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What do you think of the comedy of Monty Python?

When you’re walking home tonight and some homicidal maniac comes after you with a bunch of loganberries, don’t come crying to me!Look, Rev, I hate to see a man cry…so shove off out the office, there’s a good chap.Well, we’re sorry you feel that way, but we, er, did want a block of flats. Nice though the abattoir is.—What kind of money is there in idioting?—Well nowadays a really blithering idiot can make anything up to ten thousand pounds a year, if he’s the head of some big industrial combine.I would only perform a scene in which there was total frontal nudity.I did ask you not to say ‘mattress’, didn’t I. Now I’ve got to stand in the tea chest.Before you read on, please look at the scroll bar on the right.We’ll come back to it later.Monty Python.Back row, l to r: Graham Chapman (RIP), Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam; front row, l to r: Terry Jones (RIP), John Cleese, Michael Palin.Pictured in 1969, at the beginning of their partnership.There are a lot of comedy sketch groups out there.But Monty Python is the one that most resembles a rock band.I could be wrong, but I think they’re more beloved than most comedy teams, and that other teams that are also held in such affection tend to be held in affection in a similar kind of way: the Kids in the Hall, for instance, or the Pythons’ great precursors, the Goons.It’s got something to do with the chemistry of a particular group of people.Like a good band, the Pythons functioned best when all six of them were in the room.And, like a good band, they had a continuity of personnel, and internal disagreements.The following is an attempt to open up the Python’s comedy.To examine it. Get it to say ‘Aaaah’.To stick an enema tube in it. To marinade it in soy sauce and garlic, oil its moving parts, repaint its ceiling, fondle its nipples and generally give it a thorough and prolonged mastication.There was originally a bit, here, about the difference between a tribe and a team.I attempted to give a very loose definition of a ‘tribe’ as having something to do with kinship and one’s social group. And I defined a ‘team’ as a group of individuals who form for a purpose, and who form bonds with each other based on that purpose, as much as anything to do with their different social groups.Most of the Pythons belonged to the larger tribe of middle-class English men. But one of them was American. Most of them were straight, but one of them was gay.Of the Englishmen, one of them came from the Midlands (Leicestershire); one of them came from the West Country (Somerset); one of them came from the North-east (Durham); one of them came from the North (Yorkshire) and one of them came originally from Wales (Clwyd) but did most of his growing-up in Surrey, the place which would become the location for countless Python sketches and jokes: Croydon; Purley; Esher; Walton-on-Thames; New Malden, which appeared in modified form in a Python sketch as ‘North Malden’.I originally put all that stuff in, in order to say something about how it was interesting that the Pythons came from all over England and from subtly different social classes, and then all went to Oxford and Cambridge and had their differences partly smoothed out by the educational system.And that this was part of what made them an interesting team.But I decided to cut it out.When the first episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (hereafter MPFC) were made in August-September 1969, their producer and studio director had once been a small orphaned boy in Victorian London:That’s John Howard Davies, producer of the first five episodes, appearing aged nine in the title role of David Lean’s 1948 Oliver Twist.Davies’ best role as a child actor was probably in the eerie 1949 supernatural fantasy The Rocking-Horse Winner, where he played a boy who can pick winners in horse races. He retired from acting as an adolescent and after a term in the Navy and a period as a carpet salesman, joined the BBC in 1966 as a groovy young chap.The Pythons themselves liked Davies, but Palin in his diaries recorded that they felt he was a bit schoolmaster-ish.They wanted a rather different character to be their producer: their wild-eyed Scottish location director Ian MacNaughton.MacNaughton had also been an actor, doing all 30 episodes of a now-wiped sitcom, Tell It To The Marines, and to complete the David Lean connection, he’d had a small role in Lawrence of Arabia.I say this to point up something about the background against which MPFC was made. It was one of fairly traditional entertainment. Davies and MacNaughton were showbusiness veterans.But MacNaughton had one other thing to his credit, which was why the Pythons wanted him. We’ll get to what it was in a moment.The story goes that after the first episode of MPFC had been recorded in front of a live audience on August 30 1969, the then-director of BBC Light Entertainment, Tom Sloane, saw it, and called MacNaughton up, and told him that he had to do something about the show, because ‘it isn’t funny.’’Watching entire episodes of MPFC fifty years later, as opposed to individual sketches, one can see why Tom Sloane was so worried. That first episode, ‘Sex and Violence’, contains some classic Python moments:The Marriage Counsellor sketch, with suave Eric Idle as the Counsellor brazenly seducing the breathy and extremely willing Carol Cleveland away from Palin’s hapless, dogged Arthur Pewtey, followed by Pewtey’s brief but feeble attempt to stand up for himself;Terry Jones as Arthur Frampton, who claims to have three buttocks, but who is unwilling to prove it;Graham Chapman giving his first great performance as the Working-Class Playwright (‘Aye, ‘Ampstead wasn’t good enough for yer! You ‘ad to go poncing off to Barnsley, you and yer coal-mining friends!’)But it also contains such damb squibs as ‘Flying Sheep’, and, fatally, it ends with ‘The Mouse Problem’, an over-extended joke made possible by the previous year’s decriminalisation in Britain of male-male homosexual behaviour. ‘The Mouse Problem’ is trying to be mocking of solemn TV news pieces that treat difference as a ‘problem’. The trouble is that it’s not all that funny.The Pythons wanted Ian MacNaughton to be their producer, because he had already made a show which was rather like the ones that the Pythons wanted to make.That show was called Q5, and it was created by the then-veteran of absurdist English comedy, Spike Milligan.Milligan had made the show that the Pythons had all grown up on: The Goon Show, a surreal radio comedy programme that ran from 1951 to 1960.The Goons, l to r: Terence ‘Spike’ Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe.The Goon Show had been fuelled by the visceral dislike for authority that Milligan had developed while serving with the British Army in WW2. He’d been a good and popular soldier, rising to the rank of Lance Bombardier, but a combination of a combat wound, PTSD and a new and unsympathetic commanding officer had eventually forced Milligan to leave the front line and enter military hospital.Milligan’s combination of PTSD and a loathing of anyone telling him what to do remained for the rest of his life, and was at the source of both his comedy and his sometimes extremely questionable personal behaviour. It was as if he invented Dada all by himself.The Goon Show had been self-conscious about the fact that it was a radio show.There was no fourth wall. Its long-term announcer Wallace Greenslade, a regular BBC staff announcer, regularly got dragged into the show’s storylines, and his deadpan delivery of Milligan’s occasional nonsense dialogue was one of the most striking things about the show. I think Greenslade’s announcer persona was one of the things that influenced the Pythons’ many men-in-suits-behind-desks, who start out keeping on top of things but quickly find themselves talking complete gibberish or acting out lunatic scenarios.Q5 was the first successful translation of Milligan’s comedy into TV form. Only three episodes survive, because the BBC wiped the rest. You can find them on YouTube. I’m not going to slow down what’s already a very long answer by posting one here.(Are you settled down with a drink? Didn’t I tell you at the start to look at the scroll bar? Do I have to tell you to do everything twice?!)Watching Q5 now is an interesting experience, because Python has become so familiar to us that we no longer see how weirdly it struck its original viewers. If you want to feel as confused and as on-edge as the original Python audience felt, watch Q5. Sketches don’t so much flow as collapse into each other. The camera is frequently turned on the other cameras. Milligan’s strange, halting delivery disrupts the rhythm; he frequently seems to be laughing internally at something else.Q5 is really weird.After watching it, Terry Jones rang John Cleese. Their conversation, by all accounts, went something like this:—Have you seen Spike’s new show?—Yes, I have.—Doesn’t it look like the kind of thing we want to do?—Yes, it did.—Well, we’d better not do that, then.—Right. We’ll have to go further.MacNaughton became their producer from the sixth episode of season 1 onwards, and remained until the end of season 4. He went on to direct many operas and musicals, and died in 2002 as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident the previous year.In the best MPFC episodes, sketches seem to organically morph into each other. There’s seldom, if ever, a hard cut at the end of a sketch, or even a proper punchline.The first episode to be broadcast was actually the second to be recorded.‘Whither Canada?’ shows the Pythons beginning to get control of the all-important flow, which was the abiding and most original and disorienting characteristic of MPFC.‘Whither Canada?’ begins with what would become the classic opening sequence of early MPFC episodes, the Overly Long Gag of a ragged man (Palin) out to sea, desperately struggling to get to land for what seems like five minutes, bearing we have no idea what kind of urgent message or object or warning, until when he finally staggers onto the beach and collapses, he looks up and utters just one word:It’s…In the course of watching, yes, every single episode of MPFC as research for this answer, I noticed for the first time that the It’s Man’s costume is a ragged business suit and tie. Could he be some long-marooned BBC announcer, struggling back to civilisation for one last gig?Luke Dempsey, in the burglar-stunningly enormous annotated edition of the Monty Python scripts, notes that Gilliam’s animated title sequence brings in all the themes that the Pythons would be interested in for the next four seasons: royalty, war, the church, sexuality and class.It was accompanied by the Python’s now-iconic theme music: John Philip Sousa’s stirring and dignified ‘Liberty Bell March’. These days, ‘Liberty Bell’ is a musical shorthand for dignity brought down: hardly anyone can hear it today without thinking of the Pythons. Its intrinsic pomp and uprightness can now only be heard as ridiculous.Interestingly, however, they didn’t choose ‘Liberty Bell’ in order to send it up. According to Palin, they chose it because they felt that brass band music, which was a familiar feature of their childhoods, was friendly and approachable—much the same reason why the Beatles dressed as a brass band on the cover of Sgt Pepper.After the titles, Graham Chapman appears as a friendly announcer in a suit, smiling at the camera. He wishes us a warm good evening, then goes to sit down behind a desk, only for us to hear a pig squeal.We cut to a blackboard with a line of pigs on it: one of them is crossed out,We cut to Cleese, sitting at a piano dressed in an 18th century costume. The caption comes up: ‘IT’S WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART’.Mozart/Cleese greets us with an ingratiating, TV-presenter smile, and tells us we’ll be looking at famous deaths, starting with Genghis Khan. We cut to Genghis walking up and down outside his tent: then he gives a sudden squawk and throws himself in the air and falls down dead. A panel of judges gives him a mediocre score.(What is going on?)‘Bad luck, Genghis,’ Mozart coos. ‘Nice to have you on the show.’ We cut to a scoreboard: Idle is there, in flat cap and duffle coat, impersonating the English sports presenter Eddie Waring, giving us the run-down of a league table that includes St. Stephen, Richard III, Jeanne d’Arc, misspelled on the table as ‘Jean d’Arc’ and pronounced by Idle as ‘John Dark’, and even Marat (‘Best of friends with Charlotte in the showers afterwards’, Idle burbles happily), and then it’s back to Mozart.‘And now,’ Cleese announces, ‘time for this week’s request death. For Mr and Mrs Violet Stebbings of 23 Wolverston Road, Hull, the death of Mr Bruce Foster of Guildford.’We cut to a middle-class living room with Chapman sitting in a chair, apparently watching TV. He looks up on hearing his name, exclaims ‘Strewth!’, and dies.Back in the studio, Mozart bids us goodnight with the death of Nelson. We cut to a very obvious dummy being thrown off a tower block and crying Kiss me Haaardyyyyyy! as it plummets to the ground. As it hits, there’s another pig squeal.Then we go back to the blackboard, with the pigs. Another pig is crossed off, and we pull out to find Terry Jones as a friendly and unassuming teacher giving an Italian class.He asks the students what the Italian word is for ‘spoon’, and it immediately becomes apparent that they all know what it is, because they’re all Italian.Jones’s teacher immediately starts to struggle as his Italian-language students ask him questions he doesn’t understand in their fluent conversational Italian, and then start to bicker with each other about whether Milan is better than Naples.