Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
I'm really interested in how will the 1930's unfolds for South-East Asia. Will Aceh get help from the Malay States? Will Indonesia ever become more than just the intellectual's fantasy? What will happen to East Timor and German New Guinea? Has the Chinese Peranakans and local Malays finally see eye to eye? What about the Philippines with all its sultanates and republics?
I can't wait for the 1930's!
I can't wait for the 1930's!
Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, Funny, Tearjerker and High Octane Nightmare Fuel
Ooh, TVTropes... to achieve a page there is such a honor
We have all been here before
Zanzibar, 1932
“I think that’s them over there,” said Tiberio, pointing.
Paulo the Younger nodded, but he’d already picked them out himself: a tall, turbaned Sikh making his way down the pier, flanked by two Indian women and an ancient English one. His companions alone were sufficient to mark him out, but one look at his face was enough to remove all doubt.
“The photos didn’t do him justice,” he murmured, and indeed it was uncanny how much of his brother’s features could be written across a half-Punjabi face. Now he could understand why Sarah had recognized the man at first sight.
His sister must have reached the same conclusion, because she launched herself toward the docks faster than Paulo would have believed was possible for a woman of fifty-three. He could see she was near tears already, and she’d probably be the rest of the way by the time she got there.
“Funmi never greets you like that,” Tiberio said.
“Sometimes, when it’s been a while,” Paulo answered, remembering past greetings: when he’d visited home after the Great War, when he’d come to see Funmilayo in Paris after an absence of years. But Tiberio was right. He and Funmi had got on well together as children, for all he’d acted like a parent when their parents were away, but she’d fairly worshiped Ibrahim. She too had seen the photos, but he could only imagine how it had felt to see Ibrahim’s son in person…
“There’s more to it than that, though. Funmi is so much her father’s daughter than everyone forgets she was also her mother’s.” Tiberio looked puzzled, but Carole by his side, whose family had known Seye well… yes, she understood. Many things were important to Funmilayo, but the most important of all was family, dynasty, continuity of blood and teaching. She’d expanded her family as she matured, to include all women, all workers, all Africans, all humanity, but it was those at the core who mattered most, and to her, Ujjal Singh was a gift from God.
She was returning now, walking slowly to let Sarah keep pace, and Paulo felt a stab: the problem used to be keeping up with Sarah, not the other way around. The Indian war had aged her where the Great War hadn’t, and she looked even older than her ninety years: another thing that the photos hadn’t done justice.
He stood where he was, and waited, and exchanged greetings gravely. They were at the edge of the port terminal, and the plaza stretched beyond, think with the sound of motor-wagons and conversation. “Well, son of my brother,” he said, “shall we look at warehouses?” and without waiting longer, he led the way.
The warehouse was in the new city, east of the narrow Stone Town streets. The district was ugly, with the ironic exception of the slave market that had been made into a memorial garden, but it was full of vitality. What caught the eye here was the people: Arabs and Swahilis in white robes and taqiyahs, tall Yao in patterned garments, women veiled and unveiled, Indians in the dress of Bombay and Cochin, Europeans in suits and others gone native in the May heat, Africans from the interior and even the Great Lakes…
“A Sikh?” Ujjal asked. He’d spent the last minutes in silence, absorbing the city and the family, but the sight of a Baganda with a kirpan startled him into speech.
“There are some out by Nalubale, yes. Not many, but some of the soldiers picked it up from Punjabi troops in the big war, and their children followed. You see them sometimes when they come to trade.”
“Nalubale? The Buganda kingdom? What do they make there?”
He sees a business connection, Paulo realized. “Many things. Oils, groundnuts, leather, artwork. I’ll warn you, though, they’re not the kind of Sikhs you know. They have the scriptures now, but in the beginning, they made a lot up as they went along, and they haven’t lost the habit.”
“Neither have I.”
They’d come farther now, almost to the Patel department store, the first in the city. There was a coffee-house on the ground floor with tables out to the street, and it was crowded with people sitting and smoking, even those who couldn’t afford to shop upstairs. The sight never failed to amuse Paulo: it seemed there was always a new place to see and be seen, and that the poor appropriated it as quickly as the rich did. Tippu Tip still cast a shadow.
