Did Shivaji See a Tulip at Dutch Factory in Surat?

Today February 19 2014 is 384th Birth Anniversary of Shivaji (शिवाजी)

William Dalrymple, October 2012:

"...it was India’s extraordinary wealth that drew in the merchant adventurers of the East India Company. They came to India not as part of some Tudor aid project, but instead as part of a desperate effort to cash in on the riches of the Mughal empire, then one of the two wealthiest polities in the world. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Mughal city of Lahore is revealed to Adam after the Fall as a future wonder of God’s creation: by the 17th century, Lahore had grown richer than Constantinople, and with its two million inhabitants it dwarfed London and Paris combined. It was, in terms of rapid growth, prosperity and opportunities, the Gurgaon of its day.

What eastern Europeans are to modern Brit­ain – economic migrants in search of a better life – the Jacobeans were to Mughal India. It was only after the arrival of the various colonial powers that India came to be perceived as poor..."

Jennifer Szalai, Lapham's Quarterly:

"The speculator is fixated on what everybody else is thinking, because the existence of a market in shares means that prices will be determined more often by the mentality of the herd than by the thing itself—whether it be a tulip, a pork belly, a pound sterling, or a house...Tulips may be beautiful to look at, a lovely addition to the breakfast table, but during the height of Tulipomania in the winter of 1636-7, the bulbs were in the ground and speculators were trading pieces of paper: no tulips were actually delivered"

Mr. Narendra Modi claims that Shivaji did not sack Surat in 1664 and 1670. 

Instead, Mr. Modi says, he plundered Mughal emperor Aurangazeb's treasure in the city with the help of local people.

Maybe. 

In any case, it looks like, we all have to start loving Mr. Modi.

As  'Aurangazeb's treasure in the city was being looted', by one account,  narrated so beautifully (maybe little speculative perhaps) by the late D G Godse (द ग गोडसे), Shivaji watched it, for some time,  from the Dutch factory. 

Dutch painter then present grabbed that opportunity to draw Shivaji's most moving portrait available to us today. 

If you read Marathi (मराठी), read a couple of pages from Godse's said essay  below:

 [ "Shivrayache Kaise Bolane....", 'Samande Talash', Shreevidya Prakashan, 

("शिवरायाचे कैसे बोलणे…. ", 'समन्दे तलाश', श्रीविद्या प्रकाशन , 1981) ]

On February 2 1637,  legendary Dutch tulip bubble burst. It very much happened on Shivaji's watch. Maharaj was six years old. 

Did Shivaji know (they say he was generally well informed even about European affairs)  about the speculative madness as he stood in the Dutch factory? If he knew, what would he think about the money that changed hands in Holland during the mania? He needed only a tiny fraction of it to build his own dream and that's why he was in Surat in the first place!

Courtsey: The Economist


Dan Piepenbring writes in 'Tulipomania!': 

"...Most edifying of all, though, is a list of various articles that “were delivered for one single root of the rare species called the Viceroy,” which gives an astonishing sense of just how inflated the flowers’ value was:

·        Two lasts of wheat

·        Four lasts of rye

·        Four fat oxen

·        Eight fat swine

·        Twelve fat sheep

·        Two hogsheads of wine

·        Four tuns of beer

·        Two tuns of butter

·        One thousand lbs. of cheese

·        A complete bed

·        A suit of clothes

·        A silver drinking-cup..."

Artist: Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678), 1640

Lucknowi Lemmings: You First, You First...Canadian: After You, After You

Remembering Raj Kapoor's 'Bobby', 1973 today, Saint Valentine's Day 2014

Wikipedia informs:

"Lemmings are small rodents, usually found in or near the Arctic,..Lemmings became the subject of a popular misconception that they commit mass suicide when they migrate..."

Artist: Robert Leighton, The New Yorker, July 2013

The picture above reminded me a song from Bobby- "Mujhe Kuch Kehna Hai"...it has following lines: 

"Dekho, Jis Tarha Luknow Ke Do Nawaabon Ki Gaadi
Pehle Aap, Pehle Aap, Pehle Aap
Pehle Aap Karte Nikal Gayi Thi
Us Tarha Hamaari Pehle Tum, Pehle Tum, Pehle Tum
Pehle Tum Mein Yeh Masti Bhari Ruth Na Chali Jaaye."

( Lyricist: Anand Bakshi)

Sindbad, J S Alvarenga and Scurvy in Marathi

Wikipedia: José Salvador Alvarenga is a Salvadoran man who became known after being found on 30 January 2014 in the Marshall Islands, and claimed to have spent 13 months at sea in a fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean.

