01-13-2007, 12:24 AM
Op-Ed in Pioneer by Chandan Mitra, 12 jan., 2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Of Todd and toddlers
A largely unnoticed item about rewriting Rajasthan's history appeared in some newspapers last week, starting with The Pioneer. According to the report Rajasthan Education Minister Ghanshyam Tiwari told the media that his Government had decided to initiate a project to collate the State's rich rural history, village by village and eventually compile a few volumes of authentic people's history. It was pointed out that scholars hitherto relied upon Colonel James Todd's Annals and Antiquities of Rajputana, written almost two centuries ago as the basic source material for studying the region's historical lineage. Not surprisingly, it was also suggested that Todd's account smacked of colonial biases, which needed to be excised in order to present an accurate picture of Rajasthan's hoary tradition.
At the outset, I have a problem with dragging Todd's seminal work into controversy. That his humungous volume still remains the starting point for any historical research on Rajasthan speaks for its quality. It is a sad reality that Hindus would have remained largely ignorant of their own history had dedicated foreign scholars, especially early British administrators like Todd, James Sleeman, William Crooke and HH Risley not taken such passionate interest in chronicling India's unrecorded and mostly forgotten past. Add to that list archaeologists and patrons of archaeology like the much-maligned George Nathaniel Curzon, sociologists like Louis Dumont and Verrier Elwin, linguists like Max Mueller and many nameless scholars who took enormous pains to recreate the lost Indian identity, and you get to construct a pantheon of Europeans who revealed India to India.
Unfortunately, Indians have been congenitally incapable of adequately recording their past, so much so that even the nationalist writers of the early 20th Century who wrote of the Golden Age of the Guptas or the tales of valour of King Porus against Alexander and those of Rajputs vis-Ã -vis Muslim invaders, actually depended on the compilations of Arab travellers like al-Biruni or the same British administrators whom they reviled. Arguably, the shruti and smriti traditions survived from Vedic times and tales of triumph and tragedy were gleaned from the compositions of itinerant bards who toured the countryside narrating riveting stories of the past.
This background is important to understand why the Rajasthan Government may just be taking up a hugely daunting project. To begin with it will be difficult to find enough history-minded people to accurately compile records. Just because they will most probably be drawn from the ranks of local schoolteachers will not necessarily qualify them to execute what is a trained historian's job. The sifting of fact and outright fiction is a daunting task even for many professional historians. It would be unrealistic to expect reliable data to emerge from untrained hands. For instance, I wonder how many of the persons engaged to compile rural history would have even heard of MN Srinivas, a doyen of Indian sociology, whose The Remembered Village remains one of the most authentic and engrossing accounts of social structure and customs in a South Indian village. In fact, I would not expect the likely chroniclers of Rajasthan to have read RK Narayan's Malgudi Days or translations of Satinath Bhaduri's masterpiece on rural Bihar during the freedom struggle, Dhorai Charit Manas.
Admittedly, not every rural history compiler need be a PhD. But elementary skills would be needed to intelligently collate primary data mostly from oral sources in order to build a body of material, which in turn would be the basis for the macro study. Speaking purely from an academic standpoint, Rajasthan is at a disadvantage compared to those areas directly administered by the British. In British India, as opposed to princely states, it was mandatory to prepare district gazetteers and update them from time to time. These are invaluable source material for today's scholars for the British, with their remarkable sense of history, minutely recorded details of rural society, including social customs, fairs and festivals, economic activity, political tradition and so on.
However, on the positive side, the Princes too engaged scribes to sketch genealogical records, tales of valour and kept fairly exhaustive archives of landholdings, religious endowments and so on. The average Indian's disdain for history is manifested in the fact that few have so far bothered even to delve into these archives. When I visited Rajasthan's Shekhawati region some years ago, I was struck by the richness of the material contained in decaying chronicles at the havelis of well known Marwari families of today, some of which was used by Tomlinson in his manuscript on the prosperous community published nearly two decades ago. The murals and paintings adorning the outer walls of the havelis too have a tale to tell. But none to my knowledge has worked sufficiently on the available source material to recreate the region's glorious past.
