PALENQUE
by Carol Miller
Excerpt from TRAVELS IN THE MAYA WORLD
A 1992 Mexican presidential decree allocated federal funds to spruce up twelve pre-Columbian sites, among them everyone's darling, Palenque. The site had already suffered exhaustive scrutiny, some of it fanciful or frankly erroneous, for close to three hundred years. As my late friend, the seasoned archaeologist Ricardo Bueno, reminded us, "Anything done to a site like Palenque, good, bad or indifferent, will be criticized. It's too much in the public, as well as the political, eye."
The fact we simply have to accept is the imminence of an official reconstruction and total reorientation of this epitome of Classic Maya grace and charm. Instead of gaining access from the old parking lot, which leads to the foot of the Temple of the Inscriptions, the public now leaves vehicles at the new Museum and Service Center (offices, shop, cafe, and auditorium), where the old Hotel de las Ruinas used to stand, then ascends steep stone stairs through the cool forest, following the course of the "Queen's Bath" to the Temple of the Bats, now reclaimed. The same path leads through the newly recovered Group C--a series of residential-palace like structures that climb the ridge in layer after layer of terraces and patios--and then drops to the riverbed, finally crossing into the ceremonial center at the North Group.
Formidable stucco masks staring blankly from the heights, grand staircases, the reconstructed ball court, and the platform of the labyrinthine administrative palace with its unique tower are only preludes to the show stopper at the Cruz de Palenque. This great platform, now referred to affectionately as "The Crosses," supported a succession of structures over the centuries--the Cross of Palenque, the Foliated Cross, the Temple of the Sun, the unimaginatively named Structure XV--all now subject to the architect's slide rule.
The big news is the discovery, during excavation, of several dozen cylindrical incense burners, remarkably intact and now displayed in the new museum along with jade jewelry and turquoise masks, elaborate inscriptions and panels of glyphs, dainty clay figurines and imposing stone sculpture--what the French iconographer Claude Baudez, in his Lost Cities of the Maya, called "the refinement of the centuries of Palenque, the Athens of Mesoamerica."
The still unexplained abandonment of Palenque at the height of her genius, the peculiar delicacy of her inscriptions and reliefs, her roof combs like stone lace in a jungle that seems to breathe with a life of its own--together they have bewitched every visitor since the French painter-explorer Frederick Waldeck in the eighteenth century. Stephens and Catherwood came, Desiré Charnay, Blom and Morley, Alfred Maudslay, Alfonso Caso, the two Edwards--Seler and Thompson--followed by Miguel Angel Fernández and of course Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, so devoted to the labor of a lifetime that his grave still stands by a tree at the foot of the Temple of the Inscriptions. His imprint is so vivid that even what Ricardo Bueno describes as his "mistaken" design of the Palace staircase is a sacred cow: no one dares modify or correct it.
I have been many times to Palenque, so many I long ago lost count. When I arrived in the early fifties, the site proclaimed by UNESCO as "humanity's patrimony" was dark and damp, shielded by dense growth of the type still visible on the ridge where as yet unexcavated ruins lie collapsed or buried. Today tour buses crowd the parking lot. The Germans, who fly into Cancún, arrive in a special vehicle in which they eat and sleep. A few enterprising Lacandón natives sell them bows and arrows that were never meant to be shot but which are decorated with the iridescent green feathers of the rapidly disappearing tropical parrots. The heat is still oppressive, and sweat pours even from a brow encased in hat or headband.
Getting there is easy now, but in 1954 the road was just a track. It was a long time ago. I think I traveled on second-class buses from Veracruz, then crossed the Papaloapan River by raft at Alvarado before boarding the train that chugs straight across the marshes and lagoons of the Tabasco Plain, bound for Campeche. I remember I awoke in Teapa at the foot of the Black Forest with a great hunger. A woman hawked her tacos on the platform.
"What have they inside?" I called to her. "Meat!" she answered impatiently.
"What kind of meat?" I insisted.
"Dog!" she called back. I thought she was being spiteful, especially since her two small children burst out laughing. But it could have been anything: cat, bird, or pejelagarto (an animal between fish and reptile from the marshy lagoons). Most likely it was tepezcuintle --"wild dog" or "country dog"--a shy and stubby rodent that, although not a canine at all, looks like the mottled clay Colima tomb figures of dogs in any pre-Columbian collection.
The train finally stopped in a corner of the jungle where the roadbed widened. There I got off. I asked someone by the track--there was no station, not even a platform--if this was really Palenque, because I saw no ruins. A kind man answered me with a gracious bow and a soft, indefinable accent: "My name is Domingo LaCroix. I have a Jeep and the only hotel in town. I am at your service." I jumped into the front seat.
The original village, a few wooden houses, had stood by the side of the tracks, but not long before my arrival it had been moved four kilometers into the jungle. From there it was five or six more kilometers to the ruins, an easy walk. I went often during the next few weeks, especially early in the morning, before the heat was up, with the mist of dawn like a shroud on the hills.
The singularly unappealing town of today, called Santo Domingo Palenque, in those days sported a single dirt lane lined with six or eight ramshackle wooden houses with peeling paint, wooden shutters, and none of the geraniums in motor oil cans so notable in other, more temperate climates. The largest house was the hotel, called, appropriately in view of its owner's name, "The Cross of Palenque." The shower was out back, just a pipe with a head, on a grassy knoll. The way was lit by fireflies.
Another house was the pool hall, a sometime saloon, where on Friday nights chairs were brought in and set in rows. All the electricity in town was turned off in order to generate enough to run a temperamental projector for the weekly film. It was the golden age of Mexican cinema; the pictures were often wonderful. If the movie was foreign, it came with Spanish subtitles. These days education is compulsory and it is hard to find anyone unable to read and write Spanish, independently of local dialects or regional languages, but back then the privileged literate read to the others, generally the very old or the very young.
It was November, and I was about to celebrate my twenty-first birthday with the village's butcher and his wife and with their tenant, the village doctor, whose name I remember was José. A young graduate from the dry farm town of Acámbaro in the state of Guanajuato, he was doing the six months of social service required by law in order to receive his degree. But first I yearned for communion with nature and went to sleep in the ruins, as Waldeck and all the others had done.
The sounds of the jungle range from startling lucidity to rampant dementia. Humming, gurgling, growling, purring, panting; a falling leaf sounds like thunder and the thunder on the horizon fades to a sigh in the heavy darkness. Bats and ghosts lurk in the high vaults of the temples: Lord Pacal and Zak-Kuk, the White Bird, his mother. Great Snake Jaguar, Jackal the Third, Lord Storm. Shield Jaguar, his face pale, his breath fetid, rages from the deepest passageways and underground hallways of the Palace maze. The night is long.
Dawn comes suddenly. The air is soft and pale with damp haze. I step aside to give way to an anteater as I make my way to the river. I stretch out, fully clothed but soaking wet, and match my breathing to the panting of the jungle. Then I stop and hold my breath. A pair of tapirs, round and fit, have come to drink from the right bank. I watch them, transfixed, losing all track of time, until out of the corner of my eye I notice the jaguars--their feline stench--on the opposite bank. Their yellow eyes glow with morning, the cold dappled light on their glossy rosettes. Neither couple perceives the other, and neither notices me. I am frozen in paradise, at the beginning of time.
The insects have begun their chorus, through the forest of zapote cedar, and guarumbo, and I return to town, joyous and humble, moved by God's gift on the day of my birth. The butcher's wife has already prepared breakfast. The butcher is angry because the baby is crying and refuses to eat.
The sharp sounds penetrate my idyll. And then I feel the itching. "What's happening to me?" I yell at José, as if it were his fault. He stares at me in horror. My face and arms have begun to swell. "Maybe gnats, mosquitoes, who knows? I come from Acámbaro, remember? We have to do something."
My feet are swelling, my eyes are closed. The itching is unbearable. I start tearing at the reddened skin. My entire body, despite my heavy denim clothing, is covered with rashes and bites of varying sizes and colors, some as big as plum-colored plates, already running blood.
The butcher and his wife bring strong cord and tie me down to prevent my scratching. José is attempting any remedy that occurs to him. "We must try vinegar," he says. "No, wait. Maybe a puree of tomato. Let me go for tobacco. They say it helps--rubbing an unsmoked cigarette on the bites. And then again, there's calamine lotion."
