Indian History

Did the British Empire depend on separating Parents and Children?

Empires ancient and modern are large, hierarchical organizations, structurally founded on deep inequalities of risk and reward. The British Empire in Asia was no exception. At the front lines of imperial power were, all too often, common men (and some women) who were tricked, cozened, misled, coerced, and whipped into serving as the cannon-fodder of Empire. The temptation to desert was often present and the thought of mutiny cannot have been absent. These plebeian men were ‘kept in line’ men of status who served as commercial agents and military officers. But even among them, kickbacks and commissions were omnipresent and could grow into serious leakages of revenue or foment major acts of treason. Furthermore the wholesale desertion of a dynasty by its elite subjects was not unknown. In Britain in both 1660 and 1688, the political establishment and key army units deserted their established government to side with an invader sponsored by a foreign power. We could multiply such examples.

Transoceanic empires built by corporations like the British and Dutch East India Companies faced even greater problems because they lacked the sacred aura that surrounded kings and helped maintain nominal loyalties. It took nearly half a year for an inquiry or command to reach a functionary in Asia and it took many more months before a report or an excuse would come back. The military, commercial, or political situation could change dramatically in the interim. Many readers will be aware, for example, that the British and Americans continued to fight for six weeks in 1815 after the peace treaty was signed between the two powers. One of these peace-time battles cemented Andrew Jackson’s reputation and propelled him to the presidency. Asia was much further away and across more dangerous waters.

Corporations growing into empires, such as the Dutch East India Company and English East India Company were keenly aware of what modern organization theorists, such as Oliver Williamson, have termed the “agency problem.” This is simply the difficulty of monitoring subordinates and ensuring that they act mainly in the interest of those (“the principals”) whose “agents” they had been hired to be. In 1613, a vexed East India Company merchant, Nicholas Withington reported that the many Portuguese “renegades” were already being joined by a trickle of Englishmen, like one Robert Claxon. He converted to Islam for money but, dissatisfied with something, returned and appeared penitent. He was then trusted with Company funds and absconded for good. As the vexed Withington recounted it, Claxon:

had also turned Mahometan in the Decan, with a good allowance at [the Sultan’s] court; but, not being contented, he came to Surat, where he was pitied by us for his seeming penitence; but being entrusted with upwards of forty pounds [sterling: a considerable sum at the time] under pretense of making purchases, he gave us the slip and returned to the Decan. Thus there are at present four English renegadoes in the Decan, besides many Portuguese.

This was an example of the problems of large organizations: how can you ensure compliance and loyalty when agents are far removed and have sanctuaries beyond your control?

Even in 1787, the reforming Governor-General Cornwallis, came to India fresh from America. He often inveighed against the East India Company’s English employees for their incapacity or corruption. The editor of his letters wrote plainly of how the Company had been cheated by its senior employees in, for example, the purchase of silk.

The East India Company was an established ruling power in large parts of India after 1757. But the indiscipline and venality of even its senior-most civil and military officials once they realized how quickly they could grow wealthy brought the Company to the edge of ruin in less than 20 years. It was forced to seek a “bail-out” from the Royal Treasury. The illustration below depicts an East India Company official in regal guise, lording it over the “natives.”

An East India Company Grandee (via Getty Images)

This resulted (after some years of partisan grid-lock) in the dispatch of new governor-general with sweeping powers. This was Lord Cornwallis who came out to “reform” British India fresh from a bruising surrender at Yorktown in Virginia in 1781. He realized that neither a common language nor a common religious affiliation could guarantee either honesty or loyalty. From the time of his tenure as chief executive in India (1786-1795) therefore, the British regime carefully managed the social reproduction of European officers and soldiers. This was done to prevent the formation a dangerous Creole settler class. The Company had long sought to limit the numbers and control the conduct of private Europeans in India in order to maintain its commercial monopoly against “private trade.” Under Cornwallis, political prudence provided another rationale. The value of this strategy was made obvious when Governor General John Shore was faced with a mutiny among the East Company Army’s European officers in 1795-1796. Reflecting on the episode a year or so later, Shore’s successor in office, Richard Wellesley, wrote that:

If Europeans had been settled with their families in India; or if these men had, or could have had, their homes in that country, the Company would have lost it, [their Indian empire] and nothing could ever have regained it.

