India Archives - Not Even Past

Our New History Ph.D.s

For so many students this year, the cancellation of commencement meant the lack of an important milestone. And in this unsettling time, with it many demands on our attention, it’s possible to overlook the extraordinary accomplishment involved in completing a PhD in History. So we decided to take this opportunity to celebrate the 2019-2020 class of new UT Austin History PhDs and tell you a little about them and their work.

Each of these students completed at least two years of course work. They read hundreds of books and wrote dozens of papers to prepare for their comprehensive examinations. After that, they developed original research projects to answer questions no one had asked before. Then they did a year or so of research in libraries and archives, before sitting down to write their dissertations. They did all this while working, teaching, caring for their families, having at least a little fun, and, in some cases, writing for Not Even Past!

Here they are, with their dissertation titles (and abstracts, if we have them). CONGRATULATIONS DOCTORS!

Sandy Chang, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, University of Florida
“Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migrants in British Malaya, 1870s-1930s”

Across the South Seas explores the migration of Chinese women who embarked on border-crossing journeys, arriving in British Malaya as wives, domestic servants, and prostitutes. Between the 1870s and 1930s, hundreds of thousands of women traveled to the Peninsula at a time when modern migration control first emerged as a system of racial exclusion, curtailing Asian mobility into white settler colonies and nation-states. In colonial Malaya, however, Chinese women encountered a different set of racial, gender, and sexual politics at the border and beyond. Based on facilitation rather than exclusion, colonial immigration policies selectively encouraged Chinese female settlement across the Peninsula. Weaving together histories of colonial sexual economy, Chinese migration, and the globalization of border control, this study foregrounds the role of itinerant women during Asia’s mobility revolution. It argues that Chinese women’s intimate labor ultimately served as a crucial linchpin that sustained the Chinese overseas community in colonial Southeast Asia.

Sandy Chang on Not Even Past:
Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes
A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair, c.1880s (Courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore).

Itay Eisinger
“The Dystopian Turn In Hebrew Literature”

From its inception in Europe during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement promoted, leveraged and drove forward a utopian plan for a Jewish national revival, in the biblical Land of Israel, and in essence framed these plans as a pseudo divine right of the Jewish people. Numerous intellectual, cultural and literary historians therefore have focused on the role of utopian thinking in the shaping of Zionist ideology and Hebrew literature. By way of contrast, this dissertation focuses on the transformation, or evolution, of dystopian poetics within the realm of modern Hebrew literature. … Recent scholarship argues that while early “totalitarian” dystopias tended to focus on the dangers of the all-powerful state, tyranny, and global isolation as the main sources of collective danger to a prosperous and peaceful future, more recently published dystopias – both in the West and in Israel – have moved their focus to other topics and hazards, such as catastrophic ecological or climate disasters, patriarchy, sexism and misogyny, and the rise of surveillance and the integration of the intelligence community into the all-powerful well-oiled capitalist machine. While I do not disavow such arguments completely, I argue that most Israeli dystopias are still driven primarily by the traditional depiction of an authoritarian-fascist regime run amok – in alignment with the Huxley-Orwell model – while at the same time, explore creatively a vision of Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s prediction in 1967 that the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinians would inevitably force Israel to become a “police state.” … I examine the common themes found in these novels, including the dystopian depiction of an instrumentalization of the Shoah and manipulative abuse of the memory of the Holocaust in order to promote political agendas, allusions to the nakba, the over-militarism and nationalism of the state, the effects of the Occupation on Israeli society, and Israel’s neoliberal revolution…. By examining these novels from this perspective, and creating a dialogue between these works and different critical scholars, this dissertation aims to contribute to the study of Israel by rethinking its history – through the prism of dystopia.

Itay Eisinger on Not Even Past:
Rabin’s Assassination Twenty Years Later

Carl Forsberg, 2019-2020 Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, 2020-2021 Postdoctoral Fellow with Yale’s International Security Studies Program and the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy.
“A Diplomatic Counterrevolution: The Transformation Of The US-Middle East Alliance System In The 1970s”

This dissertation charts the agency of Arab, Iranian, and US elites in transforming the structure of Middle Eastern regional politics and constructing a coalition that persists to the present. In the decade after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the regimes of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, King Faisal in Saudi Arabia, and Shah Mohamad Reza Pahlavi in Iran set out to overturn the legacy of Nasserism and Arab socialism. Animated by a common fear that their internal opposition gained strength from a nexus of Soviet subversion and the transnational left, these regimes collaboratively forged a new regional order built around the primacy of state interests and the security of authoritarian rule. They instrumentally manipulated a range of US-led peace processes, including Arab-Israeli negotiations, US-Soviet détente, and conciliation between Iran and its Arab neighbors to advance their diplomatic counter-revolution. US administrations at times resisted these efforts because they read the region through the polarities of the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the 1973 War, however, the opportunity to marginalize Soviet influence in the region proved too enticing for US officials to ignore. My project deploys multi-lingual research conducted in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, the UK, and the US. To overcome the lack of open state archives in Arab countries, the dissertation examines US, British, Iranian, and Israeli records of discussions with Arab leaders, as well as memoirs, periodicals, and speeches in Farsi and Arabic, to triangulate the strategies and covert negotiations of Arab regimes.

Celeste Ward Gventer, Post-doc, The Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.
“Defense Reorganization For Unity: The Unified Combatant Command System, The 1958 Defense Reorganization Act And The Sixty-Year Drive For Unity In Grand Strategy And Military Doctrine”

Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles at the White House in 1956

This dissertation seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: why, in 1958 and as part of the Defense Reorganization Act (DRA) passed that year, did U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower remove the chiefs of the military services from the chain of operational command and instead empower the so-called “unified combatant commands” to lead American military forces in war? The answer, this dissertation will argue, is that Eisenhower had found himself competing with his military service chiefs for his entire first administration and the first half of his second over national (grand) strategy and military doctrine. Taking those service chiefs out of the chain of operational command would, in effect, diminish the role of those officers. Eisenhower had found that simply getting rid of refractory officers was insufficient to quiet their rebellion: only by suppressing their role permanently in the bureaucracy did he hope to unify American strategy- and policy-making. This interpretation is at odds with the few accounts of the 1958 DRA that do exist, which tend to take Eisenhower’s stated purposes—to enhance “unity of command”—at face value. The circumstances that led Eisenhower to take this step were decades, if not longer, in the making. … The situation resulted from the inherent pluralism in American military policy making … it was also a product of the decades that preceded Eisenhower’s administration during which the American military was consistently forced to “fill in the blanks” of national strategy. What drove matters to a head in the 1950s was the steady growth of American power after the 1898 Spanish-American War and, especially, after the Second World War. It is necessary to also appreciate several legacies Eisenhower confronted and that colored his own views: the history of American military thinking about command and about civilian control; the creation of military staffs and the process of reform and professionalization inside the military services during the twentieth century; and the development of independent service doctrines. … This work will trace these conceptual threads over the sixty-year rise of the United States to a global power, culminating in Eisenhower’s standoff with his service chiefs in the 1950s.