“We’ll go there tomorrow,” he said. “Now, we turn left here.”
The warehouse was two doors down the side street, and the landlord was there to show it, an Omani officer’s grandson who’d made millions in real estate. He and Ujjal walked through and talked business, while behind them, Funmi and Sarah caught up on family matters: Noura still teaching mathematics at the Sorbonne, Madeleine finally married to Noureddine and opening a gallery in Dakar, Abdoulaye studying law, Youssou finishing his national service. The two youngest were with them, and had taken Ujjal’s daughter in hand.
It wasn’t long before they were back on the street, and Ujjal was evidently satisfied; he and the landlord initialed a lease, and he stood in the roadway looking at the front gate. Paulo knew he must be imagining the sign that would soon be above it: “Akhtar & Singh, Traders in Fine African Goods.” There was a warehouse just like this one in Lagos; Paulo had found Ujjal a trustworthy manager there, and someday Ujjal himself might visit. There were others as well, in five cities and counting.
“It’ll be up there soon enough,” he said, and Ujjal turned around, startled at first but then with a dawning sense of mutual understanding. “Yes, son of my brother, you’re family. And now that’s settled, I need to eat.”
The Goa House was back in Stone Town, on a narrow street of old Persian-style balconies and carved wooden doors, not far from the house where Paulo lived and Mélisande saw her patients. The owner turned out to be not Indian but a Portuguese from Mozambique who’d spent some time across the sea, and from all appearances, there was a touch of African blood in him. He greeted the party like family and laid out a meal as eclectic as he was: piri-piri chicken and Mozambican mango chutney; prawn curry; feijoada (“we eat that in Ilorin too,” Paulo said); patoli; cauliflower in coconut milk; samosas stuffed with cabbage and curried ugali.
Ujjal took the edge off his hunger and let the conversation wash over him; he was still a bit overwhelmed at the combination of a foreign city and the family he’d only learned of as an adult. After a while, he noticed that everyone including Funmi deferred to Sarah, and everyone including Sarah deferred to Funmi. He looked across at Paulo and saw the amusement in the older man’s eyes. Both of them might rank far lower, but they could take pleasure in another family secret learned, and doubly so since neither Sarah nor Funmi seemed to be conscious of how everyone else treated them.
He’d been a bit scared of meeting Funmilayo, truth to tell. He remembered the first letter she’d written after learning of his existence: know that you carry the blood of Usman dan Fodio and Paulo Abacar, know that the sword you carried in India was also the sword of the Malê, know that you are part of this family. He’d heard she wrote as she spoke, and wasn’t sure how he would compare to someone who spoke like that, a member of three parliaments who could speak for a family or a people with utter conviction. But from the moment she’d greeted him on the pier, he’d seen the same utter conviction that he was blood of her blood – and that his wife and mother were as well. It was that conviction that made the others defer to her, although she never demanded it.
He served himself more prawn curry and, both hunger and apprehension gone, joined the stream of conversation. “I’d hoped I might meet your wife…”
“You will. She’s at her school today, though – a meeting she couldn’t cancel.”
“On medicine or anarchy?” asked Carole.
“Mélisande says there isn’t much difference – health has to be cooperative, because you can’t be healthy in a sick place. The meeting’s about clean water, or sanitation – one or another of the things people have to go out and do while the nobles debate.”
“A parallel government like the Ottomans had?”
“Don’t call it that when you meet her! And it isn’t really – more a union, a mutual aid society. The city’s growing too fast for the government to keep up with, drifting as it is, so we have to take care of each other…”
“The government’s drifting? Is it unstable?”
“Why, are you thinking of going into politics?”
“No, no… it’s just that the Yoruba artwork and the carved doors have been selling very well, and I’m branching out. I have an optics factory in Mysore now and a textile plant outside Benares, and I was thinking I might also invest here.”
“Oh, the city’s safe enough, and the Swahili coast too – we’ve got our problems here, but we aren’t about to fall apart. I saw you considering the interior, though, and you might want to wait on that. The south is too scared of the Portuguese to leave, but they want a different arrangement, and up north, the only thing still keeping them in is worry about the Nile.”
