History in Early Indian Traditions: A Deconstructive Exploration into Inter-textuality

Questions

The widespread denial that early India provides evidence of a sense of history is a belief so entrenched even now that one almost hesitates to question it. This has been provoking Thapar for the last fifty years. She marks the beginnings of a fundamental shift in the perspective to the 1960s, when it was being suggested that it might be feasible to search for a sense of history in early India. She began a systematic inquiry in this direction with a distinction between how the past is to be understood and represented, and the perception of the past as specifically historical. She has written a book of rare insight to argue for ‘a denial of this denial of history’. Her arguments start with refuting the relevance of the initial denial, in light of the fact that ‘every society has a concept of the past and that no society is a-historical’ and that ‘every society sees its past in a particular way, which it may refer to as history or not, but which is relevant to understanding that society’. ³ According to Thapar, ‘many texts of early India reflect a consciousness of the past and they show how, over a period of time there came into existence varieties of texts with recognizable forms of history and historical writing’, ⁴ and that cultural symbols and stereotypes have a role in delineating the past, which accounts for the different genres of texts. The central argument is that ‘irrespective of the question of the presence or absence of historical writing as such, an understanding of the way in which the past is perceived, recorded, and used, affords insights into early Indian society, as it does for that matter into other early societies’. ⁵

In this sense, the history of every age has been a representation of contemporary consciousness. This precludes the colonial European sense of history, which had its contemporary consciousness too, from setting a universal norm. Are we justified in judging the historicity of early writing in the light of the criteria of what we now define as history, which is impermanent too? Just because the various texts of the past do not match the contemporary genre called history, can we, succumbing to the colonial prejudice, continue to deny the existence of historical consciousness in the past? The legitimacy of applying a contemporary sense of history is because the methods of investigation and inquiry have been considerably refined, and therefore it might be more meaningful to juxtapose today’s readings of the past with those that emerge from earlier times. Since historical consciousness has been taking different forms from time to time, our concern should not be only with assessing their historicity but also with analyzing them to understand if and why they were regarded as the equivalent of history. Can we insist that history in a text of the past has to be what we regard as history today?

Her question relates to how authors from the early past saw the past before them. She has ‘tried to refine what is meant by a sense of history in the context of early societies and locate its articulation in varied Indian texts from early India, at various times during the period c. 1000 B.C. to c. A.D. 1300’. In doing this, she was not attempting to broaden the current definition of history in order to accommodate forms of writing prevalent in early India. She has argued that what is included as history in the present day is in any case no longer limited to what it was in the nineteenth century, and many more forms are now seen as potentially or actually historical. ⁶ But Thapar is not legitimizing any or every claim to an indigenous reading of Indian history. The purpose of the book is to try and identify the forms that encapsulated a sense of history in early India and ascertain how they were defined.

No Exception Anywhere

Failing to locate in early India anything comparable to the Greco-Roman historical texts, the Chinese chronicles, Arab writings or even the Biblical genealogies, colonial Europe popularized the axiom that Indian society denied history. Thapar exposes this distinction by lucidly arguing that the classical Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Renaissance European and Islamic traditions of history were all composed of diverse strands. She refers to recent analytical studies of Greek and Roman historiography, which suggest that, in their representations of the past, history and fiction were often interwoven. It is untrue that the classical Hellenic civilization distinguished between the mythologizing historiography and the real historiography. Thapar quotes Paul Veyne, Arnaldo Momigliano and particularly W. den Boer, who argue that it is difficult to describe even Thucydides as a rational, scientific historian; ⁷ that the ancient Greeks did not differentiate between primary and secondary sources; that there were no historians in the sense that there were artists and philosophers; and that Polybius and other Roman historians were concerned with rhetorical preoccupations and political intentions. ⁸

In the same way, given the multiple elements that went into the making of the Islamic and Indian heritage, she argues that there was no common single source for the Sultanate and Mughal histories. Thapar then considers at length the colonial formulations about early India dismissing histories in the Sanskrit tradition as a-historical. A few, like William Jones and Rapson, were sympathetic and thought there was potential in some texts, while most like MacDonnell thought that India had no sense of history. This was part of the European mode of coming to terms with the existence of the Other, and for many Orientalists the attempt was to domesticate the Orient through control over its knowledge. Finding no signs of progress in the Indian past, the English Utilitarians endorsed the denial, attributing it to Indian society having been static for centuries.

