Indian warrior king's rocket cache found in abandoned well | Hacker News Reader

Indian warrior king's rocket cache found in abandoned well

theguardian.com

67 pointsbenbreen43 comments

Tipu made the first indigenous rocket is a myth. There is ample evidence that the indigenous rockets were in use in Deccan at least 100 years before Tipu’s time. History of Aurangzeb’s reign, the Farsi manuscript of Mathir-i Alamgiri and the official records of the reign called Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mualla mention Aurangzeb examining an indigenously made rocket at the siege of Satara diring his wars in Deccan in 1700 AD. So its sad to see the myth alive and being reported by British press.

Can you point out where this article claims Tipu made the first indigenous rocket? I don't see that said anywhere.

relatedly there is some recent debate and discussion on gunpowder in india vs china

Indian Gunpowder – the Force Behind Empires

https://2ndlook.wordpress.com/2010/06/18/indian-gunpowder-th...

h/t

https://mobile.twitter.com/wiavastukala/status/1022469132871...

Surprisingly this sort of coverup is a common occurrence with any story/history that originates from Ancient India. And it's not just the Western authors who did this. Indian archeologists are to also partly take some blame. The best example is that of the submerged city of Dwarka: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVIsjx5X3QM

If it had been any other country, there would be lot's of excavations (example: Great Pyramids of Giza in Egypt) and in-depth study of the artefacts recovered. Strangely, most archeological excavations in India start with a lot of brouhaha and then die down almost immediately. Then rumours spread about possible cover up (with the involvement of Government officials in pilfering these historical artefacts and selling them in the black market).

I will attribute those things to lack of funding, lack of interest of the general populace, and lack of competence and less to malice or conspiracy (as it is often made out to be) -- they stabbed us in our back.

Where I went to college in the US there was this house about a hundred odd years old. They would be absolutely drooling at that 'historic' artifact, there aren't as many (physical historical artifacts). People had a lot of time to care and funds to attend to it. Compare that with any run of the mill old city in India, or compare its capital, Delhi. It would be hard to throw stones far and not hit constructions that are 100 years old. The city is strewn with these and people are to busy fighting for their day to day needs. In such a scenario it is hard for the populace to agree that significant funds need to be allocated for preservation and restoration.

Add the political agenda to it that selectively directs the attention to artifacts that fit their agenda -- then this is what you get.

We are not talking about 100 year old houses, pretty much every Hindu knows about Dwarka. So lack of funding and lack of interest are not good excuses.

I think you missed my point -- we have so much historical artifacts strewn around that we don't value them as much or fund their upkeep as much.

Yup thats a good point. Forget about the submerged dwarka, there is so much old architecture all around in india and no one cares for it or take care of it. We just simply don’t care. Go look at the forts in rajasthan ans how they are treated vs forts jn all around Europe.

> Forget about the submerged dwarka

Why, submerged dwarka is more important to Hindus than all those forts.

Because its believed to be of krishna the gold himself. Other forts are of kings

No I did not miss your point but on the other hand you missed mine, yes we have historical artifacts but Dwarka trumps all the other artifacts.

That would be an opinion though. That said, there would be significant number of subscribers in Gujarat and among the Krishna school.

I have the strongest suspicion that there would be a significant population of people who self identify as Hindu but would have at best tepid interest. There would be people who would be unhappy that their taxes are going in that direction. Day to day mundane matters and relative importance of other artifacts according to their judgement will trump it (Dwarka).

From your comments in the thread it seems you are a shade touchy about Dwarka and were taking obvious metaphors literally, but I couldn't figure out how it (Dwarka) fit in what we were discussing in the thread -- lack of wide interest among Indians on historical artifacts. So I let it ('but, what about Dwarka') go as an instance of whataboutism.

My personal belief/opinion is that it makes a lot of sense to explore that(Dwarka) than throw money at the stupid idea that the geological formation connecting main land India to Srilanka is a man made bridge built by Ram's army.

I'm not sure this is a good explanation, since the "drooling" over houses that are merely a hundred years old is pretty much like to the Americas. Yet discoveries in most of Eurasia and Africa are treated really well in general.