‘Italian Lesson’ glides into animation via another pig squeal.Even this early on, the Pythons had figured out how to present their sketches with the same kind of so-what logic that dreams have.The final sketch in ‘Whither Canada?’ is tied up with the others using great skill: yet another pig squeal and an animation of a pig falling on a man leads to a shot of Palin and other British Army officers shoving pigs across a map of Europe. A private rushes in and announces ‘Dobson’s bought it, sir!’‘Porker, eh?’ Palin murmurs into his moustache. ‘Swine.’ Surely one of the worst puns in the history of Python, but we’ve no time to lose.We cut to film of a man in a room, writing. He’s introduced to us as Ernest Scribbler, writer of jokes. ‘In a few moments, he will have written the funniest joke in the world, and as a result, he will die laughing.’So the frame here is that we’re presumably watching a dramatised reconstruction of Scribbler’s death. But after he and his mother have both died laughing, we move seamlessly to what appears to be real-time modern day news coverage of a major incident, with Terry Jones interviewing intrepid police inspector Graham Chapman, who will ‘enter the house and retrieve the joke’.Chapman’s inspector, of course, succumbs to the joke, and the style of the sketch shifts into documentary, with an earnest voice-over accompanying stock footage of army vans, because the army has taken possession of the joke and intends to weaponise it—which links up very neatly to the pigs-on-the-map gag, placing this sketch, despite the anachronisms, firmly in WW2.But then it’s postwar documentary, with Graham Chapman’s colonel walking through a forest and recounting how they translated the joke into German, with each translator working on only one word: ‘One of them saw two words of the joke and spent several weeks in hospital.’And then it becomes a war film, with the joke brigade trotting through the forest reading out the nonsensical German-sounding gibberish to hapless German soldiers falling out of trees. (For the record, the joke in German goes Wenn ist das Nunstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder und Flipperwaldt gersput.)This in turn morphs into a sketch where Palin, as a British POW, is refusing to cooperate with the Gestapo (‘I can only give you name, rank and why did the chicken cross the road.’) The original gag, of a joke so funny that it killed you, has almost served its purpose as the expendable first stage of a rocket, designed to launch the entire sketch into orbit.Because now the sketch is having fun with war film clichés, with hopeful Eric Idle as a German joke-scientist trying out his material against a German officer, and being turned down with ‘We let you know’ as if the Wehrmacht is a talent agent, and then, this being after all Nazi Germany, being shot for his trouble.In the end, the Joke is buried in the Berkshire countryside, ‘never to be told again’.And thus ended the first broadcast episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.The practice of mocking the clichés of British war movies was not new, when the Pythons did it here. They had all been fans of the great early 60s satirical revue Beyond the Fringe.The Beyond to Fringe team, l to r: Alan Bennett, Peter Cook (RIP), Dudley Moore (RIP), Jonathan Miller (RIP).Beyond the Fringe had featured a brutal take-down of wartime pieties in the sketch ‘Aftermyth of War’.At one point in that sketch, Peter Cook as an RAF officer asks Jonathan Miller as a pilot to go on a suicide mission over Germany, because the war’s not going too well and ‘we need a futile gesture at this stage.’He tells him to go to Bremen, have a look around, but not come back.‘Goodbye, Perkins,’ Cook intones. ‘God, I wish I was going too.’‘Goodbye, sir,’ Miller replies, and then with a hopeful flourish, adds ‘or is it…au revoir?’‘No, Perkins,’ says Cook.The influence of Beyond the Fringe in general and Cook in particular on the Pythons can hardly be overestimated. But as Cook’s collaborator Bennett has pointed out, Cook satirised the British Establishment at the same time as he firmly belonged to it. He spoke like them, thought like them, was emotionally unavailable like them, and wasn’t attacking it to bring it down.He was just being funny.One of the rules of good comedy is that kicking up is funnier than kicking down. Cook did neither: he kicked sideways. So did the Pythons, at least to begin with.They would, however, evolve beyond that.The Python team members all had their individual virtues and quirks.Terry Jones was famously passionate.John Cleese in later years has never tired of chuckling over how he and Jones would go head-to-head about something, and Cleese, with his officer-class hauteur and logical mind, would be driven mad by what he regarded as Jones’ Welsh irrationalism. When they were beginning to conceive Monty Python’s Flying Circus, it was apparently Jones who was especially keen on playing around with the structure of sketch shows: not bothering to write punchlines, getting one sketch to flow into another, and generally making something that was unlike anything that had been made before.By the show’s third season, Cleese had got bored and decided that they were repeating themselves, and that he no longer wished to be in the show. By the fourth, he’d actually gone. The result, at least according to him, was that the creative tension between Jones and Cleese was no longer there. There was just Jones insisting that things should be done a certain way, and the others going along with him.I don’t think Jones was a particularly brilliant actor. His stiff city gent character was maybe a little too stiff, too harrumphing.But on the other hand, when the team cross-dressed, Jones was perhaps the funniest one. In the Spam sketch, which he wrote with Palin and in which he played the waitress incredulous that anyone wouldn’t like Spam, his steadily mounting delivery of the menu is a joy, with the word ‘Spam’ being hammered out like a nail being driven into some small and annoying animal:Egg and bacon; Egg, sausage and bacon; Egg and Spam; Egg, bacon and Spam; Egg, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam; Spam, Spam, Spam, egg and Spam; Spam, sausage, Spam, Spam, Spam, bacon, Spam, tomato and Spam; Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam; or Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top and Spam.The sheer demented music of that is superb.Jones’ skill at playing squawking ratbags made him a natural fit as Brian’s mother Mandy (He’s not the Messiah! He’s a very naughty boy!)He was also the best at directing them, being the one most attuned to their needs as performers.Gilliam and he co-directed Holy Grail, but Gilliam drove everyone mad with his insistence on visual perfection (which is the abiding flaw of all his movies: obsessive attention to what it looks like with insufficient attention paid to story and performance.) Life of Brian, their best film, was directed by Jones alone. According to Palin, in the scene with the naked Hermit living in a hole in the ground, Jones as the Hermit completely forgot that he was naked and was running all over the place directing extras, etc. with only a long fake beard between his genitals and the surrounding environment.John Cleese brought intensity.It’s hardly controversial to say that there is a huge ball of rage inside John Cleese, or at least, that there used to be. In the fine 2009 documentary Monty Python: Almost the Truth, he comes across as mellow and good-humoured, but back in the day, he always seemed to be just on the verge of epically losing his sh*t. I especially love his Announcer character, who’s mostly a steady centre of sanity amid all the ridiculousness, but who occasionally gets to fly his freak flag.The classic example is the link after ’Bicycle Repair Man’ in season 1, which Cleese has been narrating throughout in a sonorous American voice.‘Yes, wherever bicycles are broken, or menaced by international communism, Bicycle Repair Man is ready. Ready to smash the communists, wipe them up, and shove them off the face of the earth…’At this point, we cut to him sitting in a garden with a table in front of him with a mic on it. He pauses, and starts to go red in the face with anger.‘Mash that dirty red scum,’ he growls. ‘Kick ’em in the teeth where it hurts!’At this point, his anger gets the better of him and he lashes out with one foot, kicking the table over.‘Kill! Kill! Kill! The filthy bastard commies! I hate ‘em! I hate ‘em!’He’s so enraged that he’s folding up like a pocket knife, and is almost choking on his own fury. He clenches his fist and, for want of an actual communist to kill, glares at it.‘AAARGH!’ he bellows, finally incoherent. ‘AAARGH!’There’s an awkward pause, and then Carol Cleveland’s friendly voice comes from offscreen.‘Norman! Tea’s ready.’Cleese glances up, and as if nothing had happened, he immediately stands up and in a perfectly normal voice says ‘Coming, dear’ and strolls off-screen. That level of sheer hysterical insanity is, weirdly, very on point for 2020.One reason why MacNaughton was such a good director of the Pythons is that he understood how to film them. He often filmed their sketches in very tight close-up, and the close-ups bear out Jones’ perception that when Cleese was performing, he almost always played things absolutely straight.Other performers couldn’t help but relax and smile a bit. Jones’ little harrumphs are his way of doing that, Idle loved talking to camera, Chapman could be a bit of a ham, and Palin tends to smile slightly and have half an eye on the reaction he’s getting.But Cleese is practically always deadly serious, and that’s why he’s so funny. A sketch like ‘Restaurant’ or ‘Architect’ or ‘Dead Parrot’ or ‘Merchant Banker’ wouldn’t be nearly as funny if Cleese betrayed the slightest amusement or lightness. In one memorable performance of ‘Dead Parrot’ for an Amnesty International benefit, you can see Palin starting to corpse, and Cleese mercilessly increases the already blazing intensity of his performance in an ultimately successful attempt to get Palin to corpse some more.Cleese’s sense of structure was also very important to ‘list’ sketches such as ‘Cheeseshop’ or, for that matter, ‘Dead Parrot’, in which the humour comes not so much from the situation itself as the sheer number of different types of cheese and different ways of saying ‘dead’ that Cleese can come up with.But I think it can be argued that, ultimately, of all the Pythons, Cleese had the most logical and conventional style of writing. Look at the fact that, immediately after MPFC finished, he co-wrote and starred in one of the most perfectly formed of classic sitcoms, Fawlty Towers.It’s just that, as a performer, he brought a level of incendiary vehemence that lifted that kind of material onto a new level.Graham Chapman brought…well, as far as the Python’s earlier years are concerned, it’s not easy to say what.He was a confirmed alcoholic throughout the MPFC years, and didn’t get sober until Christmas 1977, after which point he never drank again. His teammates recall that writing sessions would go well in the morning for a couple of hours, but then Chapman would have a drink at lunchtime and he’d be no more use for the rest of the day.He did have an apparently razor-sharp sense of what the audience would find funny: Cleese was convinced that ‘Cheese Shop’ wasn’t funny, but Chapman reassured him that it was. He also had a knack for off-the-wall ideas that turned an okay sketch into a great one, and is credited with making ‘Dead Parrot’ about a parrot, when it was based on an earlier sketch about a faulty toaster.One of the Pythons, I forget which, floated the theory that once Chapman had come to terms in the late 60s with his own gayness, after that he felt that, apart from gay rights, there were no other causes worth fighting for, and he devoted himself to hedonism. This could explain it. After he gave up drinking, he could appear on chat shows and be extremely, calmly hilarious about himself. Before, he just seemed to withdraw into a fog of alcohol.He was, when sober, the best actor of them all. In many of the MPFC episodes you can see him lacking focus and fluffing lines, but even in Holy Grail he gave Arthur an essential sense of dignity and purpose, and Life of Brian wouldn’t have worked nearly so well with any other actor as Brian. He was warm, sympathetic and alive, as he’d never been before. It took some self-restraint to be what was basically the straight man for the whole film, but Chapman was brilliant at it. (He also functioned as the on-set doctor on location in Tunisia, putting his medical training to good use.)But even before then, he could be incredibly funny, lending to MPFC a kind of lunatic glee. I love ‘Undertakers’, in season two, in which he persuades Cleese