beautiful....i suppose its a watercolour

Our habit of putting laundry to dry out on the balconies seems to be an age old custom!

This custom is also very much prevalent in Naples in italy

this has got to be the backyard servant's entrance or something, or of some regional dude calling himself rajah - the laundry hanging out to dry is slightly unbelievable. havelis used to have large terraces and open areas for hanging the laundry to dry. the doorway through which the chap is exiting is not exactly a royal exit kinda doorway - a royal haveli would have a much more dignified entrance/exit.

This is probably an inner courtyard of a Palace. EL Weeks had the practice of taking photographs of his subject and theme before painting them at a later date and probably in a different place. That is the reason we find spectacular details in his paintings. Well...its also good to permit him to have a little bit of artistic license here and there. : )

oh, i dont mind embellished reality at all, so long as it is recognized as a product of embellishment :)

always amazed by some artists to capture India's beautiful light.

One of the Cheetahs is unchained. Artistic embellishments are like dramatisation of ordinary situations. Hence a pinch of salt and snuff are inevitable. In old times, photographs used to trustworthy. These days you also find Osama Bin Laden in the situation room.

artistic embellishments also, if recognized, can be a huge pointer towards the author's perceptual predilections or levels of ignorance. for example, if the royal chap exiting from such a tiny door is seen as an embellishment, then it displays the artist's ignorance of how the rajas lived. unfortunately, such embellishments are often taken as documentary proof of yesteryears.

@Preeti Singh: That bit about our gloriously inherited butts is hilarious.

Pankaj Sapkal: Just as artistic freedom, political and ideological license are also in vogue. So history, recorded or otherwise is not free of prejudices. The historians role is to help us see through the biases (assuming of course, they don't have their own axes to grind!

of course, it is impossible to be unbiased, though it may be a bit more possible to be politically unbiased. even the fact that we can see things from only our own standpoints (physically speaking) is enough to create a bias. then there are interpretations, where further bias creeps in. btw, am reading this lovely book by e.h. carr, called 'what is history?', where one of the things the author questions is our general perception that there is one unbiased view of history and that by shedding our biases, we can reach this ideal unbiased version. this seems to be in doubt, since no meaning can be drawn without adopting a certain narrative, and all narrative is essentially a view from a limited perspective.

Pankaj : So in effect we end up choosing the bias we are most comfortable with. Every man to his poison...so to speak.

As many view point as persons! I think that will take theory of bias to an extremity. Whatever one's bias, it should be possible to reach an objective assessment. In other words, one different pople can start with different biases, they must converge to some concurrence or concurrence based on some objective criteria about what is truth. That is not to say they agree on everything but to say that consensus building is possible which takes shared knowledge forward. We all know that to be the case with the sciences. It cannot be far too different for humanities.

essentially, one can get most of us to agree on most of the things, and thats the max. for physical sciences it is very different because the premises are fully detailed and examinable, thus allowing the establishment of a common platform of premises for people to communicate. however, for humanities, the common platform can only be common to a very limited extent, and even the common premises are open to subjective interpretation. some quotes by e.h. carr, culled from his book by myself - "...It used to be said thats facts speak for themselves. this is, of course, untrue. the facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context......It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caeser's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all..." "...The historian is necessarily selective..." "...Study the historian before you being to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St Jude's, goes round to a friend at St Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance; but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation".

Wow ! This is brilliant ! Thanks Pankaj.

@RBSI: welcome, subbiah. @preeti singh: merely the effect of good company :). glad you liked the quotes.

Wonderful insight Pankaj, and wonderfully expressed.

@Pankaj, even in sciences, there is Godel's incompleteness theorem. What to say of humanities. The Nasadiya sukta always holds.

Thanks, Pankaj. You took me back about 35 years to my student days when I had an occasion to write an essay in a (Marathi) mag on the same subject, based on the very same, great book by E H Carr. It was an amateurish piece alright but my first piece of writing to be published!

interesting! you wouldn't have a copy of the essay now, would you?

I am sure he will have one but cant find it. I think it was in a magazinr called Magova.

Alas, no! A few issues of "Magowa" that I had did not last beyond the first five or six shifting of places that I went through and my piece certainly was not a collector's item meritting attention of liabraries!

ah, would have been nice to go through it...

Pankaj Sapkal :super take on 'history'( no wonder we used to call it 'his-story' ...lol ) and historians !!... sad , but it's true that many have misled n many have been so ,being unaware of this fact..