That's a very interesting point and was hoping HN'ers would add to my understanding, so thank you. I would be very interested to know how it works, for example, in Rome where "you cant miss a historical artifact if you throw a stone" applies with great force.

Don't know about Rome but in Germany people see it as part of their heritage and identity and get excited when new stuff gets discovered

What do you mean "discovered"? I may be confused, but I thought we're talking about hundred-year-old houses? In Greek cities, there are villas that are 100-150 years old and beautifully built. We aim to restore those, as they're beautiful buildings and nice reminders of an earlier era, but they are thought of as "almost modern". Ancient stuff is anything that's more than two thousand years old or so, and those definitely have higher significance (although you can barely dig a hole without finding a bunch of those too).

My '100 year old house' example was to point out that _even_ for a 100 year old houses Americans care a whole lot. I think ajmurmann here is talking about older archeological findings.

Regarding digging, you might find it funny that Indus valley civilization got discovered thanks to their bricks that the British found while laying railway tracks in North Western India. Those where being used as free and cheap but high quality ballast. So its indeed true in some regions one has to take care to miss.

Author of the article:- StPTBarnum. That sure lends credibility to the theory.

https://twitter.com/StPTBarnum

>> “the Mysorean, a prototype of British Congreve rockets used in the Napoleonic wars.”

The Mysorean is a prototype of British Congreve rockets? I thought the Brit’s adopted rockets ideas from the Mysorean!

> prototype. n. A first, typical or preliminary model of something... from which other forms are developed or copied.

So, yes?

"prototype _for_ British rockets ..."

The "of" suggests an interpretation like "based on", I can see how that phrase could be misinterpreted as an autoantonym.

The Tiger of Mysore had a fine war machine. Were he and Maratha to unite, they could've canned British few times over.

Maybe true, but that's an alliance that could only be conceived by idle nerds in the history channel.

It's like saying, were the Nazis and the Soviets to unite they would have canned the Americans a few times over.

Indeed. In fact, dozens of minor kingdoms submitting without a fight to British is said to be them preferring British to heavy boot of Marathas or Mysorees

That's no accident though. Divide and Conquer was a core conquest and governance strategy for the British Empire, one that has left scars across the world that are still causing conflict today.

Case in point: all national boundaries in Africa, the Middle East and 40% of Asia were created by Europe, mostly the British.

> one that has left scars across the world that are still causing conflict today.

How about stopping the British blame game and just accept the fact that humans like to group themselves in a tribe and fight other tribes.

Because some of us can still see the Northern/Republic of Ireland divide and realize that wasn’t an existing divide, but created entirely by the British? Then there’s how they handled Israel, but that’s too much of a can of worms to open here.

Don't stop with the British, European colonialism is responsible for the majority of issues we have in the Middle East today. Even African is still recovering after the mess left there.

India has always had conflicts between communities with 100s of individual kingdoms and warlords - some were vassals to bigger kingdoms. The modern day revisionist history tries to paint India as some sort of a united, utopia before the coming of the colonial powers but there is no evidence whatsoever to support that claim while there is plenty of evidence to counter it.

I don't think you are saying that India was never a united entity in it's history. It has been united multiple times throughout. In fact that's how it got the name "Bharat" after one if the kings.

Not really. There was never a single kingdom which encompassed the whole of India as it geographically exists. Never in history.

> were the Nazis and the Soviets to unite they would have canned the Americans a few times over

Something about that analogy is off. In case we forgot, in the 1800s, the British were the guys advocating and initiating ethnic cleansing of "inferior races" via engineered famines. Various parts of British occupied East India lost a third or more of their population. It was only that regions good fortune of having virulent tropical diseases that kept the British out. The indigenous people in Australia, New Zealand, and other places were not so lucky. The world might have been a better place if the Marathas and the Tipus of the world had united to prevent the subsequent genocides and massive loss and waste of human potential in South Asia.

>the British were the guys advocating and initiating ethnic cleansing of "inferior races" via engineered famines //

Specific details, citations?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India hints that British inaction exacerbated famine but I don't see details to indicate famine was engineered for ethnic cleansing.