Everyone in town comes to look at me, and even the baby, at first alarmed and then bemused by the flurry, stops whimpering and starts to eat. I eat nothing, of course, and spend the night of my birthday tied to a chair.
oOo
viernes, 23 de julio de 2010
jueves, 22 de julio de 2010
Que cancele. Jacobo Zabludovsky. Sobre las celebraciones del bicentenario de independencia de México. Keops Guerrero. Barcelona, España.
Jacobo Zabludovsky
Cancele, Don Felipe
Se incendia el circo y el dueño en vez de salvar a los enanos vende boletos para la siguiente función.
El símil con el gobierno mexicano no es justo porque los dueños saben dirigir sus circos, menester difícil si los hay, mientras que a nuestro gobierno se le hace bolas el engrudo y en medio del desbarajuste prepara los eventos más disparatados y costosos dizque para celebrar las fechas patrias.
Llegamos a escasos dos meses de ellas descubriendo que los encargados de preparar las conmemoraciones resolvieron su problema contratando a dedo, sin licitación alguna, empresas especialistas en mojigangas que se llevarán cerca de 3 mil millones de pesos (2 mil 971, para ser exactos). La partida mayor se le adjudicó a un señor Birch que anda por el mundo ofreciendo su “show”, maquillándolo según el comprador. En México fundó una compañía llamada Instantia Producciones para firmar los contratos. Otros 14 por un total de 447 millones de pesos se le darán, también sin licitación, a TURISSTE que, según la Auditoría Superior de la Federación, no tiene atribuciones para organizar eventos. Todo esto se viene sabiendo apenas, en medio del sigilo tenebroso, gracias a la labor de algunos reporteros.
Al publicarse esta maniobra el señor José Manuel Villalpando, jefe de la comisión de los festejos, dijo: “La crítica no me afecta, la envidia es algo muy mexicano. Si el artista fuera amigo tuyo dirías qué bueno que le pagaron, o sea, depende… Este recurso es poco en realidad, frente a los muchos millones de pesos que hay en el presupuesto nacional”. Eso dijo.
A la carencia de imaginación y talento se une el despilfarro del dinero de los contribuyentes. La corrupción deja un tufo que envuelve todo este negocio. Es hora de detener el gasto ofensivo y el espectáculo que no por ser grandote deja de ser chafa. México no merece esta agresión artera.
Estamos en medio de una de las tragedias colectivas más dolorosas de los últimos tiempos. Las inundaciones han causado muertes y pérdidas materiales en la mitad de la República. La ayuda, como siempre, ha sido lenta y escasa Los daños son incalculables y las lluvias apenas empiezan. Los meses de agosto y septiembre suelen ser los más lluviosos. Con frecuencia el grito se da bajo un aguacero. Los meteorólogos pronostican próximas tormentas. Debe preverse que la catástrofe lejos de menguar crezca y lleguemos a las mentadas fiestas patrias en medio de una emergencia mayor. Ante la realidad y el peligro de que empeore, un gobernante sensato debería evitar todo festejo superfluo y todo gasto inútil.
Deben cancelarse hoy las fiestas especiales del Bicentenario de la Independencia y el Centenario de la Revolución.
Debemos ajustarnos a la austeridad republicana, a la medianía cívica de la que habló Juárez y a la que ajustó su vida y la pública durante su gobierno. Celebremos como un pueblo maduro, no como aquelarre de nuevos ricos o de negociantes irresponsables. No podemos exagerar en las fiestas como si olvidáramos el sufrimiento de cientos de miles de familias. Y no hay que olvidar que las aguas cubren tierras castigadas por guerras contra el crimen organizado y narcotraficantes cada vez más violentos y todas las plagas ancestrales que empiezan con la extrema miseria de 40 millones de mexicanos.
Señor Felipe Calderón: el miércoles al despedir a la encargada de su Oficina de la Presidencia, Patricia Flores Elizondo, dijo al obsequiarla con ese florilegio de elogios con que acostumbra cesar a su colaboradores, que “impulsó la realización de proyectos especiales, como es el caso de la celebración del Bicentenario de la Independencia y el Centenario de la Revolución”. No es disparate pensar, en consecuencia, que ella nombró al señor Villalpando. No deje que se vaya sola, don Felipe.
Los funcionarios encargados de rescatar a las víctimas de las inundaciones se han quejado de falta de recursos. Somos convalecientes de una intensa y larga crisis económica, nos acechan tiempos difíciles también en lo económico. No celebre jolgorios escandalosos en medio de la desolación. Dedique ese dinero asignado al despilfarro a favor de quienes lo necesitan. Cancele. Se me ocurre que la manera más inesperada y satisfactoria de rendir homenaje a los héroes y a la patria que nos dieron, sería anunciar un cambio debido a la adversidad acumulada sobre los mexicanos, un cambio de planes en el programa del 15 y 16 de septiembre. Cortar todo gasto innecesario. Nos ajustaremos al grito, la verbena, el desfile y las músicas y bailes. Sin excesos. Sin imprudencias. Como todos los años. No está la novia para tafetanes.
Los actos de buen gobierno no siempre son de hacer. A veces valen más los que se dejan de hacer a tiempo.
Cancele.
Jean Paul Sartre sentenció, "Lo hemos leído y escuchado todo y no hemos aprendido nada".
Cancele, Don Felipe
Se incendia el circo y el dueño en vez de salvar a los enanos vende boletos para la siguiente función.
El símil con el gobierno mexicano no es justo porque los dueños saben dirigir sus circos, menester difícil si los hay, mientras que a nuestro gobierno se le hace bolas el engrudo y en medio del desbarajuste prepara los eventos más disparatados y costosos dizque para celebrar las fechas patrias.
Llegamos a escasos dos meses de ellas descubriendo que los encargados de preparar las conmemoraciones resolvieron su problema contratando a dedo, sin licitación alguna, empresas especialistas en mojigangas que se llevarán cerca de 3 mil millones de pesos (2 mil 971, para ser exactos). La partida mayor se le adjudicó a un señor Birch que anda por el mundo ofreciendo su “show”, maquillándolo según el comprador. En México fundó una compañía llamada Instantia Producciones para firmar los contratos. Otros 14 por un total de 447 millones de pesos se le darán, también sin licitación, a TURISSTE que, según la Auditoría Superior de la Federación, no tiene atribuciones para organizar eventos. Todo esto se viene sabiendo apenas, en medio del sigilo tenebroso, gracias a la labor de algunos reporteros.
Al publicarse esta maniobra el señor José Manuel Villalpando, jefe de la comisión de los festejos, dijo: “La crítica no me afecta, la envidia es algo muy mexicano. Si el artista fuera amigo tuyo dirías qué bueno que le pagaron, o sea, depende… Este recurso es poco en realidad, frente a los muchos millones de pesos que hay en el presupuesto nacional”. Eso dijo.
A la carencia de imaginación y talento se une el despilfarro del dinero de los contribuyentes. La corrupción deja un tufo que envuelve todo este negocio. Es hora de detener el gasto ofensivo y el espectáculo que no por ser grandote deja de ser chafa. México no merece esta agresión artera.
Estamos en medio de una de las tragedias colectivas más dolorosas de los últimos tiempos. Las inundaciones han causado muertes y pérdidas materiales en la mitad de la República. La ayuda, como siempre, ha sido lenta y escasa Los daños son incalculables y las lluvias apenas empiezan. Los meses de agosto y septiembre suelen ser los más lluviosos. Con frecuencia el grito se da bajo un aguacero. Los meteorólogos pronostican próximas tormentas. Debe preverse que la catástrofe lejos de menguar crezca y lleguemos a las mentadas fiestas patrias en medio de una emergencia mayor. Ante la realidad y el peligro de que empeore, un gobernante sensato debería evitar todo festejo superfluo y todo gasto inútil.
Deben cancelarse hoy las fiestas especiales del Bicentenario de la Independencia y el Centenario de la Revolución.
Debemos ajustarnos a la austeridad republicana, a la medianía cívica de la que habló Juárez y a la que ajustó su vida y la pública durante su gobierno. Celebremos como un pueblo maduro, no como aquelarre de nuevos ricos o de negociantes irresponsables. No podemos exagerar en las fiestas como si olvidáramos el sufrimiento de cientos de miles de familias. Y no hay que olvidar que las aguas cubren tierras castigadas por guerras contra el crimen organizado y narcotraficantes cada vez más violentos y todas las plagas ancestrales que empiezan con la extrema miseria de 40 millones de mexicanos.
