12-14-2005, 02:57 AM
Online Bookreviews
Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India. Seventh edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 544 pp. ISBN: 0-19-516677-9 (hbk.); 0-19-516778-7 (pbk.).
The chief merits of Wolpertâs book when first published in 1977 were that it provided neat narrative summaries of Indian history at a time when no others were available in the Western market. As the market has changed since, and as scholarship on South Asia has blossomed in the twenty-five years that have passed, the measure of this new volume must be how far it outshines its rivals and how comprehensively it has addressed and incorporated the new data and perspectives available.
This book shows little sign of having been seriously revised since it was first published in 1977. Instead it has simply been extended with chapters to cover events since that time. The first impression of the book then is that it is very dated. It is difficult to take a history of India seriously that covers the Mughal period without having read such standard fare as John Richardsâ The Mughal Empire (1993) or that claims to be able to assess the impact of the Depression or World War II without having seen B. R. Tomlinsonâs The Economy of Modern India, 1860-1970 (1996). It would be a misjudgement for any undergraduate to submit an essay on such subjects without bothering to consult the authorities so it is a fundamental flaw for a book that seeks to be taken seriously as a history of these periods and topics to commit such neglect.
This dearth of recent reading makes his account and analysis of the events described incomplete and unusable. Wolpertâs version of the âGreat Mutinyâ of 1857/8 is a good example of this deficiency. The myth that Bengalis dreaded âdark waterâ or âkala paniâ has been dismissed by writers such as Clare Anderson and Satadru Sen, the long-term origins of the Indian soldierâs discontent have been demonstrated by Seema Alavi and Gautam Bhadra has shown that it was not simply economics that drove rebellion among the peasantry. Indeed, Wolpertâs statement that âlocal rajas like Devi Singh in Mathura and Kadam Singh near Meerut emerged overnight to rally a generally reticent peasantry to rise up against authorityâ (234) has been falsified by Bhadraâs account which disputes the notion that 1857 was purely elitist in character. That Bhadra was writing almost twenty years ago shows just how out-of-touch Wolpertâs work is.
Similarly, it is a flaw of the book that it ignores most of the intellectual developments in South Asian historiography of the last quarter of a century. The most obvious omission is the Subaltern Studies collection of publications, starting in 1982, that has carefully and successfully exposed the myth that South Asiaâs history is best understood by focusing on its rulers. The challenge of this collection was to the sort of account that simply narrates the region as a succession of kings, viceroys, prime ministers, and policies on the assumption that the people were a âlumpenâ mass capable only of mule-like forbearance or unpredictable and sudden violence. A failure to engage with this research has resulted in a book that reproduces the sort of narrative made unsustainable by these recent intellectual developments.
Indeed, as the reader contemplates the chapters tacked on periodically since the first edition in order to update the book, the volume seems dated not only in its content but also in its moral agenda. Consistently in these chapters Wolpert insists on plucking quotes from Mahatma Gandhiâs canon; e.g., âbefore I knew anything of politics in my early youth, I dreamt the dream of communal unity of the heartâ appears in a discussion of Indian and Pakistani foreign policy in the 1970s; âIndia can conquer all by soul-forceâ is an excerpt of the lengthy quote that precedes the conclusion that âyoung Indians now prefer the pleasures of modernityâ; âif we wish to bring about the rule of God or Ramarajya in India, I would suggest that our first task is to magnify our own faults and find no fault with the Muslimsâ appears after the splendidly inaccurate prediction that the BJP would become Indiaâs Hindu-first majority government in the 2004 elections. Indiaâs youth are chastised because âa half-century after Mahatma Gandhiâs assassination by a Hindu-first fanatic of the RSS his lifeâs message of love and peace has lost its once potent popular appeal for young Indiansâ, while Nehru is associated with the leaders of the BJP and the VHP in a curious paragraph in which they all share the crime of having sought to âignore Gandhiâs messages of loveâ (469).
