India Archives - Page 2 of 4

The Last Hindu Emperor

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).

Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we have been posting their suggestions throughout the month. This is our last set of book recommendations; this week we feature books on women and gender in East Asia and South Asia.

Huaiyin Li recommends:

Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (1999)

Focusing on the life stories of five prominent women activists in twentieth-century China, this book examines Chinese feminism in the Republican era and its fate under the socialist state. Its depiction of the feminists’ pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation contrasts sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s master narrative of women’s liberation under its leadership.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011)

Based on interviews with 72 village women in Shaanxi province, this book shows how the Chinese Communist Party’s policy reshaped women’s agriculture work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting from the 1950s through the 1970s. It also addresses the intriguing questions of how memories are gendered and how gender figured in the making of socialism in Chinese agriculture. (Reviewed on Not Even Past).

Nancy Stalker recommends:

Jan Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan (2014)

(Bloomsbury, 2016) is an engaging new work that reveals gender roles and gender politics in the 1950s through close readings of diverse popular media. Focusing on newsworthy events centered around women, such as the wedding of the imperial prince to a commoner and Japan’s first Miss Universe title, Bardsley reveals the media construction of the “housewife” embedded within discourses on postwar democracy, Cold War geopolitics, and US – Japan relations.

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India (2012).

This book combines historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to track the fate of South India’s devadasis, originally Hindu temple dancers who came to be regarded as prostitutes as India was transformed by colonial modernity. Typically unmarried and residing in quasi-matrilineal communities, devadasis often served as concubines or courtesans for elite men but came under increasing condemnation by social reformists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; they were officially outlawed in 1947. Soneji goes beyond the standard narrative of social change in colonial India by including an extensive examination of the role of dance in Indian royal courts and a sensitive exploration of the memories of ex-devadasis in this innovative, well-written work.

For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations: New Books on Women’s History

Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia

It may sound strange to many readers, but when I was growing up as the son of upper middle-class civil servants in India in the 1960s, I was hardly aware of the existence of caste distinctions. We had returned from Italy in 1963 and I went to a private, Anglophone school whose privileged students belonged (I now realize) to various religions and castes. But at that time I was hardly aware of this. I now realize this arose from a conscious effort on the part of many of the Indian middle class of that era to shake off deep-rooted distinctions in order to build a new national community without invidious distinctions. On the other hand, our own class privilege by contrast to the acutely visible poverty of many around us could not escape my attention. When I enrolled in the University in the 1970s, the reduction or elimination of economic inequality was the issue that most agitated thinking people and the sources of class hierarchy was what preoccupied historians. Caste or religious distinctions – in so far as they were examined, were thought to be relics or survivals of a bygone social order or stratagems to divide working people in order to facilitate their exploitation.

This strain of thought dominated Indian intellectual life until the late 1980s and was undermined by three historical developments. One was the evident maintenance of social distinctions such as caste even as modernization broke down older taboos. It was clear that these were more than vanishing relics of a bygone era. Secondly, the collapse of the Soviet bloc alongside the astonishingly rapid and successful adoption of capitalist markets in China – the country that had gone furthest in suppressing markets and private property, demonstrated that the dominant Marxist ideas did not measure up to historical reality. Finally, in the 1990s, Indian politics was dramatically altered by the rise of caste-based political parties that eclipsed class-based organizations in elections, both in the States and the (federal) Center.

A number of scholars and commentators now turned to the West to understand these phenomena and found two related sets of ideas at hand. One was that caste was based on a religious ideology descended from ancient times (many added a racial dimension to it.) The other was that communities that lived distinct from the Hindu caste order were surviving aboriginal peoples, analogous to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia. I found both these ideas unsatisfactory if measured against historical evidence. I began by studying “tribal” or “aboriginal” peoples, the results of which I published in 1999 as Environment and Ethnicity in India c.1200-1999. This book showed how tribal communities were in fact shaped by ecological settings and political networks (something that researchers were establishing for the native peoples of the Americas too.)

That book led me to explore the work Fredrik Barth, a famous expert on the Afghan borderlands who did path-breaking work across Southwest Asia starting in the 1950s. A little-read but brilliant essay of his showed how a caste system – marked by occupational segregation and social exclusion – functioned for century in the Swat valley of what is today northern Pakistan even though the population was 99% Muslim. He showed how this served the interests of the dominant landowning class even though it had no religious sanction. I also went back to a book published by the Cambridge anthropologist Susan Bayly in 1989 where she showed how Christian communities in South India – converted centuries ago – still maintained caste exclusions into the twentieth century. I also found studies showing caste practices among Indian Muslims.