Señor Felipe Calderón: el miércoles al despedir a la encargada de su Oficina de la Presidencia, Patricia Flores Elizondo, dijo al obsequiarla con ese florilegio de elogios con que acostumbra cesar a su colaboradores, que “impulsó la realización de proyectos especiales, como es el caso de la celebración del Bicentenario de la Independencia y el Centenario de la Revolución”. No es disparate pensar, en consecuencia, que ella nombró al señor Villalpando. No deje que se vaya sola, don Felipe.
Los funcionarios encargados de rescatar a las víctimas de las inundaciones se han quejado de falta de recursos. Somos convalecientes de una intensa y larga crisis económica, nos acechan tiempos difíciles también en lo económico. No celebre jolgorios escandalosos en medio de la desolación. Dedique ese dinero asignado al despilfarro a favor de quienes lo necesitan. Cancele. Se me ocurre que la manera más inesperada y satisfactoria de rendir homenaje a los héroes y a la patria que nos dieron, sería anunciar un cambio debido a la adversidad acumulada sobre los mexicanos, un cambio de planes en el programa del 15 y 16 de septiembre. Cortar todo gasto innecesario. Nos ajustaremos al grito, la verbena, el desfile y las músicas y bailes. Sin excesos. Sin imprudencias. Como todos los años. No está la novia para tafetanes.
Los actos de buen gobierno no siempre son de hacer. A veces valen más los que se dejan de hacer a tiempo.
Cancele.
Jean Paul Sartre sentenció, "Lo hemos leído y escuchado todo y no hemos aprendido nada".
lunes, 19 de julio de 2010
Nagaland: Megalithic or Mythological
NAGALAND: MEGALITHIC OR MYTHOLOGICAL?
By Carol Miller
According to the belief of the Naga tribesmen of densely forested Northeastern India (between Assam and Burma), the human soul, at the moment of death, is divided into two parts, known in the Wanchu dialect as yaha (the animated, or physical, aspect) and mío (the ethereal and spiritual aspect).
When a Naga dies, the yaha travels to the land of the dead, while the mío remains in the village with his relatives. Abundant mío is considered beneficial to the prosperity of the Nagas and the fertility of their crops, so village elders zealously preserve the supply of mío within their domains, by reciting incantations when a villager dies, in order to prevent the mío from wandering off into the forest. Throughout the year ritual hospitality is lavished upon ancestors to insure that their spiritual force is added to the vitality of the living warriors, swidden agriculturists, and hunters, a continual Día de muertos with lanterns to guide the spirits with everlasting light, abundant fruits for their nourishment, flowers to tempt them like bees or flies to remain among the living, precious feathers and beaded headdresses or offerings embellished with human or goat hair and dried seeds not unlike Mexican colorín, all of which celebrate the joyous presence of mío.
At one time the Nagas believed that mío resided in a person’s head, thus the “spirit reserve” of the village was augmented by the taking of heads of enemy warriors from neighboring tribes. When a head was brought into a Naga village, the spirit of the slain victim was told, through chanting and prayer, that his relatives no longer cared for him, so he should feel welcome among his new friends. By the same token Naga warriors, upon discovering their own comrades among those slain by enemies, removed the heads to prevent their falling into rival hands, while at the same time avoiding an increase in the mío of an enemy village.
Trophy heads represented the wealth of a village and were displayed with pride. Skulls to this day are stacked like books on a shelf in the village longhouses, which shelter the boys in puberty. Since these longhouses or morungs are built of wood, bamboo and thatch they easily catch fire, but if trophy skulls are lost the Naga artisans carve surrogates of wood or bone, usually displayed as masks, or miniature replicas strung as beads for necklaces, considered to be equally imbued with mío, and assuring the wearer of health, prosperity, many children, lavish crops and success in hunting.
°°°
How did the Naga and their neighbors, claimed by some to be a megalithic people originating long before the Bronze Age, established by others as an Indo-Mongol offshoot related to the Kachiri dynasty of the thirteenth century, or perhaps both, manage to survive nearly intact, disdainful and in fact virtually oblivious of the British, who built their Raj, or kingship, all around the nearly impenetrable forest, exercising jurisdiction over it but never actually penetrating its mysteries? Are the Naga still headhunters? Or is that all part of their past? Is their yaha a derivation of yama, the god of death to the pre-Aryan Indus Valley cultures, with whom they are possibly related? Did the epic Mahabharata, which enters into their territory, distort their racial, cultural and linguistic history?
All these, and other questions, have presented themselves in the course of a strange but intense correspondence with a man to whom I, a sculptress and writer in Mexico City, now presume kinship in the remote Northeast of India.
With no preamble or preparation, I was contacted by an academic of sorts from a village near Dimapur, capital of Nagaland, who in cruising the Internet had stumbled upon my article on Amrit on the Syriagate website. “Dear Mam”, wrote Dr. Wati Ao Pangrak on Wednesday, the twelfth of August, 2009, “I have research on a Semitic inscription in the NE of India.” He suggested that this might offer the link I was seeking in connecting the enigmatic courtyard and fountain of Amrit in Syria with the Punjab and the pre-Aryan Indus Valley cultures, but he took his hypothesis a step farther, implying a connection as well in Southeast Asia, which by all logic would have to reside somewhere between Burma (Myanmar) and ancient Lanna, that is, northern Thailand and Laos.
He added that, “I’ve discovered a script [inscriptions carved on stone markers] resembling ancient Semitic-Hebrew script as confirmed by the AHRC [“The Arts and Humanities Research Council”]. I would be grateful if u would be interested on this subject, as this will rewrite the history of the NE rich ancient history, and its brave ancestors. There is no mention of such in the Indian history [books] but the rock inscription preserved by our ancestors tells a different story. We, especially our clan members, has been worshipping this great rock till the advent of Christianity, one hundred years back. The script is written vertically and the letters aleph, hey, zayin and lamed are clearly visible. [Others of the letters] are yet to be identified.”
A subsequent letter adds: “It is not that I want to prove [the Naga] as the descendants of Shem, but the history of NE India is a world of messed up histories with so many tribes and races with very rich cultures and traditions, that does not fit at all to the current history. The government of India is silent on the Indus Valley civilizations [I would imagine, in part, because their remains since 1947 and Independence from Britain lie in Pakistani territory] and ‘cos they knew it belonged to the mongoloids; the Aryans [from Central Asia] are later arrivals and they now dominate the country. [They have superimposed their god Indra, their preference for a light skin color, their myths and religion on our entire nation.] But the NE people stands on a very different footings untouched by civilizations until the arrival of the Britishers, during 1800 A.D., and u know they (Britishers) were not specially qualified researcher but armed officers who did write something on the books that divided our people into numerous tribes ‘n cultures [though] we were living as one since time immemorial.”
Pangrak’s third letter continues: “Semitic script discovery in our region is no co-incidental but its just like the saying ‘the builder who rejected the stone became the …’. I know this research will open the gate for unification of hundreds of tribes ‘n cultures, and this will bring the many conflicts with India into a new understanding. The Mythological Indian epic called Mahabharata never mentions how it ended, as well as [never explaining] the lost Indus Valley civilizations, but this research will speak something on the ancient history for a change.”
The British and the Indian governments, he goes on to say, “knew something on these area. They researched so much without informing the locals the purpose, but now I understand clearly their motifs and this is why I desperately wanted to contact somebody in this field. D/Mem Carol, it looks mountainous, bigger than Everest, but beyond there, God is waiting to reveal.”
°°°
Dr. Wati Ao Pangrak, assuring me that he was my brother and that we were inextricably bound by our thirst for research and knowledge, declared me “his sister” and invited me to Dimapur, where his family would meet me, travel with me the eight hours into the interior needed to reach the site of the inscriptions, and accommodate myself and my husband, “with the best available”, providing ‘foodings and lodgings’, not a ‘tourist setting’ but not inaccessible, either. “Our place is strange n may b full of new experiencies not like d sophisticated west.”
From his village and the home of his clan we would travel, presumably by foot, to the site where we would then, he insisted, decipher the inscriptions on the local stelae. These indecipherable letters, he told me, are “the key to the history of my people”, are unquestionably Hebrew, and therefore necessarily associate the tribes of headhunters, megalithic warriors and slash-and-burn (swidden) farmers in the Himalayan foothills with the Semitic peoples of Western Asia.