Differentiation of Texts

Thapar makes a nuanced differentiation between historical consciousness, historical tradition and historical writing. She maintains that

studying a tradition involves looking at a number of indices: first the point in history at which the need to create and keep a tradition becomes imperative; second, the social status of the keepers of the tradition; third, whether the tradition was embedded in sacred literature to ensure its continuity; fourth, the genres that emerged … independent of other literary forms; fifth the social context …; sixth, the audience …; seventh, the social groups, which used and manipulated the tradition…to legitimize the present and give it sanction. ⁹

A tradition is created and taken forward, but it often needs reformulation in accordance with later requirements. This process then constitutes a historical tradition, although not necessarily history…A historical tradition has to claim that what it narrates are events that happened in the past, a claim which differentiates it from fiction…the tradition can change over time, partly on account of the many ways in which the past is used in the present. ¹⁰

Thapar has also suggested that these differences are linked to the form of the record and are an aspect of what she has called embedded history and externalized history. The former is that which is presumed to be historical by the authors and their audiences, and where the narrative is embedded in ritual texts. With societies undergoing change, this is followed by a gradual reduction in the need to embed narratives in ritual texts, and instead to record them in new genres specifically recognized as pertaining to the past. Such records view happenings from the perspective of those in authority. This change suggests the demise of clan societies and their being replaced by kingdoms, requiring more recognizably historical records.

Thapar argues for three kinds of historical traditions whose identity is partly determined by the authors, the audiences and the agenda of the text. The three are the śṛamaṇa tradition of the Jain and Buddhist monks, the itihāsa-purāṇa tradition of brāhmaṇa-s, and the bardic tradition. Each is comparable to the other in certain respects but different in various ways, with the śṛamaṇa tradition distinct for its sharper perception of the role of history. Thapar assesses notions of historiography and explains the historiographical variants apparent from different perceptions. She therefore searches for the structuring of the consciousness of the past, and the uses made of the construct. ¹¹ She examines the reconstruction of the past in order to ascertain whether, in its view, it reflects socio-political changes and emphasizes what the authors of this tradition took to be significant. According to her, subsequent genres are ‘externalised’, autonomous and evidently more historical. ¹² These would include the Carita-s, biographies of rulers, Vamśāvalī-s, chronicles of regions and dynasties, and the lengthy royal inscriptions, which, when read sequentially for a dynasty, are in effect its annals.

Deconstructive Reading

Unlike what most historians do, Thapar reads ancient texts not only for the information they provide about person and event, but also for how they understand past societies and the actions of persons believed to have been historical. In short, her project is to try and understand the way the past was looking at its own past. ¹³ This is deconstructive reading, in the sense that her understanding of the past texts hardly depends exclusively on their empirically given external truth or the traditionally given absolute meaning, but also on the insight that their meaning allegorically produces.

Instances of deconstructive reading are suggested in parts II, III, IV and V of the book, of which the interpretation of the embedded tradition turns out to be intellectually the most challenging. She draws from studies of morphological analysis of traditional narratives in understanding the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa in terms of their structure, constituent elements, functions and spheres of action in order to unravel the embedded tradition. This is a difficult exercise, for it demands not only knowledge in narratology and social theory, but also some control over negotiating with mutually incompatible perspectives divided between the historical and the a-historical. Thapar’s handling of the culturally contingent uniqueness of traditional narratives is impressive. Equally awesome is her analytical unravelling of the emerging historical tradition in different categories of texts like biographies and plays. Another significant instance of deconstructive reading is that of the narrative of events in the declining years of Chandella rule in central India. The bard’s composition in this case provides a view of the rule from a subordinate’s perspective. Thapar recognizes the narrative not as a eulogy but as a text that is relatively realistic about presenting persons and events. But her reading goes beyond the realist aspect by taking note of the formulaic structure of the narrative that belongs to the bardic tradition.

The analysis of the three chronicles—the Chamba vamśāvali (the genealogy of a small kingdom probably by a single author), Kalhana’s Rājatarangiṇī and Merutunga’s Prabandha-cintāmaṇī—goes into the differential features and the dynamic of each. The Rājatarangiṇī, transparent about its sources and their reliability, shows a distinct historical perspective and is distinguishable from the Prabandha-cintāmaṇī, which comes from the śhṛamanic tradition, also showing a clear sense of history, but with what might be called a Jaina bias. Each of these genres follows from the previous but marks a departure.

