, it was the last straw for the Bulgarians. Quite unexpectedly, the new prince took the side of the people, but was at once kidnapped by Russian agents and relinquished the throne without a squeak. The Bulgarians took advantage of the sudden political vacuum to choose their own prince who, unbelievably enough, managed to stay on the throne in Sofia right up until 1918, to the great despair of the Russians.
Eastern Rumelia’s first stamps are issued in 1881, perhaps as an attempt to inject a touch of national feeling. They are printed in Constantinople, and include clear design elements from existing Ottoman stamps, along with the fairly unambiguous inscription: ‘Post from the Ottoman Empire’ in Arabic. They also bear inscriptions in Greek, Bulgarian and French, which only serve to underscore the prevailing confusion. My stamp is postmarked Philippoupolis, which is the Greek name for the city of Plovdiv in the middle of the Thracian Plain in the east. It lies amid a rolling landscape of low hills on the shores of the Maritsa River and its history goes back more than six thousand years. As this makes it one of the oldest cities in Europe, it is difficult to avoid adopting it as the new country’s capital city.
And so Eastern Rumelia is dissolved overnight and reunited with the remainder of Bulgaria. But the goal of incorporating Macedonia to form a Greater Bulgaria is never achieved. The great powers are too sceptical and the Ottomans still too strong for this to happen. Eastern Rumelia continues to be run as a province with a certain degree of autonomous rule up until 1908, and it is accepted that the Ottomans retain a certain amount of influence in the area, at least on paper. The stamps, large stocks of which still exist, remain valid until the revolutionary year of 1885 after being overprinted with the Bulgarian lion, which is on my stamp. From 1886, only Bulgarian stamps are used.
Turkish rule again south of the Balkans. But it is a mere respite. There is no vitality left in them ROBERT A.T. GASCOYNE-CECIL
Hymn-Singing and Racism ‘What particularities might lie right in front of my nose, I do not know.’70 Ingvald Schrøder-Nilsen, from Trøndelag in central Norway, sighs deeply as he sits bent over his drawing board in his tent on the highland plains of South Africa. He has been employed as a surveyor. It is evening and he is struggling to produce a fair copy of his day’s work. The dip pen must be held steady throughout the whole line to avoid blotching, a task rendered almost impossible by all the flies. It is 1898 and the Orange Free State, between the Vaal and Orange Rivers in the South African highlands, has existed for nearly fifty years. The Orange, the larger of the two rivers, has its source in the Drakensberg Mountains, which soar to heights of more than 3,000m in the east. This area sees 2m of precipitation per year and in winter it falls as snow, decking the sharp mountaintops with white caps. On its way west towards the Atlantic Ocean, the Orange River changes character, becoming a dirty orange stream that teems with birds, crocodiles, hippopotamuses and elephants in its calmer stretches. It is hedged about on both sides by thorny acacia bushes, although these are still sparse enough for the sun to scorch the earth brown through the dry summers. This was originally the tribal region of the Tswana people, the Khoikhoi and the Bushmen, or San people. But aggressive Zulu tribes from the east had almost cleared the area of its population in the first half of the 1800s before withdrawing. So the way was already clear for the white settlers who arrived from the south towards the end of this period. They were descendants of Dutch and French Huguenots who had settled in the hills inland from the Cape of Good Hope a couple of hundred years earlier. And they were unhappy about the British colonisation of the coastal area in 1795. They called themselves Boers – Dutch for farmers – and were tall, sturdy people, good at riding and shooting. Above all, though, they were dogmatic Calvinists. This meant they believed in predestination: that God predetermined whether an individual sinner was saved or damned. In line with this religion, the family system was patriarchal, and they lived simple, frugal lives on small, scattered farmsteads. On his surveying trip, Ingvald Schrøder-Nilsen experiences Boer culture at close quarters. And, being young, the girls are the first people to attract his attention:
And he accompanies them to church. Everybody coughed and cleared their throats good and long until the priest, who also led the singing, intoned a prolonged, a particularly prolonged and shrill note. It ended with some frightful trills, and immediately afterwards, everybody else joined in as loudly as they could – I have never heard music like it before!73 The Orange Free State was established as an independent republic in 1854, a couple of years after the neighbouring republic of Transvaal in the north, which was also set up by the Boers. The Free State covered an area four times larger than the Netherlands. The administrative centre was established in Bloemfontein, a collection of rectangular blocks of low houses, interspersed with a few unusually broad streets of brown gravel. The official language was Dutch and all white men over eighteen years of age had the right to vote in the Volksraad. The notion that the few remaining indigenous people in the area should be viewed as subordinate was established in the constitution: ‘The people desire to permit no equality between coloured people and the white inhabitants of the country, either in church or state.’74 All the same, many years passed in peace and calm, and the white population increased from fifteen thousand to seventy-five thousand by 1875. But as many of the farms grew in size, the need for manpower increased. Gradually, the locals – whom the Boers called kaffirs – were incorporated into a kind of crofter system. Ingvald Schrøder-Nilsen noted that this made the business of running a farm in the region seem much less arduous than in Norway. The farmer lends them oxen and plough in the ploughing season, but in return, the kaffir is obliged to carry out all the agricultural work on the farm, while the women help the housewife with the laundry and slaughtering, as well as work in the house and garden, and the children herd the cattle and drive them home at night.75 In parallel, a slavery system was gradually developed, with slaves imported from Madagascar, Mozambique and Malaya. The British, who had in the meantime passed anti-slavery laws, claimed this was the main reason why they invaded the Orange Free State in 1898. There is much to indicate that they were, in fact, more interested in the neighbouring state of Transvaal owing to the discovery of large deposits of gold and diamonds in this area during the 1880s and 1890s.76 The Orange Free State was dragged into the turbulence as a result of its mutual defence pact with Transvaal. [1869: Standard issue with orange tree] In any event, the Boer War was under way. And the British encountered greater resistance than they had expected. The Boers were individualists and experts in guerrilla warfare, and the many, scattered farmsteads secured them reliable supplies of food. To break the resistance, the British adopted scorched-earth tactics. Farms and crops were burnt, domestic animals slaughtered and soil was salted. Numerous concentration camps were also set up, where 30,000 women and children soon died of hunger, sickness and exhaustion. My stamp bears a postmark from Bloemfontein in 1899. We may assume this is just before the British occupy the city. The Orange Free State had already issued its first stamps in 1868. They were printed by De La Rue of London and came in a variety of values and colours, although all of them bore the same image of a neatly trimmed orange tree surrounded by three post horns. The motif is totally lacking in chauvinism and has a down-to-earth, honest, almost naïve appearance. After taking Bloemfontein, the British find large unsold stocks of the stamps, which are immediately hand-stamped with the initials V.R.I. (for Victoria Regina Imperatrix or Victoria Queen and Empress) before being put back in circulation. The Peace of Vereeniging is signed in 1902. Both the Orange Free State and Transvaal cease to be autonomous republics and become British colonies. The Orange Free State is renamed Orange River Colony. In 1910, it is incorporated into the South African Union as the Free State Province. Ingvald Schrøder-Nilsen had fought on the Boers’ side in the war. After being released from prison, he travelled home to Norway, where he eventually became a telegraph office manager in Molde. Many of the Boers also left, some for Argentina, others for Mexico and the USA, but the majority remained. And their attitudes soon calcified into the South African constitution and the so-called Master and Servant Laws. This stripped members of the indigenous tribes of any right to ownership of the land while also obliging them to place their labour at the disposal of the farmers and mining companies. This was followed up with the apartheid policy pursued by every government until Nelson Mandela became president in 1994. Yüklə 463,42 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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