Abstract
The books being reviewed are the outcome of a project undertaken by the Indian Council of Historical Research. They meet one of the Council’s long-term objectives, republication of rare source documents. These volumes contain documents on the economic history of southern India in the late nineteenth century. Each volume starts with introductory statements by the editors, which describe the records reprinted in the volume in question, and a foreword by the Council’s Chairman reiterating the aim of the project.
There are two sets of volumes, one set has records relating to the 1860s and the 1870s, and the other has records relating to the 1880s and the 1890s. The records compiled in the former set belong to three main groups, the Annual Administrative Reports of the Madras Presidency, the Famine Commission Reports (1876–77) and Settlement Reports and Proceedings of the Revenue Department. The records compiled in the latter set include, again, administrative and revenue reports, one famine-related document, the report of the executive committee of the Indian Charitable Relief Fund, 1897 and the text of a famous study called ‘Economic Conditions of the Pariahs’. Authored by James Tremenheere (1853–1912), the Collector of Chingleput (Chengalpattu), the report contains rare details on how a large marginalised social group lived. Tremenheere advocated redistributive land reforms as a remedy for poverty and destitution, and partly because of this, the report left a significant impact on both policy and discourse.
The initiative to reprint these documents is of great value. The Settlement and Administrative Reports are not particularly rare records, many libraries have them. But these libraries tend to be the older university libraries and archives, where access can take time and collections are often incomplete and badly preserved. These volumes can serve the purpose of disseminating a fundamental resource for information on Indian history more widely and more cheaply than at present. Whom will they serve?
The Famine Commission reports should enter the curricula of history in general. The nineteenth-century famines, apart from creating humanitarian crises on a staggering scale, also upset the belief system based on which the government undertook institutional reforms in southern and western India. These reports are valuable as descriptions, but they are more than that. They are also investigative and diagnostic in intent and discuss what went wrong. These reports are useful sources of data, on irrigation systems, for example, and useful as reflections on and critiques of policy.
The administrative reports, by contrast, deliver more routine information at a macro-level and are by and large uninteresting. But they tend to be so only if we compare adjacent years. In the long run, they grew bigger and more ambitious, and some of the 1890s ones contain information on and analyses of land systems that cannot be found elsewhere. Further, being an annual report, they can be used to track changes in some aspects of material and social conditions. Education is an example.
The revenue department documents present agricultural data at the level of taluka and district. They yield the kind of detail on agriculture that cannot be found in the statistical data sources. These details, when used creatively and in relation to the statistical sources, can show how local conditions deviated from the provincial or national averages. As such, they are essential sources for region-bound agrarian history, a subfield in which major works were produced in the 1970s and the 1980s, but few works appeared since then.
In different ways, then, these books can have a significant impact on the teaching of economic history. With progressive digitisation of resources, including government documents, maps, pictures, pamphlets and newspapers, teachers of history feel compelled to introduce students to selected sources. This is easier to do now than before and can be a great innovation in the classroom as it breaks the artificial barrier between teaching and research. I believe that the Famine Commission Reports, or parts thereof, can be integrated in teaching easily, The administration and revenue reports should be particularly useful for researchers. If they are used by teachers properly, the books should make it easy for, say, a Master’s student to start a dissertation in economic history, especially agrarian history.
If these resources are good to start thinking about a small project, they are not enough to sustain a large piece of work. A large research project would require searching and using a lot of potentially useful material that are not included in these volumes. Of course, that list is long and of somewhat unknown composition. But the editors could explain more fully the concept of ‘primary sources’ in Indian agrarian history and place these documents against that context. That could be a good way to suggest what the records compiled in these books can do and what they cannot do. Their value as information would become clearer through such a guide. The editors are eminent names in the field, and one of them is the author of a benchmark study on the agrarian history of Tamil Nadu. They are well placed to write a general guide for the researcher on documentary sources, and these books are the ideal vehicle for such a guide.
To conclude, this ambitious project aiming to republish historical documents can be the first step to a different way of teaching Indian economic history, an exploratory and investigative way than the textbook-bound and narrative-driven way currently followed in most curricula. The council will do well to promote that use by publicising these books in special events and seminars targeting teachers of the field.