I'm not disagreeing, it's the first I've heard of it really.

There's plenty there to suggest capitalism was working as intended... extracting all the wealth created by others labour, leaving too little for good infrastructure.

> Specific details, citations?

Winston Churchill. Even as recent as 1943.

Churchill: Personally, I am not greatly concerned about Russian development in China. I would rather have them develop in that way down south into India. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.

Churchill: I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

> I don't see details to indicate famine was engineered for ethnic cleansing

We have to be careful to view this from the broad system level perspective. We have individuals like Churchill who expressed a clear racial belief system. A belief system where they believed, and even directly stated it was their manifest destiny to extinguish inferior races. In their positions of power, through intentional actions (and alleged inactions), they caused large numbers of their prey/victims to die. Should we attribute that to "capitalism was working as intended" or should we actually call a spade a spade and recognize that these men had agency and did these things consciously or at best sub-consciously to achieve lebensraum for their preferred race.

Your example, while certainly a good one, is from 1943, rather late considering the empire would start shrinking and decolonizing in 45.

> Your example, while certainly a good one, is from 1943, rather late considering the empire would start shrinking and decolonizing in 45.

Again, as mentioned, I gave the 1943 example to point out how recent such colonial actions and attempts at ethnic cleansing were. There are people alive today who suffered through that.

There's ample examples of other genocides via famine performed by the English against ethnic groups they were subjugating at the time. For one closer to home, lets look at the English activity behind the Irish famine.

https://www.irishcentral.com/news/proving-the-irish-famine-w...

Baronet Charles Trevelyan was one of the engineers behind that famine. Interestingly enough he had honed his skills of bulk-murder in India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Charles_Trevelyan,_1st_Bar...

"The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people"

"Famine is an effective mechanism for reducing surplus population"

As usual, such individuals used all manner of tools to justify the genocide of any ethnic group they deemed "inferior". In this case, the Irish. It is telling that one of the major tools was that precise instrument of religion with Trevelyan even describing the famine and subsequent mass death as an instrument of God.

I'm not sure it really works to consider the Irish, my own recent ancestors, as ethnically differentiated from the British. The Tudors were seemingly descended from Irish Scots who conquered Gwynedd in the first millennium CE, for example. But I that doesn't matter, it's what the controlling forces at the time thought.

I'm not well versed in the Potato Famine but I understood it was primarily about rich landlords and wealthy Britons caring naught for any poor people. Confounded with "Catholic vs Protestant" tribalism.

Though Trevelyan appeared to believe strictly in hands-off pure Capitalism and didn't seemingly worry about religious affiliation ("Protestant and Catholic will freely fall and the land will be for the survivors.") which was a proxy for being "English" vs Irish.

We've switched to a different sort of evil perpetrated for different reasons on different people in a different time; the natural conclusion is that you erred in your initial claim and so are trying to bolster your conclusion with other information?

If you want to say British controlling powers have been involved in genocides, motivated at least in part by racial or xenophobic hate, then you'll get no opposition from me. But 'multiple generations coordinating to create conditions in which a famine can kill' as a mode of ethnic cleansing? I'm not seeing it in the argument you're making.

You said in the 1800s that their was engineering of famines in order to carry out ethnic cleansing.

So neither "it was maybe subconscious", nor Churchill fits in there.

FWIW those quotes to me sound more like "I'm not going to apologise for what I consider natural selection". Perhaps it's the lack of context, could you cite the works those quotes are from?

There's a World of difference between being unapologetic that your "race" has won-out genetically and "we're going to systematically wipe out humans who lack what we consider to be ideal characteristics".

Taken care of easily by the British by dividing along Hindu/Muslim lines.

Even today, if someone play hindu muslim can easily win elections.

Major theme in Sacred Games (Netflix).

I understand compared to Tipu's butchery of Hindus, particularly upper castes, the British were preferable. A massive population (including my own direct ancestors) were forced south and west towards Kerala fleeing Tipu Sultan.

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