1871

Two hands kneaded the dough, broke off a piece, rolled it into a ball and ran the rolling pin over it. She picked up the rolled out circle of dough and threw it into the air, her nimble fingers making a game of the catching and the throwing. She landed her little continent of dough onto the griddle. The flame shuddered in the earthen fireplace made of clay, throwing a light on Ma's face. Drops of sweat shone on her skin like early morning dew reluctant to be woken by the day. Ma turned and looked and found that Dhundiraj had walked on his knees/crawled on all fours to the door where he was digging the earth by the door, readying to eat the mud.

She leaped up and picked him into her lap. She pushed a finger into his mouth and picked out the mud. Slapped him across his face, twice over, and dumped him on the ground. Dhundiraj howled.

Dwarkabai: Cry all you want.

A thought struck her and she got up and found a torn bit of saree. She tore it further, and tied the two pieces onto her child's hands, making horse hooves of them.

"Go on, eat more mud, your hands are going to stay tied like this"

Lying in his cradle, the child looked one glance at Dwarkabai, and one at the sky. A single cloud in the blue expanse... After a few seconds, as the cradle stopped rocking, the cloud started moving, and came up, right over Dhundiraj. His crying suddenly stopped. He lay quietly in his rocking bed, a mute witness to an event that crossed the boundaries of different worlds.

His pupils dilated and floated like boats, towards his nose. A strange bird on long grey legs settled near the cradle. He was made of some porous grey material.

Ma had covered the embers of the fireplace and was sitting, lost in thought, when the silence woke her up. Why had Dhundiraj's crying stopped so suddenly? She ran to the cradle with her heart in her mouth. Dhundiraj looked like he was in a samadhi. His palm was half open like it was Tukaram's palm holding the kartal. His face had a unsettling smile, but he made no sound and the cradle was still. As though that small piece of cloud in the sky had hypnotised him.

The sudden excitement in the atmosphere subsided, the air had movement again and started bearing that cloud away. The cloud had barely moved when the cradle began to rock again, Dhundiraj came out of his trance and cried out.

Dwarkabai was relieved " You scared me, son. Oof, forgive me! I will never tie your hands again".

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Stamfer disk akin to the Phenakinetescope

Optical toys which work on the principle of persistence of vision were very popular in the 19th century. People peered through key holes and looked at the image of simultaneously rotating discs in mirrors to see a moving image. Projector lamps lit up glass slides of paintings, and gradually, of photographs, in quick succession and people saw them 'move'

The giant backdrops behind the small actors on stage gave perspective, opened out vistas.

It was time for the birth of cinema

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Lord Napier, Governor of Madras wanted the development of an Indian style that 'deals with the ideal and the allegorical', in which 'the virtues, the graces.. and other abstract conceptions and agencies are clothed in human forms which owe their majesty or their terrors to the Artist"

He saw the endless possibilities of re-imagining the treasures of the epics "All that is needed to promulgate their beauty and fame is that, in their purest and nobler passages and with the powers of European Art, they should engage in the service of the national pencil as they have fastened on the national memory and animated the national voice"

European perpective, the drawing of objects, people and space, as 'they really are', in relationship to each other, in the visible world, was being retaught to the native. The idea was somewhere also that this would change the way the native thought, it would enable the process of rational thinking, so lacking in the idol worshippers.. It seemed implied that the flat, frontal images that were popularly made and worshipped, were representative of a equally childish way of judging and looking at the world.

matsya

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Years: 1868 1869 1870 - 1871 - 1872 1873 1874

Decades: 1840s 1850s 1860s - 1870s - 1880s 1890s 1900s

Centuries: 18th century - 19th century - 20th century

1871 (MDCCCLXXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar).

Events

January - April

• January 2 - Amadeus I becomes King of Spain.
• January 10 - France surrenders to end the Franco-Prussian War
• January 18 - The member-states of the North German Confederation unite into a single nation-state known as the German Empire. The King of Prussia is declared the first German Emperor as Wilhelm I of Germany.
• January 21 - Giuseppe Garibaldi's troops win in Dijon
• March 21 - Marriage of Princess Louise to John Campbell, Marquess of Lorne, whose father, the 8th Duke of Argyll, is the serving Secretary of State for India.
• March 22 - In North Carolina, William Holden becomes the first governor of a U.S. state to be removed from office by impeachment.
• March 26 - The Paris Commune is formally established in Paris.
• March 29 - The Royal Albert Hall is opened by Queen Victoria.
• April - Stockholms Handelsbank is founded.
• April 20 - United States President Ulysses S. Grant signs the Ku Klux Klan Act.

May - August

• May 4- First MLB baseball game is played.
• May 11 - First trial of the case of Tichborne Claimant begins in the London Court of Common Pleas.
• May 21-30 - French Third Republic.government troops invade Paris Commune and crush the rebellion.
• June 10 - Capt McLane Tilton leads 109 Marines in naval attack on Han River forts in Korea.
• June 18 -- University Tests Act removes religious tests at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham.
• July 20 - British Columbia joins the confederation of Canada.
• July 20 - C. W. Alcock proposes that 'a Challenge Cup should be established in connection with the Association', giving birth to the FA Cup.
• August 29 - Abolition of the han system in Japan.
• August 31 - Adolphe Thiers becomes President of the French Republic.