“The Free Provinces have wanted out for years.” Tiberio said.
“Some of them. But if some leave, it’ll be hard for the rest to stay, and no one in government can agree on how to handle them. I’ve been trying to lay some groundwork, so when it does come, it can be friendly, but…”
Paulo let the sentence trail off, but Ujjal knew how it finished. Earlier in the day, Paulo had called himself the Sultan’s ambassador without portfolio, and no doubt he’d been sent to talk with the provincial leaders. But the risk any ambassador takes is that his government might make a liar of him.
“It’ll be a few years yet,” said Carole. “Nothing’s going to happen until Ethiopia and Egypt have their war.”
“I thought Egypt had a peace cabinet this year.”
“It won’t last long,” Paulo answered. “None of them have. The water dispute is too big for either country, and the fact that they’re both right makes it worse.”
“How do you decide, then? Between right and right.”
“The people of the Nile should decide.”
“Isn’t that the problem?” asked Tiberio.
“No, the problem is that the only way for all of them to decide is with their armies.” Paulo’s voice had a passion in it that Ujjal hadn’t before heard. “We should take the Nile away from the nations, and it should have its own parliament, elected by all the people in the watershed. Mélisande is right – anything too big to belong to anyone has to belong to everyone.”
Sarah smiled. “A river with a parliament?”
“Why not?” Ujjal said. Something about the idea had caught his fancy. “We do it all the time, on a smaller scale. Park districts. Village commons. Why not a watershed? We can be larger than nations.”
He felt that sense of communion with Paulo again, and he saw Funmi looking at her brother as well, with an expression somewhere between admiration and surprise. There was a family secret to that too, he was sure, but he couldn’t learn them all in one day.
And all at once, he realized that the meal was finished.
“Music now,” Paulo said, the intensity in his voice gone as suddenly as it had come. “Qawwali? Kiswa? Zambo? Something American?”
“You have qawwali here?”
“Tippu Tip loved it, and the parties have been coming over from Sindh for sixty years. There’s a local kind too, with some gnawa and Cairene Sufi music in it. The ghazals are very poignant here; they could stand in for the nation’s history, after all.”
“Or its future?” Ujjal asked, remembering the loss and separation, and the promise, that awaited.
“Maybe that too.”
“This doesn’t feel like a qawwali night,” Funmi said. “It’s a night of coming together. Let’s go someplace where we can dance.”
That was the last thing Ujjal had expected from a matriarch like Funmi, but then he recalled how she’d worshiped his father, and remembered Kapur Singh telling him how his father had seen dance as poetry and prayer. Funmi must have the same fascination, and he suddenly suspected that her joy was as formidable as everything else about her. He wanted to see her dance, and he wanted to dance himself.
“Zambo, then,” said Paulo. “The place isn’t far.”
Zambo was so called because it came from Mozambique, but the Zanzibaris had made it their own. The band was big, with horns from Europe and nyatiti from the north country; the beat was fast and Portuguese, rendered on drums of cowhide and steel; the lyrics straight out of a Stamboul nightclub. The bar had wine for those who drank and fruit juice for those who didn’t, and people danced on what had been a warehouse floor five years before.
Funmilayo wasn’t a very good dancer. She’d helped her mother manage a war effort during the years when she might otherwise have learned. But that hardly mattered. There was a kind of freedom in doing something badly, and a freedom in letting her body express happiness in its own way. Her lost brother’s son had returned to the family, and her surviving brother had found his crusade, and both of those were joys that couldn’t be contained.
No one had taught Ujjal to dance either: he too had given up his youth to the gods of war. He cared as little as Funmi did, even when Sarah laughed. She could dance, and she partnered Paulo in a Malê folk dance that Usman had taught her seventy-five years ago, but there was no mockery in her laughter. It was a warm laugh, a grandmother’s laugh, and it came from someone who’d known Ujjal long enough to earn the right.
They were all laughing when they went out on the balcony together. The clear air was refreshing after the kif-filled music hall, and they looked out over the harbor, toward the African mainland that lay unseen beyond the darkness.
