In the history of mankind, armies have always existed and been made to fight for one reason or another, but mostly at the behest of, and for the glory of, the individual ruler or government; to conquer and expand their territories, to add to their wealth and worth, and power and influence. In due course, war crafts were devised and perfected; bows and arrows gave way to cannons and gunfire, war logistics were developed, overt or subtle diplomacy was used in ways to gain the upper hand, failing which, the opponents went to war. In modern times wars have been fought for the same reasons as before but with more technical advancement and sophistication. However, their food remained much the same as ever for a very long time. Eventually due to individual effort, bold experiments, and increasing general awareness, improvements came. Lately, science and technology has played a crucial role in bringing the army foods and nourishment to the expected level of modernity, commensurate with advancements in other features of the war craft.

The common reader with interest in ancient knowledge and military history, wars, science, food, etc. faces a daunting task of finding suitable reading material presented in a concise manner. The main objective of writing this book originated in the felt need to provide a ready source of historical perspective on the armies of the past as well as contemporary times.

On an early August morning in 2006 while I was rushing from the Metro Station to the Department for the weekly discussion with my tutorial group, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a few students in front of the Faculty of Arts on a 72-hour hunger strike protesting against Mandal II. On entering the D-School campus I noticed that, despite being 8:30 in the morning, groups of students had gathered around J. P.'s tea stall and Ambarda's canteen and were engaged in heated discussions. By this time I should have expected a few surprises at the Department because waiting for me were my students, all of whom had turned up and that too much before the scheduled time of 9 a.m. One of them asked:

Allen G. Noble, born in New York City and raised in central New York State, received his undergraduate degree from Utica College of Syracuse University in 1951. From there he went on to the University of Maryland to complete an MA in Geography in 1953. He undertook doctoral work at the University of Illinois where he was awarded a PhD in Geography in 1957. After completing his PhD, Allen joined the United States diplomatic service. He held consular positions in India and Brazil and was also posted at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Allen's international experience and consequent interest in diverse geographic settings became the foundation for his future research work in geography. Through his international exposure, he came to appreciate diverse political and geographic issues and conditions. Initially an observer, Allen progressed towards detailed study and research into different cultures and their constituent elements. He, thus, was establishing the basis for his career as a cultural geographer. Among the diverse settings to which Allen has applied his research skills and attention are India, China, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indo-China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Finland, Spain, Greece, Italy, Poland and Brazil.

After more than six years in the diplomatic service, Allen decided to seek a teaching position in USA. His first appointment was in the Department of Geography at California State College in Pennsylvania (1963–64). Allen then moved on to the University of Akron where he has spent the rest of his career as Professor, Head of the Department of Geography and Planning, Distinguished University Professor and, currently, Professor Emeritus.

India is a land characterized by “unity in diversity” amidst a multicultural society. This is symbolized by variety in culture such as different languages, religions, castes, house types, dance forms and dietary patterns (Noble and Dutt, 1982). Of these cultural traits, language is an important instrument of cultural identity since it is through this medium that different groups of people communicate with the world and express a sense of identity to a place. Often, social tensions emerge when a certain segment of society feels ostracized from social and economic processes of development due to lack of knowledge of the dominant and prevalent language. This often leads to granting linguistic minorities special privileges to accommodate them in the process of mainstream national social and economic development.

India is considered to be the world's most linguistically diverse nation. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution specified 14 major languages and a concerted effort has been made to fully develop all these languages in the interest of national integration and development. Subsequently, eight more languages were included in the schedule and these were: Sindhi (1969), Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali (1993), Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali (2003) (Sengupta, 2009). According to the 2001 Indian Census approximately 96.6 percent of the Indian population spoke these 22 scheduled languages with another 100 non-scheduled languages spoken by a minimum of 10,000 people in different regions (Census of India, 2001).

