Linguists From The United Kingdom

"Meantime they are more open to the reception of Christianity, the surest road to civilization, than any other section of the population. They would then prove the most assured supporters of the present state of things."

"...to all those who have an interest in the art of governing subject races who have hearts to love them , and sympathies wide enough to care for their best interests , moral , material and spiritual."

"What is now required is a carefully and scientifically edited Dictionary or Gazetteer of the Castes, and Tribes, and social distinctions of British India, arranged alphabetically under the leading name, but carefully giving all the synonyms, and alternative names, carefully transliterated in the Roman Character, and given also in the local Indian Character. It is an idle war to fight against Caste, which exists in the atmosphere of India. The English is but an additional Caste to the previously existing catalogue. There are also many compensating advantages. All secret societies of a dangerous political character are impossible in a population, which is honeycombed with deep, though innocent, fissures: the panchayet of the Caste is a welcome and powerful ally to a just Ruler: the old Roman proverb applies, Divide et impera. Difference of Religion and language, great as they are, are scarcely so operative as difference of Caste. Then, again, the necessity of a general poor law to relieve the indigent is obviated by the existence of Caste. The respectability of a community is maintained by the enforcement of wise Caste-rules: they are felt, though not written, by Europeans in their own country. The English Government has steadily ignored Caste, as far as the administration of public affairs is concerned, but respected the private rights of every class of its subjects, and the Civil Courts will give a remedy for any wanton outrage of the feelings of the meanest of its subjects; while, on the other hand, any attempt to monopolize the use of wells, or other places of public convenience, or to place any section of the community under a ban, causing injury to person or property, is sternly repressed. I am glad to hear that there is a prospect of an Ethnological Survey of British India."

"“…in the mid nineteenth century disaster overtook Turkabad, in the shape of what was perhaps the last massed forcible conversion in Iran. It no longer seems possible to learn anything about the background of this event; but it happened, so it is said, one autumn day when dye-madder – then one of the chief local crops – was being lifted. All the able-bodied men were at work in teams in the fields when a body of Moslems swooped on the village and seized them. They were threatened, not only with death for themselves, but also with the horrors that would befall their women and children, who were being terrorized at the same time in their homes; and by the end of the day of violence most of the village had accepted Islam. To recant after a verbal acknowledgement of Allah and his prophet meant death in those days, and so Turkabad was lost to the old religion. Its fire-temple was razed to the ground, and only a rough, empty enclosure remained where once it had stood."

"In Sharifabad the dogs distinguished clearly between Moslem and Zoroastrian, and were prepared to go, with a diffident politeness but full of hope, into a crowded Zoroastrian assembly, or to fall asleep trustfully in a Zoroastrian lane, but would flee as before Satan from a group of Moslem boys. Moslems are not, of course, invariably unkind to dogs. Some themselves own herd- or watch-dogs, and apart from this there are naturally many Moslems who would not deliberately harm any creature. But undeniably there are others who are savagely and wantonly cruel to dogs, on the pretext that Muhammad called them unclean; but there seems no factual basis for this, and the evidence points rather to Moslem hostility to these animals having been deliberately fostered in the first place in Iran, as a point of opposition to the old faith there. Certainly in the Yazdi area na-najib Moslems found a double satisfaction in tormenting dogs, since they were thereby both afflicting an unclean creature and causing distress to the infidel who cherished him. There are grim old stories from the time when the annual poll-tax was exacted, of the tax gatherer tying a Zoroastrian and a dog together, and flogging both alternately until the money was somehow forthcoming, or death released them. I myself was spared any worse sight than that of a young Moslem girl in Mazra' Kalantar standing over a litter of two-week old puppies, and suddenly kicking one as hard as she could with her shod foot. The puppy screamed with pain, but at my angry intervention she merely said blankly, ‘But it’s unclean.’ In Sharifabad I was told by distressed Zoroastrian children of worse things: a litter of puppies cut to pieces with a spade-edge, and a dog’s head laid open with the same implement; and occasionally the air was made hideous with the cries of some tormented animal. Such wanton cruelties on the Moslems’ part added not a little to the tension between the communities."