that instead of burying or burning his dead mother, they should roast and eat her instead. When Cleese is still doubtful, Chapman delivers the wonderfully chirpy line ‘Look, tell you what—we’ll eat her, if you feel a bit guilty afterwards, we’ll dig a grave and you can throw up into it.’Terry Gilliam brought his art skill and animations, which provided the essential structural ingredient that gave the episodes flow and rhythm. He was also a fun performer when it came to grotesque characters, and his sense of art direction is always present in the Python films. Check out the way that ladders in Python films always look like they’ve been hurriedly lashed together with bits of old frayed rope. These are the touches that make Holy Grail and Brian feel like they really are set in the past. If MPFC looked different from other sketch shows, a lot of that has to do with Gilliam’s unmistakable visual style.He was also a useful member in that he played roles that nobody else wanted to play, such as the knight in armour carrying the rubber chicken. And he did give some indelible performances: Patsy and the Old Man from Scene 24 in Holy Grail, and the jailer faking insanity in Life of Brian.Eric Idle was the one who was good at finding a shape to the episodes, changing the running order of sketches so as to make them more satisfying, and acting as an intermediary between the two writing partnerships, Cleese & Chapman on the hand and Jones & Palin on the other. (They didn’t always write like that: Cleese and Palin wrote the ‘North Minehead By-Election’ sketch featuring Mr Hilter, for example. But mostly.)Idle was always happiest when he was parodying something, usually something showbiz-related. Just as Cleese and Chapman were experts at authority figures, Idle and Palin excelled as greasy game show hosts or nightclub MCs. Idle’s self-abasing grovelling as he introduced Harry Fink as an ‘incomparably superior human being’ is a joy. He was superb at insincerity and denial: remember Stig O’Tracy, who was endlessly able to forgive Dinsdale Piranha for nailing his head to the floor? And then there was his insinuating wanker character, first introduced in ‘Nudge, Nudge’ as the guy who is clearly trying to insinuate something to Terry Jones, and then returning in ‘The Visitors’ as Arthur Name, who invites himself round to Chapman’s house ‘because the film society meeting was cancelled’, and proceeds to completely ruin Chapman’s evening.As a team member, he saw himself in cricket terms not as a star bowler or batsman but as a wicket-keeper, someone who could change the direction of the game with a few small gestures. I think his finest hour in this respect was when they were touring the world promoting Holy Grail and somebody asked in a press conference what their next film would be called. Idle joked that it would be Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory, a play on the UK title of Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1970 biopic Patton. The title didn’t stick, but the idea of making a film on the theme of Jesus did, and the eventual result was IMO the Python’s greatest single achievement, Life of Brian.Idle loves wordplay, possibly a bit too much, and I could have done with fewer sketches featuring people who e.g. speak in anagrams, but on the other hand he also wrote many of their songs. ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ is the most celebrated, but my favourite is the brilliant ‘I Bet You They Won’t Play This Song on the Radio’ from the Contractual Obligation Album, which manages to convey a sense of being totally filthy without containing a single rude word.In the films, he was very versatile. He could do the cheery Mr Cheeky in Brian (‘You’re not so bad yourself, conk-features. Where are you two from? Nose city?’) and also the gravely funny Concorde, Lancelot’s steed in Holy Grail, who insists that he’s not that badly hurt, but agrees to wait with so that Lancelot will look good; and also the gibbering coward Sir Robin.Finally, Michael Palin contributed a lot of the actual comedy.The others have spoken about how Palin is a naturally funny man, someone who seems to have an apparently endless flow of good ideas, and a kind of generosity in how he spreads them around. When Jones and Palin were in tune as writers, you can see it happen when the ‘Barber’ sketch suddenly turns into the ‘Lumberjack Song’: they couldn’t think of how to end ‘Barber’, and eventually sheer exasperation made them decide that the Barber wanted to be something else all along—say, a lumberjack! Whereupon the song wrote itself in about twenty minutes.The Python team got together in the first place because Cleese, who had established himself as a writer and performer with The Frost Report, wanted to work with Palin.He and Chapman had been writing together for years, and while they were working on the sketch show At Last the 1948 Show, where a few Python sketches first appeared in embryonic form, Palin, Jones and Idle were writing and performing a children’s comedy show, Do Not Adjust Your Set.Cleese and Chapman used to watch this as their weekly treat after a hard day’s work, and Cleese, perhaps aware of Palin’s legendary affability, thought it would be fun to work with someone less difficult than Chapman, whose drinking even then made him hard to deal with. So, Palin’s basic good nature was part of the glue that stuck the team together. Years later, when Cleese and Palin went on TV to defend Brian against a spurious argument that it was blasphemous, Cleese treasured the fact that he had never before seen Palin get so angry.As a performer, he was a great all-rounder. He could be timid characters like Arthur Pewtey, but also smirking bastards like Herbert Anchovy, presenter of Blackmail, or Ron Devious, who sells a vicar car insurance with a ‘No Claims’ clause, ‘which states very clearly that no claim you make shall be paid. Which, if you never claim, is very good value, but you ‘ad to go and claim, so…’ And he could rack up the intensity too, as when Luigi Vercotti spoke about the sheer terrifying sarcasm of Doug Piranha.Palin seems to have been like the Paul McCartney of the team: the charming, fluent one who seemed to have no trouble coming up with new ideas. That’s about as far as the Beatles parallel goes, though.I’ve written elsewhere about some of the Python supporting players: Alex Johnston's answer to What are your favourite lesser-known moments from Monty Python? I won’t repeat myself, except to say that Terry Jones said of Carol Cleveland that of all the women who had appeared in MPFC in various roles, Cleveland was the only one who really got what they were doing and was able to do it herself. This seems a little harsh, since she made vastly more appearances than anyone else who wasn’t a member of the core team. But watching it again, she was invaluable to the sketches she was in.If I had more time, more energy and were being paid for my trouble, I’d go through the Python’s sketches and analyse them into different types of sketch.Cleese’s comment that they were repeating themselves has often struck me. Can we point to certain sketches and say for sure that they’re inferior versions of earlier sketches? ‘Bomb On Plane’, from season 3, is in some respects a rewrite of ‘Bank Robber (Lingerie Shop)’, in which Cleese’s ineffectual attempt to rob a lingerie shop of large piles of money which it doesn’t have culminates in him merely buying a pair of knickers. There are probably other examples.But a full-scale Barthesian analysis of MPFC would be a book, and this answer is already pamphlet-length.I think that, in their early TV shows, the Pythons were mostly content to have fun.The early episodes contain the most parodies of other shows and films, and the most jokes about the medium, and probably the most sheer silliness, although the generally subpar fourth season does contain the superb ‘Up Your Pavement’, a brilliantly daft parody of introductions to shows that you’re not going to get to watch.I leave it to the reader to recall favourite sketches and moments. (Please don’t cut and paste the dialogue of entire sketches into a comment, though.)Some, like ‘Dead Parrot’ and ‘Ministry of Silly Walks’, are by now over-familiar to anyone who knows them at all. But in the course of researching this answer, I saw a few things that I’d not seen before, and was reminded of some I’d forgotten.‘Dennis Moore’, from season 3, a series of sketches with Cleese as a highwayman who tends to get distracted when holding people up by endlessly qualifying the brave statements he makes (‘You move at your peril for I have two pistols here. I know one of them isn’t loaded any more but the other one is, so that’s one of you dead for sure, or just about for sure anyway, it certainly wouldn’t be worth your while risking it because I’m a very good shot, I practise every day, well, not absolutely every day but most days in the week…’) Moore’s effectiveness as a robber-from-the-rich and giver-to-the-poor is impaired by the fact that, to begin with, he only steals lupins, which drives Michael Palin as the object of his largesse into a rage (‘She’s bloody dying and all you bring us is lupins!’) It’s a treat to see Cleese for once being the mild-mannered one, and Palin being the angry one. Eventually Dennis decides that ‘this redistribution of wealth business is trickier than I thought’, and he takes to holding people up and then getting them to bring out their money, whereupon he painstakingly shares it out between them.‘Elizabethan Pornography Smugglers’, also from season 3, in which Palin as a vice squad detective dressed as Sir Philip Sidney infiltrates a pornographic bookshop disguised as a ‘Tudor Jobs Agency’. He then finds himself in Elizabethan England where everyone thinks he is Sir Philip Sidney, and he engages in preventing the naughty Spaniards from flooding England with porn. However, he returns home and finds his lovely wife (Carol Cleveland) eagerly reading Gay Boys in Bondage, which she hurriedly pretends is a new work by Shakespeare (‘’Tis a, er…’tis a story about man’s great love for his…fellow men.’) He commands her to read Shakespeare’s new work to him, which she rather nervously does (‘Ken, 25, is a mounted policeman with a difference…and what a difference.’)‘RAF Banter’, from season 4, in which Eric Idle’s incomprehensible RAF slang defeats the attempts of Squadron Leader Jones and Wing Commander Chapman to discern what he’s talking about. Things get even worse when Palin enters as an eager young pilot and announces ‘Bunch of monkeys on your ceiling, sir! Grab your egg and fours and let’s get the bacon delivered!’ (The great thing about the RAF Banter in this sketch is that it sounds like it probably means something, we just can’t be sure what.)‘Non-Illegal Robbery’, from season 1, in which a bunch of sharp-suited East End gangsters convene in a room and go over their elaborately constructed plan to go into a jeweller’s shop and buy a watch. Only Terry Jones has noticed that this plan doesn’t involve doing anything illegal. (‘Why are we paying for the watch?’ ‘They wouldn’t give it to us if we didn’t pay for it, would they?’)By the end of the fourth season, you can see why Cleese left at the end of the third. The very last episodes of MPFC are mostly the Pythons making the same kinds of jokes about party political broadcasts and horrible people that they’d already made before, and it no longer feels deliriously mad and gleefully angry. Just drunk-tired and bad-tempered.When they reconvened after MPFC was over to make Holy Grail, their first go at a script, as reprinted in the published screenplay, was mostly a lame rehash of the least bad sketches from the third and fourth seasons, strung together with a loosely Arthurian theme. In quite a lot of the pages, the name of the original character from the sketch is retained but then crossed out and ‘Arthur’, or whoever, written above.On reading this, they realised that it was a dog of a script, and they finally did some actual research and came up with the final version.As a film, the basic concept of Holy Grail, the thing that drives its story insofar as anything does, is the disjunction between Arthur and his knights and the world that they find themselves in.The film has a kind of fondness for the knights’ supposed gallantry, although, as we see, Lancelot is a homicidal maniac, Robin is a total coward, Bedevere is an idiot and Galahad is all too willing to drop his oath of chastity if confronted with a castle full of nubile young women. In the end, their deeds catch up with them. The police has been on their trail since one of them killed the Distinguished Historian, and during the final assault on the French, the cops move in, Arthur and his knights are arrested and the film is unceremoniously stopped.I think the ending of Holy Grail is unsatisfying, because the film hasn’t really taken that aspect of itself seriously. It’s been torn between sending the knights up and taking them at their word, and at any given moment has gone for maximum comic effect. It’s a series of brilliant sketches which barely hang together.Life of Brian, on the other hand, is a fully consistent story.Brian is, as we know, not the Messiah, but he lives in a time and place where people are desperate for a Messiah, and partly through his