I would suggest that all of this âlove and peaceâ tells us rather more about the world-view of an academic who has resided in California since the 1960s than about how readers ought to go about judging Indians and Indian history in the twenty-first century. Indeed, using the ambiguous moralising of a man like Gandhi who is all too easily located in the historical forces that have shaped modern India as a means of condemning recent events in the history of the country seems a remarkably bankrupt intellectual strategy. It also confirms the impression that Wolpert has spent little time reading recently, as a slavish devotion to the âGreat Soulâsâ utterances seems less sensible in light of the conclusions available in the recent spate of excellent books on Gandhi by writers as distinguished as Claude Markovits, David Hardiman and David Arnold.
Perhaps the content is only of secondary importance to the publishers who, after all, make most noise on the cover about its style which it likes to imagine is âaccessible and popularâ and âgraceful and engagingâ. Passages such as âParliamentâs guards were swift enough to gun down the attackers, taking many fatal bullets themselves, yet averting tragedy by saving all the members of parliament and ministers of governmentâ point the way to other historians wishing to find the tone in which to write history for the X-Box generation.
Indeed, in concluding this review the finger ought to be pointed at the publishers rather than the author who, after all, is long-retired and as such at liberty to ignore ongoing work in a subject area that no longer pays his wages. Many of the major publishing houses have recently produced one-volume histories of India and have done so by turning to historians who have driven the research agenda in South Asian Studies over the last two decades or so. As such we have accounts by writers such as Burton Stein (1998), Crispin Bates (2002), Barbara and Thomas Metcalf (2002), Peter Robb (2002), and Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (1998) in print or forthcoming. It seems to be a dreadful dereliction of its duty as a university press on the part of OUP to ignore the last twenty-five years of scholarship on India in favour of a book as compromised as this. In clinging to Gandhi as a moral measure, in representing Indian history as a narrative of its elites, in validating myths about âkala paniâ and the like, Wolpert and OUP New York have published a twenty-first century restatement of the hoary old myths of nineteenth-century Orientalism. What makes this all the more lamentable, suspicious even, is that they have done so at a time when American imperialists seem to be eyeing Asia with a sneer familiar to all who have studied the empire-builders of that former period.
James Mills, University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom
http://www.itinerario.nl/bookreviews-31.html
Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India. Seventh edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 544 pp. ISBN: 0-19-516677-9 (hbk.); 0-19-516778-7 (pbk.).
The chief merits of Wolpertâs book when first published in 1977 were that it provided neat narrative summaries of Indian history at a time when no others were available in the Western market. As the market has changed since, and as scholarship on South Asia has blossomed in the twenty-five years that have passed, the measure of this new volume must be how far it outshines its rivals and how comprehensively it has addressed and incorporated the new data and perspectives available.
This book shows little sign of having been seriously revised since it was first published in 1977. Instead it has simply been extended with chapters to cover events since that time. The first impression of the book then is that it is very dated. It is difficult to take a history of India seriously that covers the Mughal period without having read such standard fare as John Richardsâ The Mughal Empire (1993) or that claims to be able to assess the impact of the Depression or World War II without having seen B. R. Tomlinsonâs The Economy of Modern India, 1860-1970 (1996). It would be a misjudgement for any undergraduate to submit an essay on such subjects without bothering to consult the authorities so it is a fundamental flaw for a book that seeks to be taken seriously as a history of these periods and topics to commit such neglect.
This dearth of recent reading makes his account and analysis of the events described incomplete and unusable. Wolpertâs version of the âGreat Mutinyâ of 1857/8 is a good example of this deficiency. The myth that Bengalis dreaded âdark waterâ or âkala paniâ has been dismissed by writers such as Clare Anderson and Satadru Sen, the long-term origins of the Indian soldierâs discontent have been demonstrated by Seema Alavi and Gautam Bhadra has shown that it was not simply economics that drove rebellion among the peasantry. Indeed, Wolpertâs statement that âlocal rajas like Devi Singh in Mathura and Kadam Singh near Meerut emerged overnight to rally a generally reticent peasantry to rise up against authorityâ (234) has been falsified by Bhadraâs account which disputes the notion that 1857 was purely elitist in character. That Bhadra was writing almost twenty years ago shows just how out-of-touch Wolpertâs work is.