This was the bait, and I was hooked. After the research on Amrit, near Tartus in Syria, I was convinced of a bond somehow with the pre-Aryan ethnicities of the Indus Valley, yet how did we get all the way to the Eastern Mediterranean coast from a Dravidian-Tibetan-Burmese linguistic and genetic blend in the jungles of Northeast India, or even the Munda (negroid-Mongolian) speakers on India’s western border with Pakistan, both of these constituting the legendary high ground that sheltered the survivors of a volcanic eruption and corresponding tsunami, which flooded the Punjabi and Gangetic plains at approximately, says Dr. Pangrak, from 1800-2200 B.C.?
Dr. Pangrak emphasizes “our ancient cultural song” or hymn, describing the people in the Ethi/Enthi/Inti/Indi as “swallowed up by the giant waters of a tsunami” which was over many, many years “gradually seen to be disappearing”. One of the stanzas tells “how our lion-hearted forefathers [though this might refer to the more prevalent tigers, marauders of the region where lions were at that time unknown and unheard-of, except of course, ah ha!, in the Indus Valley], who possessed Tantric swords and built the Ethi city. “Interestingly,” he goes on to say, “the lion and the ocean, or ‘giant waters’, are synonymous only in our dialect.”
And he continues, though I have polished his text: “If we go back to world history around 1500 B.C. we learn of the unrecorded great sea peoples [probably the Hyksos, to this day of unknown origins] plundering Egypt and the Syro-Phoenician coast, concurrent with the decline of the Indus Valley cultures, as the light-skinned Aryans from the Altai crossed Central Asia, breached the Hindu Kush, and descended on the Indus through the Northwest Passage, and by so doing displaced, both to the east and to the west, the dark-skinned civilizations only known today by the name of the two most prominent remaining sites, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, among so many others that have been damaged or erased by time, history, conquest, floods or the limitations of archaeology to encompass so much, while [at the same time, these Aryans] imposed the Vedic cultures and its deities, as described in the epic Mahabharata, or ‘Book of Wars’.”
°°°
Further correspondence with Dr. Wati Pangrak, ever more frequent, is addressed to “D/Mem Carol: Why I m so deeply convinced is that when I first started to research on my tribe history 15 yrs ago, I came to learn that history was hiding things. The more dominant tribes still extant today are ignorant of all events related to the past, [especially beyond the last] six hundred years, and now [at this point] they don’t even know why or how this happened. I went deeper and deeper studying my small historically complicated village. I first studied the different names of geography of my village and visited the stones and found something as if scratched by someone but it was not possible since this stone was possessed and guarded within a perimeter of 1 km from time immemorial [and is therefore inaccessible to all] except our clan who happens to be the priest/king’s descendants.
“Our clans speak orally of many ups and down-migration after migration, but [while other people entered the region for various reasons] our lineage, the thirty forefathers described in our hymn and in our oral history, who dominated this region for 1000 years, never moved from this site from ancient times, and flourished here while the water level subsided. From then on I focused on the [megalithic] Kachari and [the medieval] Ahom civilizations, hostile to each other since the latter invaded the region beginning in 13th C., possibly coming from Thailand or Burma, but I came to conclude that they were also residing in our area at a previous time, but then they left, abandoned the region, perhaps moving into Assam, yet their linguistic remains, of Siamese-Chinese origins, still dominate us.” As it happens, “the first Hindu Ahom king Suhungmongba, dating from 15-16 century A.D. was brought up by a Naga chief, yet how can this be if the Nagas were still headhunters at that time? History fails to mention the king’s village of origin. And that is where the missing link begins…”
°°°
The Kachari people to whom Dr. Wadi Pangrak refers left ruins still visible in the city of Dimapur, their capital, one of three important municipalities, along with Kohima and Mokokchung, in Nagaland, and linked to Imphal and Moreh on the Myanmar border, in a region also accessible to the remote states of Manipur, Tripura and Mizoram, and by extension home to several of these clans of the elusive origins.
The ancient Kachari capital, despite Pangrak’s resentment regarding the scant research effected here, was considered to be a site of major importance with regard to megalithic cultures. Though the Kacharis are predominantly non-Aryan, with elaborate rituals and emphasis on the cult of fertility, and have left seals displaying women with traditional headdresses of precious hoopoe feathers, as well as pious ceremonies of sacrifice, they have obviously been influenced over the centuries by a superimposition of Hindu patterns of custom and worship. Whether they brought these customs with them from the pre-Aryan Indus Valley or whether religious practices of Vedic origin have been superimposed by the dominant Hindu patterns throughout the country, is still a matter of conjecture, and without precise dating, will remain so.
The Kacharis inhabited the area leaving no known designation, although the later Ahom people called it Che-din-chi-pen, “The Brick City”. Worthy of note is the fact of the mud brick or baked brick construction prevalent among pre-Aryan Indus Valley sites, notably Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.
Etymologically, Dimapur is “the city by the big river”, a later appellation originating in the Kachari dialect, referring to the Dimasa River. The Archaeological Survey of India maintains ruins of a fourteenth century Kachari palace in the city, which obviously survived the Ahom invasion. There are also the ruins of temples, reservoirs and palaces, as well as significant monolithic structures, “assigned to the elaborate rituals of the cult of fertility”, according to local anthropologists. The beautifully executed entrances to these religious compounds remain in perfect condition, even now. Blocks of stone and brick, inscribed with a variety of designs, just as described by Pangrak, dot the landscape, but they are only a few among the wealth of stelae and stone ruins in the region. The North-East Zone Cultural Center, about three kilometers from the Dimapur railway station, maintains a small museum dedicated to the still-dim cultural heritage of the Northeast.
Yet Dr. Pangrak maintains that the more remote among these monuments , referring to engraved stones removed or distant from the Dimapur area, or even the sites he mentioned at a distance of eight hours from Dimapur, “Are very specific colonies [which mark the ruined remains of ancient villages], and have been totally overgrown; they are now thick jungle, with sites barely visible though they still reveal the stones with their inscriptions and engravings. Many of the stelae are still erect, others are broken and scattered. When I saw these for myself I was awed by their size. How could these stones have been transported from at least a mile, up a steep hillside? It would be a challenge even today, with modern equipment.” Yet this phenomenon persists in so many ancient cultures, from the Nile to Stonehenge to Angkor to Easter Island to the Andes to Mexico and Central America, and the secret, whether using trees as rollers, employing earth ramps, or slave labor, has been lost; the movement of large stones or large amounts of stone, like the stories of a race of gigantic men, or an overwhelming flood, while common to every culture, remain a matter of speculation.
Another letter arrives from my brother: “With this I continued a study of our oral culture, especially as expressed in song, which speaks of 1000 elephants, the herds of the kings, and of a gigantic human race. One of our ancestors could easily embrace an elephant, shoulder to shoulder. It was about this time, according to my calculations, that names, translatable to Christian words, were assigned to places, inscriptions, clans, and so on.
“We have also learned of a colony for the elephant riders, not only the mahouts or handlers, but also warriors who rode the elephants into battle. Much has been recorded—described in words, painted in pictures, displayed in temples and palaces-- of the persistent battles between the war elephants of the Thais and the Burmese, but our people probably took part in these battles, very likely on behalf of the Ahom in these disputes for territory and dominance, or perhaps our clans fought on the side of the Burmese, our neighbors. Our stories record tales of ‘enemy chasers’, battlefields, enemies penetrating to the royal palaces, elephants trampling the panji [rice] fields, [a term actually originating in Java in Indonesia].
“These stories are mixed with descriptions of a great body of water, surely the tsunami that invaded the flatlands or flood plains, and can be pinpointed in at least seventy different areas. These stories have become local myths, which I am currently translating. Research in this area is sponsored. There is no independent research. But if you come here, and take me as your brother (I am married with two young kids, ok?) we will pursue this matter, if God wills it, in order to give the souls of my forefathers their much-deserved ever-lasting peace. Nothing stands in our way. I don’t think anyone else is really interested, there are no references, no guides or books, nor are there facilities for obtaining a doctorate.”
°°°
The Mahabharata, the epic “Book of Wars” beloved of the Aryan people, continues to puzzle Pangrak, though many of its inconsistencies have been attributed to esoteric symbolism or hermetic references.
“Imagine,” says Dr. Wati, “that this saga was written by a critical racist scholar, who fails to understand even the sexes. The heroic figure of Bhima and the Pandavas enter the thick jungles of the Northeast regions at some point in the past, only to discover a race of Rakshas, that is, the Mongoloid giants [oversized men of Mongol descent], of the Heremba kingdom.