Lauren Henley, Assistant Professor, University of Richmond
“Constructing Clementine: Murder, Terror, and the (Un)Making of Community in the Rural South, 1900-1930”

Deirdre Lannon, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Texas State University
“Ruth Mary Reynolds And The Fight For Puerto Rico’s Independence”

Ruth Mary Reynolds (Women in Peace)

This dissertation is a biography of Ruth Mary Reynolds, a pacifist from the Black Hills of South Dakota who after moving to New York City became involved in the movement for Puerto Rico’s independence…. She bucked the social norms of her conservative hometown to join the Harlem Ashram…. Her work within the Ashram connected her to the web of leftist coalition activism launched by the Popular Front era of the 1930s and 1940s, and to A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement for black equality. She became involved with organized pacifism, most notably through her membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and her close friendship with its U.S. leader, Dutch-born theologian A.J. Muste. In 1944, Ruth decided to make the issue of Puerto Rico’s independence her own. She helped form a short-lived organization, the American League for Puerto Rico’s Independence, which was supported by Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck among others. She became close friends with Pedro Albizu Campos and his family, as well as other Puerto Rican independence activists. She traveled to Puerto Rico, and in 1950 found herself swept into the violence that erupted between the government and Albizu Campos’s followers. Her experiences in New York and Puerto Rico offer a unique lens into the ways in which the Puerto Rican independence movement functioned, and how it was quashed through governmental repressions. Her friendship with Pedro Albizu Campos, the fiery independentista who remains a figurehead of Puerto Rican identity and pride, helps to humanize the man behind the mission. Ruth never abandoned her friend, or their shared cause. She fought for Albizu Campos to be freed, bucking the climate of repression during McCarthyism. This dissertation traces her efforts until 1965, when Albizu Campos died. She remained an active part of the Puerto Rican independence movement until her own death in 1989.

Holly McCarthy
“The Iraq Petroleum Company In Revolutionary Times”

Signe Fourmy, Visiting Research Affiliate, Institute for Historical Studies and Education Consultant, Humanities Texas.
“They Chose Death Over Slavery: Enslaved Women and Infanticide in the Antebellum South”

“They Chose Death Over Slavery,” … examines enslaved women’s acts of infanticide as maternal resistance. Enslaved women occupied a unique position within the slaveholding household. As re/productive laborers, enslavers profited from work women performed in the fields and house, but also from the children they birthed and raised. I argue that enslaved women’s acts of maternal violence bear particular meaning as a rejection of enslavers’ authority over their reproduction and a reflection of the trauma of enslavement. This dissertation identifies and analyzes incidents of infanticide, in Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri. Using a comparative approach to consider geographic location and household size—factors that shaped the lived experiences of the enslaved—I ask what, if any, patterns existed? What social, economic, and political considerations influenced pivotal legal determinations—including decisions to prosecute, punish, or pardon these women? Expanding on the work of Laura Edwards and Paul Finkelman, I argue that public prosecution and legal outcomes balanced community socio-legal interests in enforcing the law while simultaneously protecting slaveowners profiting from their (re)productive labor. The existing scholarship on slavery, resistance, and reproduction shows that enslaved women were prosecuted for infanticide, yet the only book-length studies of enslaved women and infanticide center on one sensationalized case involving Margaret Garner. Infanticide was more prevalent than the secondary literature suggests. Building upon the work of historians Darlene Clark Hine and Jennifer L. Morgan, I explore how enslaved women re-appropriated their reproductive capacity as a means of resistance. In conversation with Nikki M. Taylor, Sasha Turner, and Marisa Fuentes, I ask what this particular type of violence reveals about the interiority of enslaved women’s lives. Additionally, I explore what these acts of maternal violence reveal about enslaved motherhood—or more specifically an enslaved woman’s decision not to mother her child.

Signe Fourmy on Not Even Past:
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor

Sean Killen
“South Asians and the Creation of International Legal Order, c. 1850-c. 1920: Global Political Thought and Imperial Legal Politics”

This dissertation argues that South Asians used international legal discourse both for ideological disputation and to mount political challenges to the domination and subjugation that accompanied British imperial rule between roughly 1850 and 1920. South Asians instigated political and legal disputes in India and Britain, throughout the empire, and overseas, and gained promises and partial concessions to Indian opinions and demands that limited British options in imperial and international relations. In so doing, they compelled the British state to alter the ideology, the policies, and the practices of the state, in India and in its relations with other states both within and outside the empire. Britain’s power, ultimately, meant that South Asians’ argumentation and actions shaped the contours of global order after the First World War….Traditional histories of international law argue that international law originated in Europe and regulated European states’ relations until colonized states were granted international legal recognition at the time of decolonization. Recent revisionist scholarship argues that the existence and experience of empire and colonial rule shaped the development of international law and global order throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dissertation approaches empire in a way that emphasizes the global exchange of ideas and the active connections between colonizers and the colonized. Elite, English-speaking South Asians acted as cultural translators or intermediaries. They engaged in debates as public intellectuals, and they carved out spaces for themselves in the social and political communities that created public opinion. Consequently, South Asians’ ideas about relations among different peoples and between states, and South Asians’ mobilization of these ideas throughout the empire and overseas to make political claims about the obligations of the imperial state and the rights of imperial subjects shaped ideas about global order and the structure of international legal relations.

Jimena Perry, Teaching Instructor, East Carolina University
“Trying to Remember: Museums, Exhibitions, and Memories of Violence in Colombia, 2000-2014”

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia.

Since the turn of the century, not only museum professionals but grassroots community leaders have undertaken the challenge of memorializing the Colombian armed conflict of the 1980s to the early 2000s. In an attempt to confront the horrors of the massacres, forced displacement, bombings, and disappearances, museums and exhibitions have become one of the tools used to represent and remember the brutalities endured. To demonstrate how historical memories are informed by cultural diversity, my dissertation examines how Colombians remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the countryʼs internal war. The chapters of this work delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and represent at the National Museum of the country. The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their particular way of remembering, which emphasizes their peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue. Bringing violence, memory, and museum studies together, my work contributes to our understanding of how social groups severely impacted by atrocities recreate and remember their violent experiences. In addition, my case studies exemplify why it is necessary to hear the multiple voices of conflict survivors, especially in a country with a long history of violence like Colombia. Drawing on displays, newspapers, interviews, catalogs, and oral histories, I study how museums and exhibitions in Colombia become politically active subjects in the acts of reflection and mourning, and how they foster new relationships between the state and society. My work also analyzes museums and displays as arbiters of social memory. It asks how representations of violence serve in processes of transitional justice and promotion of human rights for societies that have been racked by decades of violence.