"A similar fate must have overtaken many Iranian villages in the past, among those which did not willingly embrace Islam; and the question seems less why it happened to Turkabad than why it did not overwhelm all other Zoroastrian settlements. The evidence, scanty though it is, shows, however, that the harassment of the Zoroastrians of Yazd tended to be erratic and capricious, being at times less harsh, or bridled by strong governors; and in general the advance of Islam across the plain, through relentless, seems to have been more by slow erosion than by furious force. The process was still going on in the 1960s, and one could see, therefore, how it took effect. Either a few Moslems settled on the outskirts of a Zoroastrian village, or one or two Zoroastrian families adopted Islam. Once the dominant faith had made a breach, it pressed in remorselessly, like a rising tide. More Moslems came, and soon a small mosque was built, which attracted yet others. As long as Zoroastrians remained in the majority, their lives were tolerable; but once the Moslems became the more numerous, a petty but pervasive harassment was apt to develop. This was partly verbal, with taunts about fire-worship, and comments on how few Zoroastrians there were in the world, and how many Moslems, who must therefore posses the truth; and also on how many material advantages lay with Islam. The harassment was often also physical; boys fought, and gangs of youth waylaid and bullied individual Zoroastrians. They also diverted themselves by climbing into the local tower of silence and desecrating it, and they might even break into the fire-temple and seek to pollute or extinguish the sacred flame. Those with criminal leanings found too that a religious minority provided tempting opportunities for theft, pilfering from the open fields, and sometimes rape and arson. Those Zoroastrians who resisted all these pressures often preferred therefore in the end to sell out and move to some other place where their co-religionists were still relatively numerous, and they could live at peace; and so another village was lot to the old faith. Several of the leading families in Sharifabad and forebears who were driven away by intense Moslem pressure from Abshahi, once a very devout and orthodox village on the southern outskirts of Yazd; and a shorter migration had been made by the family of the centenarian ‘Hajji’ Khodabakhsh, who had himself been born in the 1850s and was still alert and vigorous in 1964. His family, who were very pious, had left their home in Ahmedabad (just to the north of Turkabad) when he was a small boy, and had come to settle in Sharifabad to escape persecution and the threats to their orthodox way of life. Other Zoroastrians held out there for a few decades longer, but by the end of the century Ahmedabad was wholly Moslem, as Abshahi become in 1961. [The last Zoroastrian family left Abshahi in 1961, after the rape and subsequent suicide of one of their daughters.] It was noticeable that the villages which were left to the Zoroastrians were in the main those with poor supplies of water, where farming conditions were hard.”"

"The original name of the Indo/Iranian Goddess was Sarasvati ‘she who possesses waters’. In India she continued to be worshipped by this name which she gave to a small but very holy river in Madhyadesa (Punjab) whereas in Iran Sarasvati became, by normal sound changes Harahvati, a name preserved in the region called in Avestan Harakhvaiti and known to the Greeks as Anacosia, a region rich in rivers and lakes. Originally, Harahvaiti was the personification of the great river which flows down from the high Hara into the sea Vourukasa and is the source of the waters of the world, and just as the wandering Iranians called the great mountains near which they lived Hara, they gave Harahvaitis name to the life giving rivers and their Indian cousins did the same."

"...through the loss of most of its tributaries, and the failure of others, ceased to flow—although even now, in time of great floods above, its waters have occasionally reached the ocean."

"‘Sursuti [Sarsuti] is the name of a river, the ancient Saraswatī . . . Sutlaj [Sutlej] was a tributary of the Hakrā or Wahindāh’... (The Hakra’s drying up, which according to Raverty took place in the fourteenth century CE,) ‘reduced a vast extent of once fruitful country to a howling wilderness, and thus several flourishing cities and towns became ruined or deserted by their inhabitants’."

"The Chináb has changed its course very considerably, and its valley, or rather, the tract over which it has flowed at different periods, is thirty miles broad. In by-gone days, at about the point where the Shaikhán Patan now is, some fourteen miles north-east of Chaudani-ot or Chandan-ot, instead of turning more to the westwards as at present, it kept a course more towards the south-south-west, and passed five miles east of Chandan-ot; while now it passes it two miles and a half on the west. Its old bed is very distinct, and runs within a mile of Rajá-á."

"I will not go back to “ Alexander" and “ Hweng Thsaug "—for there is no doubt that the Rawi, even more than some of the other rivers constituting the Panch Nad or Panj Ab, has changed more or less from one side to the other and back again time after time; and thus to attempt to “identify " places along its present banks with others supposed to have existed more than twenty-two centuries ago, is so absurd as to require no further comment. Towards the lower part of its course, from the proofs still existing, it has flowed, at different times, over a tract of country from twenty to twenty-five miles in breadth. ... The Rawi in its last change before forsaking the Bíáh altogether, appears to have met with some considerable obstruction in its course westwards near Bakrá and Lal Káthiyah, as its winding struggles and turnings show, but more particularly north of Tulanbah, upon which, and in order to reach the depressed tracts towards the Ohin-áb, it betook itself, naturally, to the first depressed outlet in its way. This happened to be a canal which a former administrator, or farmer of the revenue, had cut to facilitate the irrigation of a part not within the influence of the annual inundations. This was carried towards the Sará'e of Sidhü, to near a point called Ram Chontarah, where the Hindus have а place of devotion, about two miles and a half east of Sidhü's Sará'e, and a little west of which it reached the Qhin-áb again, which ran south-westwards towards the Biah, but a little nearer to Multán on the east side than it had previously done."

"The academic life has become far more bureaucratic, and is increasingly dominated by people with the habits of bureaucrats. You have to either do the bureaucratic stuff on autopilot, and try to keep some section of your brain free for thinking, or find a place where there are friendly bureaucrats to shield you. I'd say this. Managerial programs work best where there is a clear and quantifiable outcome and an easy way of checking what the work-force is doing. Neither of these apply to teaching, or research. Really productive researchers are often staring at the wall, or going for walks -- and their product tends to turn up ten years later. Good teaching is not measured by the number of degrees you turn out, or even how highly the students rate you at the time. But unsophisticated management systems (and those are the ones we have) insist on counting something"