“Here the author describes how the Raksha siblings, called Hidimba, encounter Bhima. Hidimba (female) takes the form of a beautiful maiden, who was actually instructed to kill Bhima and the Pandavas, and for this purpose she successfully entices Bhima, but this relationship enrages her brother, also called Hidimba. Now Hidimba is a man. He wrestles with Bhima, then Bhima kills Hidimba and marries Hidimba. Could they have been twins? Symbolic soul-mates? Polarized values? Could Bhima have ascended to Heaven as a deity, while Hidimba (female) remained human? In which case Bhima could not have married the she-Hidimba, for she was human and not divine. With this Bhima must kill her in order for her to ascend to Heaven and thus share his divinity, and with this be able to marry.
“Meantime, the author clearly discriminates against the northeastern people, by his inability to distinguish between a man and a woman, although of course I understand that the dichotomy of gender exists in many cultures [prominently so in the Precolumbian cultures of Mexico and Central America], and I also appreciate polarized values, [another commonplace in Mexico, as in India].
“Yet the Rakshas are described as dark-skinned and are therefore equivalent to demons, satanic figures by inference evil and threatening, as opposed to the light-skinned Aryan heroes.
“Meantime, Bhima kills one of the Hidimba symbols of the Heremba kingdom, but does not destroy the entire Heremba people. I interpret this to indicate the age of the people of the Northeast, as the influence of Hinduism is buried deeply in the history and the rich past of the Northeastern clans.
“I even suspect the Ramayana, where Ram was aided by a monkey, an inference to a mongoloid group. Hanuman, the monkey king, may even have been a Mongol general, as he defended Rama and won, and to this day monkeys, though a great nuisance, are considered sacred in India and are protected.
“Hanuman lifting an entire hill, to me, is a joke, though this is also symbolic. He carries the burdens of the world on his shoulders. The hill is obviously the magic Hindu mountain, sacred Mt. Meru, atop which stands the supreme temple and thus is closest to heaven [a fact shared by other cultures, like the Maya or the Aztec, builders of symbolic sacred mounts topped by temples], but it could also be a reference to the sacred art of healing so dear to my people, and to the shrubs and herbs collected from a particular hill.
“In my opinion, all of India was once inhabited by the Mongols who lost their great cities in a volcanic eruption, followed by a devastating flood and tsunami. About this time the Aryans, most likely of Altai origin [like so many of the Turkic or Mongol groups that migrated toward the west], entered the Subcontinent through the passage between Afghanistan and Pakistan and drove away the indigenous people, sending them either west to Egypt and the Syro-Phoenician coast [which would explain the mysterious Hyksos] or east into Southern China, Laos, Thailand and Burma.
“And if the Kachari tribes are recorded as the earliest native inhabitants of the Northeast, then how about our cultural songs which mention the Kachari groups allied with the children of our ancient village? Personally, I think that after the Indus Valley civilizations ended, large migrations took place, both by land and by sea, and this gave way to the Hyksos among other Indo-European peoples in the west, and after passing through our jungles and hills in the Northeast, they continued into Southeast Asia. Many commentaries exist in the chronicles of Chinese tradesmen and travelers, of Arab travelers and scholars, testimonies of the Mongols or the people conquered by them. Why would they visit these savage people in the NE jungles? Because they knew these people were their brethren, lost long ago. All the great navigators, from the Chinese on, to the Portuguese, the Spanish, Dutch, French, English, had heard of their great wealth. Alexander knew, but his generals refused to let him penetrate beyond the Punjab. Ptolomy knew. Columbus knew. They all knew the place where the script was found. I am convinced that the entire NE was a seaport as well as the great Indian plains. Transportation was by boat from the sea side and horses by land.
“Proof of this lies in the fact that the mongoloids of NE India are very different from the people of the rest of the Subcontinent. They were never conquered and their lands were never fully explored. I am convinced that the NE people from pre-Aryan Indus Valley, who abandoned their site due to volcanic eruption, might even have coincided with the eruption at Thera (Santorini) at the height of the Bronze Age.
“Our cultural hymns speak of lions, a jungle kingdom, Mithun sacrifice in which a calf is anointed, its horns doused with milk, afterward the villages wrestle with it before ritual sacrifice, when the elders then don the horns as part of their headdress and emblem of their authority. This custom gained prestige with the gods. [see the stone seal on which the ceremony is inscribed.] These people describe their kingdom engulfed by a churning sea as great boulders disappeared. There are clues that speak of the past, but none can decipher the tales told by our forefathers. We do not understand them. We think they are crazy.
“Naga warriors possess gigantic log drums resembling a canoe stranded on a hilltop. They perform their rites, they respect their sacrifice, they gain the prestige and the approval of the gods, but they cannot explain why. Thank you, Mem Sister, for listening to the silent voice from Heaven.”
oOo
By Carol Miller
According to the belief of the Naga tribesmen of densely forested Northeastern India (between Assam and Burma), the human soul, at the moment of death, is divided into two parts, known in the Wanchu dialect as yaha (the animated, or physical, aspect) and mío (the ethereal and spiritual aspect).
When a Naga dies, the yaha travels to the land of the dead, while the mío remains in the village with his relatives. Abundant mío is considered beneficial to the prosperity of the Nagas and the fertility of their crops, so village elders zealously preserve the supply of mío within their domains, by reciting incantations when a villager dies, in order to prevent the mío from wandering off into the forest. Throughout the year ritual hospitality is lavished upon ancestors to insure that their spiritual force is added to the vitality of the living warriors, swidden agriculturists, and hunters, a continual Día de muertos with lanterns to guide the spirits with everlasting light, abundant fruits for their nourishment, flowers to tempt them like bees or flies to remain among the living, precious feathers and beaded headdresses or offerings embellished with human or goat hair and dried seeds not unlike Mexican colorín, all of which celebrate the joyous presence of mío.
At one time the Nagas believed that mío resided in a person’s head, thus the “spirit reserve” of the village was augmented by the taking of heads of enemy warriors from neighboring tribes. When a head was brought into a Naga village, the spirit of the slain victim was told, through chanting and prayer, that his relatives no longer cared for him, so he should feel welcome among his new friends. By the same token Naga warriors, upon discovering their own comrades among those slain by enemies, removed the heads to prevent their falling into rival hands, while at the same time avoiding an increase in the mío of an enemy village.
Trophy heads represented the wealth of a village and were displayed with pride. Skulls to this day are stacked like books on a shelf in the village longhouses, which shelter the boys in puberty. Since these longhouses or morungs are built of wood, bamboo and thatch they easily catch fire, but if trophy skulls are lost the Naga artisans carve surrogates of wood or bone, usually displayed as masks, or miniature replicas strung as beads for necklaces, considered to be equally imbued with mío, and assuring the wearer of health, prosperity, many children, lavish crops and success in hunting.
°°°
How did the Naga and their neighbors, claimed by some to be a megalithic people originating long before the Bronze Age, established by others as an Indo-Mongol offshoot related to the Kachiri dynasty of the thirteenth century, or perhaps both, manage to survive nearly intact, disdainful and in fact virtually oblivious of the British, who built their Raj, or kingship, all around the nearly impenetrable forest, exercising jurisdiction over it but never actually penetrating its mysteries? Are the Naga still headhunters? Or is that all part of their past? Is their yaha a derivation of yama, the god of death to the pre-Aryan Indus Valley cultures, with whom they are possibly related? Did the epic Mahabharata, which enters into their territory, distort their racial, cultural and linguistic history?
All these, and other questions, have presented themselves in the course of a strange but intense correspondence with a man to whom I, a sculptress and writer in Mexico City, now presume kinship in the remote Northeast of India.
With no preamble or preparation, I was contacted by an academic of sorts from a village near Dimapur, capital of Nagaland, who in cruising the Internet had stumbled upon my article on Amrit on the Syriagate website. “Dear Mam”, wrote Dr. Wati Ao Pangrak on Wednesday, the twelfth of August, 2009, “I have research on a Semitic inscription in the NE of India.” He suggested that this might offer the link I was seeking in connecting the enigmatic courtyard and fountain of Amrit in Syria with the Punjab and the pre-Aryan Indus Valley cultures, but he took his hypothesis a step farther, implying a connection as well in Southeast Asia, which by all logic would have to reside somewhere between Burma (Myanmar) and ancient Lanna, that is, northern Thailand and Laos.
