Abstract
D.N. J
Professor D.N. Jha needs no introduction to students of Indian history scholarship, or indeed social science academia in general. His works on aspects of ancient Indian state and economy, religion and culture, and on historiography, are well known. What is distinctive about his scholarship is the ability to interrogate contemporary concerns and assumptions that telescope into the past. While teleology has been fashionably critiqued by new age historians in the West, Jha is one of those who do not waste paper and time on verbiage. He gets to the crux of the problem, examining sources, interpreting meanings and contexts, and presenting a coherent argument on themes that are of relevance for understanding both the past and the present.
The collection of ten essays and five appendices in this volume approaches the issue of identity in its several articulations, which are neatly tied together by the self-explanatory title of the book. They all run against the grain, in terms of the themes and interpretations that are proffered. What is not of concern in these essays, not for lack of recognition, though, is gender and caste as identity markers, the interpretations of which in modern times also reflect attitudes of intolerance and historical immutability.
Four articles focus on historiography, and raise issues related to biases and methodology. One focuses on colonial and post-colonial interpretations of the ancient past that were greatly influenced by the prejudices of colonial administrator-scholars. Beginning with William Jones, who went on to find the Asiatic Society, to Charles Grant, James Mill, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Max Muller and V.A. Smith, the logic of the colonial scholars’ interpretations of earlier glory and current decline and degeneration which, then, could provide a justification of British rule in India. Common stereotypes raised in these works related to the lack of historical consciousness, the changelessness of Indian society, and religious and cultural fault-lines between Muslims and Hindus (p. 119). Jha does not spare Indian scholars in his critique, particularly, as most during this period uncritically accepted some of these generalisations. For instance, referring to R.C. Majumdar (the prolific historian who was also nationalistic in political orientation), Jha points out that repeatedly reiterated the view that Indians did not have a historical sense in the past, despite himself using numerous texts and inscriptions which belied that statement (pp. 120–21).
The essays of D.D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma, harbingers of the post- independence scholarship, highlight the significance of detailed analysis of sources of ancient Indian history. Kosambi’s training as a mathematician certainly affected his methodology, as, for instance, in his reliance on the statistical method to classify and analyse coins (p. 137). However, in his quest to contextualise the data in terms of when and who struck them, he turned to texts, eschewing translations and others’ interpretations. He became so proficient in Sanskrit and Prakrit, we are told, that he was able to edit and publish a number of Sanskrit manuscripts. The most well-known of these were the Śatakatraya, authored by the fifth-century grammarian and poet Bhartṛhari, for which Kosambi examined about 377 manuscripts (although admitted the total number of extant ones numbered nearly 3,000!). A.N.D. Haksar who has come out with the most recent translation of this collection informs us that Kosambi identified a total of about 852 independent verses, which he then grouped together on the basis of their appearance in all of the manuscripts (200 verses), in more than one of the manuscripts (152 verses) and those found only in a single manuscript (500 verses). 1
The Marxist literary historian and critic G.V. Plekhanov, in his classic Art and Social Life, talks of art, particularly literature, as reflecting social relations, and the possibility for dominant and subversive ideas being represented in artistic expression. 2 He argues that the prioritisation of form over content by artists reflects their collusion with the class ideology of the elites. Further, he argues for an analysis of content to unravel the material basis of art. Kosambi, one of the finest Marxist scholars, was sensitive to the relevance of such art criticism in the context of ancient Indian literature. As Jha points out, Kosambi saw the brāhmaṇas as complicit in class domination through their monopoly over Sanskrit language and literary forms, thus asserting and propagating the political and cultural hegemony of the exploiting strata. Anticipating Sheldon Pollock’s interpretation of the expansive universe of Sanskrit, Kosambi drew attention to Buddhist and Jaina compositions in the language, indicating their complicity in the politics of language that was played out in ancient India (Jha, pp. 140–42). That Bhartṛhari turned a mocking eye on contemporary society may also have been a source of attraction for Kosambi in undertaking the editing of this text. 3 The verses represented for Kosambi ‘the physiognomy of a whole class’, ‘acute observation of human nature’ and ‘poetry of frustration’, and the poet like many of his caste-class background had no other recourse but sarcasm and wit to express his frustrations with the society of his time. 4 The essay is a fitting tribute to a scholar who demonstrated his mastery of the historian’s craft.