It was from awareness of this danger that, as Indrani Chatterjee was the first to show, the Company assiduously sought to limit the development a local power elite with any genealogical depth. This was intended to preempt any consequent claim to the “rights of Englishmen” that had just been forcefully raised in North America. The children of mixed European and Indian parentage were therefore turned into a socially inferior class of Eurasians, excluded from power. As early as 1786, the Company forbade the children of “native women” from traveling to England, after discovering that the Indian-born John Turing, “dark as his mother,” had done so and secured a cadet’s appointment in the Army. Two decades later, a “mulatto” candidate secured an appointment only by paying a young Englishman to impersonate him at the interview. Although disavowed progeny were increasingly excluded from the Army and higher civil service, some Eurasians were in found jobs in other state employment into the 1830s. But the official policies toward them derived from a well-established, generalized contempt for those of mixed descent. As early as 1786, Surgeon Richard Wilson, in proposing the creation of a charity school to raise such children as loyal Protestants, remarked that it “hath long been a severe and unanswerable Reproach from the Natives of this Country that Britons, above all other Nations, have neglected and despised their progeny.”

If efforts at social integration had succeeded despite such attitudes, British India might have developed into a casta-ranked society like the Spanish Americas. But the need to win the support of the indigenous clerical classes, as well as the fear of promoting a Creole elite like the treacherous Americans, led the East India Company onto a different track. In the last few decades of its rule, before the revolt of 1857, Eurasian clerks were gradually displaced in state service by Indians from the traditional clerical classes, both Hindu and Muslim and, around Bombay, also Parsi and Goan Catholic. A greater regard by the British for their own “blood” returned after 1857, when Anglo-Indians were extensively recruited into the developing railway system in order to ensure imperial control of this strategic asset. Eurasians, however, could not compete with the indigenous clerical classes in subordinate employment, that is to say, clerical work.

The government continued to follow the logic of Wellesley’s argument against allowing Europeans to set down familial roots within India, and sought to ensure that the affective ties and personal aspirations of key cadres such as Covenanted Service and Army officers should be directed toward England. The disciplinary value of this policy for the East India Company’s government is shown by Sleeman’s dedication of his Rambles and Recollections (1844), to his sister. He observed how nine out of ten Englishmen in India found their greatest pleasure in letters from their sisters at home, which filled the landscapes so dear to our recollections, with ever varying groups of the family circles, among whom our infancy and our boyhood have been passed; and among whom we still hope the spend the winter of our days.

He added that the approbation of the circles represented in these letters was an important restraint on Englishmen in India, and so the sisters should be considered “a valuable species of unpaid magistracy to the Government of India.” The psychic isolation of young men well indoctrinated in this system and left among Indians without their families was described to Emily Eden in 1837 as a “horrible solitude” that produced depression. One such officer told her of “the horror of being three months without seeing an European, or hearing an English word …” Indirectly, therefore, we may see patterns of marriage and family formation being managed by the British imperial regime to bolster the loyalty of key elements of its governing apparatus. The political and military efficacy of that apparatus thus depended on constant policing of the boundaries of ethnicity.