He added that, “I’ve discovered a script [inscriptions carved on stone markers] resembling ancient Semitic-Hebrew script as confirmed by the AHRC [“The Arts and Humanities Research Council”]. I would be grateful if u would be interested on this subject, as this will rewrite the history of the NE rich ancient history, and its brave ancestors. There is no mention of such in the Indian history [books] but the rock inscription preserved by our ancestors tells a different story. We, especially our clan members, has been worshipping this great rock till the advent of Christianity, one hundred years back. The script is written vertically and the letters aleph, hey, zayin and lamed are clearly visible. [Others of the letters] are yet to be identified.”
A subsequent letter adds: “It is not that I want to prove [the Naga] as the descendants of Shem, but the history of NE India is a world of messed up histories with so many tribes and races with very rich cultures and traditions, that does not fit at all to the current history. The government of India is silent on the Indus Valley civilizations [I would imagine, in part, because their remains since 1947 and Independence from Britain lie in Pakistani territory] and ‘cos they knew it belonged to the mongoloids; the Aryans [from Central Asia] are later arrivals and they now dominate the country. [They have superimposed their god Indra, their preference for a light skin color, their myths and religion on our entire nation.] But the NE people stands on a very different footings untouched by civilizations until the arrival of the Britishers, during 1800 A.D., and u know they (Britishers) were not specially qualified researcher but armed officers who did write something on the books that divided our people into numerous tribes ‘n cultures [though] we were living as one since time immemorial.”
Pangrak’s third letter continues: “Semitic script discovery in our region is no co-incidental but its just like the saying ‘the builder who rejected the stone became the …’. I know this research will open the gate for unification of hundreds of tribes ‘n cultures, and this will bring the many conflicts with India into a new understanding. The Mythological Indian epic called Mahabharata never mentions how it ended, as well as [never explaining] the lost Indus Valley civilizations, but this research will speak something on the ancient history for a change.”
The British and the Indian governments, he goes on to say, “knew something on these area. They researched so much without informing the locals the purpose, but now I understand clearly their motifs and this is why I desperately wanted to contact somebody in this field. D/Mem Carol, it looks mountainous, bigger than Everest, but beyond there, God is waiting to reveal.”
°°°
Dr. Wati Ao Pangrak, assuring me that he was my brother and that we were inextricably bound by our thirst for research and knowledge, declared me “his sister” and invited me to Dimapur, where his family would meet me, travel with me the eight hours into the interior needed to reach the site of the inscriptions, and accommodate myself and my husband, “with the best available”, providing ‘foodings and lodgings’, not a ‘tourist setting’ but not inaccessible, either. “Our place is strange n may b full of new experiencies not like d sophisticated west.”
From his village and the home of his clan we would travel, presumably by foot, to the site where we would then, he insisted, decipher the inscriptions on the local stelae. These indecipherable letters, he told me, are “the key to the history of my people”, are unquestionably Hebrew, and therefore necessarily associate the tribes of headhunters, megalithic warriors and slash-and-burn (swidden) farmers in the Himalayan foothills with the Semitic peoples of Western Asia.
This was the bait, and I was hooked. After the research on Amrit, near Tartus in Syria, I was convinced of a bond somehow with the pre-Aryan ethnicities of the Indus Valley, yet how did we get all the way to the Eastern Mediterranean coast from a Dravidian-Tibetan-Burmese linguistic and genetic blend in the jungles of Northeast India, or even the Munda (negroid-Mongolian) speakers on India’s western border with Pakistan, both of these constituting the legendary high ground that sheltered the survivors of a volcanic eruption and corresponding tsunami, which flooded the Punjabi and Gangetic plains at approximately, says Dr. Pangrak, from 1800-2200 B.C.?
Dr. Pangrak emphasizes “our ancient cultural song” or hymn, describing the people in the Ethi/Enthi/Inti/Indi as “swallowed up by the giant waters of a tsunami” which was over many, many years “gradually seen to be disappearing”. One of the stanzas tells “how our lion-hearted forefathers [though this might refer to the more prevalent tigers, marauders of the region where lions were at that time unknown and unheard-of, except of course, ah ha!, in the Indus Valley], who possessed Tantric swords and built the Ethi city. “Interestingly,” he goes on to say, “the lion and the ocean, or ‘giant waters’, are synonymous only in our dialect.”
And he continues, though I have polished his text: “If we go back to world history around 1500 B.C. we learn of the unrecorded great sea peoples [probably the Hyksos, to this day of unknown origins] plundering Egypt and the Syro-Phoenician coast, concurrent with the decline of the Indus Valley cultures, as the light-skinned Aryans from the Altai crossed Central Asia, breached the Hindu Kush, and descended on the Indus through the Northwest Passage, and by so doing displaced, both to the east and to the west, the dark-skinned civilizations only known today by the name of the two most prominent remaining sites, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, among so many others that have been damaged or erased by time, history, conquest, floods or the limitations of archaeology to encompass so much, while [at the same time, these Aryans] imposed the Vedic cultures and its deities, as described in the epic Mahabharata, or ‘Book of Wars’.”
°°°
Further correspondence with Dr. Wati Pangrak, ever more frequent, is addressed to “D/Mem Carol: Why I m so deeply convinced is that when I first started to research on my tribe history 15 yrs ago, I came to learn that history was hiding things. The more dominant tribes still extant today are ignorant of all events related to the past, [especially beyond the last] six hundred years, and now [at this point] they don’t even know why or how this happened. I went deeper and deeper studying my small historically complicated village. I first studied the different names of geography of my village and visited the stones and found something as if scratched by someone but it was not possible since this stone was possessed and guarded within a perimeter of 1 km from time immemorial [and is therefore inaccessible to all] except our clan who happens to be the priest/king’s descendants.
“Our clans speak orally of many ups and down-migration after migration, but [while other people entered the region for various reasons] our lineage, the thirty forefathers described in our hymn and in our oral history, who dominated this region for 1000 years, never moved from this site from ancient times, and flourished here while the water level subsided. From then on I focused on the [megalithic] Kachari and [the medieval] Ahom civilizations, hostile to each other since the latter invaded the region beginning in 13th C., possibly coming from Thailand or Burma, but I came to conclude that they were also residing in our area at a previous time, but then they left, abandoned the region, perhaps moving into Assam, yet their linguistic remains, of Siamese-Chinese origins, still dominate us.” As it happens, “the first Hindu Ahom king Suhungmongba, dating from 15-16 century A.D. was brought up by a Naga chief, yet how can this be if the Nagas were still headhunters at that time? History fails to mention the king’s village of origin. And that is where the missing link begins…”
°°°
The Kachari people to whom Dr. Wadi Pangrak refers left ruins still visible in the city of Dimapur, their capital, one of three important municipalities, along with Kohima and Mokokchung, in Nagaland, and linked to Imphal and Moreh on the Myanmar border, in a region also accessible to the remote states of Manipur, Tripura and Mizoram, and by extension home to several of these clans of the elusive origins.
The ancient Kachari capital, despite Pangrak’s resentment regarding the scant research effected here, was considered to be a site of major importance with regard to megalithic cultures. Though the Kacharis are predominantly non-Aryan, with elaborate rituals and emphasis on the cult of fertility, and have left seals displaying women with traditional headdresses of precious hoopoe feathers, as well as pious ceremonies of sacrifice, they have obviously been influenced over the centuries by a superimposition of Hindu patterns of custom and worship. Whether they brought these customs with them from the pre-Aryan Indus Valley or whether religious practices of Vedic origin have been superimposed by the dominant Hindu patterns throughout the country, is still a matter of conjecture, and without precise dating, will remain so.
The Kacharis inhabited the area leaving no known designation, although the later Ahom people called it Che-din-chi-pen, “The Brick City”. Worthy of note is the fact of the mud brick or baked brick construction prevalent among pre-Aryan Indus Valley sites, notably Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.
Etymologically, Dimapur is “the city by the big river”, a later appellation originating in the Kachari dialect, referring to the Dimasa River. The Archaeological Survey of India maintains ruins of a fourteenth century Kachari palace in the city, which obviously survived the Ahom invasion. There are also the ruins of temples, reservoirs and palaces, as well as significant monolithic structures, “assigned to the elaborate rituals of the cult of fertility”, according to local anthropologists. The beautifully executed entrances to these religious compounds remain in perfect condition, even now. Blocks of stone and brick, inscribed with a variety of designs, just as described by Pangrak, dot the landscape, but they are only a few among the wealth of stelae and stone ruins in the region. The North-East Zone Cultural Center, about three kilometers from the Dimapur railway station, maintains a small museum dedicated to the still-dim cultural heritage of the Northeast.