The Tibet question in Sino-Indian relations is partly an unsettled inheritance from the Raj and partly an issue of persistent immediacy, one that has been able to renew itself and bedevil those relations into the present day. It has precipitated diplomatic and even military hostilities and still has the potential to claim lives in periodic (albeit low-level) border clashes. The question centres around two primary elements: the status of Tibet and the lack of common agreement on the border between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and India (i.e., the Indo-Tibetan border). One might think it would not be too difficult for India and China to isolate the two elements and deal with them separately, particularly since India has long accepted Tibet's status as a part of China. In truth, however, the matter of Tibet's status is inextricably linked to the border issue, which is rooted in the 1914 Simla Convention by which India and Tibet agreed to a frontier that, in the eastern sector, ran along the crest of the Himalayan range. And the force of the Simla agreement is dependent on recognition of the treaty-making authority of Tibet's traditional government. In 1950, however, with Tibet under attack from China, India acted to block United Nations (UN) action over Tibet by supporting the proposal of the United Kingdom in the General Assembly that no action be taken, in part because the British held that the status of the Tibetan government—the very government that had signed the Simla Treaty with India—was unclear.

Evolution and Food Habits

Food consumption is the basic instinct of all living things. The first life on the planet was microbial in nature, emerging and living in the primordial soup that was the ocean, also inhabiting rock, the deep Earth and the soil. They developed mechanisms and metabolic profiles to fit the environment they inhabited. Anaerobic systems and archaebacteria existed without Oxygen. Vegetation and photosynthetic cycle with the oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange mechanisms caused an atmosphere where a variety of fauna grew abundantly, both small and big. The herbivores ate the vegetation while the predators killed the herbivores as well as creatures placed lower in the food chain.

In the evolution of man, that began some six million years ago, from the time of the early hominids until the period of settled living followed by the agricultural revolution, food was what could be hunted or foraged and gathered from the wild (Gore, 2003). In the interim, from around two million years ago during the Pliocene, Homo habilis devised tools to hunt but active hunting began with H. erectus, which was better endowed with the capability to utilise nature's bounty. Acquisition of the skills of fishing came later sometime between 190,000 and 130,000 years ago in Eastern Africa during the time of major glaciation (Oppenheimer, 2003, pp. 76–77). While H. habilis still ranged, modern man appeared. According to some writings, fire was domesticated much earlier, at least 700,000 to 800,000 years ago and with the discovery of fire came the appreciation of cooked meat and adapting a less strenuous way of eating and digesting the same food (Nestle Report).

‘Literature represents a source of geographical data and perceptions that are mostly untapped by geographers. Among Indian writers of fiction in both English and Hindi, the city of Delhi, the capital of India, is ‘an idea with physical boundaries.’ Both Hindu and Muslim authors regard the capital city with mixed emotions of reverence and resentment. The urban environment of Delhi presents sharply contrasting images of security, retreat, familiarity, noise, crowds and filth. Authors carefully describe both the city's physical frame and the quality of its communal life. This essay is intended to examine the ‘idea’ of Old Delhi (Shahjahanabad, the walled city) in its contrasting facets across the writings of representative Indian authors. Old Delhi has been a living city since the seventeenth century and forms a part of the much larger Delhi Metropolitan Area.

Old Delhi: The Traditional City

The crowded world of Old Delhi is vividly portrayed in numerous novels and short stories including Jhabvala's The Householder (1960), Yadav's Andekhe Anjan Pul (‘Unseen, Unknown Bridges’) (1963), Ali's Twilight in Delhi (1966), Rakesh's Lingering Shadows (1970), Chopra's Jaren (‘The Roots’) (1972), Vaid's A Blind Alley (1972), Bista's Beete Din (‘Bygone Days’) (1974), Nahal's My True Faces (1978), and many others.

The city of Old Delhi, which now spreads even beyond the old walls of Shahjahanabad, mainly towards its west and northwest with the traditional settlement pattern, was developed largely after the Revolt of 1857.

INTRODUCTION

Ours is a time full of changes; steady things seem fewer than before. In such a challenging context, most cultures face a common problem: how to value and deal with their own significant past. Literary classics (canons) are both the components and representatives of this ‘important past’, and rethinking them would amount to a conscious reflection on one's tradition. We must remember that one of the reasons a certain literary work is considered a classic is that it often acts as a unified source from where both questions and answers regarding that culture and its values are drawn. It must also be noted that a literature develops and attains a certain status not only by means of its own literary heritage but also through its correlations with foreign literatures. Translations from other languages and cultures bring in new concepts and stimulations to a literature and its culture. Again, translation – if it is interpretation/oral transcreation or written translation – is the inevitable course a literary work has to take in going out into the world, crossing geographical and temporal limits.

