The Weight of Dates, Names and Numbers.

It is easy to measure the history of a country in time, names and dates. My tour guide, incidentally also my older cousin, tended to do just that, and as we sped through the gravel roads of rural Maharashtra the occupants of our ancient but reliable Jeep were subject to a regurgitation of his history textbook. Our guide commandeered the rattling car through small townships which made up the soul of a country trapped in limbo between the indomitable wave of global society and the inflexibility of ancient tradition. The sun-baked soil of the land was kicked up in dust by the polished shoes of children in starched uniforms reminiscent of a colonial past, as they held hands with their mothers, who wore bright saris that looked as commonplace today as they would a thousand years ago.

While the Jeep slowly navigated itself through the narrow roads, scaring chickens and veering to avoid wandering cattle, I was caught out by my fellow passengers as being more engrossed in the signage above tiny shop windows in a language that made as much sense to me as it did to the cows, and reprimanded for my lack of focus on the history of the land, which I had after all requested to hear myself. I brought up my familiar complaint on history in general; I wanted to be able to feel in awe of the past, not simply envision it quietly in my mind’s eye. Countless museum visits had left me with a thirst for my own heritage, which I felt I needed to reclaim in more than just words on paper and relics behind inch-thick glass. The Jeep suddenly came to a halt and we were thrown forwards in our seats. A calf had broken its tether and run onto the street, giving us all a shock and me a headache. We were twelve kilometres from our destination.

The forefathers of the people who now inhabited this land were warriors who had fought the invading Mughals and then the British. Two hundred years on from their famous military prowess, their lineage had come to find itself in the body of a pudgy teenage Indian-Australian, who desperately sought to understand his ancestry. The past had lost its intangibility and manifested itself in a form beyond pictures and stories. In a four hundred year old armoury, a thirteen year old boy felt the weight of history in the hilt of a curved sword that had been forged and used by the defenders of his homeland. History weighed three and a half kilograms, as it had four hundred years ago and as it does, unforgettably, to this very day.