Yet Dr. Pangrak maintains that the more remote among these monuments , referring to engraved stones removed or distant from the Dimapur area, or even the sites he mentioned at a distance of eight hours from Dimapur, “Are very specific colonies [which mark the ruined remains of ancient villages], and have been totally overgrown; they are now thick jungle, with sites barely visible though they still reveal the stones with their inscriptions and engravings. Many of the stelae are still erect, others are broken and scattered. When I saw these for myself I was awed by their size. How could these stones have been transported from at least a mile, up a steep hillside? It would be a challenge even today, with modern equipment.” Yet this phenomenon persists in so many ancient cultures, from the Nile to Stonehenge to Angkor to Easter Island to the Andes to Mexico and Central America, and the secret, whether using trees as rollers, employing earth ramps, or slave labor, has been lost; the movement of large stones or large amounts of stone, like the stories of a race of gigantic men, or an overwhelming flood, while common to every culture, remain a matter of speculation.
Another letter arrives from my brother: “With this I continued a study of our oral culture, especially as expressed in song, which speaks of 1000 elephants, the herds of the kings, and of a gigantic human race. One of our ancestors could easily embrace an elephant, shoulder to shoulder. It was about this time, according to my calculations, that names, translatable to Christian words, were assigned to places, inscriptions, clans, and so on.
“We have also learned of a colony for the elephant riders, not only the mahouts or handlers, but also warriors who rode the elephants into battle. Much has been recorded—described in words, painted in pictures, displayed in temples and palaces-- of the persistent battles between the war elephants of the Thais and the Burmese, but our people probably took part in these battles, very likely on behalf of the Ahom in these disputes for territory and dominance, or perhaps our clans fought on the side of the Burmese, our neighbors. Our stories record tales of ‘enemy chasers’, battlefields, enemies penetrating to the royal palaces, elephants trampling the panji [rice] fields, [a term actually originating in Java in Indonesia].
“These stories are mixed with descriptions of a great body of water, surely the tsunami that invaded the flatlands or flood plains, and can be pinpointed in at least seventy different areas. These stories have become local myths, which I am currently translating. Research in this area is sponsored. There is no independent research. But if you come here, and take me as your brother (I am married with two young kids, ok?) we will pursue this matter, if God wills it, in order to give the souls of my forefathers their much-deserved ever-lasting peace. Nothing stands in our way. I don’t think anyone else is really interested, there are no references, no guides or books, nor are there facilities for obtaining a doctorate.”
°°°
The Mahabharata, the epic “Book of Wars” beloved of the Aryan people, continues to puzzle Pangrak, though many of its inconsistencies have been attributed to esoteric symbolism or hermetic references.
“Imagine,” says Dr. Wati, “that this saga was written by a critical racist scholar, who fails to understand even the sexes. The heroic figure of Bhima and the Pandavas enter the thick jungles of the Northeast regions at some point in the past, only to discover a race of Rakshas, that is, the Mongoloid giants [oversized men of Mongol descent], of the Heremba kingdom.
“Here the author describes how the Raksha siblings, called Hidimba, encounter Bhima. Hidimba (female) takes the form of a beautiful maiden, who was actually instructed to kill Bhima and the Pandavas, and for this purpose she successfully entices Bhima, but this relationship enrages her brother, also called Hidimba. Now Hidimba is a man. He wrestles with Bhima, then Bhima kills Hidimba and marries Hidimba. Could they have been twins? Symbolic soul-mates? Polarized values? Could Bhima have ascended to Heaven as a deity, while Hidimba (female) remained human? In which case Bhima could not have married the she-Hidimba, for she was human and not divine. With this Bhima must kill her in order for her to ascend to Heaven and thus share his divinity, and with this be able to marry.
“Meantime, the author clearly discriminates against the northeastern people, by his inability to distinguish between a man and a woman, although of course I understand that the dichotomy of gender exists in many cultures [prominently so in the Precolumbian cultures of Mexico and Central America], and I also appreciate polarized values, [another commonplace in Mexico, as in India].
“Yet the Rakshas are described as dark-skinned and are therefore equivalent to demons, satanic figures by inference evil and threatening, as opposed to the light-skinned Aryan heroes.
“Meantime, Bhima kills one of the Hidimba symbols of the Heremba kingdom, but does not destroy the entire Heremba people. I interpret this to indicate the age of the people of the Northeast, as the influence of Hinduism is buried deeply in the history and the rich past of the Northeastern clans.
“I even suspect the Ramayana, where Ram was aided by a monkey, an inference to a mongoloid group. Hanuman, the monkey king, may even have been a Mongol general, as he defended Rama and won, and to this day monkeys, though a great nuisance, are considered sacred in India and are protected.
“Hanuman lifting an entire hill, to me, is a joke, though this is also symbolic. He carries the burdens of the world on his shoulders. The hill is obviously the magic Hindu mountain, sacred Mt. Meru, atop which stands the supreme temple and thus is closest to heaven [a fact shared by other cultures, like the Maya or the Aztec, builders of symbolic sacred mounts topped by temples], but it could also be a reference to the sacred art of healing so dear to my people, and to the shrubs and herbs collected from a particular hill.
“In my opinion, all of India was once inhabited by the Mongols who lost their great cities in a volcanic eruption, followed by a devastating flood and tsunami. About this time the Aryans, most likely of Altai origin [like so many of the Turkic or Mongol groups that migrated toward the west], entered the Subcontinent through the passage between Afghanistan and Pakistan and drove away the indigenous people, sending them either west to Egypt and the Syro-Phoenician coast [which would explain the mysterious Hyksos] or east into Southern China, Laos, Thailand and Burma.
“And if the Kachari tribes are recorded as the earliest native inhabitants of the Northeast, then how about our cultural songs which mention the Kachari groups allied with the children of our ancient village? Personally, I think that after the Indus Valley civilizations ended, large migrations took place, both by land and by sea, and this gave way to the Hyksos among other Indo-European peoples in the west, and after passing through our jungles and hills in the Northeast, they continued into Southeast Asia. Many commentaries exist in the chronicles of Chinese tradesmen and travelers, of Arab travelers and scholars, testimonies of the Mongols or the people conquered by them. Why would they visit these savage people in the NE jungles? Because they knew these people were their brethren, lost long ago. All the great navigators, from the Chinese on, to the Portuguese, the Spanish, Dutch, French, English, had heard of their great wealth. Alexander knew, but his generals refused to let him penetrate beyond the Punjab. Ptolomy knew. Columbus knew. They all knew the place where the script was found. I am convinced that the entire NE was a seaport as well as the great Indian plains. Transportation was by boat from the sea side and horses by land.
“Proof of this lies in the fact that the mongoloids of NE India are very different from the people of the rest of the Subcontinent. They were never conquered and their lands were never fully explored. I am convinced that the NE people from pre-Aryan Indus Valley, who abandoned their site due to volcanic eruption, might even have coincided with the eruption at Thera (Santorini) at the height of the Bronze Age.
“Our cultural hymns speak of lions, a jungle kingdom, Mithun sacrifice in which a calf is anointed, its horns doused with milk, afterward the villages wrestle with it before ritual sacrifice, when the elders then don the horns as part of their headdress and emblem of their authority. This custom gained prestige with the gods. [see the stone seal on which the ceremony is inscribed.] These people describe their kingdom engulfed by a churning sea as great boulders disappeared. There are clues that speak of the past, but none can decipher the tales told by our forefathers. We do not understand them. We think they are crazy.
“Naga warriors possess gigantic log drums resembling a canoe stranded on a hilltop. They perform their rites, they respect their sacrifice, they gain the prestige and the approval of the gods, but they cannot explain why. Thank you, Mem Sister, for listening to the silent voice from Heaven.”
oOo
lunes, 26 de abril de 2010
Taller de consciencia y creación en movimiento. Danza contemporánea. Keops Guerrero. Barcelona, España.
Taller intensivo de danza contemporánea con base en la metodología Laban, técnica Nikolais y Kinesiología.
Dirigido a bailarines, acróbatas, actores y artistas que hagan uso del cuerpo como lenguaje o medio de expresión.
Nivel: Intermedio-Avanzado
Sede: La nave espacial
Ávila 176, Glorias.
Fecha: Del 4 al 29 de mayo de 2010
Martes y jueves de 17:00 a 19:00 hrs.
Sábado de 11:00 a 13:00 hrs.