Jimena Perry on Not Even Past:
When Answers Are Not Enough: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
More Than Archives: Dealing with Unfinished History
Too Much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellin, Colombia
Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory, 2000-2014
My Cocaine Museum by Michael Taussig
History Museums: The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogatá, Colombia
History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

Christina Villareal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, The University of Texas at El Paso
“Resisting Colonial Subjugation: The Search for Refuge in the Texas-Louisiana Borderlands, 1714-1803”

This dissertation is a history of the Spanish borderlands from the perspectives of subjugated people in the Gulf Coast. Based on colonial, military, and civil manuscript sources from archives in the United States, Mexico, Spain, and France, it traces the physical movement of Native Americans, soldiers, and African and indigenous slaves who fled conscription, reduction to Catholic missions, or enslavement in the Texas-Louisiana borderlands of the eighteenth century. It reconstructs geographies of resistance to understand how challenges to colonial oppression shaped imperial territory and created alternative spaces for asylum. While the overarching focus of the dissertation is political space-making at the ground-level, the pivotal change occasioned by the Treaty of Paris (1763) serves as the central arc of the dissertation. The treaty, in which Spain acquired Louisiana from France, signified a major imperial transformation of the Gulf Coast. Initiated “from above,” this geopolitical transition expanded the Spanish borderlands over former French territory and altered the locations where Native Americans, soldiers, and enslaved people could find or avoid colonial oppression.

Christina Villareal on Not Even Past
The War on Drugs: How the US and Mexico Jointly Created the Mexican Drug War by Carmen Boullusa and Mike Wallace

Andrew Weiss
“The Virgin and The Pri: Guadalupanismo And Political Governance In Mexico, 1945-1979”

This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between Catholicism and political governance in Mexico from 1945 until 1979 through the lens of Guadalupanismo. Guadalupanismo (devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe) is a unifying nationalistic force in Mexico. After 1940, Church and state collaborated to promote the Virgin of Guadalupe as a nationalist emblem following decades of divisive state-led religious persecution. Mexico, however, remained officially anticlerical sociopolitical territory. I analyze flashpoints of Guadalupan nationalism to reveal the history of Mexican Church-state relations and Catholic religiosity. These episodes are: the 1945 fiftieth anniversary of the 1895 coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe; U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 visit to the Basilica of Guadalupe; the construction of the New Basilica in the 1970s (inaugurated in 1976); and Pope John Paul II’s trip to Mexico and the Basilica in 1979. Each of these occasions elicited great popular enthusiasm and participation in public ritual. And each brought politicians in contact with the third rail in Mexican politics: religion. The essential value of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as I show, is that as both a Catholic and a nationalistic icon, she represented an ideal symbolic terrain for the renegotiation and calibration of Church-state relations under PRI rule. I follow these Guadalupan episodes to track the history of Guadalupanismo and interpret the changing Church-state relationship at different junctures in the course of the single-party priísta regime. These junctures (1945, 1962, 1976, and 1979) are relevant because they are representative of classical and degenerative phases of priísmo (the ideology of the ruling party [PRI] that governed Mexico from 1929 until 2000) and cover the episcopates of three major figures who ran the Archdiocese of Mexico for over sixty years. The Church-state covenant was renegotiated over time as seen by the Guadalupan episodes I analyze.

Andrew Weiss on Not Even Past
Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey

Pictured above (Clockwise from top center): Sandy Chang, Andrew Weiss, Deirdre Lannon, Jimena Perry, Celeste Ward Gventer, Christina Villareal, Itay Eisinger.
Not pictured: Signe Fourmy, Lauren Henley, Sean Killen, Holly McCarthy, Carl Forsberg,

Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire by Jeffrey A. Auerbach (2018)

by Amina Marzouk Chouchene | First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum

The British Empire has been firmly tied to myth, adventure, and victory. For many Britons, “the empire was the mythic landscape of romance and adventure. It was that quarter of the globe that was colored and included darkest Africa and the mysterious East.”[1] Cultural artifacts such as music, films, cigarette cards, and fiction have long constructed and reflected this rosy vision of the empire as a place of adventure and excitement. Against this widely held view of the empire, Jeffrey Auerbach identifies an overwhelming emotion that filled the psyche of many Britons as they moved to new lands: imperial boredom. Auerbach defines boredom as “an emotional state that individuals experience when they find themselves without anything particular to do and are uninterested in their surroundings.”[2]

Unenthused British Men and Women in India (via Wikimedia Commons)

Auerbach identifies the feeling as a “modern construct” closely associated with the mid-eighteenth century. This does not mean that people were never bored before this, but that they “did not know it or express it.”(p.4) Rather, it was with the spread of industrial capitalism and the Enlightenment emphasis on individual rights and happiness that the concept came to the fore.

In a well-researched and enjoyable book, the author argues “that despite the many and famous tales of glory and adventure, a significant and overlooked feature of the nineteenth-century British imperial experience was boredom and disappointment.”(p.4) In other words, instead of focusing on the exploits of imperial luminaries such as Walter Raleigh, James Cook, Robert Clive, David Livingstone, Cecil Rhodes and others, Auerbach pays particular attention to the moments when many travelers, colonial officers, governors, soldiers, and settlers were gripped by an intense sense of boredom in India, Australia, and southern Africa.

Imperial Boredom by Jeffrey A. Auerbach (2018)

In five thematic chapters, “Voyages”, Landscapes,” Governors,” Soldiers”, and “Settlers,” Auerbach shines new light on the experience of traversing, viewing, governing, defending and settling the empire from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. (p.6) The monotonous nature of the sea voyage, dreary and uninteresting imperial lands, daily routine, depressingly dull dispatches, mind-numbing meetings are some of the sources of an utter sense of imperial boredom.