John Keay, 'The Honourable Company/ A History of the English East India Company', 1993:

"...After frantic preparations Lancaster sailed from Woolwich with four ships in February 1601. The Red Dragon, his flagship, had been bought from the Earl of Cumberland who was at this time the only titled member of the Company. The vessel partook of his Lordship’s ‘quality’. She was of 600 tons, had been built for privateering in the West Indies, and like most subsequent ‘East Indiamen’ was as much warship as cargo carrier with thirty-eight guns plus space, if not accommodation, for 200 men. To maintain her complement at 200 Lancaster, mindful of past disasters, prescribed lemon juice for all ranks. Three spoonfuls per man were administered every morning as they sailed into the scurvy latitudesof the south Atlantic. The dosage seemed to work. During the six months that it took to reach the Cape the men of the Red Dragonremained in rude health..."

Felipe Fernández-Armesto:

"...Magellan's pioneering crossing, made diagonally between Chile and Guam, with the trade winds for most of the way, between 28 November 1520 and 6 March 1521. By the end of the journey the explorers were starving, champing painfully—they claimed—on the leather covers from the yards with jaws weakened by scurvy, drinking putrid water, and eating wormy biscuit "which stank strongly of rats' urine." The voyage exposed the intimidating vastness of a one-way ocean which could be crossed, at terrible hazard and cost, but not recrossed..." 

 ('MILLENNIUM / A History of the Last Thousand Years', 1995)

William H. McNeill, 'PLAGUES AND PEOPLES', 1977/1998:

"...Indeed, even after a British naval surgeon, James Lind, published the results of his carefully controlled experiments that proved the efficacy of fresh lemons and oranges in curing scurvy (1753), the Admiralty did not act. The reason was partly pecuniary: citrus fruit was expensive and scarce and could not be stored for very long. Partly too, the naval authorities believed other cures were suitable, e.g., the sauerkraut Captain James Cook fed his crews in the Pacific. Moreover, when in 1795 the Admiralty did decide on citrus juices as the best preventative for scurvy and prescribed a daily ration for all sailors on shipboard, the result was imperfect..."

 

Once scurvy was a dreaded disease and also a funny thing.

Frances Wilson,  'Jokes of Old', ( review of Simon Dickie's  'Cruelty & Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century'):  
 
"...In fact, anything to do with hunchbacks, club feet, cleft palates, harelips, scurvy, jaundice, rickets, epilepsy, asthma, syphilis, deafness, blindness, squints, missing limbs, long chins or stammers was guaranteed to set the table a-roar..."

On August 5 2013, I wrote a post "Marathi Literature at Sea!...मराठी साहित्यात समुद्राच वास्तव किती सातत्याने दुर्लक्षित केलं आहे."


In February 2014, I read about the latest 'castaway' Mr. Alvarenga.

Not every one is convinced of his story. One of the reasons for skepticism: "it's hard to think how anybody could go more than six or seven months without getting scurvy at least." 

I first read the word scurvy in my primary school  and I took any interest in it because one got full marks if one knew its connection with Vitamin C.

Before I read any European literature or history,  I knew only one sailor: Sindbad,  and I never read about him or his fellow seamen getting any scurvy.

'Sindbad the Sailor and the old man of the sea'  

Artist: Edmund Dulac (1882-1953)

(That old man in the Sindbad story scared bejesus out of me much before Narayan Dharap नारायण धारप came along. Does that old man represent scurvy?)

I was never told by our book or teacher that "Between 1500 and 1800, it has been estimated that scurvy killed at least two million sailors.": 25 times the then entire population of Miraj (मिरज)! If I was, I would have sat up and taken notice.

Is there is a word for scurvy in Marathi? (Is there in Tamil or Bengali?) I could not find it in Marathi.

 Google Translate interprets it as "क्षुद्र, नीच, गचाळ, जीवनसत्वाच्या अभावाने उद्‍भवणारा एक प्रकारचा रक्तरोग"...hardly helps


One possible reason for  English scurvy to remain Marathi scurvy- just like plague, flu, HIV/AIDS etc but unlike smallpox, cholera, syphilis, scabies, jaundice etc- is because we came to know of it via Europeans. 

We were never at sea for that long! 

Artist: Warren Miller, The New Yorker, 6 September 1969

Whoever he is, he is not Marathi (मराठी)!