“We are larger than nations,” Funmi said, and Paulo, Ujjal, Sarah followed her gaze to the stars.
Zanzibar, 1932
“I think that’s them over there,” said Tiberio, pointing.
Paulo the Younger nodded, but he’d already picked them out himself: a tall, turbaned Sikh making his way down the pier, flanked by two Indian women and an ancient English one. His companions alone were sufficient to mark him out, but one look at his face was enough to remove all doubt.
“The photos didn’t do him justice,” he murmured, and indeed it was uncanny how much of his brother’s features could be written across a half-Punjabi face. Now he could understand why Sarah had recognized the man at first sight.
His sister must have reached the same conclusion, because she launched herself toward the docks faster than Paulo would have believed was possible for a woman of fifty-three. He could see she was near tears already, and she’d probably be the rest of the way by the time she got there.
“Funmi never greets you like that,” Tiberio said.
“Sometimes, when it’s been a while,” Paulo answered, remembering past greetings: when he’d visited home after the Great War, when he’d come to see Funmilayo in Paris after an absence of years. But Tiberio was right. He and Funmi had got on well together as children, for all he’d acted like a parent when their parents were away, but she’d fairly worshiped Ibrahim. She too had seen the photos, but he could only imagine how it had felt to see Ibrahim’s son in person…
“There’s more to it than that, though. Funmi is so much her father’s daughter than everyone forgets she was also her mother’s.” Tiberio looked puzzled, but Carole by his side, whose family had known Seye well… yes, she understood. Many things were important to Funmilayo, but the most important of all was family, dynasty, continuity of blood and teaching. She’d expanded her family as she matured, to include all women, all workers, all Africans, all humanity, but it was those at the core who mattered most, and to her, Ujjal Singh was a gift from God.
She was returning now, walking slowly to let Sarah keep pace, and Paulo felt a stab: the problem used to be keeping up with Sarah, not the other way around. The Indian war had aged her where the Great War hadn’t, and she looked even older than her ninety years: another thing that the photos hadn’t done justice.
He stood where he was, and waited, and exchanged greetings gravely. They were at the edge of the port terminal, and the plaza stretched beyond, think with the sound of motor-wagons and conversation. “Well, son of my brother,” he said, “shall we look at warehouses?” and without waiting longer, he led the way.
The warehouse was in the new city, east of the narrow Stone Town streets. The district was ugly, with the ironic exception of the slave market that had been made into a memorial garden, but it was full of vitality. What caught the eye here was the people: Arabs and Swahilis in white robes and taqiyahs, tall Yao in patterned garments, women veiled and unveiled, Indians in the dress of Bombay and Cochin, Europeans in suits and others gone native in the May heat, Africans from the interior and even the Great Lakes…
“A Sikh?” Ujjal asked. He’d spent the last minutes in silence, absorbing the city and the family, but the sight of a Baganda with a kirpan startled him into speech.
“There are some out by Nalubale, yes. Not many, but some of the soldiers picked it up from Punjabi troops in the big war, and their children followed. You see them sometimes when they come to trade.”
“Nalubale? The Buganda kingdom? What do they make there?”
He sees a business connection, Paulo realized. “Many things. Oils, groundnuts, leather, artwork. I’ll warn you, though, they’re not the kind of Sikhs you know. They have the scriptures now, but in the beginning, they made a lot up as they went along, and they haven’t lost the habit.”
“Neither have I.”
They’d come farther now, almost to the Patel department store, the first in the city. There was a coffee-house on the ground floor with tables out to the street, and it was crowded with people sitting and smoking, even those who couldn’t afford to shop upstairs. The sight never failed to amuse Paulo: it seemed there was always a new place to see and be seen, and that the poor appropriated it as quickly as the rich did. Tippu Tip still cast a shadow.
“We’ll go there tomorrow,” he said. “Now, we turn left here.”
The warehouse was two doors down the side street, and the landlord was there to show it, an Omani officer’s grandson who’d made millions in real estate. He and Ujjal walked through and talked business, while behind them, Funmi and Sarah caught up on family matters: Noura still teaching mathematics at the Sorbonne, Madeleine finally married to Noureddine and opening a gallery in Dakar, Abdoulaye studying law, Youssou finishing his national service. The two youngest were with them, and had taken Ujjal’s daughter in hand.
