The Meerut Scrapbook
Mustafa Castle, Ashoka Pillar
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Last updated - Monday, 20-Jul-2009 18:32:06 EDT
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Sunrise/Sunset for 5th May: Specifically for Meerut . Twilight start - 5:05am Sunrise - 5:36am Sunset - 6:20pm Twilight end - :6:56pm. Meerut Latitude : 29.0 deg N, Longitude : 77.5 deg E.
Here is a 2500 year (at least) old saying - We hang petty criminals the big ones we elect to high office.Anyone who saw the NewsX super exposé last night ( 5th October ) would agree with that. About how the Chief minister of UP collects Rs. 15/ per bottle of liquor sold in the State. Everyone contacted in Delhi "was not surprised", thought "it was the most corrupt Government ever" etc. etc. How they swoop down on little encroachments but put a crook at the top of the foul structure and nothing can be done, they just spew forth parrot like phrases. What else to expect from a 200 year old System incorporated by 'Scoundrels and Scalawags'( read East India Company ). You can rest assured anything that gets to the core of corruption never gets repeated or followed up. I doubt if we hear that news item repeated.7th Oct: Sure enough none of the Ho-Hum channels picked that up. Some of the stuff they can repeat ad nauseum for days but not this.
Today there is headline news in Dainik Jagran of a minister in Jharkhand who has accumulated Rs 4000 Crores in 2 years . Jharkhand is a poor state. The power of multiplication was known to the East India Company whose clerks became very wealthy from money collected from poor farmers ( something they called settlements).
There is no doubt that the concept of Fiscal Policy is a good and noble concept. However in practice it has never worked as it should, right from the time of the Pyramids. At that time forced labour( a form of tax ) was used to build tombs for Pharaohs not housing drainage and water supplies. 'Fiscal' is derived from the word Fiscus which means money basket. The concept is automatically understandable. Except that the people closest to the basket forget whose money it is.
Thinking of planting ,starting a garden. Lots of nurseries will give you hints arrange for malis. Number of them on Boundary road opposite telephone exchange.
The Melange is certainly Meerut's most impressive structure, has been functioning for over two years, approach still not easy!
World War II started in the first week of September 1939. Lehman's collapsed last September..We are just getting out of recession. In the US they call stock values funny money. If money which does not exist in the first place, vanishes, why should it affect anything? But it does and how.
Nice interview with Nandan Nilekani on NDTV. About the UID (Unique Identity)project. Mammoth task, no doubt in good hands. A few weeks back when preliminary inquiries for this task took place in the Delhi Muncipality 41,000 employess could not be traced. Their salaries probably get deposited in some thieving minister's bank account. The Babu newspaper The Hindu did not even report the news, it reported a very far fetched excuse. No follow-up. This is the way vast amounts of the tax payer's money vanish, and not through luxurious living in expensive hotels. It ends up in false sales figures of bogus companies. Result no money for basic amenities.
Thanks to Brenda Puech for this . If you want the full size picture you have to contact her.
It mentions Overseas Campaigns and the Second World War, both endless topics. The Opium Wars which were continued under the Crown are part of the count. Many regiments went to China for these wars from here in Meerut. Now comes the interesting angle to this. The brave Jat Soldier thinks nothing of dying for his country. BUT would he die to forcibly sell Opium to the Chinese? What bag of tricks did the East India Company use to send them to this kind of War? Did it simply keep them in the dark about the real reason for the 'campaign' ? It does not end here Pearl S. Buck won a major literary award for writing about the Opium afflicted Chinese.
And the Second World War. It made the word 'million' sound like small change. And it referred to lives not Dollars. Hitler systematically and methodically killed perhaps 6 millions Jews. Millions of Germans died on the Russian front. Of course thousands of British and Americans died and Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki( total less than 200,00). What is often forgotten is that China and Japan were also at War(1937-1945)(casualties in excess of 10 million ). The casualty figures there were more than those in Europe. The Great Bengal Famine took place in 1943 and 3 million died. It took place because agricultural production from Bengal was diverted to the 'war effort'. Satyajit Ray made a film about this called Asani Sanket. Somehow this is omitted in the Roll Call of the dead. Uncle Winston was at the head of the War effort did he know about it? Certainly. However its operation seems to have been the work of the Morons heading India here.
