Abstract
The book under review, The Concept of ‘Bharatavarsha’ and Other Essays, is the latest anthology by the renowned chronicler of ancient Indian history, B. D. Chattopadhyaya. As the description on the back cover underlines, the essays in the collection loosely address the question of the nature and character of early Indian civilisation. Overall, they attempt to subvert the imagination of precolonial and ancient India as an overarching unity as often presented in most nationalist historiography. Hence, Chattopadhyaya focuses his attention on charting out the historical process of the empirical evolution of various key terms and concepts such as janapada, nadu, dharma, vana, and bhava across diverse genres, texts and traditions.
The book is divided into eight chapters. Except Chapters 4 and 5, all of these can be said to have a rather broad focus.
Chapter 1, ‘The Concept of Bharatavarsha and Its Historiographical Implications’, for instance, traces the empirical trajectory of the term Bharatavarsha across centuries. Contra nationalist and subaltern historiographical traditions, it is interested in disrupting the commonly assumed connection among modernity, nationalism and Bharatavarsha. Therefore, it reads how Bharatavarsha gets configured in historical terms through four specific moments in ancient Indian history: in the movement from jana to janapada (peoples to territories and spaces), in the Puranas, in Raghu’s dig-jigisa (conquest of the quarters) as portrayed in Kalidasa’s genealogical poem Raghuvamsam and in desa-vibhaga (division of country) as detailed in Rajasekhara’s treatise on poetry Kavyamimamsa.
Similarly, Chapter 2, ‘Space, History, and Cultural Process: Some Ideas on the Ingredients of Subregional “Identity”’, underlines the essential correlation between imaginations of ancient Indian cultures and their location in distinct spaces and territories. It provides empirically rich glosses on janapada and nadu in the context of north and south India, respectively. Here, Chattopadhyay’s suggestion is that the long-accepted and generally unquestioned paradigm of ‘unity in diversity’ has meant that regional and sub-regional conglomerations have been read in most Indian historiography as being held together by a centripetal force. Time is ripe, according to him, for Indian historians to take a bottom-up approach, as it were, and imagine sub-regional identities such as Tamil and Bengali negotiating their own respective spaces and bounds.
The third chapter ‘The State’s Perception of the “Forest” and the “Forest” as State in Early India’ is a rigorous examination of the imagination of and around forests in ancient India, especially in the Brahminical worldview which accords centrality to the figure of the sovereign. The essay suggests that there exists great diversity about the semantic and empirical connotations of forests in the early times. In the medical tradition, for instance, jangala was a space characterised by the community of animals, trees, birds, the climate and men. According to the Buddhist viewpoint, life in the forests meant experiencing an ideal situation—a distance from quotidian toils and conflicts as well as the cycles of existence which necessarily bring about suffering and pain. The chapter also rejects the view that forests represented stable and unchanging spaces and communities. Rather, it argues that the bounds of forests kept changing as other spaces would often encroach upon them. This meant that forests had the potential to be transformed into localised spaces of complex social formation and interaction. ‘Festivals as Ritual: An Exploration into the Convergence of Rituals and the State in Early India’, the sixth chapter, is an investigation of a couple of clearly delineated take-off points. The first examines non-Brahminic, non-Sanskritic ritual practices among communities whose lives were not governed by the dominant Sastric ritual tradition. The second undermines the apparent contradiction between the orthodox or normative and the non-orthodox ritual practices. This section of Chattopadhyaya’s essay describes ritual occasions and events intended to temporarily turn social arrangements topsy-turvy. For readers familiar with Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings, the discussion will recall how the works of Francois Rabelais and Fyodor Dostoevsky temporarily liberate the assumptions of hegemonic style and literary usage through the employment of disorder, chaos and humour (Bakhtin, 1984a, 1984b). The piece concludes with an interesting discussion of the festival of Durga, Durgotsava, which is very popular in eastern India. Here, Chattopadhyaya argues that the festival encapsulates another festival within itself and thus speaks with the interaction of dominant and subversive ritual traditions in early India.