Analyzing the composition, authorship and audience helps. Thapar overcomes many a riddle that the early Indian texts present through their differing genres (such as poetry, drama, biography, chronicle and inscription), or even epic time or mythical space. She observes that a change in genre assumes changes in authorship and audience. Authors of the early heroic compositions and epics were bards and poets attached to the clans, but their compositions were worked over by Brāhmaṇa-s with a literary bent. The audience for both would initially have been gatherings of clan members and others. The authors of the Purāṇā-s were Brāhmaṇa-s who collated the materials from various sources and recited it to audiences in temples as well. The Buddhist texts were composed by learned monks and written as the history of the teaching and of the Sangha. ¹⁴ Inscriptions, intended to be read by or read to the public audience rippled out from the court circles to the populace, being statements associated with rulers involving the court and administration, and are suggestive of the authority of the state. Likewise, it was in the context of the court and the literati that plays were performed and biographies read.

Thapar shows how concepts of time also became part of this process, especially in the interface of cyclic and linear time. Cyclical time in cosmology plays on imagined numbers, some drawn from astronomy and some invented. ¹⁵ According to her, a sharper and more manageable sense of time and rational history surfaces in situations of crisis. ¹⁶ The ordering of the past into history becomes all the more necessary when there is a crisis of acculturation, with new groups having to be adjusted in existing society, but with the probability that new identities will have to be forged.

Intertextuality

According to Thapar, a text from the past relates to prior texts in some ways. Sometimes the text may directly and self-consciously identify with other texts on which it builds, or against which it sets itself; sometimes the reference is more implicit, but intentional; and sometimes the relation is entirely submerged, relying on familiar textual traditions and cultural resources. Her analysis of traditional texts includes unravelling their sub-texts, and the identification of their historical context. Thapar’s interpretation of what the texts seek to accomplish depends on her close understanding of the way the text relies on prior texts. In short, it constitutes what may be called intertextuality, that is, the relationship among texts. It is a reserve generated across texts and a sphere of action enabling textual assertions of position, implication and result. At the same time, it is not a text outside the text, for the intertextuality at the instance of every text is ultimately within itself.

Thapar probes into ambiguities, ironies, contradictions, conflicts, silences, breaks, deviations, differential meanings, linguistic oddities, recurrences and so on, and examines the ways in which a text implies something different from what it openly states. Her strategy throughout the book is to look for moments in each text when it refers to itself and to discover how the texts unravel. Inevitably, this also involves examining the historical, cultural, social and political processes that bring a genre into being.

Afterword

In this book dedicated to comprehending the contextual relationship between texts of the past and the nature of their historical consciousness, Thapar, as usual, uses the latest theoretical research but without borrowing much of its technical language. Firmly rooted, she is in a face-to-face relationship with the theories in cognate disciplines, creatively negotiating with them and independently shaping her own interpretations. The hardcore substance in this volume is quite original, stemming from her rootedness that enables her to make a strong epistemic critique of the imperialist theories of Europe.

Her central argument hinges on the theory that, not only is history defined as the textual product of historians, but it is also the narrative understood as the textual model for the past itself. Inquiries into the history of a sense of history should begin with textual representations of the past instead of with the past itself. Historical texts are not expected to embody the truth about the past, but only the truth that each text constructed as its time required. The past and written history are not the same anyway, a predicament that precludes the possibility of the latter being strictly objective. Hence, Thapar makes no claims for logo-centric certainties and methodological objectivity in the book about the past before us, for such claims are invariably not philosophically sustainable. History is not what is empirically given, unlike what many believe, nor is it an objective reporting of what really happened. History is consciously done and rendered plausible as required by social power relations. It has always been a socially contingent cultural product and the methodology of contemporary history makes us aware of this. As Thapar has been demonstrating through all her books, history is a narrative interpretation viewed through social theory and framed by the historian’s ideological pre-supposition. The views can be many but the acceptability and priority given to some depend on the reliability of the methods of analysis.

Despite the lengthy analysis of early Indian texts that the book embodies, Thapar is not satisfied. She maintains that her discussion touches only the surface of these texts. To her, ideally, a study such as this requires examining the various recensions, ascertaining their authenticity and analyzing them for historical content. Such studies would help in understanding the notion of history in early India, but according to her, it would take a few lifetimes. However, this lifetime study is going to be an authentic and scholarly reference volume on the theoretical historiography of early India for many years to come.