Although Auerbach’s book traces imperial boredom from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, he makes it clear, from the beginning, that the sense of boredom experienced by many Britons in new colonial settings was much more profound during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the latter was marked by a series of bewildering social, cultural, and technological changes that stripped the empire of its sense of novelty. The development of new means of transport such as steamships, the rise of tourism, and the proliferation of guidebooks jeopardized the sense of risk, newness, enthusiasm that had long been associated with the British imperial experience. (p.5) Consequently, while “the early empire may have been about wonder and marvel, the nineteenth century was far less exciting and satisfying project.”(p.77)

Map of India from A Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma, and Ceylon Guidebook, 1911 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Additionally, Auerbach suggests that imperial boredom arose out of a yawning gap between the rosy vision of the empire as a thrilling experience, largely fostered by nineteenth-century fiction, and the realities on the ground. Instead of pure entertainment, colonial officers and governors were fed up with the excessively ceremonial and bureaucratic nature of the empire. They were bombarded with a burdening volume of paperwork and monotonous public duties such as hospital visits, school inspections, and state dinners.(p.8) Soldiers were engaged in mere skirmishes and spent most of their time in barracks suffering searing heat. Rarely were they able to resist the temptations of alcohol. Others deserted the army and went missing “searching for simple and transitory pleasures that might alleviate their monotony.”(p.116) Settler women incessantly complained about the dullness of their lives, interspersed with unexciting social rituals and prohibitions on contact with indigenous people.(p.9)An interesting case in point is that of British women in India, who rarely learned an Indian language or interacted with the local population due to “an imperial culture increasingly rooted in difference and aloofness.”(p.150) As a result, experiences of solitariness and a consequent sense of boredom were a ubiquitous feature of their lives. For example, Maria Graham, who visited Calcutta and Madras in 1810, complained about her inability to know any Indian family due the “distance kept up between Europeans and the natives.”(p.150) Thereupon, she was bored.

A woman sits alone in a field, 19th Century India (Photo Credit: British Library Board via CNN)

All of these examples are compellingly relevant and illustrative of some of the colonial circumstances that drove Britons mad with boredom, challenging one of the enduring myths about the British Empire as a site of exciting adventure.

[1] Jeffrey Richards, “Boy’s own Empire: Feature Films and Imperialism in the 1930s.”Imperialism and Popular Culture. edited by John Mackenzie, Manchester UP, 1986, 143.
[2] Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Imperial Boredom.

You might also like:
The November feature: History Between Memory and Reconstruction
Did the British Empire depend on separating Parents and Children?
Anxieties, Fear, and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné (2016)
The Public Archive: Mercenary Monks
Indrani Chatterjee on Monasteries and Memory in Northeast India
The Public Archive: Indian Revolt of 1857

History Between Memory and Reconstruction

By Sumit Guha

Nothing seems easier than remembering. Each of us remembers a great deal – from the recent past and the remote past. And even if we cannot remember something it surely is recorded somewhere in a collective memory – perhaps in the vast ragbag of information, disinformation, and speculation to be found on the internet? But once we think of verifying what we remember, we find that we are all – including the most eminent – sometimes mistaken. As the forensic psychologists Loftus and Doyle describe it,

“Sometimes information was never stored to begin with. Sometimes interference prevents memory from emerging to consciousness. Sometimes witnesses wish to forget; sometimes they are temporarily unable to retrieve… Moreover, another force, known as a constructive force, is also at work. People seem to be able to take bits and pieces of their experience and integrate them to construct objects that they never saw and events that never really happened.”

With audiences of millions, true crime stories and celebrity criminal trials form the most widely consumed form of historical memory in the USA – and perhaps in the world – today. A criminal trial elicits and tests evidence to a standard that few historical narratives could consistently meet. Yet, as Loftus and many others have pointed out, they can generate false narratives, either though bad laboratory science or the frailties of eye-witness memory.

So where does that leave historians, they who deem themselves the custodians of authentic memory? Are we simply writing the most tedious genre of “magical realism,” as Alice suspected? Historians are not writing imaginary history, but they cannot transcend either the passage of time or the loss of knowledge. They must live in the society of their own time, with all the limitations that that implies.

Maurice Halbwachs (Wikipedia)

All thought on this must begin with the work of the great French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs who was murdered in Buchenwald in 1945. Halbwachs sought to integrate the then emerging science of social psychology with his concept of collective memory. He wrote that we can remember the past only by retrieving the location of past events “from the frameworks of collective memory.” Almost a century of psychological research after Halbwachs has solidly supported his claim. “Remembering” is not an act of retrieval, but of reconstruction within a social group.

The reconstructive process is where mistakes occur, such as the implanting of false memories. Experimental psychologists have long known about false or implanted memory. But obviously, demonstrating falsity depends on our capacity to recover authentic truth. So if the memory claims to be a statement of fact, then it is open to interrogation – even first-person eyewitness narrative may be questioned. These have failed scrutiny more than once.

A Tale from the Decameron by John William Waterhouse, 1916 (Wikimedia)

In reconstructing historical memory, scholars have often focused only on the high scholarship of the past, ignoring folk and popular modes of reconstructing pasts. The family estate, the clan, the village, up to the larger imagined communities of ordinary folk — these commonplace and everyday pasts also tell important stories At various times and places, such narrations occupied the whole space of historical practice: all history was non-professional history. It was also often consciously public, directed, for example, to establish present privilege through an inherited right. Only gradually was history that was based on claims to sanctity, honor, property, and taxation displaced by new histories written by professionals, at least in the confines of the formal educational system. That transition required the determination of the protocols of historical inquiry within the community of scholars.

Collective memory is defined by its public and societally monitored character. It is necessarily made and reproduced within a framework of social and political relations that create and bind a community of thought. It also follows that the disintegration of that framing community will also cause its social memory to vanish. Sometimes – usually in recent millennia, collective memory has left some legible trace in the historical record: more often it has not. That indeed, is what has happened to the greatest part of human collective memory: the bards and sages died and left no disciples. Inscriptions and monuments crumbled. Scribal traditions died out and scripts became illegible. In the past two centuries, that collective memory has increasingly, but not solely, been built by standardized and state-controlled education. It has also been deeply imprinted by any given state’s variety of nationalism.

Collective memory was not trivial: it affected political life, criminal justice, and property claims in concrete and specific ways. It is a reconstruction that is socially sanctioned and institutionalized. In 1658, the noble Raymond de Gigord who carried the armorial symbols shown above had to prove his nobility to avoid a royal tax (franc-fief).

But before and alongside the modern state, many smaller social entities also provided frameworks for the organization of memory. Some operated by the creation of ‘micro-histories.’

Hero-stone commemorating warriors who fought large numbers of enemies to protect their herds of cows. (Sagar Borkar’s Blog. Used with permission)

The descendants of an impoverished lineage revived their claim some sixty years after fleeing their village during an invasion. They told the tribunal their story and authenticated it by referring to a well-known village monument:

“Our ancestors maintained their lordship through the generations, but we cannot discover who first obtained the right. In the days of Bijapur rule [i.e. before the 1650s] Krishna-shet son of Yesa-shet ran the lordship. Krishna-shet’s brother Sona-shet died in the village, his wife immolated herself, her masonry memorial is still extant in the village. Then Bhāg-shet son of Krishna-set managed the lordship.”

This hero stone commemorates a “sati,” a woman who burned herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. (Sagar Borkar’s Blog, used with permission).

Such episodes were recorded on the landscape in thousands of monuments, like the memorial shown immediately above and below, and at the top of the page. The local community would have preserved their hero’s memory and associated it with the stone. After the community is long since dispersed, the stones remain.

Original memory has worn away but stone still survives (Wikipedia)

Historical memory is not only lost: it is also made anew by emerging communities. For the past two centuries and in a growing part of the world, such communities include emergent nations struggling against colonial empires. Nationalists sought to shape various alternative memories to fit their own future projects. The departure of the British Empire from South Asia left its apparatus of schooling and research in new hands. That is the frame in which modern practices of historical memory were shaped in nineteenth and twentieth-century South Asia and elsewhere. But they exist as bubbles in the stream of other narratives, some concocted for entertainment, some for more sinister purposes.

For more on history and memory in India, see Sumit Guha’s new book: History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000.

Suggestions for further reading:

Maurice Halbwachs On Collective Memory. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. (1992).
This was written in the 1930s and essentially founded the study of historical memory. It contains a particularly important study of the remembered and imagined topography of Jerusalem that later Christians sought to find and sometimes implanted.

Yosef H. Yerushalmi Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. (1982).
This book studies not only the textual record of a community that preserved and expanded it for 2500 years, but also develops an elegant explanation of why it took the shape that it did.

Prachi Deshpande. Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960. (2007).
Tracks a continuous tradition of historical memory in Western India and illustrates the leakages from tradition to historical text to theatre and novels in a major Indian language, Marathi.

Christian L. Novetzke. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. (2008).
Novetzke tracks the many textual traditions and performative oral memories of a pan-Indian religious figure through seven centuries.

Indrani Chatterjee. Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India. (2013)
Shows how a religious tradition and network were erased under the pressures of colonial conquest and a new set of identities and memories were implanted under the joint pressures of Western anthropology and Protestant missionary enterprise.

Header photo credit: Shreyans Vasa, Memorial in Chhatardi, Bhuj, India (Wikipedia)

From There to Here: Indrani Chatterjee

In 1947, when British India was carved into two states of India and Pakistan, many Hindu families relocated from eastern Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971) to Indian Bengal. My parents came from two such families. My father was deeply curious about the world, and bought various Readers Digest and National Geographic publications on a meager rupee-based salary, earned as a doctor in the postcolonial Indian army. My youth was shaped by his predicament, balancing between his own ‘outsider’ status in the complex social-political world of postcolonial India, and the straining to flee these complexities for a world conjured up by books, theater, film.

In the 1980s, when I wanted to pursue research in history, funds were scarce. I worked as an adjunct at various women’s colleges for some years, learning to teach neo-literate young girls about distant places and long-ago events in Hindi when necessary. I met my partner, another historian, at a teacher’s strike for better wages during one such stint. Five years later, a scholarship to pursue research in School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, finally gave me the chance to belong to the land of books my parents had taught me to love.

The wealth of records in the SOAS Library, British Library and the British Museum convinced me to remain in the field of teaching and research, and to make these gains available to others in the country of my origin. But the country of my birth-origin had moved on by the late 1990s. Though I resigned my tenured job of teaching in a college of Delhi University, and moved to a full-time research position in my mother’s beloved city, Calcutta, the ethnic-linguistic and religious sectarianisms of the closing years of the millennium also narrowed research agendas. The Indian elections of 1998 were decisive in that regard. My life in research, as distinct from my partner’s, was over if we did not relocate. By 2000, we had both begun another version of ‘outsider’ lives, this time in the North American academe, he as a chair-holding professor, and me as a spouse on a visa that disallowed paid employment! Then began the struggle to secure work-authorization and the green card (resident status), learning the rituals of professional belonging – the job-search, from letter-writing to securing letter-writers for one’s own research, the social codes undergirding the profession. Mercifully, there were the Journal of Higher Education, various web-sites for applicants, and more than a little help from my friends. With all these tools, a brave Black feminist Chair heading a search at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ and an inheritance of survivorship, I entered the academic workforce in 2001. And here I am, a citizen, learning my way through the delightful open stacks of the Perry Castañeda Library, willing to do whatever it takes to preserve this new country of mine for the perpetually curious.

Others in this series

The Public Archive: Mercenary Monks

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Jonathan Seefeldt’s digital project “Mercenary Monks” provides a glimpse into the lives and continuing legacy of the Dadupanthi Nagas—an early modern monastic community from the semi-desert region of western India. Poems, photographs, and other documents illuminate a monastic world of raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

More on Seefeldt’s project and The Public Archive here.

The Public Archive: Indian Revolt of 1857

Also known as “Sepoy Mutiny,” the Indian Rebellion of 1857 represented a major, although unsuccessful, challenge to British colonialism. Anuj Kaushal’s digital project, titled “Indian Revolt of 1857”, considers the question of Indian nationalism during the rebellion and British response through blogs, lesson plans, and digitized issues of Illustrated London Times and New York Daily Tribune.

More on Kaushal’s project and The Public Archive here

The Public Archive

Doing History Online and In Public

by Joan Neuberger

Links to their projects can all be found below on this page.

We built these digital, public projects in four main steps.

First, with the help of UT librarians, the students identified collections related to their research that were not yet available to the public. These collections of documents come from the many wonderful archives on our campus: the Harry Ransom Center, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Perry-Castañeda Library, the Briscoe Center for American History, and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection. Then we digitized them.

Second, we each wrote a series of blog-essays to share our archival finds with the public. Each blog is meant to show something historically significant about our documents and to open them up in ways that any curious reader, without any background in the subject, can understand and appreciate.

Third, we wrote lesson plans based on our documents to allow educators at the K-12 and college levels to bring our archives into their classrooms.

Finally, we each built a website to introduce our topics, to share our digitized documents, and to make our blogs and lesson plans openly available.

Here are the results:

Qahvehkhaneh: Reading Iranian Newspapers: by Andrew Akhlaghi

The coffeehouse, qahvehkhaneh, was an important political and cultural institution in Iran. As men drank coffee, played backgammon, and discussed business, they also listened to impassioned pleas for democracy and reform from newspapers published in the Ottoman Empire, Russian Caucasus, and British India, smuggled into Iran and read aloud. This qahvehkhaneh is meant to spread the issues of one newspaper, Etella’at, to those curious about Iran.

Bureaucracy on the Ground: the Gálvez Visita of 1765: by Brittany Erwin.

This project examines the localized consequences and on-the-ground implications of the royal inspection, or visita general, administered by José de Gálvez in New Spain from 1765-1771.