It wasn’t long before they were back on the street, and Ujjal was evidently satisfied; he and the landlord initialed a lease, and he stood in the roadway looking at the front gate. Paulo knew he must be imagining the sign that would soon be above it: “Akhtar & Singh, Traders in Fine African Goods.” There was a warehouse just like this one in Lagos; Paulo had found Ujjal a trustworthy manager there, and someday Ujjal himself might visit. There were others as well, in five cities and counting.
“It’ll be up there soon enough,” he said, and Ujjal turned around, startled at first but then with a dawning sense of mutual understanding. “Yes, son of my brother, you’re family. And now that’s settled, I need to eat.”
*******
The Goa House was back in Stone Town, on a narrow street of old Persian-style balconies and carved wooden doors, not far from the house where Paulo lived and Mélisande saw her patients. The owner turned out to be not Indian but a Portuguese from Mozambique who’d spent some time across the sea, and from all appearances, there was a touch of African blood in him. He greeted the party like family and laid out a meal as eclectic as he was: piri-piri chicken and Mozambican mango chutney; prawn curry; feijoada (“we eat that in Ilorin too,” Paulo said); patoli; cauliflower in coconut milk; samosas stuffed with cabbage and curried ugali.
Ujjal took the edge off his hunger and let the conversation wash over him; he was still a bit overwhelmed at the combination of a foreign city and the family he’d only learned of as an adult. After a while, he noticed that everyone including Funmi deferred to Sarah, and everyone including Sarah deferred to Funmi. He looked across at Paulo and saw the amusement in the older man’s eyes. Both of them might rank far lower, but they could take pleasure in another family secret learned, and doubly so since neither Sarah nor Funmi seemed to be conscious of how everyone else treated them.
He’d been a bit scared of meeting Funmilayo, truth to tell. He remembered the first letter she’d written after learning of his existence: know that you carry the blood of Usman dan Fodio and Paulo Abacar, know that the sword you carried in India was also the sword of the Malê, know that you are part of this family. He’d heard she wrote as she spoke, and wasn’t sure how he would compare to someone who spoke like that, a member of three parliaments who could speak for a family or a people with utter conviction. But from the moment she’d greeted him on the pier, he’d seen the same utter conviction that he was blood of her blood – and that his wife and mother were as well. It was that conviction that made the others defer to her, although she never demanded it.
He served himself more prawn curry and, both hunger and apprehension gone, joined the stream of conversation. “I’d hoped I might meet your wife…”
“You will. She’s at her school today, though – a meeting she couldn’t cancel.”
“On medicine or anarchy?” asked Carole.
“Mélisande says there isn’t much difference – health has to be cooperative, because you can’t be healthy in a sick place. The meeting’s about clean water, or sanitation – one or another of the things people have to go out and do while the nobles debate.”
“A parallel government like the Ottomans had?”
“Don’t call it that when you meet her! And it isn’t really – more a union, a mutual aid society. The city’s growing too fast for the government to keep up with, drifting as it is, so we have to take care of each other…”
“The government’s drifting? Is it unstable?”
“Why, are you thinking of going into politics?”
“No, no… it’s just that the Yoruba artwork and the carved doors have been selling very well, and I’m branching out. I have an optics factory in Mysore now and a textile plant outside Benares, and I was thinking I might also invest here.”
“Oh, the city’s safe enough, and the Swahili coast too – we’ve got our problems here, but we aren’t about to fall apart. I saw you considering the interior, though, and you might want to wait on that. The south is too scared of the Portuguese to leave, but they want a different arrangement, and up north, the only thing still keeping them in is worry about the Nile.”
“The Free Provinces have wanted out for years.” Tiberio said.
“Some of them. But if some leave, it’ll be hard for the rest to stay, and no one in government can agree on how to handle them. I’ve been trying to lay some groundwork, so when it does come, it can be friendly, but…”
Paulo let the sentence trail off, but Ujjal knew how it finished. Earlier in the day, Paulo had called himself the Sultan’s ambassador without portfolio, and no doubt he’d been sent to talk with the provincial leaders. But the risk any ambassador takes is that his government might make a liar of him.