A little research uncovered the fact that the very word “caste” was not found in any Indian language. It was spread world-wide by the Spanish and Portuguese empires of the sixteenth century. They applied the concept of “caste” to various ranked ethnic groups in Spanish Mexico and to various communities the Portuguese encountered in India. Thus the viceroy in India wrote to the King of Spain in 1630 that he had met the Mughal officer Daulat Khan (a Muslim name) who was of the “casta Abexim” or Abyssinian caste. But the Iberian peoples had a racial or genetic idea of caste while Indian society thought more in terms of behavior and purity. Racial caste can never be gained or lost: but Indian society admitted temporary exclusion and readmission as well as permanent expulsion. But branco or mestic̨o were permanent categories like white or black in the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, a number of sociologists pointed to aspects of U.S. society that could be analyzed in terms of a caste structure.

Finally, I found historical studies of the practice of caste in Sri Lanka, a mainly Buddhist country. Quite amazingly, the Dutch who ruled much of the island before the British captured it from them in 1796 regulated and enforced the caste system there. This was not because the Dutch Reformed Church prescribed it: rather, it was because they exacted taxes and forced labor from their subjects on the basis of their caste occupations such as cinnamon peeler, rice farmer, carpenter etc. None of these obviously could be thought of as the results of a religious ideology like Hinduism.

800px-Seventy-two_Specimens_of_Castes_in_India_(66) — A page from the manuscript “Seventy-two Specimens of Castes in India,” an album compiled by the Indian writing master at an English school established by American missionaries in Madura, and given to the Reverend William Twining. Each illustrated portrait is captioned in English and in Tamil, and the title page of the work includes English, Tamil, and Telugu. (Via Wikimedia)

It became clear that modern states and social and political interests played a major part in the reproduction of caste structures. In India, caste identity worked to mobilize voters. But this modern form of identity broke free from older taboos such as touching or eating beef. A graphic example came to mind: some time in the early 1980s, some shrewd if unscrupulous merchants began marketing an exceptionally cheap margarine (hydrogenated vegetable oil) in North India. Millions bought cans of this useful cooking fat. Then it came to light that the vendors had bought low-cost beef tallow on the world market, imported it under the pretext of soap-making and then sold it to millions of unsuspecting Hindus as a pure vegetarian product. There was a media furor for a few months, warehouses were sealed, the firm prosecuted and then everyone forgot about the fact that untold millions had ingested the fat of a sacred animal. Millions did not rush to seek penances and purifications. In 1857, the mere rumor that Indian soldiers were to be issued ammunition greased with pork and cow fat had driven tens of thousands of them into a desperate rebellion where vast numbers perished. In the 1980s, there was barely a ripple. Yet this was supposed to be a society (if the “religious” theories of caste discrimination were true) that held religious purity as its highest value and organized its economic and social life accordingly. Even if food taboos had fallen however, social discrimination and resentment persisted. Caste-based or ethnic political parties have won large votes in the elections year after year. No mainstream political party can now ignore the caste, religious, or linguistic affiliation of the voters in the constituencies where it is running.

So how then can we understand the long life of “caste”? I suggest that we stop looking at the many different classifications in human society and instead focus on what is common to tribes, ethnic groups, racial groups and castes: they are “bounded communities” and they all distinguish their members from those of other communities or ethnic groups. Understanding begins by looking at how membership is decided: who gets in the club? Who is kicked out? Clubs admit members on many different criteria – what is important is that they all have ‘boundaries’ determined by rules of membership. Let me end with a provocative quote from Fredrik Barth: we should study “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses.”

Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia

Indrani Chatterjee on Monasteries and Memory in Northeast India

European monasteries were segregated by sex – for men or women only – and the inhabitants were expected to be celibate. In South Asia, where many different religious traditions grew up side by side in the same terrain since the earliest times, monasticism neither insisted on absolute celibacy for men, nor did it exclude women. Many monastic men moved from site to site collecting food and exchanging information. Those who were not ordained as monks but were simply followers or tenants on lands that belonged to a monastery, took herds out on seasonal cycles, traded in goods, and transported goods on behalf of their monastic teachers. Women held these monastic centers together and were central to their everyday lives. They cultivated the land, provided the food and maintenance services, and often, their sons or brothers joined the order or served it in some military or diplomatic task. The functions these little monastic communities carried out make it possible to call them “governments.”

