Abstract
Russian intellectuals’ active interest in Indian history, society, religions and culture goes back to over a century and some of the most significant debates on these themes have originated with them. Professor Eugenia Vanina is foremost among the present-day generation of Russian historians of India, especially medieval India and even as her very impressive, well researched contributions have ranged from crafts and craftsmen, communal relations, historiography and intellectual history, this study surpasses them all in its conceptual grandeur and depth of research. The theme is clearly inspired by the watershed work of the outstanding Russian historian of medieval Europe, late Aaron Gurevich’s Categories of Medieval Culture (1984/85) which had explored nearly the same themes and two other books, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (1988) and Medieval World: The Culture of the Mute Majority (1990, still untranslated from Russian). However, Vanina scrupulously refrains from implanting the European analytical categories on to the Indian data, like many historians of feudalism in India do; instead she looks at these notions in the Indian context not as replicas of the European archetypes but quite autonomously of these. Vanina has in several of her writings long argued for a ‘medieval world’ in terms of values and mindsets; she is quite happy to use the term ‘feudal’ as the equivalent of ‘medieval’ so long as one’s perspective comprises these values and mindsets. It is not for her a ‘mode of production’.
Vanina has elected to look at medieval Indian society not in terms of class or caste structure—though that too is discussed at length—but ‘from a different perspective of cultural mindscapes’, in order to ‘reconstruct major values and mental stereotypes that were inalienable to [medieval Indians] worldview and were recorded in written sources’ (pp. 7–10). The sources for this reconstruction comprise bardic poems, hero-stories and ballads, hagiographies, clan origin myths, etc. hitherto dismissed as fiction. Indeed the sources she has utilized are immensely more extensive than these and the languages in which these are found comprise the veritable list of major Indian languages—Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu, besides Persian, English, French and of course her native Russian.
In exploring the notion of Space, Vanina goes through the whole gamut of visions and
emaphasizes the reciprocal character of relationship between human endeavour and nature.
‘Believing that every element was connected one to another, it was also possible
to conclude that violating one element would adversely affect the whole system’
(p. 35). It was the human habitat that lent beauty to the environment. ‘[T]he
Gokul village, the Yamuna River, forests and hills of Vrindavan were beautiful because
Krishna lived there; he left this area and all beauty fades’ (p. 38). Reminds one
of Ghalib’s verse:
har yak makān ko hai makīn se sharf Asad
Majnūn jo mar gayā hai to jangal udās
hai
Every habitat obtains its glory from its resident The forest is sad ever since Majnūn has departed
Vanina then engages in a fascinating discussion of the notions of India, Bharat, Hindustan (pp. 42–57). Always seen as ‘several countries, a conglomerate of regions and states’ (p. 44 emphasis in the original), the notion of India as one country is really the contribution of the national movement in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. Indeed, there is no indigenous term either for India or even for country. Bharat leaves out all of India south of the Vindhyas and much of the west, east and north-east from its purview. Hindustan comes from the Persian language and is again used for the Gangetic plains. Indeed, Babur even coins the plural Hindustānāt for these plains. And dèsh has come to denote country again only in the context of the national movement; prior to it, the term only meant the village or town of one’s birth; a few miles’ distance from it took you to pardès, construed as foreign land. But absence of the clear identity of one’s ‘country’ until the twentieth century was not exclusive to India. Fernand Braudel’s two-volume L’Identité de la France virtually opens with the question: Is France one country and goes on to explore how the identity of France as a single country, nation and even society fully evolved only in the twentieth century, especially with the invention of the radio and later on television. Even now, inhabitants of Bretagne sometimes assert a separate, non-French identity for themselves.
Vanina also formulates a very interesting concept of ‘folk region, each characterized by a certain physical, geographical and economic complex, social hierarchy headed by the dominant landholding caste, local dialect and local cult’ (p. 48).
After Space, Vanina explores the theme of Time. There is a long discussion of the rather old theme of cyclical vs linear time and Vanina’s own intervention in it is of a very high and engaging quality. She discusses the notion of a historicity implicit in cyclical time, especially takes on Vinay Lal’s lauding of it as a self-defence mechanism, questions the celebrated argument of Narayan Rao, David Schulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam on redefining historical time as ‘texture’ rather than as an empirical reality and strongly endorses the notion of historical consciousness in medieval India. She then engages in a very interesting discussion of historical causality in medieval India and affirms a ‘certain historicity corresponding to the criteria of not our present, but the medieval epoch’ (p. 100). The qualification is somewhat defensive. The notion of search for the objective truth hidden in history given to us by positivism as the criterion of ‘our present’ is now somewhat under strain; there is a lot that history reveals to us but ‘the’ objective truth forever remains elusive. Still on Time, Vanina traces ‘significant changes in both the Hindu and Muslim authors’ views of history in late medieval India. These changes signified, first, the growing understanding of time and changeability of social conditions and values’ (p. 116). One did not really have to wait until the late medieval ages to appreciate changes wrought by time in society. The reason why historian Zia Barani wrote his marvellous books in middle of fourteenth century was because, for him, not only had times changed from the glorious days of the prophet and his four pious caliphs, but indeed, things ‘must’ change. It is however when the change is doing the horrible thing of bringing in all those ‘low-born’ people into higher nobility that the desirable limits of change were being crossed and Barani sought to arrest these with his didactic writings.
The third theme deals with Society, where Vanina seeks to ‘reconstruct the social image of major groups of medieval Indian society and to redefine the set of values’ (p. 127). Here she looks at caste as an estate, constantly changing temporally and spatially. Indeed, the idea of a rigid caste system was a construction of colonialism—on this she draws upon the work of several other scholars. This is followed by a longish discussion of the medieval Indian code of chivalry and loyalty, mainly drawn from normative or literary texts. The result is a somewhat stylized version. Vanina then divides the rest of the chapter to dealing with separate groups: People of the Sword; People of the qalam; and People of the Bazaar. Fascinating discussion, but inclined towards the normative. Perhaps a checklist of real-life characters and events would have demonstrated the vulnerability of this version. That a Rajput would lay down his life for his master without a moment’s thought is part of folklore; that history records their acts of betrayal equally without a moment’s hesitation makes them more human, people like us.
The final chapter on Man engages in a very appealing exploration of the identity of the individual in the midst of his identity as part of a group—family, caste, community, whatever.
Vanina’s engagement with these absolutely scintillating themes is a testimony to her capacity to think big, supported by an astonishing amount of learning. Some features of her earlier work have been articulated in this one more forcefully. She has for long envisioned a shared medieval ethos across human societies, even though her area of study is by and large confined to India and Europe. The values, the modes of thinking, the modes of behaviour, even literary styles have, in her long-held view, been common to medieval societies, which she is happy to call feudal. She has constantly sought to highlight this shared ‘mindscape’ in this magnificent book. Implied in it is a fairly clear distinction between the medieval and the modern, although the temporal boundaries of both remain fuzzy. I am not the only one who has had reservations about the usefulness of the term ‘feudal’ in the past; today, even the distinction between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ is under serious interrogation and not in terms of time period alone. The interrogation also involves the neat divide between the medieval and modern mindscapes. Aren’t these our own creations?