R.S. Sharma, another doyen of ancient Indian history, and his contributions are the focus of the ninth essay in the volume. It is worth reproducing Jha’s commentary on the former’s central concerns:
In a sense, R.S. Sharma was the first professional historian to make an in-depth analysis of sources stretching over a long period to trace the history of caste and delineate the vicissitudes of the lower social orders. Sharma’s path-breaking work Śūdras in Ancient India, a doctoral dissertation completed at the School of Oriental and African Studies, in 1956… examined the position of the Śūdras and untouchables up to the end of the Gupta period, captured the voices of the oppressed masses in them and anticipated the later subaltern historiography, though, of course, without sharing the anti-Marxism of its enthusiastic exponents. (p. 165)
Jha points out that some criticism of Sharma’s theories with regard to feudalism, decline of urban centres, etc. led to some revisions in Sharma’s understanding of transitions and transformations. However, the one thing that Sharma continually emphasised was the constant change in society and the repudiation of communal interpretations of ancient Indian history (pp. 177–79). Further, his emphasis on sources as well as on theoretical foundations firmly laid the ground for serious historical scholarship on ancient India, going beyond the banalities and glorification of Indologists and antiquarians.
The first essay in the volume on the ‘Pre-history of Hindu Identity’ is concerned with the communal interpretation of history, which projects the contemporary political ideology of Hindutva onto the ancient history of the subcontinent. Locating the roots of this in the ideas of the social reformers of the nineteenth century, Jha criticises the essentialising and unchanging aspect of religion and culture that was introduced by scholars, activists and political ideologues in the colonial period (pp. 13–34). Given the voluminous literature on situating Hinduism in pre-modern contexts over the past few decades, Jha’s focus exclusively on the writings pertaining to the modern period may leave one with some disquiet. Although his main critique is of the evocation of Hindu identity by othering the Muslim, there is a need to further explore and engage with scholarly interpretations of whether a religious and cultural identity as Hindu was completely a colonial invention. 5
Jha, as a critic of all nonsense, shows his masterly command over sources, contexts and language, whether it be in his discussion of beef eating in ancient India (Chapter 2), the invention of Bharatmata (Chapter 3), brahmanical intolerance (Chapter 4) or gods drinking liquor (Chapter 6). Alongside brahmanical literature, the Jaina and Buddhist sources are used to highlight the perceptions of the brāhmaṇas and brahmanical literature as supporters of hiṁsā and sanctioning violence against other creeds (pp. 88–90). The fifth essay of the volume on the disappearance of Buddhist monuments again foregrounds violence, as legitimised in word and deed in the brahmanical tradition. Here, it would be pertinent to recall the position of Kosambi who sought the decline of Buddhism in the uneconomic development of the monastic establishment, rather than in external causes, and hence, he concluded that the ‘major civilising function of Buddhism had ended by seventh century AD’. 6 Jha’s object of concerns are the Buddhist monuments – symbols of faith and resource mobilisation: their disappearance for him is to be firmly attributed to the intolerance of the adherents of the brahmanical faith (pp. 95–107). Despite the slightly one-sided arguments, it is indeed a conundrum for historians that a vibrant religious tradition along with its institutional apparatus, having adherents across the subcontinent, and with a conspicuous monumental presence revealing the broad based patronage it enjoyed, just seems to have disappeared almost totally from the entire subcontinent by 1200.
The appendices are a testimony to the times we live in, and firmly place Jha, the historian, in the contemporary milieu, which has seen a rise in communal, obscurantist and irrational views of the past being peddled as history. The reviews of Jha’s The Myth of the Holy Cow by Wendy Doniger and Susan Watkins are particularly detailed and delightful (Appendices 1 and 2). Both quote from the texts cited by Jha to reiterate that meat-eating was not unusual in ancient India (pp. 198–99, 205–07), nor was vegetarianism the equivalent of ahiṁsā (p. 199). Doniger’s optimism that the attack on this book was a good sign that the pen is mightier than the sword belongs to the period before the present turn in Indian polity and public life when we are witnessing the brazen manner in which history is being retold. Nevertheless, Jha’s collection of essays is a reasoned call to historians to go to the sources and critically engage with form, content and context, without caring about what quasi-official propagandists demand of them.