Similarly, it is a flaw of the book that it ignores most of the intellectual developments in South Asian historiography of the last quarter of a century. The most obvious omission is the Subaltern Studies collection of publications, starting in 1982, that has carefully and successfully exposed the myth that South Asiaâs history is best understood by focusing on its rulers. The challenge of this collection was to the sort of account that simply narrates the region as a succession of kings, viceroys, prime ministers, and policies on the assumption that the people were a âlumpenâ mass capable only of mule-like forbearance or unpredictable and sudden violence. A failure to engage with this research has resulted in a book that reproduces the sort of narrative made unsustainable by these recent intellectual developments.
Indeed, as the reader contemplates the chapters tacked on periodically since the first edition in order to update the book, the volume seems dated not only in its content but also in its moral agenda. Consistently in these chapters Wolpert insists on plucking quotes from Mahatma Gandhiâs canon; e.g., âbefore I knew anything of politics in my early youth, I dreamt the dream of communal unity of the heartâ appears in a discussion of Indian and Pakistani foreign policy in the 1970s; âIndia can conquer all by soul-forceâ is an excerpt of the lengthy quote that precedes the conclusion that âyoung Indians now prefer the pleasures of modernityâ; âif we wish to bring about the rule of God or Ramarajya in India, I would suggest that our first task is to magnify our own faults and find no fault with the Muslimsâ appears after the splendidly inaccurate prediction that the BJP would become Indiaâs Hindu-first majority government in the 2004 elections. Indiaâs youth are chastised because âa half-century after Mahatma Gandhiâs assassination by a Hindu-first fanatic of the RSS his lifeâs message of love and peace has lost its once potent popular appeal for young Indiansâ, while Nehru is associated with the leaders of the BJP and the VHP in a curious paragraph in which they all share the crime of having sought to âignore Gandhiâs messages of loveâ (469).
I would suggest that all of this âlove and peaceâ tells us rather more about the world-view of an academic who has resided in California since the 1960s than about how readers ought to go about judging Indians and Indian history in the twenty-first century. Indeed, using the ambiguous moralising of a man like Gandhi who is all too easily located in the historical forces that have shaped modern India as a means of condemning recent events in the history of the country seems a remarkably bankrupt intellectual strategy. It also confirms the impression that Wolpert has spent little time reading recently, as a slavish devotion to the âGreat Soulâsâ utterances seems less sensible in light of the conclusions available in the recent spate of excellent books on Gandhi by writers as distinguished as Claude Markovits, David Hardiman and David Arnold.
Perhaps the content is only of secondary importance to the publishers who, after all, make most noise on the cover about its style which it likes to imagine is âaccessible and popularâ and âgraceful and engagingâ. Passages such as âParliamentâs guards were swift enough to gun down the attackers, taking many fatal bullets themselves, yet averting tragedy by saving all the members of parliament and ministers of governmentâ point the way to other historians wishing to find the tone in which to write history for the X-Box generation.
Indeed, in concluding this review the finger ought to be pointed at the publishers rather than the author who, after all, is long-retired and as such at liberty to ignore ongoing work in a subject area that no longer pays his wages. Many of the major publishing houses have recently produced one-volume histories of India and have done so by turning to historians who have driven the research agenda in South Asian Studies over the last two decades or so. As such we have accounts by writers such as Burton Stein (1998), Crispin Bates (2002), Barbara and Thomas Metcalf (2002), Peter Robb (2002), and Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (1998) in print or forthcoming. It seems to be a dreadful dereliction of its duty as a university press on the part of OUP to ignore the last twenty-five years of scholarship on India in favour of a book as compromised as this. In clinging to Gandhi as a moral measure, in representing Indian history as a narrative of its elites, in validating myths about âkala paniâ and the like, Wolpert and OUP New York have published a twenty-first century restatement of the hoary old myths of nineteenth-century Orientalism. What makes this all the more lamentable, suspicious even, is that they have done so at a time when American imperialists seem to be eyeing Asia with a sneer familiar to all who have studied the empire-builders of that former period.
James Mills, University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom
http://www.itinerario.nl/bookreviews-31.html