Translating the Buddhist scriptures into Chinese had left a lasting impression on the history of Sino-Indian cultural exchanges. Among the translators, including Indian, Chinese and the central Asians, Kāśyapamātanga, Dharmaraksa, Kumārajāva, Zhi Qian, Xuan Zang were the famous ones, and Xuan Zang was definitely the most distinguished figure. With the translation of scriptures, Buddhist literature was introduced into China, and it had a profound influence on Chinese literature.

Nature of Problem

Land in Delhi is used for a variety of purposes among which residential land use is most important. It accounts for a large part of built-up area of the city with varying patterns of population density and housing quality. Being the largest user of space, residential houses are heterogeneous, immobile, complicated and expensive. The houses are occupied by households belonging to different social and economic classes, depending on their capacity to pay the housing market. Therefore, in Indian cities, the segregation of people into different neighbourhoods on the basis of social characteristics, such as ethnicity, occupation or income is a fairly common feature. The spatial distribution of housing characteristics, the nature of housing markets and the neighbourhood communities within cities have become one of the major research foci of urban social geography (Cadwallader, 1996, p. 241).

Over the last three decades, most cities in India, including Delhi, have experienced residential and social polarization in the built-environment and social space resulting into slums and squatter settlements and highstatus residential areas. The net result has been massive inequality and increasing intolerance. Our cities are becoming more divided, increasingly segregated and differentiated across the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, class and power (Del Casino, 2009, p. 1). Social geographers are interested in these issues because they deal with organization and contestation of space (Del Casino, 2009, p. 2).

INTRODUCTION

To begin with, let us reflect upon the history of this inter-text laden title; the discerning reader will have identified the texts already. The main title is an invocation to the grand old man of non-British literature in English, Chinua Achebe, whose essay ‘The Novelist as Teacher’(1965) first pointed out the dilemma of the writer as ‘teacher’, specifically of English, that great power language in the colonies. He remembers being asked by a reader to include question-and-answer models at the back of his pioneering novel Things Fall Apart (1958) so that it is easy for students preparing to pass examinations in English, which doubtless would qualify them for lucrative jobs and prestige in newly independent ex-colonies of the British Empire. However, that was a different context, though born out of the same dilemma of the academician in a non-English ex-English colony. The present essay is a statement of a problem arising partially out of the ‘problem’ of English in multilingual societies like Nigeria and India, where English is just another language with a rather heavy baggage. Turning the focus on the non-English cultures of this sort of multicultural, multilingual ‘nation’, we will begin by asking, what the ‘task’ of the ‘teacher’ of a particular discipline is, across a temporal and spatial interval. Posing this question in the title, we attempt to search for the materials of an answer. The subtitle offers a proposal for the reading of Indian literatures, formed by the many ‘other’ languages as well as ‘English’, through the use of comparative methodology.

The significance of domestic politics can never be underestimated because if there is one dimension that could potentially threaten the current phase of China's rise it is this. Conversely, the rise of China is equally dependent, if not more, on the smooth functioning of the political system. These two processes are interrelated and in turn dependent on the current political leadership as well as people. Since the stability of Chinese political system is critical to its rise, there is an imperative to gauge the contemporary domestic politics as accurately as possible eschewing any kind of ideological or any other lenses. The enormity of the complex nature of Chinese political system is captured best by Michel Oksenberg when he posited that it “defies encapsulation in a single short phrase. Such previous depictions as “totalitarianism”, a “Leninist party state”, “fragmented authoritarianism”, “sot authoritarianism”, or “bureaucratic capitalism”, miss the complexity of Chinese state structure today.”

Given this complexity, this chapter focuses primarily on three central themes of ideas, institutionalisation and issues that have been determining the dynamics of Chinese polity in the last three decades. It also offers some concluding remarks highlighting the problems and future of domestic politics in China and their implications for India. What is distinctly common to these three is the continual change that has been taking place in a gradualist manner. Equally interesting is that they have been changing both well beyond, for some, and below for others, of any conceivable imagination of several shades of sinologists, thus making the existing analytical tools inadequate thereby requiring us to be flexible as Tony Saich quite aptly compares the Chinese political system to a moving target.