September - December

• October 8 - Four major fires break out on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, Illinois, Peshtigo, Wisconsin, Holland, Michigan, and Manistee, Michigan. The Great Chicago Fire is the most famous of these, having left nearly 100,000 people homeless, although the Peshtigo Fire killed as many as 2,500 people making it the deadliest fire in United States history.
• October 20 - The Royal Regiment of Artillery formed the first regular Canadian army units when they created two batteries of garrison artillery which eventually became The Royal Canadian Artillery.
• October 27 - The Comte de Chambord refuses to be crowned 'King Henry V of France' until France abandons its tricolour and returns to the old bourbon flag.
• October 27 - New York mayor Boss Tweed arrested
• October 27 - British occupy the Klipdrift in South Africa, ending the Klipdrift Republic
• November 10 - Henry Morton Stanley locates missing explorer and missionary, Dr. David Livingstone in Ujiji, near Lake Tanganyika, and greets him saying "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"
• November 17 - The National Rifle Association is granted a charter by the state of New York.
• December 10 - The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck tries to ban Catholics from the political stage by introducing harsh laws concerning the separation of church and state.

Unknown date

• Trade Union Act - British trade unions legalized.
• Heinrich Schliemann begins the excavation of Troy.
• Japan forms its own police force based on French model.
• George Biddell Airy discovers astronomical aberration is independent of the local medium.
• William Marcy Tweed serves his last year as the "Boss" of Tammany Hall.
• Neath RFC founded
• Cary, North Carolina named in honor of Samuel Fenton Cary

Births

• January 7 - Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel, French mathematician and politician (d. 1956)
• January 30 - Wilfred Lucas, Canadian-born actor (d. 1940)
• February 4 - Friedrich Ebert, President of Germany (d. 1925)
• February 18 - Harry Brearley, English inventor (d. 1948)
• March 1 - Ben Harney, American composer and pianist (d. 1938)
• March 5 - Rosa Luxemburg, German politician (d. 1919)
• March 19 - Schofield Haigh, English cricketer (d. 1921)
• March 27 - Heinrich Mann, German writer (d. 1950)
• March 31 - Arthur Griffith, President of Ireland (d. 1922)
• May 3 - Walter Robinson Parr, English-born pastor (d. 1922)
• May 6 - Victor Grignard, French chemist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate (d. 1935)
• May 6 - Christian Morgenstern, German author (d. 1914)
• May 27 - Georges Rouault, French painter and graphic artist (d. 1958)
• June 14 - Jacob Ellehammer, Danish inventor (d. 1946)
• July 10 - Marcel Proust, French writer (d. 1922)
• July 17 - Lyonel Feininger, German painter (d. 1956)
• July 25 - Richard Ernest Turner, Canadian soldier (d. 1961)
• August 14 - Guangxu Emperor of China (d. 1908)
• August 19 - Orville Wright, American aviation pioneer (d. 1948)
• August 25 - Ross Winn, American anarchist writer and publisher (d. 1912)
• August 27 - Theodore Dreiser, American writer (d. 1945)
• August 29 - Albert Lebrun, French politician (d. 1950)
• August 30 - Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, New Zealand physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (d. 1937)
• September 24 - Lottie Dod, English athlete (d. 1960)
• September 26 - Winsor McCay, American cartoonist and animator (d. 1934)
• September 27 - Grazia Deledda, Italian writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1936)
• October 2 - Cordell Hull, United States Secretary of State, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (d. 1955)
• October 19 - Walter Bradford Cannon, Physiologist (d. 1945)
• October 30 - Paul Valéry, French poet (d. 1945)
• November 1 - Stephen Crane, American writer (d. 1900)
• December 9 - Joe Kelley, Baseball Hall of Famer (d. 1943)
• December 13 - Emily Carr, Canadian artist (d. 1945)

Deaths

• January 15 - Edward C. Delevan, American temperance movement leader (b. 1793)
• January 19 - Sir William Denison, Governor of New South Wales (b. 1804)
• February 11 - Gaspard Théodore Ignace de la Fontaine, Luxembourg politician
• February 20 - Paul Kane, Irish-born painter (b. 1810)
• May 11 - John Herschel, English astronomer (b. 1792)
• September 20 - John Coleridge Patteson, Anglican bishop and missionary (martyred) (b. 1827)
• September 23 - Louis-Joseph Papineau, Canadian politician (b. 1786)
• October 18 - Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor (b. 1791)
• December 28 - John Henry Pratt, English clergyman and mathematician (b. 1809)
• March 18 - Augustus De Morgan, Professor of mathematics and mathematician (b. 1806)