Chapter 7 ‘Accommodation and Negotiation in a Culture of Exclusivism: Some Early Indian Perspectives’ seeks to subvert the retrospective and anachronistic projections of the early Indian society as being composite in nature. Chattopadhyaya underlines that the demands of nationalist ideology present ancient Indian civilisation and culture as instances of ‘composite culture’ and ‘fundamental unity’ and thus paper over differences, divisions and contradictions. In this regard, he suggests that early Indian Brahminical thinkers would have anyway disapproved of juxtaposition or intermingling of cultures even as these may have been the natural way of existence in non-hegemonic social spheres. Yet, he does not disregard the fact that the emergence of contemporary Indian society in its distinctiveness needs to be studied from a historical and evolutionary perspective. Hence, the essay presents a nuanced survey of some basic elements like dharma and religion in terms of contradiction, accommodation and negotiation. The concluding piece of the book under review ‘Interrogating “Unity in Diversity”: Voices from India’s Ancient Texts’, in a similar spirit, critically examines the connotations and implications of the oft-used phrase ‘unity in diversity’. Chattopadhyaya asks as to what is the meaning of the unity espoused in the expression and what may be its limits considering that it is juxtaposed with diversity. He considers the enquiry to be temporally prescient because it speaks with the colonial–nationalist espousal of India’s ‘essential’ unity as well as the more contemporary avowals of ‘one India’.
As stated earlier, Chapters 4 and 5 in The Concept of ‘Bharatavarsha’ and Other Essays have a sharper focus compared with the rest. ‘Rama’s Acts in Exile and in Kingdom’, the former, is an interpretation of three actions performed by Rama in Valmiki’s narrative—the killing of Valin, the rescue and rejection of Sita (through the fire ordeal), and the ‘justice’ meted out to Sambuka. Chattopadhyaya argues that Valmiki’s location of the epic in three different terrains, that is, janapada (territory), vana (forest) and dwipa (island) provides a nuanced gloss on the actions Rama performs in each of these places. He also suggests that Rama’s actions need to be understood as the workings of sovereign power in at least these three different contexts as Valmiki always considers him to be the king, the representative of the natural order of things. Chapter 5 ‘Local and Beyond: The Story of Asura Naraka, and Society, State, and Religion in Early Assam’ is a critical examination of the legend of the demon Naraka, the abiding motif or symbol associated with the north-eastern region of Kamarupa-Pragjyotisapura. In this essay, Chattopadhyaya resists the usual tendency of establishing the exact historical contours of legends and myths. Instead, like D. D. Kosambi’s study of the legend of Urvasi and Pururavas, he invests himself in tracing the way the core storyline about the legend of Naraka came to acquire embellishments and variety over time (Kosambi, 1962). Hence, he presents a nuanced account of the representations of the legend in The Visnu Purana, Harsacarita, Kalika Purana and in different inscriptions.
The summaries of the chapters in the book under review as presented above should serve as ample demonstrations of Chattopadhyaya’s erudition and critical acumen. Yet, the book does not quite hold together in its entirety. There are at least three reasons for the same. One, the author does not provide an introduction that would highlight the way the chapters speak with each other. In its present form, for example, Chapters 4 and 5 do not quite rhyme with the others on account of their specific nature. Second, most of the discussion in the chapters is oriented through a focus on early north and eastern India. As a result, the southern and western parts of the country appear to have been short-changed. Finally, the essays collected here will not necessarily attract the attention of students and general readers outside the domain of ancient Indian history as they do not quite respond to contemporary debates around issues of common interest. Rama’s rejection of Sita as well as the killing of Sambuka, for instance, have generated considerable critical reflection among Indian feminists, literary scholars and philosophers. Arshia Sattar in particular has explored these actions in terms of their complicated morality as well as affects like love and anguish (Sattar, 2011, 2016). Sadly, Chattopadhyaya’s learned anthology makes no reference to such contemporary glosses on the questions that it otherwise considers in great detail.