Legitimate reproduction was now focused on Europe-born women. Lord Cornwallis had raised official salaries both to ensure fidelity and to allow mature civil servants to make “suitable” marriages and sustain the establishment needed for them. Licit sex and open conjugality were now limited to English-born women. By the 1850s it was said of the junior-most Indian Civil Service officer that he was worth “three hundred [pounds sterling] a year, dead or alive.” Numbers of young women sailed out to India as part of what was archly termed “the Fishing Fleet.” Many did marry officials there. But it was soon discovered that their infants died in alarming numbers, doubtless aided by Victorian medicine and its therapeutic use of opium, alcohol, mercury and blood-letting for all ages and sexes. Furthermore, the still prevalent climatic theories of “racial qualities” suggested that children raised in hot climates deteriorated from the parental stock. From the mid-nineteenth century therefore, young children were usually sent back to Britain while in India fathers worked and mothers sought to monopolize all legitimate conjugality. The result was that generations of children were torn away from their parents and if boys, certainly introduced to that staple of Victorian education, the rattan cane. Two of these children were initially too young (six and three) for school, so Rudyard Kipling and his sister were left in Lorne Lodge, Southampton.

Rudyard Kipling Heritage Site at: 43 Villiers Street, Charing Cross, London (via Wikimedia)

Kipling later wrote of himself and his sister that, when he was told his parents had left him “for ever,” he “went out and wept bitterly with Judy, into whose fair head he had driven some ideas of the meaning of separation.” He also invoked the desolation he had felt in a later poem:

A Well-a-day for we are souls bereaved!

Of all the creatures under Heaven’s wide scope

We are most hopeless, who had once most hope

And most beliefless, who had once believed.

There are doubtless children in the USA today with good reason to echo that.

The Public Archive: Indian Revolt of 1857

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.

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.

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).

Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, by Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2004)

By Ben Breen

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is a historian of remarkable erudition and imagination. His personal itineraries over the years—from the New Delhi School of Economics to the École des Hautes Études in Paris, and from Oxford to UCLA, where he currently holds an endowed chair in history—mirror those of the early modern travellers who frequently take center stage in his historical work. The book reviewed here (the second volume of Explorations in Connected History, which includes a companion volume called Mughals and Franks) is a collection of eight incisive essays penned by Subrahmanyam between 1993 and 2003.

As Subrahmanyam notes in his introduction, these essays “had a rather complex evolution.” The first chapter, a previously unpublished reflection on the scope of “Indian history” as a field of study, began life as a lecture at the University of Oxford. Chapter two, on Asian perspectives on the Portuguese colonies in the Indian Ocean, is a translation from an edited volume published in Portuguese, while the third chapter previously appeared in an edited collection on the Bay of Bengal. Other chapters originally appeared in a range of scholarly journals. Although these chapters range extremely widely, they are bound together by Subrahmanyam’s methodological concern with what he calls “connected histories.”

The notion of “connected histories” is, for Subrahmanyam, a necessary corrective to at least three distinct historiographic trends. First, it seeks to move away from what Subrahmanyam regards as an overly simplistic, isolated, and “mechanistic” framework for writing global histories that has prevailed in the past: comparative history. Second, Subrahmanyam’s connected history methodology seeks to expand the geographic and thematic scope of what we mean by “the early modern period.” The societies that existed in the Old and New World prior to European imperial hegemony, he suggests, were participants in a nascent modernity that was taking place organically and chaotically on a global level, rather than being engineered by European states. And finally, Subrahmanyam marshals the notion of connected histories to challenge what he considers to be a submerged form of “exoticism” at work in post-colonial studies. Subrahmanyam, never one to shy away from a scholarly confrontation, takes special aim at the Subaltern School, which he critiques for “see[ing] the Indian role as one of largely reacting and adapting to European initiatives.”

A panorama of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, Georg Braun and Franz Hogenbergs atlas Civitates orbis terrarum, 1572.