These monastic governments were connected to each other across vast territorial expanses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – before the borders of the modern state of independent India, Pakistan, Bangladesh were carved out. From the mountains of Nepal to the Manipuri Valley to West Bengal, monasteries of diverse religions – Buddhists, Saiva and Vaisnava Hindus, Sufi Muslims, Bonpo Tantriks – shared many political, economic, military, and gender practices. Communities formed around a central leader, who was considered both a teacher and a “friend.” Initiates who wanted to join a monastic community agreed to submit to that teacher’s legal, moral, and disciplinary leadership. They would provide personnel for religious practices for artisanal production and military protection. The monasteries were also centers of economic activity. All students paid the monastery, in cash gifts or in labor. Sometimes local authorities transferred to the monastic teacher such secular powers as collecting taxes or punishing criminals. Wealthy women were active as patrons of monasteries up and down the economic hierarchy. They both offered gifts of gold, valuable manuscripts, lamps, and herds, and they worked in the monastery’s fields. Marriages were central to establishing lines of alliance and power. In many of these communities, multiple spouses – polyandry as well as polygamy – strengthened political and economic power. Long-distance relationships between monastic communities were nourished by the mobility of ordained men and laymen who moved about as soldiers, pastoralists, itinerant merchants and peddlers, and diplomats working on behalf of particular disciples and patrons.

These connections among monasteries were dramatically reconstituted after 1765, when the English East India Company established its control over the subcontinent. After the 1830s, most lands of monastic governments located in the hills east of the Ganges Delta were taken over by European-funded tea plantations. Officers who worked for a soon-to-be-defunct English East India Company also used some of these lands to settle groups favorable to colonial control – gifting lands to Christian missionaries, settling some Vaishnava lineages in the Manipuri valley and ousting others. So they did not entirely dissolve the monasteries but made them give up their privileges.

By the 1850s, a harsh regime of work arrived to make tea plantations here a profitable enterprise for European planters. Large numbers of women and female children were brought from parts of central India to pick tea and work in these plantations. In 1869-70, some older monastic lineages pooled resources to liberate the predominantly female laboring population from the brutality of some of these plantations. The British-led military fraternity responded with an ideological war followed by a military war. The administrative aftermath was to isolate the entire belt of tea-planting lands from the monastic order. After 1871, when the Buddhist monks and Vaisnava-Saiva teachers were prohibited from working on or holding lands in the tea-planting regions, Christian missionaries took over.

This extension of colonial control radically dispossessed the monastic daughters and widows of the rights to landed property and authority that they had previously enjoyed. Yet this dispossession, along with the similarities of monastic communities among diverse religions, has gone unnoticed by modern historians of India. The intervening century has created other investments in the land, and none of the present investors wants the past owners and cultivators remembered. And of course, Christian missionizing has also authorized the erasure of the past because it is designated as “barbarian.”

Professional historians of India (and Bangladesh after it was founded in 1971), even when they were not trained in missionary-funded schools and colleges during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looked upon the complex history of the terrain through lenses similar to the colonial authorities. Pre-colonial societies were “feudal” and colonial rule was equated with modernity and industrialized progress. These historians were extremely faithful to the spirit and letter of the colonial records. Their interpretation of the records echoed the colonial officials’ descriptions of once-resistant monastic subjects and adherents as “tribals” at best, and “savages” at worst.

After the 1970s, a younger group of historians expressed greater sympathy for the anti-state resistance movements they found in the same records. Better known as the Subaltern Studies scholars, these historians were, however, hampered by their lack of training in the multiple languages and literary traditions essential for uncovering the story of the multiple dispossessions practiced in the region that came to be called Northeast India. The result was therefore the same: postcolonial historians too failed to see through existing categories of “forest” or “tribal” rebels. If I had to sum it up, I would say that the cultural and financial successes of tea-drinking since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have ensured a collective and permanent failure of memory among postcolonial historians. That amnesiac disregard of the past is especially dense around the various women who supported monastic governments in the past.

So when post-colonial, independent, democratically elected Indian governments allow their own military or paramilitary officers to evade judicial process after they rape and torture women from these eastern communities, they betray the extent to which such governments continue the practice of the dispossession of women and the erasure of women’s important roles in the history of the region and of the links that joined the people living in Northeast India as “friends.” Historians can refuse to be complicit in this dispossession by telling their stories

Indrani Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memory in Northeast India

On Women and Nation in India

by Indrani Chatterjee

Sanjib Baruah, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality. (1999) Written by a political scientist attempting to explain the ethnonationalist (and anti-refugee) movement that sprang up in late 1970s in Assam, one of the seven provinces of Northeast India. The movement lasted for at least two decades. The author departs from other political scientists in taking a longer view of the politics, beginning with the colonial formation of the province of Assam from 1874.

