Santa Claus's Tombs, Surat's Vermin Hospital, Desi Rasputin - Monday Cup Of Links #86
And Ice Age Mammoth Ivory Cave Lions
Happy Monday!
It’s that time of the year when we start making New Year Resolutions. I’m wondering what to resolve to do. I find annual goals something I can stick to, especially with bullet journaling. But specific resolutions like “hit the gym twice a week” somehow don’t quite go so well for me. What are you thinking of doing differently in 2025? What follow-through mechanisms work for you?
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Onto our links for this week:
They found Santa Claus’s tomb in Turkey! Well, so the story of Santa Claus is based on St. Nicholas, who was the Bishop of Myra in present-day Turkey in the 4th Century. There has been a Church of St. Nicholas there since about a century after that, which was supposedly built atop his original burial site. Now they’ve been excavating under that church, and they’ve found a sarcophagus that might just be St. Nicholas. They’ve only managed to get to the lid so far. It’s been said that his remains were taken to Bari, Italy, in the 11th century, and more of his bones were taken during the Crusades.
This is interesting because there’s a village in Ireland that claims to house the remains of Santa Claus. Jerpoint Park used to be a flourishing medieval town, but now just has Maeve and Joe O’Connell who run a farm there. They say that two crusader knights who were among those who transported the remains of St. Nicholas from Turkey to Italy “for safekeeping” took a couple of bones home with them to Ireland and interred them there at Jerpoint Park.On Wednesday, I went into Janardhan Thakur’s All The Prime Minister’s Men again and wrote about Dhirendra Brahmachari, who had a Rasputin-like hold over Indira Gandhi that she allotted him lakhs of government money, allowed him to import planes tax-free, used IAF planes and choppers to shuttle visiting Westerners to his ashrams, which were described as “dens of vice”, and allowed him to be a big power broker in the PMO. I thought about what I’d written, and it’s quite obvious in hindsight that he was laundering money for Indira Gandhi by spiriting it off to Swiss banks. Especially since his key disciples all happen to be Swiss nationals.
I came across a British account from 1834 of the Banian Hospital in Surat, which was a free hospital for animals, run by Jains. I can’t seem to find any further accounts of this place in subsequent years. If any of you know more, do respond! I I found an excerpt from a twopenny London weekly called The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, which is “the first long-lived cheap periodical” in Britain. I further looked for its original source, which was cited as “Forbes Oriental Memoirs”, and I came across this book called Oriental Memoirs: A Narrative of Seventeen Years Residence in India
The Banian hospital at Surat is a most remarkable institution; it consists of a large plot of ground, enclosed with high walls, divided into several courts or wards, for the accommodation of animals; in sickness they are attended with the tenderest care, and find a peaceful asylum for the infirmities of age. When an animal breaks a limb, or is otherwise disabled from serving his master, he carries him to the hospital, and, indifferent to what nation or caste the owner may belong, the patient is never refused admittance. If he recover, he cannot be reclaimed, but must remain in the hospital for life, subject to the duty of drawing water for those pensioners debilitated by age or disease from procuring it for themselves. At my visit, the hospital contained horses, mules, oxen, sheep, goats, monkeys, poultry, pigeons, and a variety of birds, with an aged tortoise, who was known to have been there for seventy-five years. The most extraordinary ward was that appropriated to rats, mice, bugs, and other noxious vermin. The overseers of the hospital frequently hire beggars from the streets, for a stipulated sum, to pass a night among the fleas, lice, and bugs, on the express condition of suffering them to enjoy their feast without molestation.
The Banian hospital in Surat has several dependent endowments without the walls, for such invalids and convalescents to whom pasturage and country air may be recommended; and especially for the maintenance of the goats purchased from slaughter on the anniversary of the Mahomedan festival, when so many of those animals are devoted to destruction.
The doctrine of the metempsychosis is commonly supposed to be the cause of founding this singular hospital; I, however, conversed with several Brahmins on the subject, who rather ascribed 1t to a motive of benevolence for the animal creation: nor can we do otherwise than approve of that part of the institution appropriated for the comfort of those valuable creatures who have exhausted their strength in the service of man.
Um… that bit about the vermin ward is crazy, for it privileges vermin over people, especially since they just multiply and spread on finding a human host. But maybe that is what it looks like to consider all souls equal.
On Friday, I went into this very interesting incident described in Niranjan Pal’s memoir. In sharp contrast to Gandhi’s story where he is thrown off a train due to racism, this incident from 1908 talks of a few fledgling revolutionaries getting into an argument on a Calcutta tram with a disrespectful European tea planter, almost getting shot, and wresting the gun away from him. Do read it, it is a great first-person account of the mood in Calcutta in that era.
Artefact of the week - Lion’s head carved out of mammoth ivory. An ice-age artifact, 40,000 years old, found in the Vogelherd cave in the Swabian Alps. This is currently at the Wurttemberg State Museum in Stuttgart, Germany. This depicts a cave lion, and those apparently had sparser manes than Asian or African lions. Look at how precisely the ears, nose and mouth are carved.