“It’ll be a few years yet,” said Carole. “Nothing’s going to happen until Ethiopia and Egypt have their war.”
“I thought Egypt had a peace cabinet this year.”
“It won’t last long,” Paulo answered. “None of them have. The water dispute is too big for either country, and the fact that they’re both right makes it worse.”
“How do you decide, then? Between right and right.”
“The people of the Nile should decide.”
“Isn’t that the problem?” asked Tiberio.
“No, the problem is that the only way for all of them to decide is with their armies.” Paulo’s voice had a passion in it that Ujjal hadn’t before heard. “We should take the Nile away from the nations, and it should have its own parliament, elected by all the people in the watershed. Mélisande is right – anything too big to belong to anyone has to belong to everyone.”
Sarah smiled. “A river with a parliament?”
“Why not?” Ujjal said. Something about the idea had caught his fancy. “We do it all the time, on a smaller scale. Park districts. Village commons. Why not a watershed? We can be larger than nations.”
He felt that sense of communion with Paulo again, and he saw Funmi looking at her brother as well, with an expression somewhere between admiration and surprise. There was a family secret to that too, he was sure, but he couldn’t learn them all in one day.
And all at once, he realized that the meal was finished.
“Music now,” Paulo said, the intensity in his voice gone as suddenly as it had come. “Qawwali? Kiswa? Zambo? Something American?”
“You have qawwali here?”
“Tippu Tip loved it, and the parties have been coming over from Sindh for sixty years. There’s a local kind too, with some gnawa and Cairene Sufi music in it. The ghazals are very poignant here; they could stand in for the nation’s history, after all.”
“Or its future?” Ujjal asked, remembering the loss and separation, and the promise, that awaited.
“Maybe that too.”
“This doesn’t feel like a qawwali night,” Funmi said. “It’s a night of coming together. Let’s go someplace where we can dance.”
That was the last thing Ujjal had expected from a matriarch like Funmi, but then he recalled how she’d worshiped his father, and remembered Kapur Singh telling him how his father had seen dance as poetry and prayer. Funmi must have the same fascination, and he suddenly suspected that her joy was as formidable as everything else about her. He wanted to see her dance, and he wanted to dance himself.
“Zambo, then,” said Paulo. “The place isn’t far.”
*******
Zambo was so called because it came from Mozambique, but the Zanzibaris had made it their own. The band was big, with horns from Europe and nyatiti from the north country; the beat was fast and Portuguese, rendered on drums of cowhide and steel; the lyrics straight out of a Stamboul nightclub. The bar had wine for those who drank and fruit juice for those who didn’t, and people danced on what had been a warehouse floor five years before.
Funmilayo wasn’t a very good dancer. She’d helped her mother manage a war effort during the years when she might otherwise have learned. But that hardly mattered. There was a kind of freedom in doing something badly, and a freedom in letting her body express happiness in its own way. Her lost brother’s son had returned to the family, and her surviving brother had found his crusade, and both of those were joys that couldn’t be contained.
No one had taught Ujjal to dance either: he too had given up his youth to the gods of war. He cared as little as Funmi did, even when Sarah laughed. She could dance, and she partnered Paulo in a Malê folk dance that Usman had taught her seventy-five years ago, but there was no mockery in her laughter. It was a warm laugh, a grandmother’s laugh, and it came from someone who’d known Ujjal long enough to earn the right.
They were all laughing when they went out on the balcony together. The clear air was refreshing after the kif-filled music hall, and they looked out over the harbor, toward the African mainland that lay unseen beyond the darkness.
“We are larger than nations,” Funmi said, and Paulo, Ujjal, Sarah followed her gaze to the stars.
d32123
Banned
That update was beautiful.
One of the things I really love about this TL is the "human touch". We get to really feel like what it's like for people to live in this ATL. Rather than just reading like a history textbook, we can really get a sense of the feelings and emotions of the people living in this world. Makes it much more relatable.