William Dalrymple's latest work, The Last Mughal is a masterpiece in terms of bringing alive the Walled City of Delhi at the time of the Uprising of 1857. But it is a sad commentary on Indian scholars that over the last 100 years nobody seriously used the material comprising minutest details even of dhobi lists and meal menus of both the British and the Mughals. When I interviewed him for our sister publication Darpan recently, Dalrymple showed me a bound catalogue of 1857 records borrowed from the National Archives that had been issued only once since Independence, according to the library stamp!
In the West, local history, particularly community history is a cherished academic tradition. American scholars excel at this, although in fairness it must be pointed out that chronicling a few hundred years is significantly easier than covering several millennia. In France, the Annales school of historiography broke ranks with established history-writing by delving into church records, town planning details, marriage registers and so on to vividly describe how ordinary people as opposed to kings and nobles lived in times bygone. In India, while many young historians in the 70s and 80s got drawn into subaltern history or history from below, the volumes later degenerated into ideological diatribes against established historiography robbing the works of much academic value.
The point, therefore, is that the Rajasthan Government's laudable idea will need to cross almost insurmountable obstacles to achieve its objectives. I would be suspicious of untrained hands compiling history, which contrary to the prevailing philistine understanding is not just an account of dates of wars and names of rulers. On the other hand, the Marxist domination of history writing in India has ensured sterility and made history into a tool for ideological proselytisation, which is equally repugnant.
<b>Still, I welcome Rajasthan's initiative while hoping that adequate checks and balances will be built into the process of data collection and eventual collation</b>. Some years ago, West Bengal made a bold effort to write district gazetteers afresh and despite some snags and biases, it was a worthwhile endeavour. <b>If the Rajasthan Government entrusts the project to reasonably dispassionate historians (that's those without ideological blinkers), it might just emerge a pioneer in regenerating interest in people's history. Do that by all means, but please don't denigrate the Todds of Indian history in the process.</b>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Of Todd and toddlers
A largely unnoticed item about rewriting Rajasthan's history appeared in some newspapers last week, starting with The Pioneer. According to the report Rajasthan Education Minister Ghanshyam Tiwari told the media that his Government had decided to initiate a project to collate the State's rich rural history, village by village and eventually compile a few volumes of authentic people's history. It was pointed out that scholars hitherto relied upon Colonel James Todd's Annals and Antiquities of Rajputana, written almost two centuries ago as the basic source material for studying the region's historical lineage. Not surprisingly, it was also suggested that Todd's account smacked of colonial biases, which needed to be excised in order to present an accurate picture of Rajasthan's hoary tradition.
At the outset, I have a problem with dragging Todd's seminal work into controversy. That his humungous volume still remains the starting point for any historical research on Rajasthan speaks for its quality. It is a sad reality that Hindus would have remained largely ignorant of their own history had dedicated foreign scholars, especially early British administrators like Todd, James Sleeman, William Crooke and HH Risley not taken such passionate interest in chronicling India's unrecorded and mostly forgotten past. Add to that list archaeologists and patrons of archaeology like the much-maligned George Nathaniel Curzon, sociologists like Louis Dumont and Verrier Elwin, linguists like Max Mueller and many nameless scholars who took enormous pains to recreate the lost Indian identity, and you get to construct a pantheon of Europeans who revealed India to India.
Unfortunately, Indians have been congenitally incapable of adequately recording their past, so much so that even the nationalist writers of the early 20th Century who wrote of the Golden Age of the Guptas or the tales of valour of King Porus against Alexander and those of Rajputs vis-Ã -vis Muslim invaders, actually depended on the compilations of Arab travellers like al-Biruni or the same British administrators whom they reviled. Arguably, the shruti and smriti traditions survived from Vedic times and tales of triumph and tragedy were gleaned from the compositions of itinerant bards who toured the countryside narrating riveting stories of the past.