What, then, does a connected history methodology offer in place of comparative history, early modern European history, or post-colonial studies? Subrahmanyam is that rare historical writer who is equally skilled at intervening in big-picture historiographic debates and digging deeply in difficult archives and specialist bodies of knowledge. The work on display here amply demonstrates the promise of his methodology. Subramanyam engages closely with Portuguese chronicles of Indian conquest and the rather myopic Lusophone historiography that has built up around them, showing that a careful attention to alternative narratives—like texts written in Malay, Arabic, and Farsi—can challenge many of our prevailing assumptions about European colonialism. Crucially, Subramyam differentiates between the various imperial powers in the Indian Ocean—not only the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, but also non-European polities. This sets his work apart from other big-picture studies of what was once called “the Age of Expansion” (like Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient or Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony), which suffer from a tendency to sort the region’s actors into overly binary “European” and “non-European” camps.

Departure from Lisbon for Brazil, the East Indies and America, engraving from c.1592 by Theodor de Bry (Flemish, 1528-1598), illustration in America Tertia Pars. Location- Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes.

Although the essays in this book focus on south Asia, Subrahmanyam makes clear that the problems of Indian historiography—what he calls “an extravagant nationalism and crude ‘presentism’”—are not unique. From France to Java, historians have tended to reify contemporary distinctions between regions as if they were immutable historical facts. But if part of Subrahmanyam’s aim is to “complicate” (that favorite verb of historians) our understanding of nation and place in the early modern world, he also seeks to clarify. Subramanyam’s connected history approach, which shares a family resemblance to Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s “entangled empires” and Joseph Fletcher’s “integrative history,” is not a totalizing effort to explain all of world history à la Toynbee. But it is ambitious in both its geographic and linguistic scope. Marshaling his remarkably polyglot erudition, Subrahmanyam argues that the early modern world must be understood as a porous network of regions and local communities rather than as a patchwork of well-defined states. Although this framework demolishes facile comparisons between, say, “French” and “Indian” mentalities or cultural practices, it also allows us to think in a more theoretically well-defined way about the connections between the societies and regions of the early modern world.

Detail of India, from a 1630 Portuguese map of Asia, entitled General tables of all the navigation, divided and corrected by D. Jeronimo de Ataide, with all the ports and conquests of Portugal delineated by Joao Teixeira, cosmographer of His Majesty, Year 1630.

The advantages of such an approach are apparent in Chapter Five of this volume, which advances the startlingly original thesis that a “millenarian conjuncture… operated over a good part of the Old World in the sixteenth century.” In other words, a set of apocalyptic beliefs and concerns were shared between both Portuguese mariners and the South Asian merchants and courtiers with whom they interacted. Fears about portents, omens and signs, no less than currencies and gems, flowed between Europe and the Indian Ocean in this period. Although scholars of Reformation-era Christianity have written extensively on the apocalyptic currents of this era, Subrahmanyam’s mastery of Persian, Turkish, and South Asian sources allows him to connect this historiography to what he calls the “messianic pretensions” of the Persian ruler Isma’il, to various strands of Sufi mysticism, and to the medieval Alexander legends. It is a bravura display of learning that also sets up a bold new framework for thinking about religion as a factor in early modern globalization.

Portrait of Shah Ismail I of Persia (1487-1524) by an unknown Venetian artist. The original rendering is kept in the Uffizi Gallery museum in Florence, Italy.

One potential objection to Subramanyam’s connected histories framework arises from his own erudition. The promise of such an approach is obvious in his own work. But this work depends upon a mastery of a dozen languages and the kind of deep historiographic knowledge that takes decades to amass. Who else, besides Sanjay Subrahmanyam, is capable of working in the framework he advocates? History needs more historians who are able to cross national and linguistic boundaries, yet the North American and British academies continue to require historians to specialize on area studies or nationalist historiography. Scholars with the polymathic knowledge on display here are rare, and producing more of them may well require a new approach to how we train young historians.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Giving a life, winning a patrimony

By Sumit Guha

It was the Indian month of Shravana, and early summer rains of 1653 would have set in as the delegation of villagers toiled up the steep slopes to the gates of the fort of Rohida, (later named Vicitragadh) and presented themselves to the officials there. They came into the court of Dhond-deu, the Hawaldar – an officer charged with the general fiscal and administrative control of the villages subordinate to the fort. These were turbulent times in western India as the Mughal empire from the north began to slowly conquer the southern kingdoms based in Bijapur and Golkunda. Locally a young lord, Shivaji Bhosle, was gradually adding fort after fort to his domains and planning the creation of an independent kingdom. The officers seated around Dhond-deu must have heard many tales of strife before this time. But this one was stranger than usual.

