Abstract
Professor Satish Chandra Mishra played a significant role in redefining the approaches to medieval India. However, the annual lectures delivered in his memory do not essentially confine themselves to that period alone. The ten essays in the present volume, written by nine historians from diverse fields of specialisation, cover a wide range of topics from the ancient techniques of minting coins to Raghunath Dhondo Karve’s mission of population control and sex education in ‘modern’ India. There are, of course, four essays which deal with different aspects of medieval India.
Each article offers a refreshing read, hemmed in as they are between the intricate details of each strand within the macro-narratives of sections the editor chooses to classify as ‘History and Ideology’ and ‘Economic and Social History’. These are not mutually exclusive; the ‘inner history’ of the Hool could have been included in the section on Ideologies and the essay on Jyotirao Phule and his Satyasodhak endeavours may also be read in the context of social history.
The article by Rajesh Kochhar situates the growth of modern science in colonial India in the context of what he develops as ‘seductive Orientalism’. The growth of Calcutta and the consequent rise of a new social class emboldened the latter to look upon themselves as ‘long alienated brethren’ (Mahendra Lal Sircar, 1869) or ‘parted cousins’ (Keshab Chandra Sen, 1877) of the British. Sir Richard Temple, the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, suggested the use of ‘practical science’ to make them ‘feel their utter inferiority’ to the White Man in 1875. Kochhar establishes the politics of science education in colonial India through the rivalry between the Indian Association and the India League and the complexities of colonial politics that promoted the setting up of a polytechnic enlisting the support of India League.
Barun De interrogates the myths regarding historicity and sources still prevalent among a section of conservative historians in India. Taking his cue from Geoffrey Barraclough and Jean Chesneaux, the author situates the ‘contemporary’ vis-à-vis the ‘modern’ in history and argues why the point where contemporary history would begin is best left to the discretion of the individual researcher. The non-availability of governmental records in India for the ‘contemporary’ historian and the archival regulation requiring a 30-year gap between ‘history’ and the ‘present’ are pertinent points raised in this article.
The Rama discourse has baffled historians through ages. Tarini Charan Chattopadhyay (1858) was one of the earliest proponents of the idea that the South was covered with forests and inhabited by uncivilised tribes, until Rama unfurled the flag of ‘Hindu’ civilisation in that region. On the other hand, there are historians like K.A.N. Sastri (1963) who contest the historical basis of the Ramayana. Focusing on the origin and growth of a cult of personal devotion centring on Rama Dasarathi within the Vaisnava paradigm, Suvira Jaiswal marks a clear distinction between ‘historical attitudes’ and ‘factual histories’. She builds up a counter-narrative of the thesis of Sheldon Pollock that a temple centred cult of Rama evolved as a result of Hindu reaction to the ‘transformative encounter’ with Muslims. Jaiswal establishes her argument on the basis of epigraphic evidence from the Chola–Pandya regions from the tenth century onwards. The role of colonial politics in the creation of two homogenised and antagonistic Hindu and Muslim identities has also been scanned in the context of the cult of Rama Dasarathi.
A pioneer in the field of numismatics in India, Bratindra Nath Mukherjee’s extensive article on the technique of minting coins in pre-modern India marks a definitive intervention in both economic history and the history of technology. Along with the historical commentary on the evolution of techniques in minting and the historical significance of their legends and metallic content, the eight plates illustrating the different processes of casting are very informative. The plates depicting the evolution of coins from the ancient to the present times also provide an interesting insight into the domain of numismatics.
Factors which led to economic and social development and growth during the medieval period or factors which inhibited it are generally looked at from a communal angle in India. Enlisting four major questions on India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Satish Chandra has touched upon the pertinent ones which have a bearing on the development problematic and the communal issue in his article titled ‘Economic Development and the Communal Distortion of History in Medieval India’.
Professor Chandra had since the 1960s emphatically established the strong trend towards the growth of a money/market economy in the country during the seventeenth century and the role of the rulers and other elites in undertaking commercial activities. Strongly countering Moreland’s theory of a virtual stagnation of the Indian economy during the seventeenth century, this article establishes how the Mughal state facilitated economic growth contributed to the growth of merchant capital and promoted a culture of religious tolerance.
Aniruddha Roy, in his ‘preliminary’ discussion on the changing trends of the Bengal economy during the Sultanate (c. 1350–c. 1575), highlights upon the paucity of sources for his study. He critically examines the extant Persian and Bengali sources to reconstruct the history of an otherwise obscure period in the history of Bengal. It is particularly interesting to note the use of the corpus of devotional literature produced by the Vaisnava poets of Bengal, including Mukundaram Chakrabarty, Brindaban Das and Krishnadas Kabiraj in this article. The text of Mukundaram, for instance, has been used to provide an interesting reading into the economy of Bengal. The author has used it to establish the varieties of cottage industry and the artisans in different professions during the sixteenth century. Evidence of the existence of two parallel systems of economy is a brilliant example of how literature can fill in the gaps in sources and corroborate the art of history writing.
Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri’s examination of some interpretations of Hool is one of the longest articles in this volume. Reinterpreting the Santal insurgency, the author looks at what he calls the ‘inner history’ of this chapter of Indian history. However, what he means by the term need not have been repeated (pp. 201, 216). Interrogating the complexities of the credit question as raised by F.B. Bradley-Birt and George E. Somers, Chaudhuri has analysed the intricacies of the Santals’ necessity for borrowing and the creditors’ preference for debt bondage over land acquisition for non-payment of debt. The author has meticulously studied the role of rumours as a major driving force behind self-mobilisation (pp. 229–33, 247) of the Santals. He has eased the task of the critical reader in enlisting the five points where his proposition differs from that of Ranajit Guha. The various aspects of the debate, for example, whether the circulation of sal leaves suited a pre-literate society (Guha), or was a traditional practice of calling Santals to join the annual hunt, later the revolt (Chaudhuri), is now left open to the reader.
In a country where the epics seek to legitimise and conserve the social hierarchy through the promulgation of the Sambuka and the Ekalavya episodes, the discourse of social justice took a long time to enter into the mainstream of Indian movements. The emergence of Mahatma Jyotirao Govindrao Phule as the chief ideologue of the low-caste protest movement in the nineteenth-century Maharashtra anticipated Ambedkar on the one hand, and Gandhi on the other hand. Raghunath Dhondo Karve’s (1882–1953) pioneering movement for population control, family planning and sex education in India marks another important aspect of the transition of India into modernity. J.V. Naik’s biographical studies of these two personalities in two separate essays may be situated in the trajectory of the reform movements in India.
A.R. Kulkarni’s study of medieval Konkan is a significant contribution in regional history.
Historians have an important role in shaping the sensibilities of their readers. It is interesting to note that many essays in this volume address the communal discourse in some form or the other. If the year in which the lecture was delivered had also been mentioned with each essay, it would have enabled the readers to situate some of them in a wider perspective, both in terms of the social relevance of the topic and the standpoint of the historian concerned. As I have said in the beginning, the ten essays in this volume could have been arrayed in a variety of other combinations. But the present arrangement amply justifies the title of the collection. History, after all, concerns ideas and society.