May 10, 2008 Snipped from http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23666767-5002031,00.html JOURNEYS: THE SPIRIT OF DISCOVERY: The Times Atlas of World History is a record of the impermanence of human and political borders, writes Murray Laurence IN Imperium, his account of the disintegration of the Soviet empire, the great Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski writes, "At the approach to every border, tension rises within us; emotions heighten. The Times Atlas of World History is an extraordinary record of the impermanence, instability and arbitrariness of the world's human and political borders. On every page there is a map that illustrates the expansion of the territory of one group of humans and the inevitable contraction of another's. We know without reading the accompanying text that such movement in frontiers would have involved pillage, rape, torture, calamity and death often on an unimaginable scale. The borders thus grasped would be assaulted anew at any time by the previously vanquished, ambitious or thwarted relatives of the current possessor of the territories, or by some new more formidable invader, causing more terror, destruction and flight. Choosing a country where I have wandered, I look at the entry on the Mughal Empire and the growth of British power in India, covering the 16th and 17th centuries. It depicts the expansion of the Mughals under Akbar and Shahjahan, and up until the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 by which time the Maratha Hindus, as well as Persians, Afghanis and European trading powers had the Mughals facing almighty assaults on multiple fronts. The expansion and then retreat of the Mughal borders involved battles on a gigantic scale. We know from reading William Dalrymple's scholarly works that armies comprised thousands of elephants, which suggests the carnage involved, as well as the cataclysmic disruption to the lives of innocents. The saying was "the Ruler of Delhi is the same as the Lord of the Universe", attesting to their supposed immanence. Oddly, this brings to mind the verse by Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, Inniskeen Road: July Evening, which ends, "A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king/of banks and stones and every blooming thing" but I feel that Kavanagh's territory is not of a dimension that would have impressed a Mughal. Still, in 1803, Shah Alam II, defeated by the armies of Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington), sought the protection of the British, leaving India in the hands of the British East India Company. Granted, Akbar and his successor kings did leave a colossal heritage in art, including, in an ironic touch, the miniature painting and boundless architectural wonders, not much of it wreckage at the time, but in meditating upon the expansion and disintegration of the borders of their universe, and the fortunes of their subjects, we appreciate the meaning of Kapuscinski's words. ============================ ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India