After the Silence: María Luisa Puga and the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake by Ashley Garcia

María Luisa Puga (1944-2004) was a talented Mexican novelist from the Post-Boom movement whose personal notebooks, manuscripts, correspondence, and related documents are held in the Benson Latin American Collection. On this site you will find digitized selections from Cuaderno 118, which contains both Puga’s coverage of the earthquake that struck Mexico DF (now Mexico City) in 1985 and her reflections on those original pages, written in 2002.

Building a Jewish School in Iran: The Barmaïmon-Hamadan Manuscript by Isabelle Headrick

Where do you go when you want to change the world? For Isaac and Rebecca Bassan in 1900, the destination was Hamadan, Iran, to establish a French-language, Jewish school for the small Jewish community in that city. About fifty years another teacher at the school, Isaac Barmaïmon, wrote an 81-page manuscript that describes the first twenty years of the school’s existence.

Food Migrations: Texas Czech Culinary Traditions by Tracy Heim

Texans with Czech heritage have been able to preserve their culture in America through organizations, cultural events, church groups, and especially through food. Two books of recipes and other documents contextualize the process of migration into life in Texas and create a framework for understanding the Texas Czech culture.

Indian Revolt of 1857 by Anuj Kaushal.

South Asia witnessed an event during 1857 which altered the history of India, Britain, and the British East India Company. The event, known as a mere “mutiny” by the British and as an anti-colonial revolt by Indians, was reported in the English language press around the world.

The Road to Sesame Street by Peter Kunze

The Road to Sesame Street features government documents tracing the development of the Public Broadcast Act of 1967, the landmark legislation that established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, PBS, and NPR. Using materials from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, this project provides a behind-the-scenes view of the power players, interest groups, and decisions that laid the groundwork for American public media.

Animating Italian Immigration: Sicilian-American Puppetry by Megan McQuaid.

Attending a puppet theatre performance with familiar characters acting out well-known stories gave some Italians living in New York City a regular taste of the homeland they had left behind.

Frederic Allen Williams: Citizen-Artist with a Magic Lantern by Jesse Ritner

Frederic Allen Williams (1898-1955) was a prominent sculptor, lecturer, intellectual, and rodeo rider based in New York City, where he became known for his talks on Native American art, illustrated with magic lantern slides, which he gave in his midtown studio near the then recently built Museum of Modern Art.

Woven Into History: Living Cultural Fabrics by Alina Scott

The nineteenth and twentieth-century Navajo rugs in this collection aims to provide a platform for respectful collaboration and discourse to recenter the discussion of Navajo culture and commodity production around them and to diversify traditional conversations about Navajo textiles and their communities.

Mercenary Monks by Jonathan Seefeldt

These texts are windows into a thriving monastic world whose varied activities included: raising mercenary armies, caring for widows and child brides, providing credit and other banking services, collecting tax revenue from farmers, providing merit and prestige to an emerging merchant class, and asserting a (short-lived) form of political independence.

Guards and Pickets: The Paperwork of Slavery by Gaila Sims.

The documents in this collection provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, as well as the financial documentation used to make money off the institution of slavery.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following people for sharing their expertise in digital and public history with us: Dale Correa, Liza Talbot, Ian Goodale, Stephanie Malmros, Christina Bleyer, Albert Palacios, Andrea Gustavson, Elizabeth Gushee, Astrid Ruggaldier, Penne Restad, and Stacy Vlasits.

Victoria & Abdul: Simulacra & Simulation

by Gajendra Singh
University of Exeter

Posted in partnership with the History Department at the University of Exeter and The Imperial and Global Forum.

One of the earliest films to be shot and then screened throughout India were scenes from the Delhi Durbar between December 29, 1902 and January 10, 1903 The Imperial Durbar, created to celebrate the accession of Edward VII as Emperor of India following the death of Victoria, was the most expensive and elaborate act of British Imperial pageantry that had ever been attempted. Nathaniel Curzon, as Viceroy of India, oversaw the construction of a tent city housing 150,000 guests north of Delhi proper and what occurred in Delhi was to be replicated (on a smaller scale) in towns and cities across India.

The purpose of the Durbar was to contrast British modernity with Indian tradition. Europeans at the Durbar were instructed to dress in contemporary styles even when celebrating an older British Imperial past (as with veterans of the ‘Mutiny’). Indians, however, were to wear Oriental (perceptibly Oriental) costumes as motifs of their Otherness. This construction of an exaggerated sense of Imperial difference, and through it Imperial order and Imperial continuity, was significant. It was a statement of the permanence of Empire, of Britain’s Empire being at the vanguard of modernity even as the Empire itself was increasingly anxious about nascent nationalist movements and rocked by perpetual Imperial crises.

It’s unlikely that Stephen Frears watched these films from 1902 or 1903 upon finalising the screenplay and then shooting Victoria & Abdul. They have only recently been digitized and archived by the British Film Institute. But his recent movie, filmed when most visions of the past are obscured by the myopia of the present, is an unconscious reproduction of films produced and shown when Empire was an idée fixe in the British mind. Abdul Karim, one of several Indians at Victoria’s court during her long reign (the other two, that I know of, were Dalip Singh, the last Maharaja of Punjab, and Victoria Gouramma, the daughter of the last Raja of Kodagu), is a cypher throughout the film. He shows no emotion or sentiment or stirring rhetoric except when genuflecting before his Empress – kissing her feet upon their first meeting, stoically holding her hand upon her death, sitting as a sentinel by her statue in Agra into his dotage.

Such a one-dimensional portrayal is partly a reflection of the populist histories used as source material for the film. Sushila Anand’s Indian Sahib: Queen Victoria’s Dear Abdul is a titillating account of the possible sexual encounter between the matronly white Empress and her much younger lowborn Indian servant and Shrabani Basu’s Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant is a more sober tale of the scandal that the relationship caused among Victoria’s staff. But even in these accounts Karim has voice and agency. Anand and Basu are, in part, relying upon Karim’s own accounts of what transpired when he and Victoria were alone.

Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim, 1893 (via Wikimedia Commons)

That agency is consciously stripped by Frears. His instruction to Ali Fazal upon taking up the role was to play him as Peter Sellar’s Chance in Being There, a character who is a simple-minded, sheltered gardener suddenly catapulted into political power.[1] It is Judi Dench’s Victoria and, to a lesser extent, Eddie Izzard’s wonderfully corpulent Bertie/Edward VII who are the actual protagonists of the piece. The official synopsis makes this clear:

The film tells the extraordinary true story of an unexpected friendship in the later years of Queen Victoria’s remarkable rule. When Abdul Karim, a young clerk, travels from India to participate in the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, he is surprised to find favor [sic.] with the Queen herself. As the Queen questions the constrictions of her long-held position, the two forge an unlikely and devoted alliance with a loyalty to one another that her household and inner circle all attempt to destroy. As the friendship deepens, the Queen begins to see a changing world through new eyes and joyfully reclaims her humanity.