own fault, he gets mistaken for one. As a result, the film has a consistent story, with more and more people piling expectations onto Brian that he can’t possibly meet. When, at the last minute, he is given the opportunity to escape death by crucifixion, he’s distracted by being so angry with the People’s Front of Judea for not rescuing him. Mr Cheeky pretends to be him, and gets rescued instead (although to be fair to him, as he’s dragged away he’s insisting that it was a joke, he’s not really Brian.)This is why Brian’s story works so much better: it actually makes narrative sense. And the fact that the film is a comedy is why we can get away with the brilliantly dark ending of all the crucified people tapping their toes along with ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’.Brian doesn’t flinch away from the cruelty and stupidity that it makes fun of. Brian shouldn’t have to be crucified just because he briefly pretended to be a prophet, but he is anyway, because he lives in a cruel and stupid society. And yet Life of Brian looks that society in the face, and laughs at it. And if we laugh too, it’s because laughing at that kind of cruelty and stupidity is what enables us to resist it.Looking back, those were always the Pythons’ favourite targets: cruelty and stupidity. The cruelty that makes us be arseholes to one another, and the stupidity with which we justify it to ourselves.The petty stupidity of selling someone a dead parrot and insisting that it’s not dead, and the larger stupidity of calling some stranger a prophet, and worshipping them, and even letting them be martyred, just because you desperately want to believe that they are one.And the other, larger stupidities: the ones we do in the name of order, and law, and ‘right-thinking’, and ‘God’.Now look: no one is to stone anyone until I blow this whistle, do you understand? Even—and I want to make this absolutely clear—even if they do say "Jehovah".There is something to be written about the politics of Python, but I think I’ll leave it to a footnote in the comments in case anyone asks.Over the course of their career, their comedy became more focused and reached a high point with their most infamous film, Brian.The Meaning of Life, by contrast, felt like another contractual obligation, despite some memorable moments. ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’ had that focus, but the Mr Creosote sketch, although unforgettable, was a step backwards into being gross for its own sake.When the jokes don’t come off, Monty Python feels like we’re having our noses rubbed in the dirt by a bunch of smug Oxbridge types.But at their best, especially the first time you encounter them, the Pythons’ comedy has the liberating effect of all great art.Somehow, these six very different men brought together their anger, and their comic invention, and their freewheeling exploration, and their sense of absurdity, and their knack for structure, and the skill to make it all flow like it was the most natural thing in the world.And when it does work, there’s a sense of unity to it all.The silliness and the logic are in harmony with each other. The freewheeling insanity seems to make a higher kind of sense. Darl Larsen, author of the most exhaustive commentary written on Flying Circus, has placed the Pythons within the tradition of ‘University Wits’, of the English Renaissance. I’m sure there’s something in that.The best of the Python’s comedy engages with our lower natures, all our grubbiness and smelliness and selfishness and daftness, and jolts us into remembering that we still have something going on inside us, and between us, which is better than that.That—ridiculous as we are—we can soar.Thanks for reading.Sources:Monty Python’s Flying Circus, dir. John Howard Davies and Ian MacNaughton, Complete First, Second, Third and Fourth Season DVDs, Sony PicturesMonty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut), dir. Alan G. Parker, Bill Jones & Ben Timlett, 2009Monty Python and the Holy Grail, dir. Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam, 1975Monty Python’s Life of Brian, dir. Terry Jones, 1979Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, dir. Terry Jones, 1983Monty Python’s Flying Circus Complete and Annotated: All the Bits, annotations by Luke Dempsey, Black Dog & LeventhalDarl Larsen, Monty Python’s Flying Circus: An Utterly Complete, Thoroughly Unillustrated, Absolutely Unauthorized Guide to All the References, Vols. 1 & 2, Taylor Trade PublishingMichael Palin, Diaries 1969–1979: The Python Years, Weidenfeld & NicolsonEric Idle (ed.), Monty Python's The Life of Brian / Monty Python Scrapbook, Methuen

A professor told me that Native Americans had no sense of property or territory prior to European colonization. How true is this?

I tend to dislike any statement that uses the term “Native Americans”. It’s like you took a look at Poland and used this example to state generalities about “Indo-Europeans”, whether they live in Portugal or are Indians. As if worshippers of Ganesh were Catholics!Also people tend to project fantasies on ancient indigenous societies and want to find in them the lost Paradise of Eden, “primitive communism”, or “anarcho-primitivism”, or whatever… But the more I read about them, the less pleasant I find these societies, and the XXIst century still is probably more comfortable in many ways.I don’t think any indigenous society had a total absence of property or territorialism, even in the nomadic societies, it’s just that they had very different priorities, that were the product of a different lifestyle.In nomadic cultures speaking Algonquian languages (this is what I will discuss, don’t generalize outside of these cultures), French missionaries would notice that indigenous were often « chapardeurs » (pilferers). In French it would usually imply you’re a petty thief, but that’s not what it means here. They meant that when they left their own personal possessions around, it was likely an indigenous would just pick it up, pass it to someone else, it would circulate among them and they would not have any inhibition thinking that the item belonged to the missionary. This is usually where the notions that they did not have a notion of private property is from and that they shared everything. Several of these nomadic Algonquian-speakers found simply offensive that missionaries would consider certain items were their exclusive possessions, it was regarded as an anti-social behavior; you liked objects more than people. Also, it was common that when a missionary gifted something, the indigenous that received it requested the missionary to keep custody of it, because otherwise he would lose the exclusivity over the object (eventually, indigenous accepted that the French did not like their items to be passed around without their permission).(Map of the Algonquian family of languages, named from the Algonquin nation. This is not a political map and a lot of indigenous polities are missing.)« […] quand vous refusez quelque chose à un Sauvage, aussitôt il vous dit Khisakhitan : Tu aimes cela, sakhita, sakhita, aime-le, aime-le, comme s’ils voulaient dire qu’on est attaché à ce qu’on aime. »“[…] when you refuse something to a Savage, right then he tells you Khisakhitan: You like this, sakhita, sakhita, like it, like it, as if they wanted to say one is attached to what one likes.”(Relations des Jésuites)Paradoxically, this propensity to share everything was the cornerstone of inequality in those nations: social prestige was derived from the ability to gift a lot of wealth to everyone. Europeans had a similar concept, called with the Greek word evergetism, when rich bourgeois were expected, as good Christians, to donate a lot to their city, as compensation for being rich. For the French in America, you have an example of this when the rich bourgeois Charles Aubert de La Chesnaye donated money to relieve people that lost their homes in a fire in Québec City. I would also find a similarity with Soviet bureaucracy: a Soviet official was not supposed to own anything, he had to temporarily use a car or an house issued by the State during his lifetime, but not formally owning those did not mean that their way of life was not superior to most people because in the end the exclusive right to use something can resemble a lot to property when it’s reserved to the elite. Wealth, in many indigenous cultures, was to give every wealth you could capture to the entire nation, as a mean to strenghten political bonds and assert your political power, which would put you in an unequal position as you would have more influence.Because no, these societies were not completely equal. And missionaries paid a lot of attention to how power worked because a common evangelization strategy was to target the most influential people, convert them, and use their influence to convert everyone else, so they were actively looking for powerful figures. While, for example, the offices of what we tend to call “chiefs” in our languages (it can be military chiefs, political chiefs, who are rarely the same people), or as the French said “captains”, were not hereditary, in reality some families were capable to reproduce themselves in these positions and create a quasi-heredity. For example, among the Odawa ogimaag (“chiefs”), you had a chief called Nissowaquet, and the name was transmitted to another individual when the former one died, and it tended to remain in the same family. In short, some people had better contacts, and could achieve more, obtain more wealth for their clans trough warfare or trade, and be more politically influential, despite there was no power as concentrated as anything the Europeans were familiar with.Another factor of unequality was eloquence. If you had better rhetorics and could persuade others with seductive words, you could go far in life in these societies. It sounds awfully like the Roman politicans that cultivated the art of rhetorics precisely for the same goal. Some missionaries studied so well indigenous languages that they became truly eloquent and got the admiration of the nation, and were sometimes even given important responsibilities.(A French drawing of an Illinois nation, with a female Fox slave sat at the lower left corner of the picture. The standing man in the right is not Illinois but an Attakapa.)(An indigenous-crafted halter for slaves)Something leftists often like to overlook and forget is that there was in fact ONE private property in these societies: slaves. And yes, there was a slavery, but often its cultural peculiarities confuse people that grew with the European notions about slavery. First of all, indigenous slaves were pretty much never hereditary. You can’t be born a slave. This is a problem as it’s often part of the definition of slavery for Europeans. Another problem is that there is great variance in the treatment of slaves and so sometimes it can be so soft you wouldn’t want to use the word “slave”:The best-case scenario is that you are a kid captured in a raid, you are a prisoner of war that is enslaved, and you are tortured by cutting you a finger, but you impress the indigenous by remaining stoic. A family among your captors wants to replace one of their dead so you are adopted. Initially, you are a prisoner: you are not free to escape, you will be pursued if you try to escape. But over time, the nation trusts you, you become a full member of the nation, and you may even become someone important. This happened to a few French as well, like Guillaume Couture, who is the only European in history to become a member of the Iroquois Council. Due to this scenario, many historians considered that there was no indigenous slavery, merely adoption. [Yes, I know Iroquois are to be excluded from the Algonquian peoples, but I think that phenomenon may also happen among them.]Indigenous typically torture enemy warriors. It was in fact an honor, it was “manly” to remain stoic in front of pain and indigenous admired that quite a lot and even trained their children to be used to pain. Sometimes they even practiced ritual cannibalism with their enemies (which was otherwise a terrible crime within the nation). This is the fate of those who are not enslaved because they are killed right away.The French hated that custom, because they were from a culture in which officers moved around with their bed and tea set and enemy officers exchanged pleasant conversations before shooting at each other. (« Messieurs les Anglais, tirez les premiers. », Battle of Fontenoy) Despite this, they resolved to do it as well in Détroit, for example, because they found that if they did not torture enemy indigenous, they lost all respect and credibility and were not considered powerful. So the French reluctantly tolerated that sort of torture and would also let their allies burn indigenous enemies alive. The depiction in the series Barkskins that the French would hang Iroquois on a tree to spread terror is outrageously inaccurate and contrary to their entire culture of war of the time.Read more: the criticism of how New France is represented in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (book and TV) by the Franco-Ontarian historian Joseph Gagné, Barkskins: Dud on Arrival (let’s just say it’s awfully inaccurate)Another possibility is that you are captured, but you resist