“The fort gateway was probably elaborately ornamented, a contrast to the simple huts of the villagers who toiled up the hill to it. We may conceive its appearance from the sketch made about 1850 of the gateway to the fort of Panhala – not far from Rohida.”

Some days earlier the two hereditary headmen from the village Karanjiya had come to the fort to pay their taxes. The headmen, Balaji Kudhle and Nayakji Kudhle, were accompanied by a Dalit (lower-caste) servant named Gondnak who was employed by the tax office. Maybe he had been sent to summon them? While in the fort, Gondnak (so the document says) got into a broil and beat up a junior treasury official. The headmen seem to have quickly fled back to their village, but a cavalry unit soon arrived in pursuit and seized their extended families and servants. They then demanded to be fed: the villagers slaughtered a goat and supplied them with rich viands and marijuana candy among other things. After a while, some of the soldiers went to sleep and others sat on guard. But their repast began to tell, and so they summoned the hereditary Dalit (Mahar) servants attached to the village and told them that if even a single detainee was missing in the morning, all of their heads would be cut off.

The villagers held a hasty confabulation: they asked the Dalits who had patrimonial rights in the village if one of them would step forward to confess to the offense: each of these replied – “Confess and have our heads and our sons’ heads cut off? We cannot do this.” The Gondnak who had gone to the fort that day was found and the headmen and their kinsmen beseeched him to surrender and redeem all of them. He had no patrimony and was merely a servant at the fort. He said: “Very well, I will ransom you all with my neck. But swear to me now what share of inheritance you will give my son and swear on your ancestors that you will fulfill that promise.” So they all duly swore to give his son, Arajnak, an eighth share of the rights and fees pertaining to the Dalit Mahar servants of the village as well as an honorific role in village ceremonies and shares in taxable and tax-free lands. They swore this on their ancestors and the name of the fearsome god Mahakala. They bound their descendants to never contest this claim in future. Then Gondnak stepped forward and was taken away and beheaded.

Teen darwaza gate, Panhala, Maharashtra, India, 1894

Thus it was that the village delegation came up to the fort to have the deed attesting the creation of a new share in patrimonial rights and lands of the village attested and recorded in the fort where they paid their revenue. The officials in the fort asked the head of the current holders of village service shares, Dhaknak, son of Jannak if he accepted the arrangement. He said that the promise the headmen made bound him and his clan in perpetuity. A deed recounting the circumstances in which Arajnak gained a share in the patrimony was written out and sealed. Copies were kept in the district office and the original given to Arajnak, son of Gondnak to hold as evidence of his rights.

My narrative so far follows that in the document. But I suspect that the village heads may have been the instigators or indeed participants in the broil where the official was beaten up and that the impoverished Dalit Gondnak was the scapegoat for the whole affair. Else it would be unclear why the headmen and their relatives were arrested at the outset. Surely the horsemen would have sought out Gondnak’s kin or children for reprisals? But the incident is a vivid illustration of how important acceptance into the village community was – even if only as a lowly watchman and servant, in western India a few centuries ago.

Image of doorway to fort of Rohida, later named Vicitragadh

The fort is now in ruins but a gateway – perhaps even the one through which the villagers came – survives largely undamaged.

For more on the social and political system where this incident occurred:

Sumit Guha Beyond Caste: Power and Identity in South Asia, Past and Present (2013)

First image via Graham, D.C. 1854. Statistical Report on the Principality of Kolhapoor Selection from the Records of the government of Bombay No. VIII (new series) Bombay: Education Society Press.

Second Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Third image via Wikimapia.org