Opium Wars, The Bengal famine,2nd Sino-Japanese war are topics on Wikipedia.
India's first Independence day celebrations. The Christmas trees are British. The one in white was the Last Viceroy - Mountbatten. Probably looking at a flypast by Spitfires and Hurricanes - World War II disposal stuff. Independence day or merely Farewell day? They went home in their socks and left their shoes behind, and what a rush for these there was. Their ridculous rules stayed on, even those dating from before the Mutiny. These are easily identified by the CGO prefix. Council General Order - the Council-General ended in 1857!!. For decades someone all of us knew roamed around Meerut and just got into the run of things. He had spent several decades in the Viceregal Lodge / Presidential Estate Delhi. Certainly saw Independence day there and had seen Mountabatten daily . Whatever he had to say about life there took a few minutes .. Sure Mountbatten came to Meerut weekly for the races on Tuesday in a Rolls Royce with outriders. One race at Delhi was not enough. This is just a few years after WWII, and could we forget WWII almost to the late 70s. English Magazines, movies , comics always had some mention.
Even though Rules & Laws - Old Grant 1836 - predating the Mutiny are still in effect ( many with much greater force than the post East India Company British 'Crown' exerted ), the bravery of the Mutineers is still celebrated. Such minor inconsistencies never bothered our Civil Service Babus, who should have weeded out a multitude of toxic laws immediately after Independence. Their reverence for their Masters prevented them from doing so. Now that there is no trace of the ICS selected by the British, a process has been set in motion.
The cover of a book sold on the Mutiny Train which visited Meerut in 2007. Written by Madhukar Upadhyay. Published by Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, New Delhi . Nobody can dispute Mr. Upadhyay's immense knowledge of the subject. Yet he makes one error in the book. This can easily be attributed to the fact that many aspects of Colonial India as well as pre-Colonial India were deliberately obscured or distorted. He calls Walter Rhinehardt* an employee of the East India Company. Rhinehardt was an Adventurer/mercenary from Luxemburg. In fact all the Rajas, Maharajas employed many Europeans in their armies at various levels. And the British mostly confronted such forces. You can check this out at Sardhana Cemetery - Poles, Italians, French lie there. At the Golf Course in Noida there is a big Sandstone tablet perched on a mound which is Titled Battle of Delhi, it says that a Lord Lake defeated Maratha Forces led by a Frenchman Louis Bourquien on Sep. 11, 1803 - deadly date :).
* At Sardhana you could pick up a small booklet compiled by Bishop Patrick Nair ( retd.) for an amazing amount of detail for this region's history of that time. If you are a research scholar then you already know about the Rampur Library. If you are not then you should know that it is not far from Meerut and contains some amazing items, too many to mention in a little note.
The book contains what the real reason of the Gadar was - Revolts against Taxes/Levies. The nonsense that it was due to cartridges greased with cow and pig fat was deliberately allowed to spread as it diverted attention from a much more serious and essential pillar of the Raj ( money and lots of it ). Amazed that money is the root cause of all evil? Why do you think the Americans threw out the British. The slogan there was 'no taxation without representation'. Of course they threw out their 'constitution' too, which worshiped the British King as the Head ( the British by the way have an unwritten constitution ).
These revolts started a few years after the East India Company got its Tax Collection Machinery( The Indian Civil Service - the finest the world has ever seen ) in place, and continued much beyond 1857. Do not forget that the 'Sepoy' in the Sepoy Mutiny was a Peasant first and Sepoy later. The book The Peasant armed : The Indian Rebellion of 1857 by Eric Stokes for some reason is not easily available. There is another one The Peasant and the Raj also by him - not cheap.
So how do you label the 'cow and pig fat cartridges'? Complete fabrication ? Consider these facts : the British - at least of that time - were great collectors. They 'collected' a lot of things from a lot of different Countries in the name of God , Country and King. Simpler cultures would use a different word for that sort of 'collection'. To name a few The Elgin Marbles from Greece ( who want those back :) ), artifacts from the Pyramids. Some gullible souls actually gifted them with treasures like the Kohinoor diamond. Yet in all these collections there is no trace of cartridges which are supposed to have started a rebellion! Some of the most absurd, fascinating and non-sensical fiction comes from British writers like Lewis Carrol and J.K. Rowling. The kind of creativity to create 'Cow and pig fat cartridges' was well within the talents of whoever chronicled the rebellion.
Truth they say is stranger than fiction . These cartridges are not fictitious. They may not be in museums because they are available in specialist shops. Breech loading guns had not appeared at that time. These cartridges were used to load Muzzle loaders!! Interested ? Then search for P-53 Enfield Cartridges on the world's most comprehensive reference resource - the NET. The cartridges may not be fictitious but linking them to the rebellion certainly was a flight of fancy!
We cannot go about correcting the system without knowing where the system came from , why, by whom and for whom. One of the books is SOUTH ASIA : An Environmental History by Christopher V. Hill - 2007. Very Prosaic Academic language. Uses the word 'Government' for East India Company and Revenue for what was actually theft. In the snippet you can read "the British mind found it incomprehensible a society based on unwritten custom and Government by personal discretion". An interesting comment as England itself has an unwritten constitution. On the same page as this snippet there is a discussion about diara land ( maybe it is daria ). This was land which is fertile one year and a riverbed next year. It appears that once it submerged and came back it did not belong to the previous owner acording to the revenue mad East India Company laws..The book which says it like it should be said is The Evil Empire: 101 ways in which England ruined the World - 2009. The topic seems to be quite current.. Here is another From The Guardian of June 8th . Should all this history matter? Certainly - the structure and priorities are still retained, in fact most of the fullstops and commas of their statutes are still there . While the 'Government' can forcibly collect, there is nothing in the rules to make it forcibly deliver. There is an incredible amount of violence implicit in the words that the revenue should be invariant. So that there was sufficent money for their La-di-dah expenses? This violence seems to escape even a 21st century American Historian, but that is what led to the 1857 Revolt.
However what fascinates me is how this aspect of collection of revenue remained hidden for so long. I wanted to get the locations of 'Settlement' offices of the East India Company - NO LUCK. Maybe not on the net but in the real world these offices are easy to locate - these are red brick buildings in civil line areas of district Headquarters.
MEERUT is an ancient town , but little literature about it is available . Any information mythical, factual, or hand me down stories preferably specifically related to your ancestors are welcome. Contact address is at the bottom of page. To come back to this site look for Meerut in Yahoo regional directory.
It is not generally known that Meerut was one of the 16 major
towns of Ashokan times . An Ashokan pillar was erected here which means
that this was a major Buddhist center . This pillar was shifted to Delhi near Bara Hindu Rao Hospital on the ridge around 1300 AD. The one at Firoz Shah Kotla Ground came from Topra. For the uninitiated the Ashokan Period (a short historical note) dates at
around 256 BC. About 75 years after Alexander's ( Sikander in Hindi ) invasion
of the Punjab.
Don't know what Ashoka wrote about ? Then
checkout the translation of all his Edicts by clicking here .
Currently these pages are partial to the immediate colonial past. See a 1904 map of the district ( click here) .And of the town (click here )
The picture which best represents Meerut is the spectacular Chaudhary Charan Singh University (CCSU) Gate. It is no easy job to label the style . Futuristic ? Modern ? Indian ? Western ? Ancient ? Rural ? Urban ? Take a good look, it is perhaps all of these. The pillars go all the way back to ancient Greece or Rome. And the security cabins? A roof under a roof ? It is perhaps the only one its kind in the world. Help !! Talking about labels.. why should one have a neat label for everything ? And as usual the name of the architect to whom the honours go is not easy to find. Not to a casual observer at least.
Regarding the mindset of people here it would be in order to quote a State Bank of India hoarding which said "Apna Ghar, Anpni Kar, Apna chota Karobar". That came close to defining the axle around which life rotates in many of the prosperous smaller towns in all of Northern India. It seems the coming or going of larger Industries in the vicinity does not have much effect on the economic climate. That is quite obvious in Modinagar where almost all Modi industries have closed down. Here in Meerut there is no let up in new shops opening and flashy Malls coming after Modi Continental closed down. Many visitors note ample evidence that ignorance is bliss. However that does not rankle them as much as the evidence that ignorance is wealth.
That is Ghantaghar in the picture on the left. Easily the most magnificent structure in Meerut. Built by the British in 1914, in place of what used to be Kamboh Darwaza(Gate). The window on the left looks out from a little room on the first floor where the old man the keeper of the big clock lived and ran a little shop for clock repair. He died in the early 1990s. Sure enough the big Clock stopped.. short.. when the old man died, nobody rewound it. It is a great change from the open and vacuous Cantonment area. Need a Calculator cheap clock transistor radio or want to get a mechanical/pendulum clock ( yes even Grandfather Clocks) repaired then this is the place. Further down is Lala ka Bazaar - ideal for cheap toys in bulk for Christmas trees, Birthday party favours, all sorts of plastic and glass jars are also available.
This milestone is about 400 meters north of Begum Bridge. This area is now known as the Zeromile point after the Meerut Cantonment Board very graciously looked up its records and put back the names which had become invisible on this, well, signpost. The distances are in miles.
Some facts and figures about Meerut. The latest census puts it in the above 1 million category. It has about the same population as Indore, Faridabad, Thane. It is the 24th largest town in India (populationwise), and the 4th largest town in UP after Kanpur and Lucknow, and Agra. Kanpur is larger than Lucknow with a population of 2.5 million. It is about 6 hours drive from the Taj Mahal Agra and Fatehpur Sikri. It is less than 50 Km from Hastinapur the seat of both Hinduism and Jainism. Haridwar - in the region where both Ganga and Jamuna enter the plains - is a little over 100 km.
A Computer page to share tips
The entrance to Mustafa Castle is shown below. Belongs to
the family of Nawab Ismail. One of the sons was a signatories of the Indian
constitution. There is a huge photograph of all the signatories of the
constitution in the main room. It is not a public place .
This is what Dr. Tariq Kuraishy ( now in the US for the last 30 years ) has to say about Mustafa Castle....
I am one of Nawab Ismail Khan's grandsons. I've been in the U.S. for almost thirty years, but have been back to Meerut a few times. What you refer to as the Grand Home is actually called Mustafa Castle. Built by Nawab Ismail's father, Nawab Ishaq Khan, and named for his father, Nawab Mustafa Khan Shefta. Shefta was a contemporary of Ghalib's and a prominent poet in his own right. My memories of living there in the 50's and 60's are wonderful ones. Of witnessing the end of a golden and opulent era. When the Nawabs and Rajas lost their estates, titles and lands, the mansions could not be kept up. It is almost sad to visit this once wonderful castle, in it's present state of disrepair. Somebody told me about your site, and it brought back a few memories.
Dr. Kuraishy's e-mail is : kuraishy@sbcglobal.net.
I have included a reply from an uncle of Dr. Kuraishy in Pakistan. You have to click the link in the text adjoining the next picture.
Perhaps the Grandest old building in Meerut. It is called Mustafa Castle. 'Palace' may not be off
the mark . Still occupied by the descendants of the original owners. The
Drawing room is retained in its original layout as a tradition . Among
many antique items is an old floor standing candlestand , which can hold
7-8 candles . Still used because of a very unreliable electric supply. It has been visited by Mahatama Gandhi,Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Nehru, Jinnah.
West End Road
Click here to read further details about Mustafa Castle sent by Mr. Iftikar A Khan in Karachi.If you want to book the area for a wedding , conference , birthday that is possible now click here
The whole place was upgraded in the summer of 2004. It can be hired for Weddings, Birthdays and conferences. It is called Castle View.
No text about Meerut can be complete without a reference to the Mutiny of 1857.
Click here for some notes. Use the Browser back button to come back here.
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