too much. They kill you brutally and dishonorably, they are losing patience.Or you are too weak to walk, they lose patience, they kill you. Indigenous hate slaves that are slowing them down.You are forced to walk with an halter. When the band stops to sleep, you have to lie down and you are tied to poles so you can sleep while not being able to escape.Your social standing is that of a dog, and indigenous treat dogs very badly. In fact, the word for slave is the word for dog, or any other domestic animal. A dog is malnourished by definition, that’s what they consider good training for a dog. You may regularly be beaten.Their treatment of dogs shocked the French, at least the nobles among them, because for the French the dog was a prestigious noble animal used by the nobles in their hunts in the super prestigious chasse à courre, and there was an entire science of taking care of dogs, called vénerie, with detailed treatises explaining how to take care of dogs. French peasants however, not so much, they regarded them just as tools.Yes, indigenous that practiced agriculture would use you as forced labor for agriculture, but what differs from Europeans of the sugar colonies is that slaves were not really essential for that and their absence was not much of a problem.You would be used as a messenger, run errands.You could be a sexual slave. In the specific case of the Illinois, who were a patrilocal and patrilinear society as opposed to many of their northern cousins, a man could have four “wives”, several of which were slaves. The Illinois, unusually for the nations of their language group, were pretty patriarchal and female slaves had the tip of the nose cut off if they “cheated” on their “husband”.The French punishment for the same offense was to send the woman to a convent for some time and to ban the man she cheated with.As a slave, your life was disposable and you could be killed on a whim for no reason if one of your captors had a moment of anger.Slaves could be gifted to another nation as diplomatic present. For example, the father Marquette learned the illinois language by using a slave that the Illinois gifted to the Odawa, who in turn gifted him to Marquette.The Illinois considered that enslavement was an “ingurgitation” into the nation, and that manumission was “vomiting”.So to go back to private property, a slave was typically reserved to an individual, and you had to ask permission to borrow a slave. So this is totally unlike material possessions which were communal properties. So slaves are a big exception. In Illinois society, social prestige was proportional to the number of slaves you captured in war, and they got a tattoo for each slave they captured.Source for slavery : Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France, 2012.Algonquian-speaking nations didn’t really have a notion of obedience or chain of command. Military leaders were appointed by their peers for a campaign, and it was not a sense of obedience that bounded the people “under” them to them but mere admiration. Indigenous warriors could simply decide to leave a campaign and it was not considered “desertion”. What made a military leader followed was just admiration, and that admiration replaced quite well obedience. They would follow the commander everywhere and sometimes would prefer to die rather than admit to them they did a mistake. Indigenous stopped frequently to debate the next move, military decisions were collegial. So this is very different from Europe, where armies were very coercitive. A form of obedience was obtained but trough persuasion, which is why again rhetorics makes a huge difference. Class is the product of speech. Another difference is that indigenous do not observe “articles of capitulation”. There is no such thing as conditionnal surrender. You can’t capitulate to indigenous, they will take your belongings and kill anyone that resists and you can’t negociate anything, yet another offensive thing for Europeans.As for territory, it’s a difficult thing to address. Algonquian societies lived in a world in which there was no territorial stability for anything. Populations moved, even sedentary villages moved, game and fish moved, etc. Therefore a notion of border was not really possible, and anyways we tend to forget that Europe in the Middle Ages had not borders either but at best “marches” (sort of buffer zones). What complicates things even more is that there was a sort of “expanded territory” used for hunting, which was much bigger than the core territory they regarded their own, and often indigenous disputes are in these territories. Indigenous lived in a world in which spirits inhabited everything and you negociated with them to get meat or maple sap or corn.It’s difficult to understand what conquest means for them. My hunch is that conquest is more about dominating populations rather than territories, but even then I’m not sure. Indigenous did make war on the resources : they sometimes overhunted on purpose on their enemies’ territories just to disrupt their economy (especially once the beaver became a commodity to trade with the French). For the indigenous, it’s not possible to own “land” as for them, “land” is something that cannot be measured and quantified (much like the sea), therefore you can only be a caretaker of the land; there can be attribution but not possession in the sense Roman law understands it. Land is seen as infinite and boundless. So any use of land in the details is necessarily temporary, transitory; only vague regions can be claimed.Yes, there is territoriality. They did not consider that everyone could just pass through their territory and they even enforced “customs” for people that passed trough them for trade. The Algonquins for example watched the circulation of canoes at the île aux Allumettes to charge a toll on passing merchants.L'Isle-aux-AllumettesThere exists a fascinating French document that reveals a lot about how territoriality works between nomads. Let us remember that the French governor, known as Onontio to the indigenous, pretended to become the arbiter that would solve conflicts between all the nations. Some nations took that seriously and asked the French for arbitration in their disputes.In March 1705, a band of Innu indigenous [Montagnais in French] known to the French as Guillaume Chische, Joseph Marachualik and François ȣcachy [ȣ is a Latin ligature of letters that is an O topped with an U, making the sound [u], spelled OU in French], had a camp in the territory where they hunted beaver. They were somewhere around their summer quarters at the Lac Saint-Jean, and they were traveling west to reach their winter quarters. Then, they sighted numerous footprints in the snow. They suspected it was Abenakis, and they considered them trespassers that were “pillaging” their furs.Their suspicions proved correct : they encountered a band of 6 Abenakis led by François Thékȣérimat. The Innu were at a disadvantage, they had numerical inferiority. The Abenaki first sent to the Innu a delegation matching their numbers. They were warning the Innu that they were trespassing, and for now they would not resort to violence, but it was a warning. According to what the Innu told the French :“Thékȣérimat told us that the lands of Lac Saint-Jean belonged to the Abénaquis and that they had come to hunt on them”This claim meant that the Abenaki considered they could “pillage” what the Innu had hunted, as they considered that their property. It’s interesting to note that Innu and Abenaki were military allies. Nethertheless, there is a lot of tension in the situation. The Abenakis are not doing acts of war but they are forceful towards their allies.This Innu band could not resist as it was in inferiority and so gave in : they offered 6 moose hides to be spared from pillage. They also let the Abenaki sleep in their lodge and in the morning, they were intimidated enough to reveal the location of their food caches. They even gave the Abenakis a toboggan to carry their loot.The French were an interested party indirectly: the merchant François Hazeur sold things on credit to the Innu, and now the Innu were not able to pay their debt due to the Abenaki incursions. This is why Hazeur insisted that the French, as arbiters of the indigenous nations, obtain justice for the Innu. Hazeur also suspected that a rival French trader based in Trois-Rivières was backing the Abenakis.All of these people went to meet the French intendant, the highest magistrate for civilian matters, to begin an inquiry. The 3 Innu were interrogated with the help of an interpreter and a clerk recorded their words.The intendant summoned Louis Thékȣérimat, son of the Abenaki chief involved in the dispute, and held a separate interrogation. The Abenaki version said that the lands belonged to his father, and that they visited the Innu camp to lodge a protest.“They [the Abenaki] complained that the Montagnais were hunting on their lands, and that they had so thoroughly destroyed the animals on it, that they could find no food, to the point where they had had to make canoes in order to return [to Saint-François].”The Abenaki complained that the Innu were killing all the moose, even the ones that they had cared to “raise” and “conserve”. Even more scandalously, the Innu would have killed all the beavers.In the Innu testimony, the French asked: is it not a rule among them never to hunt without permission on the lands of another?The Innu answered :“it is a rule for us that each hunter hunts on his own lands.”The French asked to the Abenaki Louis Thékȣérimat : did the Abénaquis usually hunt in this area?“Replied that they go there whenever they want and that no one has ever opposed them. Being presently numerous, they have been obliged to go and seek their livelihood where they could and the land in question belonged to his grandfather who in turn gave it to his father. In killing all the animals that were in this place, the said Montagnais have, in effect, killed the Abénaquis themselves.”Interestingly, neither party uses any landmark and they are not trying to place a boundiary.In the end, the French were baffled, had no idea how to solve the issue, and so did not decide anything for the Innu and Abenaki (presuming both sides would have accepted their ruling) and left them to solve their issue, but ordered new regulations for the French King’s Posts in Innu territory in relation to this episode.So I would say nomadic territories are the hunting grounds used by a band (a hunting party, a fraction of a nomadic nation). They belong to a specific band in the nation. The animal resources on the territory belong to the band. Perhaps when they all meet in the summer, properties are communal, but in the winter it’s to the band. I guess the summer territory is the core territory, less prone to disputes between nations, but the winter territory (hunting grounds, with the nation dispersing) is much bigger and so more prone to disputes.Source for this episode : Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America, 2018, pp. 298–305.So yes, there is inequality (but it’s rather light), there is private property (slaves), there is territoriality. It’s just really not similar to European notions.When I did not quote a specific source, I probably took it in Le Piège de la liberté and in Le Pays renversé. Both these books draw heavily on La Relation des jésuites. There may also be Masters of the Middle Waters as well.What I discussed here is entirely irrelevant to the Mexicas of Tenochtitlán. These people, who built an aggressive empire, had sort of notaries that recorded the information on who owned what, and the lands used for agriculture had boundiaries (in the form of agave plants). In their case you could almost say they had a cadastre, a land survey.EDIT : Since you may want to study the documents pertaining to the territorial conflicts between the nomadic Innu and Abenaki, I will put here what Allan Greer quoted exactly :France, Archives nationales d’outre-mer, colonies (shortened ANOM), C11A, vol. 25, fol. 27–36, Requête du Sr. Hazard [could it be a typo of Hazeur ?] à Jacques Raudot, 3 August 1706, plus attached documents.See also ibid., 25: 82–87v, Déclaration à Messieurs les directeurs general [directeurs généraux] de la Compagnie de la colonie de Canada, 19 June 1705; ibid., 25: 76v; Petition of Sr. Hazeur to Govr. Vaudreuil, 4 November 1705; ibid., 27: 55v, Hazeur to Pontchartrain, 5 November 1707.These were studied in Toby Morantz, “Colonial French Insights into Early 18th- Century Algonquians of Central Quebec,” in Papers of the Twenty-Second Algonquian Conference, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1991), 213–24; Sylvie Savoie and Jean Tanguay, “Le nœud de l’ancienne amitié: La presence abénaquise sur la rive nord du Saint-Laurent aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 33 (2003): 36–41; Nelson-Martin Dawson, Feu, fourrures, fléaux et foi foudroyèrent: les Montagnais: Histoire et destin de ces tribus nomades d’après les archives de l’époque coloniale (Sillery: Septentrion, 2005), 182–84.FR

What is the story behind Pakistan Administered Kashmir? What is the real story behind Kashmir? Who does it belong to; India or Pakistan? Is India right in claiming Kashmir to be its part? What is the Line of Control between these two countries?

