P. A. Nazareth's "Illuminating Minds on the Blue Waters" Is A Captivating Survey Of Global Civilisations

After three-and-a-half decades of the daily diplomatic grind, most Foreign Service officers take a respite from the diurnal round of evening cocktail parties in quiet, peaceful retirement. A few others find academic outlets or think-tanks to further hone their area expertise. A very few see the next three or more decades after superannuation as opportunities for creativity, a quality which is rarely accorded or appreciated in their conventional, hierarchical, bureaucratic careers. Pascal Alan Nazareth, IFS (1959), almost uniquely, has chosen the vocation of a popular historian to survey with a bird’s eye various world civilizations in all their antiquity and the diversity of their trajectory of evolution over millennia.

In his autobiography, he presented a riveting image of himself as a diplomatic Sherlock Holmes tracking down an absconding Indian fugitive, Dharam Teja, from Costa Rica (could any place be more exotic?) to London where the felon was caught and extradited. On exiting from the IFS, Nazareth has exchanged his Holmes-vintage stalker’s cap for a sailor’s cap, on the numerous luxury cruises he was invited to by the owners on condition that he edify so unlikely an audience as their passengers on world civilizations. I say, ”unlikely” for his audience consisted mainly of honeymooning couples, senior citizens on their second honeymoon, young stallions on the lookout for the main chance (it being rumoured that the ozone over the oceans acts as an aphrodisiac on comely co-passengers) and aged tourists spending their life savings trudging round sites of antiquity that they barely knew about or understood. Yet, Nazareth the Lecturer kept his unlikely brood so transfixed that he was invited again and again, over several decades, to delight these audiences with his erudite but succinct portrayals of distant lands and peoples long ago.

And now, we humble readers who cannot afford luxury cruises, have been presented with a selection of his lectures relaxing in our most comfortable sofas at home, away from the “madding crowd” (Thomas Hardy). It is a heady, absorbing voyage even if the waters below us are no more than the few tepid inches in our bathtubs or a cozy bed before nodding off.

Nazareth’s bandwidth is amazing. Whether it is “The Mughal Contribution to India” or “Fundamentals of Islam and Islamic Fundamentalism”, or the sacred isles of Japan, the Peloponnesian and Punic wars of ancient Greece and Carthage, or “The Rise and Fall of Venice”, or the millennia that stretch over “The Great Naval Battles of the Mediterranean” from Actium to Trafalgar to the Second World War – all is grist to Nazareth’s mill. As is my favourite lecture, “Ireland: The Emerald Isle”, which is startling for an Indian because of the many parallels between Ireland’s centuries-old fight with British colonialism and exploitation and our much shorter freedom struggle; as also the happy ending of religious friction across the Catholic-Protestant divide through Tony Blair’s Good Friday accord, contrasted with our utter inability to conciliate India-Pakistan or Hindu-Muslim differences.

There is not a lecture that does not grip one’s imagination and leave us many times better informed than twenty minutes ago when we started reading any one of these learned lectures. Professional historians may cavil at some of the arguments or be pernickety about one or the other detail (as even an amateur like me is) but for the uninformed or less informed, as most of us are, about so much of the geography, history, language and culture of our fellow human beings, this pocket guide is both invaluable and unbeatable.

When I first ventured to read something familiar to me, such as the piece on the Great Mughals, I wondered how Nazareth’s listeners and readers could absorb unknown names and places like the following on just one page (or one minute listening): Farghana, Kabul, Panipat and Chittor’s Rana Sangha’s setback at the Battle of Khanwa - all on one short page (36) and then on the next page (37): Babar; Humayun; Sher Shah Suri; Sultan Tahmasp of Persia; Jalaluddin (later Akbar the Great); Bairam Khan, the Regent; and mansabdars, in under two minutes of listening time. But when I reached “The Cultural Heritage of China”, I had little difficulty in picking up Confucius, Cheng Yi, Chu Hai (also known as Zhu Xi), Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit priest-scholar reporting from China, and Lao Tzi’s “Tao te Ching” (The Book of Tao and Its Virtues) on a single page (102) or from “Japan: The Sacred Isles”: Shinto, Izabagi, Izanami, Amaterasu, Ninigi, Dai Nippon, Kyushu, Jimmu, Yamato and Honshu on a single half page (136). So, you have to hand it to Nazareth that he makes the unfamiliar familiar, the unknown known, and the unpronounceable pronounceable.

He does the same whether it is “Gandhi: The Non-Violent Revolutionary”, “The Greatness and Tragedy of Greece“, “The Legacy of Rome”, “Napoleon’s Impact on History” or, most fascinating of all, “Islam and Europe”: did you know that all of northern coastal Mediterranean Europe from Andalusia in Portugal and Spain through the boot of Italy, Sicily and Malta, Albania and the Balkans, right up to the Turkiye caliphate was Islamic for centuries and that pan-European Islam was thwarted only at Tours in France and the gates of Vienna in central Europe? (Had that not happened, we might have had Maulana Macron and Ayatollah Trump!) Or that Islam has left behind the magnificent works of art and architecture from the wondrous Alhambra at Granada and the mosque-church in Cordoba, Spain (where Allama Iqbal is said to have written his haunting “Gumbad-e-Minai” – my two-bits, not Nazareth’s!) to the fabulous Islamic-Byzantine Hagia (Aya) Sofia in Istanbul?

Read Nazareth and you‘ll be enlightened enough to cancel your tickets to Birmingham and Dallas to be rebooked, much more economically, for stunning Istanbul (Modi and Allah willing), Sarajevo and Mostar in Bosnia, Thessalonika in Greece, Toledo and the Moorish mosques in Lisbon and Porto, Portugal.

My only regret is that with Nazareth’s native exposure to the Spanish tongue from the Jesuit priests who taught him at elementary school on the Konkan coast, and his expertise in Latin America stretching from Costa Rica in the centre to Lima in the south, he has not told us of the Aztecs and Mayas and Incas whose empires, arching over large parts of Central and South America. Nor the powerful and wealthy empires of Africa south of the Sahara, which he knows well after having been accredited to several Francophone countries in West Africa. They have not been touched upon in this book. Had Nazareth been on his teach-in cruises to these sites of ancient but little-known civilizations, perhaps we would have had as erudite pieces on these two continents as we have on “South-east Asia at the Crossroads of History” and “India, Britain and America”. There is also virtually nothing on West Asia and North Africa, extending from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, although this is where human beings created the earliest civilizations and the three great Semitic religions were birthed and spread.

I end by proclaiming, “Put Nazareth back to Sea” to give us more of the beautiful photographs that illustrate this volume and to teach us more of the world we live in, whose heritage belongs to all of us.