Her rule, her favour, her humanity. It is a story told to redeem Victoria. It is through her eyes that the narrative is conveyed and any change or evolution in a character occurs in her attitudes towards India and her subject people – learning some terribly mis-pronounced Hindustani/Urdu and that Indians too can act as competent servants (huzzah!). Victoria is cast as the flagbearer of Imperial progress against her “racialist” son who despises Karim and is representative of a “bad” form of Imperialism. “If only the latter had not won out,” we are expected to cry, “then India would not have been lost!” Only in the uncovering of the fact that Karim had gonorrhoea by Victoria’s outraged staff do we get a glimpse of the many lives lived by Karim. One can only assume that he had at least some fun in England.

The film is an Orientalist fable that is not meant to reveal any social life of the Indian portrayed. But that is not what makes it remarkable. Stephen Frears made his career with My Beautiful Laundrette in 1985, a film which presented the transgressive relationship between Gordon Warnecke’s Omar, a British-Pakistani from Battersea, and Daniel Day Lewis’ Johnny, a neo-Nazi. It seems that the complex filmic relationships that were once Frears’ stock-in-trade are no longer filmable or seen as commercially viable. Instead in Abdul we have a character who is childlike in his stupor at British munificence, completely asexual despite the revelation that he has a sexually transmitted disease, and is always ready with a word of wisdom that only a true Oriental can provide (lines that are, of course, from Rumi – always Rumi). It is an unconscious reproduction of the first films ever produced of and in India. But at least in those films the desire to cast Indians into caricatures was born from Imperial anxiety; this is merely the product of an absence of thought.

Sources and Related Reading:

Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (2015).

Kim Wagner, ‘“Treading Upon Fires”: The “Mutiny”-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’; Past and Present, 218: 1 (2013): 159-197.

Sushila Anand, Indian Sahib: Queen Victoria’s Dear Abdul, (1996).

Shrabani Basu, Victoria and Karim: The True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant, (2010).

Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, (1997).

UK readers can find early films of India on BFI Player here, and a full list of films from this era (with commentary by the author) here. US and international readers can see a similar film, Delhi Durbar (1912) on Youtube here.

[1] According to Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, BBC Radio Five Live, 15^th September 2017. Hello to Jason Isaacs.

The Last Hindu Emperor

By Cynthia Talbot

Why are some medieval kings still widely remembered today, when so many others have been forgotten? The monuments they commissioned sometimes keep their memories alive, but the kings of the distant past who loom largest in popular memory typically either ushered in a new age – like Charlemagne, the king of the Franks, crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope in 800 AD – or else they represent the end of an era – like King Arthur, a British leader who may have fought the Saxon invaders around 500 AD.

Like Charlemagne and King Arthur, the twelfth-century Indian ruler Prithviraj Chauhan stood on the cusp of two periods in a time of great change. He has often been described as “the last Hindu emperor” because Muslim dynasties of Central Asian or Afghan origin became dominant after Prithviraj Chauhan’s death.

Prithviraj Chauhan is mentioned in history textbooks today mainly because he lost a major battle in 1192 against Shihab al-Din Muhammad Ghuri, based in Afghanistan. This defeat soon led to Muslim rule in much of North India under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526) and the Mughal empire (1526- ca. 1750). Prithviraj Chauhan’s defeat had serious consequences: an influx of Central Asian and Afghan warriors, the adoption of Persian language and culture, and the spread of Islam. But his defeat in one battle does not seem important enough to justify the dozens of narratives about him that have been composed since his death. He continues to be remembered in India to this day. A three-rupee postage stamp bearing his name was issued in 2000 and a lavishly produced TV series on his life, “Prithviraj Chauhan, Warrior Hero of (Our) Land” (Dharti ka Veer Yodha Prithviraj Chauhan) aired between 2006 and 2009 on StarTV. A recent bronze statue of him forms the centerpiece of a large memorial park created in the king’s honor in 1996 at Ajmer, the city in the state of Rajasthan that was his dynasty’s capital. It is featured on the Wikipedia entry on Prithviraj Chauhan and appears on numerous other websites.

The main reason for Prithviraj Chauhan’s continuing fame is Prithviraj Raso, an epic about the king that became popular beginning in the late sixteenth century. In this poem composed in medieval Hindi, Prithviraj does not simply sink into obscurity after his defeat as most historians now believe. Instead, Prithviraj Raso tells us that the king was taken captive and blinded. Prithviraj’s loyal court poet, Chand Bardai, hears of his lord’s imprisonment in Ghazni, the enemy’s capital, and makes the long journey to Afghanistan. There he tricks Muhammad Ghuri into permitting an exhibition of Prithviraj’s legendary skill at archery. The blind Prithviraj, who is supposed to shoot an arrow through seven metal gongs thrown up in the air, instead aims at Muhammad Ghuri’s voice and instantly kills him. With this gratifying ending to his life story, the king regains his honor if not his kingdom. Although scholars have denied Prithviraj Raso‘s historicity for over a century, the claim that it dates back to Prithviraj’s twelfth-century lifetime is still sometimes made, especially in popular Indian culture.

The almost two hundred surviving manuscripts of Prithviraj Raso show that it was a favorite of the Rajput warriors of northwestern India. Rajputs were the main group of Hindus who fought on behalf of the mighty Mughal empire, most of whose leading officers were Muslim. Prithviraj Raso maintained its status as an authoritative source of information on King Prithviraj among Rajputs well into the nineteenth century. This was partly because James Tod, the first British agent appointed to their territory, accepted and propagated the Rajput belief that the epic was written by Chand Bardai, Prithviraj’s court poet. Rajput nobles of the early nineteenth century cherished Prithviraj Raso as a history of their community because the epic narrated the valiant deeds not only of the king but also of his 100 elite warriors, regarded by later generations of Rajputs as their ancestors.

Once a sense of Indian nationalism developed in the late nineteenth century, after more than a hundred years of British rule, Indian intellectuals came to regard Prithviraj Chauhan as a patriot who had given up his life in the struggle against foreign invaders. Prithviraj Chauhan and other Rajput lords inspired colonial era Indians who also had to face foreign rulers, although they were English this time and not Central Asian. Prithviraj Chauhan was already confirmed as a nationalist, anti-colonial hero when Western scholarship rejected Prithviraj Raso‘s claim to be an eyewitness account of the king’s twelfth-century reign. During the early twentieth century, Prithviraj Raso‘s version of his heroic exploits was retold repeatedly in the newly expanding public sphere created by the modern Indian printing presses. He was even commemorated in visual form, on mass-produced lithographs like the example below from the 1930s. Throughout the period of the nationalist movement against British colonialism, therefore, the hero of Prithviraj Raso retained his grip on popular imagination and this image of the king has prevailed in popular culture since India’s independence in 1947 as well.

