Abstract
I
It is always interesting to read text books on South Asian histories framed for under graduate students produced in milieus where its study is taken very seriously but without being imbricated in the national politics which mires text book writing in the subcontinent. This review considers three well known text books, at least two of some vintage and a third, of Ishita Dube, a more recent intervention.
Thomas R. Trautmann’s India: A Brief History of A Civilization is an introductory text that hopes to acquaint newcomers with the ‘mental map of the history of Indian civilization as a whole’ (p. x), by striking a balance between complex historical interpretations and providing for appropriate chronological overview. This, Trautmann hopes, will encourage students to approach more advanced textbooks on Indian civilization with fewer reservations. The chapter outline is intriguing as the first eight chapters focus on the first four thousand years, and the last four chapters depict the last one thousand years. This is deliberately done to show that the early period of Indian civilization has an ongoing presence and agency in the construction of the present and the future of South Asia. Also interesting is Trautmann’s attempt at providing a comparative perspective between Indian civilization and other civilizations and nations over time, which would be helpful to new students in making sense of linkages and deviations that existed within this lengthy period. Though each chapter offers a basic historical outline of political events, the emphasis is more on development of various religious and cultural formations, outlined mainly through a detailed examination of literary and linguistic sources, which are then used to formulate an ethnological view of the changing social structures and knowledge production systems across time. Particularly interesting are Chapters 5, 6 and 7, which draw heavily from Trautmann’s own previous works on kinship structures and linguistic analysis, that determine the mentality of the early part of Indian civilization. However, the reader feels that the author could have provided an additional chapter on medieval India with a greater emphasis on the religious eclecticism that was characteristic of this period and had longstanding impact on both Islam and Hinduism in India. In fact, the unique perspective that the author presents in the initial chapters, falters heavily from Chapter 9 onwards, and instead opts for a more traditional summarization of later periods of Indian civilization. Nonetheless, the section titled ‘Further Reading’ will provide students with sufficient references to satiate their curiosity concerning themes that interest them.
Historians Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose’s co-written book, Modern South Asia, is another suitable introductory work that aims to cover the broad historical spectrum of modern South Asia. The book is now in its third edition since its first publication in 1997, and has been updated to incorporate new historical scholarship and historiography. Both Jalal and Bose have previously worked extensively on the historical role of communalism and nationalism in the shaping of various political trajectories within the Indian subcontinent. Therefore, readers are introduced to a South Asian history within which exist contending visions of nationhood based on common but blurred boundaries, determined heavily by communitarian and religious ideologies. This influence shows up most prominently in the second half of the book, particularly in the chapters concerning the Partition and post-colonial South Asia. Here, these events are not represented as departing points for separate national histories but rather as a chance to explore and compare the post-colonial states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. However, because of the book’s major focus on politics, economy and religion, it falls short in adequately including the roles of gender, tribal groups, caste communities, labour unions, and even environment, in shaping the histories of these nation states. As new histories and perspectives are being brought into focus, it is necessary that an introductory text on modern South Asia should make more of an effort to include these highly marginalized voices, which would complement the historical study of nationhood and identity formation in South Asia from antiquity to modern times. Nonetheless, the book has an extremely helpful bibliography full of rich secondary sources and a few primary archives, organized around the chapters of the book that would encourage students to pursue more advanced works on South Asia.
Ishita Banerjee-Dube’s A History of Modern India maintains a more exclusive focus on the modern period of Indian history. Like most accounts of the history of modern India, Ishita Banerjee-Dube’s book also begins with the decline of the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century up to the time of Indian independence from British colonial rule. Dube mentions that her focus is to ‘convey a sense of plurality of pasts’ (p. xiv) that allow for a diversity of perspectives in the understanding of social and cultural histories of Modern India. Within the book, there are generous insights into issues of gender, caste, tribal, and other subaltern identities in contributing to ideas of Indian nationalism and modernity. This book also very adequately covers relevant historiographical debates in an easy to understand manner for students who might not be familiar with specialized readings on Indian history. For example, in Chapter 7, Dube discusses in depth Gandhi’s ideologies concerning nation and civilization, whilst offering equally rich insights into feminist readings of Gandhi’s ambivalent attitude towards women and sexuality. Throughout its eleven chapters, the book does not just confine itself to historical trends in Bengal, but also focuses on regions like Maharashtra, Travancore, Punjab, Odisha and Madras Presidency, something that is missed out in both Trautmann, and Bose and Jalal’s works. Among all three books, Dube’s is the most impressive in terms of visual and textual aids, due to the inclusion of varied images, citations, references at the end of each chapter, detailed chronological tables and updated maps, which would be extremely useful for students who are new to the study of Indian history. However, the reader feels that Dube could have also devoted some more space to relevant issues pertaining to Indian economic history such as the significant impact of the two World Wars and the Depression on the Indian economy, and the important changes in industrial and commercial policy of India in the early twentieth century. In addition, the book lacks a contextualization of Indian history against the background of a new post-colonial terrain of modern South Asia and rise of new competing nation states of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In post-colonial India, histories of these nations also matter for a better grasp of a shared colonial past as well as a broader understanding of civilizational histories of the Indian subcontinent.
The authors of the reviewed books have consistently mentioned that their respective works are meant to attract those students who are interested in the history of South Asia but might be unfamiliar with the basic chronological outline and historiographies. Consequently, these books contain plenty of illustrations, photographs, map guides and extensive bibliographies, to help new students access a more specialized understanding of the region concerned. History students at Indian universities might feel an advantage as modern Indian history is an essential part of the curriculum of Indian schools. However, a major struggle for those teaching history at graduate level in Indian universities is getting such students to unlearn this ‘schooled history’ (in recent times, the history curriculum in schools has become a frequently contested political site) and introducing them to a more plural interpretation of the past. Sumit Sarkar’s Modern India: 1885–1947 and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India have long been preferred as suitable textbooks for introducing students at Indian universities to a more complex image of modern Indian history through their discussions on various methodologies and historiographies. On the other hand, the extremely long chapters and minimal visual/textual aids of these books can cause many students to lose interest easily. In contrast, the three books that have been reviewed here contain shorter chapters with more crisp content, and are organized in a way that moves away from the traditional chronological format of presenting Modern Indian history. These books are valuable also for questioning histories of nationhood, and bring to light those aspects that tend to be subsumed in favour of a particular account of India and South Asia.
It might seem that newcomers to Indian history are at a disadvantage to those in India who have been already schooled in India’s past. But as discussed above, this familiarity may not necessarily be an advantage as this kind of historical understanding tends to be extremely narrow and a frequent object of political manipulations. As Marc Bloch has himself said, history is a ‘thing in movement’ and therefore fixing an idea of the past to one standard narrative would be equivalent to denying its agency in influencing the present and future. The aim of these books is then to not only familiarize students with the historical landscape of South Asian/Indian history, but also to encourage them to think of the past as a heterogeneous entity that incorporates diverse historical interpretations with a constant presence in their daily lives. While the politics of the nation might be well questioned in all their narratives, less explicit in all their renderings (with the possible exception of Trautmann) is the politics of their specialization: ancient, medieval and modern periodizations of Indian history have their origins in the First World readings of India’s pasts. A self-reflexive discussion on colonial modernity while discussing Indian history is critical while writing a history of India, especially for a readership quite oblivious to the meaning or experience of ‘colonialism’.