This background is important to understand why the Rajasthan Government may just be taking up a hugely daunting project. To begin with it will be difficult to find enough history-minded people to accurately compile records. Just because they will most probably be drawn from the ranks of local schoolteachers will not necessarily qualify them to execute what is a trained historian's job. The sifting of fact and outright fiction is a daunting task even for many professional historians. It would be unrealistic to expect reliable data to emerge from untrained hands. For instance, I wonder how many of the persons engaged to compile rural history would have even heard of MN Srinivas, a doyen of Indian sociology, whose The Remembered Village remains one of the most authentic and engrossing accounts of social structure and customs in a South Indian village. In fact, I would not expect the likely chroniclers of Rajasthan to have read RK Narayan's Malgudi Days or translations of Satinath Bhaduri's masterpiece on rural Bihar during the freedom struggle, Dhorai Charit Manas.
Admittedly, not every rural history compiler need be a PhD. But elementary skills would be needed to intelligently collate primary data mostly from oral sources in order to build a body of material, which in turn would be the basis for the macro study. Speaking purely from an academic standpoint, Rajasthan is at a disadvantage compared to those areas directly administered by the British. In British India, as opposed to princely states, it was mandatory to prepare district gazetteers and update them from time to time. These are invaluable source material for today's scholars for the British, with their remarkable sense of history, minutely recorded details of rural society, including social customs, fairs and festivals, economic activity, political tradition and so on.
However, on the positive side, the Princes too engaged scribes to sketch genealogical records, tales of valour and kept fairly exhaustive archives of landholdings, religious endowments and so on. The average Indian's disdain for history is manifested in the fact that few have so far bothered even to delve into these archives. When I visited Rajasthan's Shekhawati region some years ago, I was struck by the richness of the material contained in decaying chronicles at the havelis of well known Marwari families of today, some of which was used by Tomlinson in his manuscript on the prosperous community published nearly two decades ago. The murals and paintings adorning the outer walls of the havelis too have a tale to tell. But none to my knowledge has worked sufficiently on the available source material to recreate the region's glorious past.
William Dalrymple's latest work, The Last Mughal is a masterpiece in terms of bringing alive the Walled City of Delhi at the time of the Uprising of 1857. But it is a sad commentary on Indian scholars that over the last 100 years nobody seriously used the material comprising minutest details even of dhobi lists and meal menus of both the British and the Mughals. When I interviewed him for our sister publication Darpan recently, Dalrymple showed me a bound catalogue of 1857 records borrowed from the National Archives that had been issued only once since Independence, according to the library stamp!
In the West, local history, particularly community history is a cherished academic tradition. American scholars excel at this, although in fairness it must be pointed out that chronicling a few hundred years is significantly easier than covering several millennia. In France, the Annales school of historiography broke ranks with established history-writing by delving into church records, town planning details, marriage registers and so on to vividly describe how ordinary people as opposed to kings and nobles lived in times bygone. In India, while many young historians in the 70s and 80s got drawn into subaltern history or history from below, the volumes later degenerated into ideological diatribes against established historiography robbing the works of much academic value.
The point, therefore, is that the Rajasthan Government's laudable idea will need to cross almost insurmountable obstacles to achieve its objectives. I would be suspicious of untrained hands compiling history, which contrary to the prevailing philistine understanding is not just an account of dates of wars and names of rulers. On the other hand, the Marxist domination of history writing in India has ensured sterility and made history into a tool for ideological proselytisation, which is equally repugnant.
<b>Still, I welcome Rajasthan's initiative while hoping that adequate checks and balances will be built into the process of data collection and eventual collation</b>. Some years ago, West Bengal made a bold effort to write district gazetteers afresh and despite some snags and biases, it was a worthwhile endeavour. <b>If the Rajasthan Government entrusts the project to reasonably dispassionate historians (that's those without ideological blinkers), it might just emerge a pioneer in regenerating interest in people's history. Do that by all means, but please don't denigrate the Todds of Indian history in the process.</b>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->