Entrada Libre
los objetivos generales del taller son la creación y/o descubrimiento de nuestras posibilidades y carencias físicas y espaciales para poder crear o sumar a nuestra forma de entrenamiento general, herramientas adecuadas para la optimización de nuestros propios recursos, además de la realización de un trabajo de danza colectivo propuesto a partir del deseonvolvimiento orgánico e individual de cada uno de los participantes.
Taller intensivo de consciencia y creación "No de improvisación".
viernes, 5 de marzo de 2010
Kafeta Trans. Presentación de Trans Block. Danza contemporánea "Héroes y heroínas". Keops Guerrero (México). Barcelona, España, marzo 2010.
PRESENTACIÓN DE TRANS-BLOCK
Somos militantes activas del movimiento trans que ha emergido en estos años en nuestra ciudad, Barcelona.
Venimos de las terapias de grupos, de las cicatrices, de las cajas de hormonas, de horas sin dormir con la cara clavada en el espejo, venimos de espacios feministas, transmarikabollos, okupados, anticapitalistas, antipsiquiátricos, artísticos y performativos, pero sin duda alguna somos herederas del colectivo Guerrilla Travolaka.
No estábamos dormidas, estábamos pensando, reflexionando, estudiando la estrategia, fortaleciendo alianzas con otros colectivos, afilando los cuchillos.
Y aquí estamos de nuevo, la resistencia trans, lista para izar de nuevo las velas y volver a la carga. Seguimos con el sabotaje trans, al binomio hombre-mujer, al sistema hetero-normativo.
Os esperamos el próximo viernes!!!
TRANS BLOCK
Piratas del género.
12 de marzo
CSO Can vies
C/Jocs Florals, 40
Metro línea 1 y línea 5, metro Plaza de Santz.
20:00 hrs. Presentación de Trans Block, Piratas del Género
21:30 hrs. Estreno del video ¡Aqui está la resistencia Trans! (Mani octubre)
Cenador ¡¡¡Maribocatas!!!
22:30 a 02:00 Hrs. "Héroes y heroínas, danza contemporánea por Keops Guerrero (México).
DJ Maricarmen free.
miércoles, 24 de febrero de 2010
Cultura y soberanía nacional - Severo Iglesias. El Financiero. México.
Cultura y soberanía Nacional - Severo Iglesias.Redacción
17 de febrero de 2010
Ahora bien, ¿Qué lugar ocupa la cultura en la soberanía nacional?
Si la economía, la tecnología, el Estado, son bases para construir una casa propia, la cultura soberana es una base imprescindible para tener modo de vida autónomos, de acuerdo con nuestros intereses, nuestras aspiraciones e ideales.
Éste es el problema que nos ocupa.
Contemporáneamente se usa la palabra "cultura" para designar cualquier cosa. En efecto, en los años cincuenta del siglo XX Foster se dió a la tarea de reunir los significados del término y encontró 150 diferentes, en medio de los cuales prácticamente es imposible orientarse.
En esa profusión, la palabra "cultura"se llena de sobreentendidos que se mezclan y en torno a los cuales cada quién parece defenderla; pero muchas veces protege solamente el interés de su escuela, su doctrina o su grupo.
Con frecuencia la palabra "cultura" adopta un caracter psicologista y manipulatorio. Se habla de cultura como un conjunto de símbolos, mitos, ritos, valores, actitudes y se dice que sirven para la identidad social.
Entonces parece ser que no nos caracteriza el trabajo, nuestra vecindad o la patria mexicana, sino una vaga sensación de identidad que obtenemos a través de los restos del pasado.
De alguna manera, este concepto psicologista de cultura suple al de ideología, que es más claro y más legítimo.
Ideología quiere decir: La toma de posición que cada quien tiene sobre los problemas y los intereses de la sociedad. Cada ser humano, las clases sociales, los grupos, los Estados, tienen su ideología. Y en ese sentido podemos hablar de ella con mayor claridad.
Esto hace necesaria una cosa: relegar las discusiones de caracter académico, que han llegado a catalogar 150 acepciones diferentes y acercarnos al concepto de cultura nacional. Esto es más claro y determinado.
Veamos.
Quienes hayan leído algo de la cultura griega (la cultura madre de la civilización occidental) saben una cosa: Grecia no tenía un concepto explícito de cultura, nunca lo necesitó. Y, sin embargo, ha sido el pueblo más culto de occidente.
¿Y por qué no tenía un concepto de cultura? Porque contaba con su realización, vivía inmersa en ella, no había distancia entre la vida de la polis, o sea la comunidad de Atenas, y el campo cultural.
No tenía necesidad de definirla, sino de vivir con ella. Nosotros sí. El mundo de la cultura se ha vuelto distante de grandes capas de la población, que quedan al margen de toda necesidad, de toda producción y de todo disfrute cultural. Aparece verdaderamente extraña y como cosa de minorías, porque con frecuencia se identifica la cultura con el arte y así se le condena a ser un asunto de élites.
Pero si hablamos de cultura nacional es obvio que debemos plantear otro escenario, no el de las obras dirigidas a las minorías, sino algo que compete a todos los mexicanos.
Recordemos: La palabra cultura es una invención de los latinos, precisamente de Cicerón. Viene del latín colo, colere, que significa simplemente, "cultivar", "rotar", "preparar la tierra para sembrar". Tan elemental como eso.
Por obra de las mutaciones significativas ha llegado a designar 150 cosas diferentes. Las más sublimes, cercanas al espíritu; y las más rupestres, como son estas seudo "culturas democráticas" que destilan los medios de comunicación y que son contrarias a la verdadera cultura.
Sucede con estos cambios una cosa muy curiosa: ¿Dónde encontramos la fuente de la verdadera cultura, y sobre todo la de una nación o un pueblo? Precisamente, el punto en el cual los seres humanos dan forma, ponen sello o preparan lo que es natural. Por eso es curioso que la palabra cultivar pertenezca a la agricultura y, sin embargo, la usamos para significar lo que se aparte de lo natural.
Entonces, ¿Qué hace quién cultiva la tierra? Le imprime la huella, el sello humano, a lo que simplemente es natural.
Distinguimos fácilmente cuándo un terreno ha sido cultivado: Cuando vemos como da vuelta una fila de surcos con una figura específica. En efecto, la palabra sánscrita carsa significa "surco", que es uno de los orígenes primitivos de la cultura. Igual la islandesa hvel significa "rueda". Esto es, la "cultura" comienza cuando damos forma o significado humano a aquello que simplemente es natural. Comienza con el surco que hacemos en la rudeza de nuestro cuerpo.
*Fragmento de "Cultura y soberanía nacional", del filósofo Severo Iglesias, tomo No 33 de Los Cuadernos de EL FINANCIERO que saldrá a la venta el próximo lunes 22 de marzo.
martes, 16 de febrero de 2010
Gloria Contreras: estudian 12 años y no los contratan por tener piel morena. La Crónica. Lunes 25 de Enero de 2010. Angélica Albazán. México D.F.
"Duele ver a los jóvenes que quieren ser bailarines. Estudian 12 años y al final no encuentran trabajo por tener la piel morena y rasgos mexicanos. Les dicen que no encajan en el perfil de la compañía. Pareciera que en México no nos gustan los mexicanos." Asi mira una parte de lo que es la escena de la danza la maestra Gloria contreras, y también habla de sus recuerdos, del dificil panorama de la danza en este año y de sus 40 años al frente del Taller Coreográfico de la UNAM.
En entrevista en su casa, donde muchos libros y objetos personales denotan sus preferencias, asegura que el arte nunca debe arrodillarse ante el poder. Siempre defender su grandeza histórica nacional, sin doblegarse ante nada.
Sobre el futuro de la danza en México, señala que en el país hay una fuerte crisis. "Ya casi no hay mecenas y poco ayuda el Estado. Lo que pasó a la recientemente desaparecida compañía Ballet Teatro del Espacio es un ejemplo de la crisis".
Para finalizar, la maestra Contreras invita a los nuevos coreógrafos a reflexionar que tienen en sus manos la más difícil de todas las artes. "El coreógrafo es un maestro a la vez que un padre, mucho de lo que surja en su bailarín depende de su humanística, siempre debe tener conciencia de que somos hombres, no seres perfectos. Debe hacerse de esto una filosofía, y saber dar esperanza a la gente, haciendo que ésta se dé cuenta de que la danza es amor, no exhibicionismo".
puedes ver la entrevista completa aqui: http://www.cronica.com.mx/nota.php?id_nota=483256
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)