Monday Cup Of Links #70 - Mermaids in Ancient Bengal, Revolutionary’s Missing Skull
Happy Monday!
I wrote 7000 words this week. The manuscript stands at 84800 words. I can confidently say more than half the first draft is done.
Onto our links!
Where Is The Skull Of Prafulla Chaki? A wild tale I came across while looking up stuff to write my novel. So there was a magistrate in Calcutta in the 1900s called Douglas Kingsford who heard many cases against patriots, and gave them very harsh sentences for sedition, including lashings for boys distributing pamphlets, and hard labour for the men and women running nationalistic magazines.
The Anushilan Samiti, who were a secret society fighting the British, decided he had to go. They sent him a bomb in a book, but he didn’t open it. And the authorities realized he was in danger and transferred him to Muzaffarpur, in present-day Bihar.
The Anushilan Samiti sent two boys, barely nineteen years old, Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki to assassinate him. They tried to do so with a grenade, but erred and ended up accidentally killing his wife and her friend. They tried to escape, but were caught eventually. Khudiram was captured alive and was ready to go to the gallows. Prafulla ended up in a shootout with an off-duty policeman and killed himself to avoid capture.
When Prafulla’s body was brought to Muzaffarpur, Khudiram identified him positively. However, the British decided this wouldn’t suffice, and so they - get this - beheaded him, and sent his head to Calcutta to be identified.
This kind of brutal cruelty the British displayed is quite galling, and one bullet point wouldn’t do justice to how awful I think they are.
But here’s where it’s interesting. Apparently Prafulla’s skull remained in a police station in Calcutta for years, and now we need to ask, Where did his skull go?!This week I came across several beautiful artifacts on social media from the archaeological site of Chandraketugarh, 22km northeast of Kolkata. I hadn’t heard much of it, but I looked, and it’s a site that the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1900s had said was of “no interest”. There have been digs in the 50s, and in 2000. Now the finds are housed in a museum, and we still don’t have enough information to know much about this settlement, or who Chandraketu was. But it’s also pretty appalling that the site hasn’t been guarded appropriately or paid enough attention, and now several artifacts are showing up in museums around the world, and even on auctions at Sotheby’s.
This article on the use of sound in wartime to unsettle the enemy. Whistling arrows. War chants. Murmurs amplified by metal shields. Pigs wailing to upset battle elephants. Tango music keeping the enemy soldiers up all night. Great read. And it links to some samples of these sounds, and they are frankly quite unsettling and unnerving!
Artifact of the week: A terracotta plaque of Goddess Durga from Chandraketugarh, now at The Met Museum. This is dated back to the 1st Century BCE. a large number of such plaques were discovered there, so this is possibly a plaque someone used to worship in their house.
Bonus artifact: A plaque of a mermaid!!!! From Chandraketugarh as well.