The long history of Prithviraj Chauhan and the popularity of epics like Prithviraj Raso shows the remarkable resilience of popular myths that can shape the ways kings are remembered in new historical contexts.

Adapted from:

Cynthia Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Read more about Indian rulers and their stories:

Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe (2006).

This survey of Indian history provides an overview of developments from Prithviraj Chauhan’s death in the late twelfth century to the commencement of British dominance in the subcontinent. The time span it covers, the years from 1200 to 1750, corresponds generally with the period of Muslim rule in North India. It is particularly strong on cultural history.

Manan Ahmed Asif, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (2016).

The Chachnama has long been identified as an eighth-century chronicle about the Arab invasion of Sind, the southern Indus region of Pakistan. Because that was the first area of the subcontinent to be ruled by Muslims, this text was regarded as the forerunner of a long line of triumphant narratives about the Muslim conquest of South Asia. In his radical re-interpretation of Chachnama, Asif shows that it is actually a work of the thirteenth century which articulated a regional identity for Sind that situated it in a transnational world of commerce and travel.

James W. Laine, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India (2003).

Laine, a scholar of religious studies, is interested in how the evolving narratives about the seventeenth-century Maratha king Shivaji contributed to the formation of a Hindu identity in the Maharashtra region during the past 350 years. Over time, Shivaji, whose armies successfully resisted the advance of the Mughal empire into the Western Deccan for decades, came to be associated with certain local saints and goddesses in popular memory. Laine’s questioning of some aspects of the stories surrounding Shivaji led to outrage among right-wing groups in Maharashtra and the banning of this book.

Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India c. 1500-1900 (2007).

The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen also explores multiple narratives about a single figure and highlights their changing content over time. However, the focus of Sreenivasan’s study, Padmavati, is a woman who most probably never existed but whose beauty was reputedly the cause of Delhi sultan Ala al-Din Khalji’s attack on the famous Rajput fort of Chittor in 1303. As in the case of Prithviraj Chauhan, the story of Padmavati was retold by James Tod and subsequently taken up by Indian nationalists; and Sreenivasan attends closely to the shifting political contexts.

Top Image:

Prithviraj being dissuaded from going out in a storm while Kamdev, God of love releases arrows of desire and Laxmi and Narayan, rest on the celestial serpent ‘’Shesh nag’’: Mewar 17 century. Albert Hall Museum, Jaipur, Accession Number 17/11, 1097

Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, by Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2012)

by David Rahimi

Starting with the encounter with European colonialism and modernity in the eighteenth century, Muslims increasingly began to worry that Islam was beset by existential crises as Muslim countries slowly fell under colonial domination. Some thought Islam had stagnated and made Muslims weak; others said true Islam already had the answers to modernity. Consequently, many prominent Muslim intellectuals from the Middle East and South East Asia, like Rashid Rida, Shah Wali Allah, Muhammad Iqbal, ‘Ubayd Allah Sindhi, and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, insisted over the course of the next two centuries that Islam must in some way rediscover, renew, or reform itself to address the challenges of a changing world. This, of course, raised a host of questions. What needed to be reformed? How should reform be enacted? Who or what had the authority to decide such matters? Were these crises even real?

Muhammad Iqbal was knighted in 1922, by King George V (via Wikimedia Commons)

Muhammad Qasim Zaman takes these concerns as his starting point to examine Muslim contestations of religious authority and “evolving conceptions of [Sunni] Islam” from the nineteenth century to the present day.” At its core, this is a story of inconclusive debates, ambiguity, and cyclical tension as old wounds reopen and close, as lay and traditional religious scholars (the ‘ulama) contest how Islam should be understood and lived. By tracing the contextualized debates of the modern ‘ulama in a comparative, transnational framework, Zaman shows the multifaceted dimensions of internal debate and how this fosters ongoing fragmentation of religious authority in Islam, despite efforts to the contrary. Disposing with an overall chronology or single narrative, Zaman divides his book into the following key thematic issues: religious consensus, ijtihad (i.e. independent analogical reasoning), the common good, religious education, the place of women in law and society, socioeconomic justice, and violence. The problems surrounding these issues have continuously resurfaced within Muslim intellectual and religious circles since the nineteenth century. What links these hot-button, yet seemingly disparate, topics together are the fundamental issues of religious authority, that “aspiration, effort, and ability to shape people’s belief and practice on recognizably ‘religious’ grounds,” and internal criticism among Muslims. Each chapter topic, then, serves as a vehicle through which to explore the interplay between authority and criticism, and what the consequences and implications are for Islamic thinkers and Muslims more broadly.

Countries with Muslim-majority populations (via Wikimedia Commons).

The real world consequences of this battle over religious authority through internal criticism come across strongly in the chapter on violence. For example, the moderate Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), wrote in his 2008 magnum opus Jurisprudence of Jihad that jihad was only permissible in cases of defense. Zaman shows, however, that this opinion does not align with the majority of classical Islamic jurisprudence, to which Qaradawi claims to faithfully adhere. Furthermore, another prominent moderate, Taqi ‘Uthmani of the Pakistani branch of the Deobandi school, had previously rejected purely defensive jihad in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2009, ‘Uthmani reaffirmed this theory of offensive jihad, adding that it only applied, however, to “formal” Islamic states and not to individuals. This disagreement about jihad conveys Zaman’s central point that is replicated across the other chapters as well. The ‘ulama are active in articulating their views, but who or what holds ultimate authority to resolve these religious problems remains unclear, since even the theory of authoritative scholarly consensus is hotly contested. Ultimately, Zaman argues that greater attention must be given to religious authority as a relational concept, formed by the specificities of the context in which this authority is performed. Abstract authority not only comes into tension with authority as it is practiced in real life, but historical circumstances and individual beliefs shape how Muslims respond to or recognize religious authority. The ECFR, founded in 1997, exemplifies this tension, since on the one hand, it seeks to create a new authoritative consensus around a particular set of ‘ulama, yet on the other hand, it claims not to compete with the authority of the many non-affiliated ‘ulama. The unsettled nature of these debates, Zaman insists, results in an “authority deficit” and persistent fragmentation within Muslim intellectual and religious circles.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi (center) in 2013 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age is a work of tremendous insight and compelling vignettes. The weakest portions are its introduction and conclusion, which both tend to be verbose and slightly disorganized. It is also unclear at moments whether the author intends to offer a strong overarching argument or to merely “open a new window onto the Muslim religious and public sphere” – one that forefronts debates among the ‘ulama. Thankfully, these are minor problems. While not meant for readers looking for an introduction to Islam, those hoping for a meticulously researched study of the internal religious dynamics of Sunni Islamic thought will find their expectations well met.

Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).