One of the things I really love about this TL is the "human touch". We get to really feel like what it's like for people to live in this ATL. Rather than just reading like a history textbook, we can really get a sense of the feelings and emotions of the people living in this world. Makes it much more relatable.
I wish we had this kind of thinking during the times when we needed it.
Nonetheless, it's an amazing update, Jonathan.
Didn't realize that Ujjal was a businessman as much as he was a solider, though.
This is amazing. All of it. I don't say it enough, but now it definitely bears repeating.
Hmm... considering that Tewodros and Anastasia have effectively modernised the empire ahead of OTL and that Egypt is also going the same way, I'd say an earlier water dispute isn't that much of an implausibility.
I'm literally crying right now, partly because of that heartwarming story and partly because of hay fever... But seriously, that was wonderful. The fact that you've forshadowed in there as well makes it even better.
Also the map will probably take longer due to some preparations for the upcoming semester. I hope to get it done by the next weekend, but considering how troublesome mapping the Southern Cone (oh Araucania...) and India (even after the reforms) will be, I won't be able to get it done sooner.
Also the map will probably take longer due to some preparations for the upcoming semester. I hope to get it done by the next weekend, but considering how troublesome mapping the Southern Cone (oh Araucania...) and India (even after the reforms) will be, I won't be able to get it done sooner.
Thanks to everyone who liked the update - this is a family story as well as a world history and I'm happy to see it appreciated.
Yes - that was one part of the interim constitution that functioned well, and the parties liked the idea of a neutral head of state, so there wasn't any momentum for change.
Thanks! One of the things I wanted to do with that update, aside from catching up with the family, was to give a sense of TTL's Zanzibar and its place in the emerging Indian Ocean commercial-cultural network. India had quite a bit of influence on Zanzbari culture in OTL (Indian movies and music were very popular in the 1920s-50s) and will have even more in OTL, but Portugal, the Swahili coast and the many peoples of the empire's interior also play a large part. Think of zambo music as Latin meets East African meets Egyptian; the kiswa style is Afro-Arab with a Bombay filmi twist, and there are plenty of musical traditions from the interior provinces that have found an audience in the capital.
He'd had enough of soldiering when the Indian war ended, and he had newfound family connections in Africa, so he decided to see if West African goods (mostly art and decorative pieces, but also oils, textiles and Malê precision instruments) might find a market in India. He found a partner with capital - the Akhtar half of Akhtar and Singh - and tried his luck, and with independent India newly open to the world, it worked.
A few of the fourth-generation Abacars might well end up working for him.
There are four primary reasons: rising populations; greater industrialization in both countries with a consequent increase in the demand for water; rural-urban migration which has increased the water needs of the cities; and rising standards of living which demand irrigation projects to meet the demand for higher-end foods.
The first Nile water treaty in OTL was signed in 1929, BTW, so it was an issue by that time even in our own history.
Well, by this time in TTL, people are starting to think in terms of sovereignty as a package of rights rather than an indivisible whole, so this sort of solution for a multinational resource dispute would be considered plausible. Add to that the Abacarist revolutionary tradition, Mélisande's ideas of communal self-government and Belloist solidarity, and you can see where Paulo the Younger is coming from.
We'll see if it actually happens, though - right now, passions are too high in both Egypt and Ethiopia.
Hopefully this helps. Darkest blue is the Republic of India proper; medium blue denotes the "princely unions" that are part of the Republic but have a somewhat different administration (1: Rajputana; 2: Saurashtra; 3: Madhya Pradesh; 4: Vindhya Pradesh; 5: Orissa); the purplish areas are "treaty states" under Indian protection but with substantial autonomy; light blue is for the remaining princely states; green is fully independent; red is British; maroon is the dual dominion of Madras and associated states; yellow is for the parts of the Raj that were abandoned to Persia or Siam. The Maldives, not shown on the map, are also a princely state associated with India.
I left out the administrative boundaries within the Republic because, as noted, I'm a bit fuzzy about where some of them are. For the record, the provinces (starting in the south and going more or less clockwise) are Travancore, Karnataka, Bombay, Baroda, Sindh, Punjab, Agra, Awadh, Bhojpur, Bihar, Bengal, Assam, Arakan, Rangoon and Andhra Pradesh.