A broader history of the women’s struggles of the twentieth century can be found in Geraldine Forbes’ Women in Modern India (1995).

Northeast Review is a website that offers access to current literary and cultural trends in the region in English.

Politicizing the Past: Depictions of Indo-Aryans in Indian Textbooks from 1998-2007

By Abhijith Ravinutala

Download “Politicizing the Past”

This Spring, UT-Austin student Abhijith Ravinutala received the John Ferguson Prize for Excellence in the Study of History. In his thesis paper, “Politicizing the Past: Depictions of Indo-Aryans in Indian Textbooks from 1998-2007,” Abhijith links the history lessons in Indian school textbooks to broader political conflicts taking place over the nation’s religious and historical identity. He particularly concentrates on their depictions of the ancient Indo-Aryan people, arguing that these historical narratives reflect very modern political disputes. You can read Abhijith’s thesis abstract below.

Abstract:

Schools across the world strive to instill national pride in students by presenting a shared history of the nation’s development – a common past. Yet, in the case of India, there is no consensus on the common past, leaving students without a clear understanding of Indian history. From 1998-2007, Indian schools employed three different sets of history textbooks, each with radically different ideas on ancient Indian history concerning Indo-Aryans (peoples considered to be the founders of the Hindu faith). This paper endeavors to show that these textbook changes were clearly politicized; different political parties promoted conflicting ideas on Indo-Aryans due to incompatible religious beliefs. To provide context, there is also a discussion of the different historical issues regarding Indo-Aryans, such as the mystery of their origins and their relation to the Indus Valley Civilization. Additionally, this paper attempts to explain how the textbook changes were uniquely important to Indian national identity.

An Elementary School in Chittoor, India (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

To accomplish these ends, I use direct quotes from all three sets of textbooks, as well as newspaper articles from The Times of India. An analysis of the textbook quotes shows that the ruling political party could dictate its own views on the culture, identity, and society of Indo- Aryan peoples. Furthermore, an analysis of newspaper articles reveals the public’s reaction to textbook changes, showing that India is uniquely prone to such changes because its history is so ancient and ambiguous. Indians do not have the knowledge or clarity about the ancient past to pass down stories to future generations. As a result, students learn about their ancestry and identity through the material provided in textbooks, but that material is at the whim of political parties. This project reveals how political parties tamper with history to achieve their own ends, and the effect it has on the public’s conceptions of history and national identity.

Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, by Gauri Viswanathan (1989)

Gauri Viswanathan provides a fascinating account of the ideological motivations behind the introduction of English literary education in British India. She studies the shifts in the curriculum and relates such developments to debates over the objectives of English education both among the British administrators, as well as between missionaries and colonial officials.

Viswanathan argues that British administrators introduced English literary study in India in the early nineteenth century to improve the moral knowledge of Indians. Since Britain professed a policy of religious neutrality, Christian teachings could not be used in India, unlike the situation in Britain. In order to resolve this dilemma, colonial officials prescribed English literature, infused with Christian imagery, for government schools. Initially, Indians studied English literature using poetical devices, such as rhyme, alliteration, and reduplication. However, missionaries decried such secular practices and insisted upon a more religious reading of English literature. As a result, between 1830s and the mid-1850s, government schools in India used English literature to explain Christian teachings and emphasize the higher levels of historical progress and moral standards of English society. By the end of the 1850s, however, British administrators again changed their stance and advocated a secular reading of English literature to encourage commercial and trade literacy. This reversal of stance occurred as British officials realized that a religious reading of English literature did not provide Indians with the proper knowledge to join the colonial administrative services. Besides, after the 1857 Indian revolt against foreign rule, British officials did not wish to adopt policies that might ignite fears of conversion among Hindus and Muslims.

775px-Pandit_Bapudeva_Sastri_1821-1900_Professor_of_Astronomy_teaching_a_class_at_Queens_College_Varanasi — *Bapudeva Sastri, Indian Astronomer and Professor, teaching a class at Queen’s College, Varanas, 1870*

Viswanathan gives a detailed account of the various debates that influenced the introduction of English literary study in India. While she minutely examines the stances of Utilitarians, Anglicists, and missionaries, the absence of chronological benchmarks at regular intervals prevents the reader from fully understanding the shifts in education policies in British India emerging from such debates. However, her work changes our way of studying British educational policies in India. Previously, scholars merely studied the transformative effects of British education to understand the historical function of educational policies. Viswanathan ably proves that it is necessary to examine the discourse and the context of the formulation of educational policies to better understand educational history.