3 June 1947:Mountbatten proposed the partition plan to divide British India into independent dominions of India and Pakistan.19 June 1947:Lord Mountbatten visited Kashmir for 5 days to persuade the Maharaja to accede to India or Pakistan.😔 The Maharaja showed reluctance.11 July 1947:Md Ali Jinnah declared that if Kashmir opted for independence, Pakistan would have friendly relations with it.Liaquat Ali Khan endorsed this position.19 July 1947:Jinnah's personal secretary K. H. Khurshid assured the Maharaja that Pakistan would not "take away an iota of his power".23 July 1947:State's PM Ram Chandra Kak visited Delhi for 5 days, meeting Mountbatten and the political leaders of Congress and the Muslim League.He explained that the State had decided not to accede to either Dominion.😥(Ram Chandra kak)14 August 1947 – 15 August 1947:Independence and Partition of British India into 🇮🇳 and 🇵🇰.Kashmir signed the Standstill Agreement with Pakistan.India requested further discussions for a standstill agreement.20 August 1947:Pakistan Army formulated Operation Gulmarg to organize a tribal invasion of Kashmir.The main invasion of raiders into J and K that was planned and launched by the Army HQs of Pakistan was called 'Operation Gulmarg'.👇1–2 September 1947:(Mian Iftikharuddin)Pakistan Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan charged Mian Iftikharuddin with organizing a revolt in Kashmir.✅Iftikharuddin introduced the Muslim Conference leader Sardar Ibrahim to Colonel Akbar Khan.✅Sardar Ibrahim requested and received arms for the rebels.Invasion of Tribe started. 👇4 September 1947:Henry Lawrence Scott informed the Maharaja that 400 armed Muslims infiltrated 😡from Kahuta into the state to terrorize the Hindu and Sikh minorities.Kashmir reported the information to Pakistan and urged it to control the infiltration.12 September 1947:Liaquat Ali Khan approved ✅ the plan for "Armed Revolt inside Kashmir" prepared by Colonel Akbar Khan and another plan prepared by Sardar Shaukat Hayat Khan.Khurshid Anwar of the Muslim League National Guard was dispatched to the Frontier to mobilize the “Pashtun tribes”👇 for an armed attack.19 September 1947:The Muslim Conference acting president Choudhri Hamidullah and general secretary Ishaque Qureshi were summoned by Pakistani prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan and briefed about Pakistan's invasion plans.19 September 1947:Mahajan met Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel in Delhi and apprised them of the situation in the state.He indicated the Maharaja's willingness to accede to India but asked for political reforms to be delayed.🤓🤓Nehru demanded the release of Sheikh Abdullah.20 September 1947:According to Sardar Ibrahim, a people's militia of 50,000 ex-servicemen 😡had been raised to form an 'Azad Army'.22 September 1947:Muslim Conference convention at Srinagar took a decision favoring accession to Pakistan.27 September 1947:Nehru wrote to Vallabhbhai Patel predicting a Pakistani incursion into Kashmir.😔29 September 1947:✅ Sheikh Abdullah was released from prison.30 September 1947:🤨 Nehru proposed using plebiscite as a means of settling disputes regarding princely states.It was discussed in the Indian Cabinet and then communicated to Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan in Delhi.Khan's eyes were said to have "sparkled" at the proposal, though he made no response.😏Tribal started Occupying J&K.5 October 1947:Nehru is informed by Dwarakanath Kachru that the Maharaja had lost control of the western districts of the state.😥6 October 1947:An armed rebellion began in Poonch🇮🇳(185101).Sardar Ibrahim organized the Poonch rebellion, with the help of Pakistan Army and the Muslim League, the invasion of Jammu and Kashmir.The Maharaja replaced Chief of State Forces Banbury and Police Chief Powell with Hindu officers.8 October 1947 – 9 October 1947:The Owen Pattan (POK) post on Jhelum river was captured by rebels.😡(Also known as “Azad Pattan”)Sehnsa, a large town in POK, and Throchi were abandoned by State Forces after the attack.😡Pakistani raids on the borders of Jammu and Kathua districts began.😡12 October 1947:Khurshid Hasan 👇K. H. Khurshid, Jinnah's private secretary, was sent to Kashmir to mobilize support for Pakistan,😑 He advocated Pakistan to use force, and "supply arms and foodstuff to the tribes within and without the state."14 October 1947:The activists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh 🚩 and the Akalis 🙏mounted on villages of the Jammu district to help Hindu and Sikh victims of Tribal attack.but 1947 Jammu violence began.15 October 1947:Mehr Chand Mahajan took charge as Prime Minister of the state. The concentration of tribesmen reported at Abbottabad-Mansehra.(“Abbottabad” in 🇵🇰)17 October 1947:Brigadier N.S. Rawat given the charge of the Jammu Brigade of the State Forces.and Brigadier Khuda Baksh made Chief of Staff, second in command.17-18 October 1947:A battalion of Patiala State Forces arrives in Jammu and a mountain battery (artillery regiment) is stationed in Srinagar.20 October 1947:Lorries carrying 900 “Mahsud” tribesmen😡 departed the Frontier tribal region heading to Kashmir.😌 Governor George Cunningham sent a letter to Indian Army Chief Gen. Rob Lockhart & warned him about the invasion;the letter was received on 23 or 24 October.21 October 1947:Dak Bungalow at Bhimber was attacked by rebels.There were accusations that this was an effort to kill or abduct the Maharaja, who had been scheduled to visit that day.Now, first Indo🇮🇳-Pakistani🇵🇰 War Started.21 October 1947 – 22 October 1947:Pakistan launched a tribal Lashkar (levy) from Waziristan to overthrow the Maharaja's government.😠Thousands of Pashtuns from Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province recruited covertly by the Pakistani Army, invaded Kashmir along with the Poonch rebels,😑In Poonch and Jammu, The tribesmen engaged in looting and killing 😔along the way.👉 Pro-Pakistan members of the Maharaja's army rebelled at Domel (Muzaffarabad) and took control of the Jhelum river bridge.😔22 October 1947:👏All the Muslim members of the State Police in Jammu City (after their rebellion) were disarmed and ordered to go to Pakistan.24 October 1947:😍 R.L. Batra, the Deputy Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, carried a message from the Maharaja to Nehru which requested military assistance and proposed accession to India.24 October 1947: Bhimber fell to rebels after an attack by armoured vehicles of the Pakistan Army.😥(“Bhimber” in POK)25 October 1947:A Defence Committee meeting in Delhi, headed by Lord Mountbatten, considered the Maharaja's request.Ministers were unanimous in sending military assistance.but disagreed on whether to accept Kashmir's accession.✅ The secretary of the States Department, V. P. Menon, was sent to Kashmir to assess the situation.26 October 1947:V. P. Menon brought news that:the situation in Kashmir was critical.the Maharaja was ready to agree to "any terms".😀✅26 October 1947 – 27 October 1947:The Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession (IOA), acceding the state to the Indian Union.😍India accepted the accession, regarding it provisional until such time as the will of the people could be ascertained.🙏 IOA confirms that J&K belongs to India🇮🇳.27 October 1947:The Indian army entered the state to repel the invaders.27 October 1947:Mohammad Ali Jinnah ordered General Douglas Gracey to send Pakistani troops into Kashmir.Gracey declined, pointing out the fact of Kashmir's accession to India.Gracey had a 'stand-down order' from Supreme Commander Claude Auchinleck to the effect that, in the event of an inter-Dominion war, all the British officers in both the armies must stand down.27 October 1947:The Kashmir Liberation Committee was formed to manage Pakistan's conduct of the war.It was headed byPrime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan,with Colonel Akbar Khan as the military member,Ghulam Muhammad, the finance minister, andSardar Ibrahim, the president of the POK government.28 October 1947:Field Marshal Auchinleck flew to Lahore to explain the stand-down order to Jinnah.Upon his suggestion, Jinnah invited the Indian leaders for a conference in Lahore.but the Indian Cabinet declined the invitation.29 October 1947:Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan entered the war officially by deciding to maintain a force of at least 5,000 tribesmen in Kashmir.😒Tribesmen again poured into Kashmir.31 October 1947:Sheikh Abdullah was appointed as the head of the Emergency Administration in Kashmir.31 October 1947:A provisional government was declared by the rebels.1 November 1947:Lord Mountbatten and Mohammad Ali Jinnah met in Lahore, as the Governor-General of India and Pakistan.Mountbatten offered India's proposal that:the accession of Junagadh, Hyderabad, and Kashmir should be decided by an impartial reference to the will of the people in the form of a plebiscite.Jinnah rejected the offer.Early November:Sheikh Abdullah recommended thatIndia should give an ultimatum and declare war against Pakistan upon the expiry of the ultimatum.Nehru did not favour a broader war.3 November 1947:Tribesmen broke through to within 5 miles (8.0 km) of the Srinagar airport and were beaten back.Indians suffered heavy casualties.Indian Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel argued for the army to be reinforced;two more battalions were air-lifted, and a squadron of armoured cars and field artillery were dispatched from Pathankot.3 November 1947:Mendhar, in the eastern part of the Poonch district fell to rebels; Bagh and Rawalakot followed in quick succession.Hindu and Sikh refugees from these areas took shelter in Nowshera, Mirpur, Kotli and Poonch, which were all surrounded by rebels.(Mendhar is in India-administrative Kashmir)5 November 1947:Most of the tribesmen withdrew to Uri in the face of the Indian assault. Many returned home, sensing that the fight was lost.5 November 1947 – 6 November 1947:Convoys of Muslim refugees from Jammu going to West Punjab were attacked by armed bands supported by State troops; very few survived.6 November became a remembrance day in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir.7 November 1947:Reinforced Indian troops in the Kashmir Valley engaged the tribesmen at Shalateng and inflicted heavy casualties.The defeated tribal forces were pursued and Baramulla and Uri were recaptured.(Baramulla-193101)(Uri-193123)Rajouri was captured by Azad rebels.30,000 Hindus and Sikhs gathered there were killed before it was relieved, with the exception of 1,500 who escaped to the hills.9 November 1947:An attack on a convoy of Muslim refugees from Jammu was repelled by Indian troops, killing 150 of the attackers.No further attacks on convoys were reported after this incident.13 November 1947:Major General Kalwant Singh issued an order to the 50 Para Brigade to relieve Nowshera, Jhangar, Mirpur, Kotli and Poonch in seven days.The ambitious plan was criticised by General Roy Bucher.16 November 1947:Pakistan's Political Agent, Khan Mohammad Alam Khan, arrived in Gilgit and took over the administration.The provisional government was dismissed.18 November 1947:50 Para Brigade relieved Nowshera.(Pin-19001Nowshera.(Pin-19001125 November 1947:Mirpur fell to rebels. 20,000 Hindus and Sikhs taking shelter at the town were killed during the rebel occupation.The day is remembered as the "Mirpur day" in Indian-administered Jammu.26 November 1947:50 Para Brigade relieved Kotli, but evacuated it the next day due to the difficulty of defending it against the surrounding rebels.(Kotli, POK)26 November 1947 – 27 November 1947:During Liaquat Ali Khan's visit to Delhi for a Joint Defence Council meeting,the two countries reached an agreement on the sharing of sterling balances.A tentative agreement on Kashmir was reached;Pakistan agreed to use its influence on the raiders to withdraw, India to scale back its troops, andthe UN to be approached for holding a plebiscite.However, the agreement was vetoed by Jinnah:"No commitments should be made without my approval of terms of settlement. Mr. Liaquat has agreed and promised to abide by this understanding," read his note to the ministers.The next day, India's Defence Committee was informed that Pakistan was reinforcing the tribesmen.30 November 1947:Large concentrations of insurgents were reported at Sialkot, Gujrat and Jhelum.December 1947:Liaquat Ali Khan visited the Azad staging areas in the Sialkot District and was enraged by the reports of atrocities narrated by the Azad rebels.He issued a renewed call to arms.4 December 1947:The British Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army sanctioned military involvement in the Kashmir War.One million rounds of ammunition and twelve volunteer officers were provided.8 December 1947:A meeting between Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan, along with ministers and Lord Mountbatten, was deadlocked.Mountbatten proposed that the UN be invited to break the deadlock.15 December 1947 – 20 December 1947:Indian forces lost ground and Nehru contemplated escalating the war across the international border to strike against the raider's bases, but decides against it.20 December 1947:Mountbatten recommended India take the matter to the UN, where he says it would have a "cast-iron case".He believed the UN would promptly direct Pakistan to withdraw.The proposal was discussed in the Indian Cabinet.22 December 1947:Nehru handed Liaquat Ali Khan a formal letter demanding that Pakistan deny assistance to the raiders.24 December 1947:Indian forces were evicted from Jhangar by rebels.(Jhangar represented by the red icon in above two maps)However, the Indian army repelled the attack on Nowshera by 27 December. India reinforced Kashmir by an additional brigade.27 December 1947:British Commonwealth Minister Philip Noel-Baker considered it a "political miscalculation" by India that the UN Security Council would condemn Pakistan as an aggressor.28 December 1947 – 30 December 1947:Mountbatten: stop the fighting and to stop it as soon as possible.Prime Minister Attlee: opening a broader war would jeopardise India's case in the UN.Britain alerted the US. and US demanded clarifications from the Indian government.31 December 1947:India referred the Kashmir problem to the UN Security Council.(UN assembly)31 December 1947:The British Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO) asked its permanent representative at the UN, Alexander Cadogan, about the validity of Indian claims.Cadogan responded that India was entitled to charge Pakistan as an aggressor under Article 35 and to take measures for self-defence under Article 51, including "pursuing invaders into Pakistan".1948:(UN assembly)UN Security Council considered the Kashmir problem.January 1948:'Balawaristan' insurrection in Gilgit by the local people but put down by forces.2 January 1948:The British Cabinet decided to send minister Philip Noel-Baker to Kashmir.on 10th Jan, Noel-Baker put forward the British proposals to the US State Department but failed to win US support for these proposals.15 January 1948:India and Pakistan made presentations to the UNSC.India reiterated its demands in the original referral.17 January 1948:UN Security Council passed Resolution 38 :20 January 1948:UN Security Council passed Resolution 39 :January 1948:Noel-Baker won the support of the Western powers i.e the US, Canada and France.for the Pakistani position that the raiders cannot be withdrawn without a change of government in Kashmir.Draft resolutions were formulated along the lines of the 10 January proposals.February–April 19483 February 1948:India🇮🇳 requested an adjournment of the Security Council discussions.The Indian Cabinet was said to be in favour of what Swami Ji said.Subramanian Swamy: India should withdraw illegal petition ...9 February 1948 – 11 February 1948:Gilgit rebels attacked Skardu. The State forces at Skardu defended it for almost six months afterwards.No reinforcements were possible due to closure of the Zoji La pass by winter snows.The Ladakhis appealed to Nehru for help.12 February 1948:Security Council discussions were adjourned.😃7 March 1948:A small group of Indian troops crossed through the treacherous Zoji La pass, reaching Leh with guns and ammunition to raise a local volunteer force.10 March 1948: :Security Council deliberations resumed.18 March 1948:The Republic of China tabled a resolution in three parts:Pakistan to withdraw the raiders.India appoint a plebiscite administration with UN-nominated directors,India broadens the interim government with representatives from all major political groups.21 March 1948:UN Security Council passed Resolution 47:The UN Commission was named United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP).Pakistan rejected the resolution but promised to work with the Commission.May 194810 May 1948:Operation Sledge — Four columns of insurgents struck Indian lines of communication at Gund, Pandras, Dras and Kargil.except Gund rest 3 were captured.🇮🇳22 May 1948:India established an air link to Leh.1 November 1948:Zoji La 🇮🇳pass was taken back by India.😍15 November 1948:Dras 🇮🇳 was recaptured.😍23 November 1948:Kargil 🇮🇳was recaptured.😍14 December 1948: A major attack was made by the regular Pakistan army on the Indian line of communications at Beripattan-Nowshera.19491 January 1949:A ceasefire between India and Pakistan.India: Kashmir Valley, most of the Jammu province and Ladakh,while Pakistan gained control of POK, the Gilgit Agency and Baltistan.1949:Jammu Praja Parishad launched an agitation. 294 members of the party were arrested.20 June 1949:Maharaja Hari Singh announced his decision to abdicate and appointed his son Karan Singh as the Prince Regent.17 October 1949:The Indian Constituent Assembly adopted Article 370:At the end of the year, Jihadist rhetoric inflamed Pakistan and continued into 1951.1951June 1951:India moved troops to the India–Pakistan border in response to the rhetoric from Pakistan.September 1951 – October 1951:75 seats allocated to the Indian-administered part of Kashmir and 25 seats reserved for the Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir.October 1951:Jammu Praja Parishad became an affiliate of the newly founded Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the precursor of the Bharatiya Janata Party.Shri Shyama Prasad Mukharjee 🙏 started Bharatiya Jana Sangh on 21 October 1951 in Delhi, with the collaboration of the RSS.November 1951:The Constituent Assembly passed legislation stripping the Maharaja of all powers and making the government answerable to the Assembly.January 1952 – June 1952:Jammu Praja Parishad(JPP) renewed agitation and called for the full integration of the state with India.The army was called to impose order and several hundred activists were imprisoned.Jana Sangh and other Hindu nationalist parties staged a demonstration outside the Indian Parliament in support of the Praja Parishad.1952January 1952 – June 1952:July 1952:🇮🇳Sheikh Abdullah signed the Delhi Agreement with the Indian government which provided for the autonomy of the State within India and the autonomy for regions within the State.🇮🇳November 1952:The Constituent Assembly adopted a resolution abolished the monarchyJPP relaunched its agitation campaign for a third time.The Jana Sangh and other Hindu nationalist parties launched a parallel agitation in Delhi, which supported the Praja Parishad.1953May 1953:Jana Sangh leader Syama Prasad Mukherjee made a bid to enter Jammu and Kashmir, citing his rights as an Indian citizen. He was promptly arrested at the Jammu border. In a widespread agitation in Jammu, Punjab and Delhi, 10,000 activists were imprisoned.Abdullah headed a subcommittee of the National Conference which recommended 4 options for the state's future, all involving a plebiscite or independence.23 June 1953:Syama Prasad Mukherjee died in prison. Large protests were held in Delhi and other parts of the country.Death Of Shyama Prasad Mukharjee Is Still A Mystery.August 1953:Nehru pushed for a plebiscite in talks with Pakistan, and the two countries agreed to appoint a Plebiscite Administrator within six months.A plebiscite would be held in all regions and the state partitioned on the basis of the results.1954February 1954:🇮🇳The Constituent Assembly, under the leadership of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, passed a resolution ratifying the accession of Kashmir to India.🇮🇳May 1954:Pakistan and the US signed a mutual defence assistance agreement.Nehru withdrew the plebiscite offer to Pakistan.1955–1957August 1955:Sheikh Abdullah's lieutenant Mirza Afzal Beg formed the Plebiscite Front to fight for the plebiscite demand.17 November 1956:🇮🇳The state Constituent Assembly adopted a constitution for the state which declared it an integral part of the Indian Union.