Well, I'm back. Fantastic updates J.E
Yes - that was one part of the interim constitution that functioned well, and the parties liked the idea of a neutral head of state, so there wasn't any momentum for change.
Thanks! One of the things I wanted to do with that update, aside from catching up with the family, was to give a sense of TTL's Zanzibar and its place in the emerging Indian Ocean commercial-cultural network. India had quite a bit of influence on Zanzbari culture in OTL (Indian movies and music were very popular in the 1920s-50s) and will have even more in OTL, but Portugal, the Swahili coast and the many peoples of the empire's interior also play a large part. Think of zambo music as Latin meets East African meets Egyptian; the kiswa style is Afro-Arab with a Bombay filmi twist, and there are plenty of musical traditions from the interior provinces that have found an audience in the capital.
Nonetheless, it's an amazing update, Jonathan.
He'd had enough of soldiering when the Indian war ended, and he had newfound family connections in Africa, so he decided to see if West African goods (mostly art and decorative pieces, but also oils, textiles and Malê precision instruments) might find a market in India. He found a partner with capital - the Akhtar half of Akhtar and Singh - and tried his luck, and with independent India newly open to the world, it worked.
A few of the fourth-generation Abacars might well end up working for him.
There are four primary reasons: rising populations; greater industrialization in both countries with a consequent increase in the demand for water; rural-urban migration which has increased the water needs of the cities; and rising standards of living which demand irrigation projects to meet the demand for higher-end foods.
The first Nile water treaty in OTL was signed in 1929, BTW, so it was an issue by that time even in our own history.
Well, by this time in TTL, people are starting to think in terms of sovereignty as a package of rights rather than an indivisible whole, so this sort of solution for a multinational resource dispute would be considered plausible. Add to that the Abacarist revolutionary tradition, Mélisande's ideas of communal self-government and Belloist solidarity, and you can see where Paulo the Younger is coming from.
We'll see if it actually happens, though - right now, passions are too high in both Egypt and Ethiopia.
Hopefully this helps. Darkest blue is the Republic of India proper; medium blue denotes the "princely unions" that are part of the Republic but have a somewhat different administration (1: Rajputana; 2: Saurashtra; 3: Madhya Pradesh; 4: Vindhya Pradesh; 5: Orissa); the purplish areas are "treaty states" under Indian protection but with substantial autonomy; light blue is for the remaining princely states; green is fully independent; red is British; maroon is the dual dominion of Madras and associated states; yellow is for the parts of the Raj that were abandoned to Persia or Siam. The Maldives, not shown on the map, are also a princely state associated with India.
I left out the administrative boundaries within the Republic because, as noted, I'm a bit fuzzy about where some of them are. For the record, the provinces (starting in the south and going more or less clockwise) are Travancore, Karnataka, Bombay, Baroda, Sindh, Punjab, Agra, Awadh, Bhojpur, Bihar, Bengal, Assam, Arakan, Rangoon and Andhra Pradesh.
I've spent the past three montsh reading this TL from start to finish and, now that I've caught up, I just want to say that this is definitely one of my favourites TLs on AH.com. I love the focus on oridnary people, ideas, and mass movements rather than on politicians and generals. In particular, I very much appreciate the way the Great War was handled, as I'm much more interested in reading about technological and political wartime innovations and how everyday people are being affected by the war than I am in reading a play-by-play of the various battles. I've definitely stopped reading other TLs because they got too focused on battles, and I'm really happy that didn't happen here.
Anyways, one shout out I wanted to give, Jonathan, is that if you're interested in writing any more scenes set in Halifax, I did grow up there and know a fair bit of the local history (although, by this point in TTL most of the local history has changed: e.g. no Halifax explosion), so feel free to PM me if I can help.
Anyways, one shout out I wanted to give, Jonathan, is that if you're interested in writing any more scenes set in Halifax, I did grow up there and know a fair bit of the local history (although, by this point in TTL most of the local history has changed: e.g. no Halifax explosion), so feel free to PM me if I can help.