La_Martiniere_1858 — *La Martiniere, a British private school in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, 1858*

Photo Credits:
All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope by Judith M. Brown (1989)

by Dharitri Bhattacharjee

Judith Brown’s Gandhi, Prisoner Of Hope published in 1989 amply reflects the decades of quality research that went into its production. Brown elucidates Gandhi’s transition from being “a man of his time” to “a man for all times and all places” by his unswerving and whole-hearted submission to the idea of satyagraha or truth-force, most significantly reflected in the deep questions that he asked, many of which he himself did not find answers to. Brown’s biography breaks many a myth about Gandhi and encourages readers to evaluate his life and achievements for themselves, as they find access to Gandhi’s own voice, that of his contemporary’s opinions on him and even the attitudes of the Raj’s officials towards Gandhi.

The title renders to the readers two aspects of Gandhi’s life. First, the book describes Gandhi’s career from being a “nonentity” in England to symbolizing Indian identity to the world; from being an unsure leader in South Africa in his early middle age to becoming the central public figure in India in his old age. The book carefully constructs the image of Gandhi, juxtaposing it against the popular image of him as Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” a title by which he began to be called much before any of his ideas were accepted or executed on a large scale. Brown tries to project the man behind the mahatma, with his failings, doubts, mood swings and blood pressure problems. Second, Brown projects the ideological and philosophical mind of Gandhi, tracking carefully the origins of his ideas, be it satyagraha, non-violence, civil-disobedience or his stand against westernization and modernization; their development, their timely execution and their fall out. In this process Brown sets the groundwork on which she is able to explain how time and again, almost ironically, Gandhi falls in his own esteem in trying to execute his ideas, yet tries again, and how in doing so with uncompromising optimism, Gandhi became a “prisoner of hope.”

Brown does not praise Gandhi uncritically nor does she place him on a pedestal, above human beings and closer to the God that Gandhi so relied on. The beauty of her work lies in the way she discovers the mahatma in Gandhi, almost at the end of the book. In the epilogue Brown’s thesis comes to a full circle and she shows how Gandhi’s greatness, his well deserved praise, lay in being a flawed man but being courageous enough to correct those flaws. Gandhi, a frail man by stature, emerges in Brown’s works one of the strongest men in history. “God centered and man oriented,” Gandhi searched for “[H]im in humanity” and there lay his strength.

Photo Credits:

Left: Gandhi spinning, December 1929 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

Right: Gandhi at his Johannesburg law firm, 1905 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins (1975)

by Ellen Mcamis

Freedom at Midnight paints a sweeping picture of the tumultuous year of India’s independence from Great Britain in 1947. The narrative style of the book immerses readers in the visual landscape of the falling Raj and allows them to step into the minds of the great actors of this time. This sort of narrative history also contains drawbacks that limit our understanding of this important moment.

The book compresses the story to a tight one-year time frame. This allows Collins and Lapierre to focus on the state-level negotiations on India’s independence. It begins with Louis Mountbatten’s installation as the Last Viceroy of India, and closely follows the negotiations between Mountbatten, Whitehall, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and Mohandas Gandhi as they make the decision to partition India. It then continues with the chaos and bloodshed of the split, until ending with Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. This narrative is undeniably fascinating, however, it also places an almost exclusive emphasis on the “great men” of history. They are represented here as isolated personages who hold the fate of the Indian people in their hands. The people themselves are often lost in this depiction, appearing as faceless masses helplessly reacting to political machinations.

Mahatma Gandhi (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Despite this focus on the agency of the great men, the primary mechanism which forces history forward in the book is destiny or fate. In this account, the British were “a race that God had destined” to rule the Indians, and therefore “naturally acquired” India. Faced with the prospect of division, Mountbatten must “save India” from itself. This device frees Mountbatten and the British from the charge of poorly handling or rushing independence. Instead, they are depicted as contending with historical inevitabilities far more powerful than themselves.

While a current reader does not expect a highly sympathetic and nuanced portrait of India from a book written three years before Edward Said’s Orientalism, and the rise of post-colonial studies, as a narrative with insight into the rush of daily life on the cusp of independence, it remains an enjoyable and exciting read.

You may also like:

Sundar Vadlamudi’s review of “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India.”

Amber Abbas’ review of “Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan.”

Jack Loveridge’s reviews of “Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal,”“Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography,”“The Decline, Fall, and Revival of the British Empire,” and “The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan.”

Voices of India’s Partition, Part V: Interview with Professor Mohammad Amin

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Interview with Professor Masood ul Hasan

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Interview with Professor Irfan Habib

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider