Historiography of South Asia Research Paper

1. Historiography Of Ancient India

1.1 Historical Traditions In Ancient India

Compared to classical Europe, ancient India was rather deficient in historical traditions. The Hindu mythological texts called the Puranas (circa first to fourteenth century) contained geneological lists of Indian dynasties. These lists, by way of narrating the achievements of the kings, also recorded rudimentary information about wars, conquests, and the rise and fall of empires. A very small number of works chronicle the history of individual kings and dynasties. Of these, the most famous is Kalhana’s Rajatarangini (Stein 1900), a history of the Kashmir princes. Incidentally, the author recognized one historical principle, namely, that the historian must try to be unbiased in his/her judgment, ‘like a judge.’

The Buddhists and Jains developed a tradition of sacred history, especially hagiographies centered on the life-stories of their founders. Some of the stories concerning the Buddha, like the account of his death (Mahaparini ana-sutta, Bongard-Levin 1986) bear the stamp of authenticity.

1.2 European Scholarship On Ancient India

In the nineteenth century, European scholars like Pargiter tried to reconstruct the dynastic history of ancient India using the Puranic lists, inscriptions, coins, archaeological remains, and foreign accounts of India like those of Alexander’s historians and the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims. European Orientalists also tried to reconstruct the religious and social history of India, using religious texts and the smritis, normative writings laying down the rules by which the Brahminical Hindu was expected to live in matters both ritualistic and secular (like inheritance and punishment for crimes). They also undertook the massive task of publishing critical editions of religious texts which laid the foundation for serious work on religious, cultural, and social history. A large number of German, French, and East European scholars have contributed to this enterprise.

1.3 Historiography Of Ancient India: The Indian Contribution

A large body of Indian scholars started research on ancient Indian history following the lead of the European scholars. Their work was heavily focused on archaeological evidence, especially the study of inscriptions. The archaeological work, by Europeans and Indians, helped move back the known beginning of civilization in South Asia to about 3000 BC through the discovery of the Indus valley civilization. The work of the Indian Indologists also reflected the new-found nationalistic pride in the glories of ancient India. Some of it focused on traditions of democratic oligarchic politics and developed statecraft to challenge the notion that these were European imports into India. However, the central concern of the earlier work was with the meticulous reconstruction of dynastic history, especially the correct chronology. Some scholars like R. K. Mukherji and R. C. Majumdar did research on the history of Indian cultural influence in south-east Asia and invented the now discarded notion of Greater India.

1.4 ‘Orientalism’: A Controversy

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1995), which projects the view that western scholarship on Asia projected the notion of an inferior ‘other’ of Europe and thus reflected the new relationships of power generated by imperialism, has had a seminal influence on the historical work on South Asia (since 1980) even though Said’s primary point of reference was the Middle East. The controversy generated by this work has drawn attention to the many strands of Orientalist studies in the West and to the fact that French and German studies of South Asia do not project any unquestioned superiority. For ancient India, the controversy has led to more research on western historiography than to any reorientation in exploration of substantive themes.

1.5 Indology After World War II

The post-World War II historiography of ancient India has moved away from these earlier preoccupations and, under the influence of Marxism as well as anthropology, concerned itself with discovering structures like feudalism and patterns of large-scale social change over time. The writings of D. D. Kasambi (1965), R. S. Sharma (1990), Romila Thapar et al. (1990) are prime examples of this initiative. The multivolume History and Culture of the Indian People edited by R. C. Majumdar (1951–1969) reflects a more traditional approach, while Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus (1972) applies Levi-Strauss’ structural analysis to the study of the caste system.

2. Historiography Of The Indo-Islamic Period

The thirteenth century saw Turkish and Afghan dynasties and tribes, Muslims by faith, firmly established as rulers in many parts of India. The sultanate based in Delhi, where there was a succession of dynasties, became the seat of a pan-Indian empire with fluctuating boundaries. These dynasties were succeeded by the Mughals or Timurids in the sixteenth century and their effective rule lasted until the late eighteenth century. This long period, marked by the encounter between the older Indian civilization and the religion and culture of Central Asia’s Islamic peoples, has been the subject matter of a rich historical literature.

2.1 The Medieval Persian Chronicles

India’s central Asian invaders brought with them a rich tradition of historiography. This literature, written mostly in Persian, is known as tarikhs, a term, translated as annals. The tarikhs are narratives of dynastic successions, wars and conquests. Some of the writers had leanings towards Islamic fundamentalism and hence were inclined to present the wars of the Muslim invaders and Hindu dynasts as jihad or ‘holy’ wars. These accounts were later used by some British writers to project the Indo-Islamic era as an age of Muslim tyranny. This perception informed the ideology of India’s proto-nationalism, which saw the struggle of the Rajput clans and other Hindu chiefs to retain their territories as the Hindu struggle for independence. However, chronicles provide ample evidence of a pragmatic bent in the policies of the Muslim kings, anxious not to alienate their Hindu subjects. The historians at the court of the third Mughal emperor Akbar, project his policy of peace with all, which was not to the liking of the more orthodox elements at his court. One component of the historical literature of the period is the memoirs written by the emperors, Babar and Jahangir and by Babar’s daughter, Gulbadan. These sensitively written accounts offer a portrait of the age and the family life of the Mughals.

2.2 Regional Histories

The Indo-Islamic era also produced a rich and varied body of historical writings written in the regional languages. Best known among these are the Marathi bakhars, modeled on the Persian tarikhs, the chronicles of the Ahom kings of Assam, known as buranjis, and the Madla Panji retained in Orissan temples which recorded the annals of the local dynasties. Besides these, the Vaishnavas in Bengal produced a body of hagiographical literature celebrating the lives of their founder, Chaitanya and other pioneers of the movement. All these products of the period have been later used to reconstruct the history of the period.

2.3 Colonial And Post-Colonial Historiography Of The Indo-Islamic Era

The earliest ‘modern’ historical writings on the IndoIslamic era go back to the nineteenth century. Works like Orme’s History of Indostan are amateur efforts focused on the political history of the period. The famous collection of selected source material, translations from the Persian chronicles, Eliot and Dawson’s History of India as told by her own Historians (1981), contain introductions which are essentially historical statements. One of the compiler’s stated objects was to prove how very inferior ‘Muslim rule’ was compared to its British counterpart. In general histories of India, written by administrator–scholars like Vincent Smith (1981) the same concern to prove the superiority of British rule is less obviously present. It only appears as a view of Indian history which projects a long-term proneness towards political unification that finally succeeds only under the British. Such works contain an implicit evaluation of moral and material welfare of the people in pre-British times. The twentieth-century economic historian W. H. Moreland (1920) undertook a comparison between India at the death of emperor Akbar with conditions in the nineteenth century. Serious academic research on the Indo-Islamic era, based on the study of the chronicles as well as documentary evidence like the akhbars or newsletters of the Mughal period, belong to the twentieth century. It produced magnificent works of scholarship like Sir Jadunath Sarkar’s multi-volume histories of Aurangzeb and the later Mughals focused on political narratives. There were other studies dealing with the religious policies of the Mughals and art and architecture of the period. The burgeoning nationalist consciousness sought to emphasize the syncretist traditions of the Indo-Islamic era, implying that the conflict between communities was a product of British rule.

Since World War II, a major development in this field of study resulted from the work of a group of scholars based at Aligarh. Irfan Habib’s Agrarian System of Mughal India (2000), drawing upon a wide range of source material, was hailed as a path-breaking contribution to the study of agrarian history. The research of the Aligarh ‘school’ uses the methods of modern historiography and has drawn upon a vast quantity of new material. While some of the scholars subscribe to Marxist theories of history, the impact of Marxism is not very obvious in their work.

In recent years some Western historians have projected the view that the Mughal empire, like all its predecessors in India, was a ‘segmentary state’ under a thin veneer of centralization. This has led to a controversy with some of the Aligarh historians.

3. Historiography Of The Colonial Era

3.1 Colonial Historiography Under Colonial Rule

British historians writing in the colonial era produced a large body of works which recorded the history of the conquest, the wars with indigenous powers, and histories of the local powers like the Marathas, Sikhs, and Mysore with whom they had to contend for power. These histories are in the purely narrative mode, supplemented by ethnographic accounts of various elements in Indian society. They are informed by a simple assumption regarding the legitimacy and naturalness of the British conquest. One of the pioneers in the field, James Mill (Mill and Wilson 1997), writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century, first projected a clear notion of cultural and racial superiority, significantly absent from earlier British writings on India.

British writings in the latter half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century often assumed a defensive posture in response to the growing nationalist criticism of their rule, especially the charge that the colonial nexus had induced a drainage of resources from India, thus steadily impoverishing the country. British historians challenged this view and instead projected a picture of economic transformation and development as a result of colonial rule. This controversy has not yet died out. The British historiography of colonial rule before World War II almost entirely focused on the activities of the government. A number of studies dealt with individual viceroys. Some twentieth-century works briefly refer to the burgeoning nationalist movement (one historian described it under the heading ‘Political Sentiment’) but with one exception they dismissed it as a phenomenon not to be taken seriously until the very eve of the transfer of power. However, the British colonial historiography increasingly adopted the methods of modern research with its emphasis on ‘objective’ analysis of records. But since the records in question were for the most part products of the colonial government, the resulting research inevitably reflected the built-in bias of the documents, a bias which the historian generally shared. Indian historians, excepting those writing on economic history, rarely ventured into comments on the history of British rule. Exceptions to this pattern were the publicists writing on the rising of 1857 (one of whom described it as India’s First War of Independence) and authors who considered British rule to be beneficial for India. The strong ideological and political undertone manifest in the historiography of the colonial era has assumed more subtle forms in the post-colonial period.

3.2 Historiography Of Modern India After Decolonisation

Since the transfer of power in 1947, attention has shifted from the working of the British administration to the structure and dynamics of indigenous politics, though a number of monographs on the political history of the Raj, as well as its administrative and constitutional initiatives, were written during this period. Indian historians now came to be deeply concerned with the history of the Indian nationalist movement and its social–cultural origins. A group of historians approached the subject from the overt perspective of nationalism; others were influenced by Marxist class analysis and saw Indian nationalism as an expression of colonial bourgeois aspirations. A group of British historians centered at Cambridge explored the close relationship between British administrative and colonial initiatives on the one hand, and the structure and dynamics of indigenous politics on the other. The competition between those who were admitted to a share in power by the colonial ruler and those who were not was seen to be the central feature of indigenous politics. Nationalism itself was perceived to be a strategy reflecting the aspirations of the ‘havenots.’ This view was questioned by Indian historians who saw the thesis as a continuation of the old colonialist perception dismissing nationalism as a conspiracy of the self-seeking few. However, the thesis was directly, or indirectly, questioned outside India as well. A group of historians under the leadership of Professor Low of the Australian National University recognized the reality of Indian nationalism and proceeded to unravel its local and class roots. American scholars brought to the subject the insights of social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology. There were considerable developments in economic history, using economic theory as well as statistical methods. The new techniques were used to tackle the old questions regarding the negative or positive impact of colonialism. The debate, as noted, remains inconclusive. The inadequacy of statistical evidence is one reason for this state. It should be noted here that Indian historical research has now become an international enterprise to which the Japanese, Russian, and continental scholars have made significant contributions.

One major new development in the subject is centered on the series of publications entitled Subaltern Studies (Guha et al. 1988). Borrowing the concept of the Subaltern from the Italian Marxist, Gramsci, the contributors to this series have focused on the history of the underprivileged elements in South Asian society and used the post-modernist techniques of discourse analysis to unravel the autonomous consciousness of the dispossessed and the record of their resistance to exploitation and domination by the elite. This movement, too, has become an international enterprise with historians and social scientists from all parts of the anglophone world contributing to the Subaltern Studies.

Pakistani historians and their pre-independence predecessors who focused on the development of Muslim consciousness and aspirations in the subcontinent have been deeply influenced by the theory of two nations, the ideological basis of the demand for Pakistan. Their perception is in sharp contrast to the nationalist perception of co-existence and mutual accommodation between the major ethnic cultures of the region. The history of Sri Lanka, despite its many links with the civilization and society of the mainland, has been unjustifiably peripheral to the concerns of the historians of India. But there was a strong tradition of historiography in the region drawing, inter alia, on the Buddhist religious texts for the ancient period. Some of the products of this historiography are influenced by Marxist theories of history.

One marked feature of developments in the historiography of modern India is the diversification of its subject matter. History of art and its links with nationalist sentiment, women’s studies, and ecological history are some of the areas explored in recent years. This has helped bring the subject within the sphere of contemporary intellectual interest and brings to an end its intellectual isolation.

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