🇮🇳🙏Many Resolutions prove J&K is an integral part of India. 🇮🇳🇮🇳24 January 1957:The UN Security Council passed Resolution 122 :8 August 1958:Sheikh Abdullah was arrested in the Kashmir Conspiracy Case.Kashmir Conspiracy Case was the legal case filed by Government of Kashmir and Investigation by the Government of India:Abdullah along with Mirza Afzal Beg and 22 others, who were accused of conspiracy against the state for allegedly espousing the cause of an independent Kashmir.1959–19621959:The 1959 Tibetan uprising or the 1959 Tibetan rebellion began on 10 March 1959, when a revolt erupted in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, which had been under the effective control of the People's Republic of China since the Seventeen Point Agreement was reached in 1951.Armed conflict between Tibetan guerillas and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had started in 1956 in the Kham and Amdo regions, which had been subjected to socialist reform.The guerrilla warfare later spread to other areas of Tibet and lasted through 1962.China annexed Tibet.Tensions rose between China and India on the issue of the boundary between Tibet and India, especially in Aksai Chin.1962: Indo-China War (Sino-Indian War)India claims that China has occupied approximately 38,000 sq. kms. area of Jammu Kashmir by constructing a road connecting Tibet and Xinjiang around 1957.On the “Aksai chin issue” China and India fought a brief war in 1962 but in 1993 and 1996, both countries signed agreements to respect the Line of Actual Control(LAC).1963–1969March 1963:The Chinese government signed an agreement with Pakistan on the boundary between the Northern Areas and the Xinjiang province, ceding the Trans-Karakoram Tract.8 April 1964:The Nehru government dropped all charges in the Kashmir Conspiracy Case.Sheikh Abdullah was released after 11 years.21 November 1964 – 24 November 1964:Articles 356 and 357 of the Indian Constitution were extended to the State, by virtue of which the Central Government can assume the government of the State and exercise its legislative powers.The State Assembly then amended the State Constitution, changing the posts of:Sadr-i-Riyasat to Governor and "prime minister" to"chief minister", consistent with the Indian Constitution.Scholar Sumantra Bose regarded it the "end of the road" for Article 370 and the constitutional autonomy guaranteed by it.Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 started.The war began after Pakistan's Operation Gibraltar.In this operation, Pakistan wanted to bring forces into Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir to conquer the area of Kashmir ruled by India.Result:United Nations-mandated ceasefire.India Won.Indian forces gain 360-500 sq. km. of Pakistani territory on the outskirts of Lahore1966:On 10 January, the Tashkent Declaration was signed by both countries, agreeing to revert to their pre-1965 positions under Russian mediation.Pakistan-supported guerrilla groups in Kashmir increased their activities after the ceasefire.Kashmiri nationalists Amanullah Khan and Maqbool Bhat formed another Plebiscite Front with an armed the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front (JKNLF).(Amanullah Khan (JKLF), Maqbool Bhat and JKLF)1971:26 March 1971:The Bangladesh Liberation War started.15 May:Indian army starts aiding Mukti Bahini.16 December:End of the Bangladesh Liberation War.East Pakistan Army surrenders to Mitro Bahini represented by Jagjit Singh Aurora of the Indian Army faction of the military coalition.93,000 Pak troops surrendered to India leading to the creation of Bangladesh.1972:Simla Pact:2 July 1972:Indira released over 90,000 prisoners of war (PoW) instead of resolving the Kashmir dispute "in lieu of the PoW.India missed 'golden opportunity' to resolve the Kashmir dispute in 1971 war.paved the way for diplomatic recognition of Bangladesh by Pakistan.The agreement converted the cease-fire line of 17 December 1971 into the Line of Control (LOC) between India and Pakistan.1976:Maqbool Bhat was arrested on his return to Kashmir.1979:The USSR invaded Afghanistan.The US and Pakistan became involved in training, recruiting, arming, and unleashing the Mujahideen on Afghanistan.The Mujahideen so recruited would, in the late 1980s, take on their own agenda of establishing Islamic rule in Kashmir.8 September 1982:Sheikh Abdullah died. His son, Farooq Abdullah, later assumed office as Chief Minister of J&K.1984:Ravindra Mhatre👇, an Indian diplomat in Birmingham, was kidnapped and killed 😔by JKLF's UK arm the Kashmir Liberation Army (KLA).India executed Maqbool Bhat.Amanullah Khan and Hashim Qureshi were expelled from the UK and returned to Pakistan.Pakistan's (ISI) sought their help in preparing the groundwork for the liberation of Jammu and Kashmir from India.Amanullah Khan established JKLF in POK.13 April 1984:Operation Meghdoot: The Indian Army took the Siachen Glacier region of Kashmir.1987:Farooq Abdullah won the Assembly elections.The Muslim United Front (MUF) alleged that the elections had been rigged.MUF’s election aides called the HAJY group - Abdul Hamid Shaikh, Ashfaq Majid Wani, Javed Ahmed Mir and Mohammed Yasin Malik - joined the JKLF.Young disaffected Kashmiris in the Valley such as the HAJY group were recruited by JKLF.1988:Protests and anti-India demonstrations began in the Valley, followed by police firing and curfew.1989:Mass Exodus of Kashmiri Hindus started in Kashmir Valley.The Hindus of the Kashmir Valley were forced to flee the Kashmir valley as a result of being targeted by JKLF and Islamist insurgents during late 1989 and early 1990.The end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan released a great deal of militant energy and weapons to Kashmir.Pakistan provided arms and training to both indigenous and foreign militants in Kashmir.1990Kashmiri Pandits began to leave in much greater numbers in the 1990s during the eruption of militancy, following persecution and threats by radical Islamists and militants.19 January 1990:Mosques issued declarations that the Kashmiri Pandits were Kafirs and that the males had to leave Kashmir, convert to Islam or be killed.approximately 100,000 of the total Kashmiri Pandit population of 140,000 left the valley during the 1990s.Other authors have suggested a higher figure for the exodus, ranging from the entire population of over 150,000, to 190,000 of a total Pandit population of 200,000, to a number as high as 800,000.Kashmiri Pandits Became Refugees in Their Own Home.(Refugee camps for Kashmiri Pandits)13 February 1990:Lassa Kaul, director of Srinagar Doordarshan, was Killed by the militants for implementing pro-Indian media policy.February 1990 – March 1990:Though the JKLF tried to explain that the killings of Pandits were not communal, the murders caused a scare among the minority Hindu community.The rise of new militant groups and unexplained killings of members of the community contributed to an atmosphere of insecurity for the Kashmiri Pandits.1 March 1990:An estimated one million took to the streets to protest against India.1990 – present:An officially estimated 10,000 Kashmiri youths crossed into Pakistan for training and procurement of arms.Indigenous and foreign militant groups besides pro-India renegade militants proliferated through the 1990s with an estimated half a million Indian security forces deployed in the Kashmir Valley.1998 – present:Operation Sadbhavana (Goodwill) launched officially by the Indian army in Jammu and Kashmir.3 May 1999 – 26 July 1999:Kargil War:the infiltration of Pakistani soldiers and Kashmiri militants into positions on the Indian side of the LOC was the reason for war.An armed conflict took place between May and July 1999 in the Kargil district of Kashmir and elsewhere along the LOC.Israel aided India with mortar and ammunition and became one of the few countries that helped India directly.India won.2001–200914 July 2001 – 16 July 2001:General Pervez Musharraf and Atal Bihari Vajpayee met for peaceful talks.October 2001:Kashmiri assembly in Srinagar was attacked, 38 fatalities.December 2001:The Indian Parliament in New Delhi was attacked.April 2003 – May 2003:Operation Sarp Vinash launched by the Indian army.The largest network of terrorist hideouts covering 100 square kilometers in Pir Panjal found and more than 60 terrorists killed.2 May 2003:India and Pakistan restored diplomatic ties.Feb 13, 2006:Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday invited Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front chief Yasin Malik for talks on Kashmir on February 17.22 August 2008:Following 2008 Kashmir unrest, hundreds of thousands of Muslims marched in Srinagar for independence, the largest protest against Indian rule in over a decade.2010–201812 Feb 2013, Congress-led UPA Govt. funded Yasin malik to talk with Pakistan.Manmohan wanted to contact militants of Pak: Yasin.25 November 2014 – 20 December 2014:Despite boycott calls by separatist Hurriyat leaders, the 2014 state election saw the highest voter turnout in the 25 years since insurgency erupted in the region.Kashmiri people voted in favour of democracy of India.Bharatiya Janata Party won 25 seats with vote share of 23%.8 July 2016:Following the killing of Burhan Muzaffar Wani on 8 July, violent protests broke out in Kashmir Valley.An imposed curfew continued for more than 50 days.Two lakh across Valley attend Burhan Wani's funeral.July 2017 – present -Operation All-Out started by Indian Army to flush out militants and terrorists in Kashmir until there is complete peace in the state.2019–20 Jammu and Kashmir lockdown:23 Feb 2019:Yasin Malik arrested under Anti-Terror law.Revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir via scrapping of the Article 370 of the Constitution of India, Article 35A of the Constitution of India and the introduction of Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019.According to a September 6 report, More than 200 separatist politicians, with more than 100 leaders and activists from All Parties Hurriyat Conference were detained in the disputed region.Thanks, Modi Ji🇮🇳🙏 for making our dream “Revocation of Article 370 and 35A” come true.“Knowledge shared matters”.Share Answer.Upvote inspires.Jai Hind.🇮🇳

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