88 Books & arts The Economist December 4th 2021
ta at Keeladi reveal no signs of Hindu influ
ence, and indeed no indications of reli
gious worship at all. But a wealth of writing
shows clear links to later Tamil script and,
tantalisingly, similarities to the pre
Sanskrit graffiti of the very oldest urban
settlements in the subcontinent: those of
the Indus Valley Civilisation (ivc), which
flourished in the far northwest from
around 30002000bc.Dig for victory
No one disputes that Tamils, who are
roughly the same in number as Germans
(not including 3m in Sri Lanka and a 5m
strong diaspora spread from South Africa
to Singapore to Silicon Valley), have a long
and illustrious past. The Sangam litera
ture, a corpus of some 2,381 love poems by
473 poets, dates back to a courtly age when
south Indian kingdoms traded with the
Roman Empire. Seafaring Tamils later car
ried Hinduism and Buddhism to South
East Asia; the giant temples of Borobudur
in Java of the seventh century ad, and
those of Angkor Wat in Cambodia from the
12th century, emblazon that legacy.
Less certain is Mr Stalin’s suggestion
that Tamils represent the oldest thread in
the Indian subcontinent’s complex tapes
try of cultures. The evidence points firmly
elsewhere and earlier. Theivcthrived at a
time when Egyptians were building pyr
amids and the first citystates arose in
Mesopotamia. Its most impressive site is
Mohenjodaro, a city that may have housed
40,000 souls, in what is now Pakistan. This
thoroughly documented civilisation col
lapsed and disappeared before 1900bc—at
least 700 years before someone popped an
offering of rice into a clay pot in Sivakalai,
around 2,300km to the south.
Further digging in Tamil Nadu will
surely turn up more finds, but it is highly
doubtful that they will outdate the ivc. In
stead, what may become clear is that urban
settlement emerged quite independently
in India’s far south at more or less the same
time as it reemerged in the north: a lesser
historical boast for Tamil nationalists, but
still a prize worth having.
Partly because no Rosetta Stone has yet
been found to help decipher ivcscripts,
the biggest mysteries of Indian history are
why it died and what happened next.
Archaeology, genetics and linguistics all
suggest that what followed in north India
was a prolonged interregnum. Then, possi
bly not long before a Tamil mourner made
their funeral offering, an influx of horse
riding, IndoEuropeantongued Central
Asian peoples seems to have brought in a
new pastoral culture and what eventually
became a new religion—Hinduism.
Historians believe that the first Vedas,
the early oral traditions of Hinduism, may
have emerged around 1500bc. The mighty
Hindu epics, the Mahabharata andRamayana, took form over a millennium
later. A few centuries after that, around the
time Alexander the Great marched a Greek
army across the Hindu Kush, written hist
ory arrived. And as Indian schoolchildren
learn, the first ruler to unite the country’s
scattered and warring kingdoms was Asho
ka the Great, in about 250bc.
But vast as it was, Ashoka’s shortlived
empire never reached the Tamil south. Ov
er time Tamils culturally assimilated with
the rest of India, adopting a rigid caste sys
tem topped by a Sanskritised priesthood;
butitwasnotuntiltheBritishRajthatthe
farsouthwasbroughtintothesamepolity
asIndia’snorth.TheTamilexperiencewasunusual in other ways: whereas Muslim
dynasties conquered and ruled much of
the north for 800 years, in the south Mus
lims arrived by sea as traders, which they
remained, mostly peaceably.
Tamils for the most part fit happily into
today’s Indian mosaic of some 22 major
language groups and hundreds of smaller
ones. But they do feel a bit different, and a
bit special. “They portray us as little states
and want to make the history of the south a
small event,” says Kanimozhi Mathi, a law
yer in Chennai who in 2018 sued the gov
ernmentwhenitthreatenedtoclose the
Keeladidig.“Butwearenotjustone state
amongmany.Wearea nation.”nEmbattledminoritiesStations of the cross
A
fter a strict convent education,
Janine di Giovanni, an American war
correspondent, drifted from religion. Yet
as she travelled the world, reporting from
Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda, her faith re
turned. Wherever she went, she writes in
“The Vanishing”, she would find a church,
seeking “ritual and a sense of belonging”.
Her book is the culmination of two
decades of fieldwork in the Middle East, its
four sections reflecting her stints in Egypt,
Gaza, Iraq and Syria. As the title suggests, it
is a portrait of a disappearing people.
Christians are an embattled minority in
many countries, including North Korea,wheretensofthousandsarebelievedto be
held in concentration camps, and Sri Lan
ka, where around 250 people died in the
Easter bombings of 2019. In the Middle
East, Islamic extremists depict Christians
as Westernised interlopers, yet the region
was the birthplace of the religion, which
flourished until the Muslim Arab conquest
of the seventh century. Christians have
since faced discrimination in varying de
grees, precipitating waves of emigration.
Today 93% of the population of the Middle
East and north Africa are Muslim.
Ms di Giovanni brings a compassionate
perspective to her narrative, interweaving
complex, sometimes dense history with
evocative vignettes and interviews. Her in
terlocutors range from nuns to imams,
from the last vestiges of Gaza’s Christian
elite to Cairo’s impoverished Zabbaleen,
who sort rubbish in “Garbage City”. These
“dying communities” of various Christian
denominations, some claiming direct de
scent from Jesus’s disciples, share a stark
choice: to abandon ancestral roots in
search of a better life elsewhere, or cling on
for a precarious future. Most keep their
heads down, but the allegiance of some to
dictators—seen as bulwarks against ex
tremism—has antagonised Islamists.
In Iraq and Syria (pictured), minorities
were once protected by the Baathist re
gimes of Saddam Hussein and the Assads,
whose Alawite offshoot of Shia Islam had
itself experienced persecution. After the
Americanled invasion of Iraq overthrew
Hussein in 2003, a cleansing of Christians
by Islamic State (is), who burned churches
and destroyed homes, prompted an ex
odus. Most Syrian Christians, meanwhile,
believed Bashar Assad alone could main
tain interfaith harmony. After war brokeThe Vanishing. By Janine di Giovanni.
Public Affairs; 272 pages; $17.99.
Bloomsbury; £20The long perspectiveA war correspondent’s intimate portrait of the Christians of the Middle East