www.sacw.net - January 23, 2006
Getting to know the
past better *
by Romila Thapar
* Keynote address at the inauguration
of the Karachi International Book Fair on December 7, 2005
(This paper appeared in print in the 'Books and
Authors' section of well known Pakistan daily, Dawn (Karachi) of
January 22, 2006. It has been reproduced by SACW in
public interest since this section of Dawn has no web based archives
for people to consult.)
Fifty years ago, at the time of independence and just after, we
inherited a long tradition of historical writing. There were two
perspectives on history that constituted our heritage: one was the
colonial view of Indian history, and the other was the nationalist
view. The colonial view was the one in which, first of all, an attempt
had been made to periodize Indian history -- to divide it up into
different periods. The periodization that took root and was followed by
all the earlier historians, was the periodization put forward by James
Mill in 1819, when he wrote about three periods: that of Hindu
civilization, of Muslim civilization and of the British period. This
periodization was based on the religious identity of the dynasties that
ruled the subcontinent: Hindu to begin with, succeeded by Muslim
dynasties, and ultimately succeeded by the British. It was also based
on the assumption that the basic units of Indian society are
monolithic, unified religious communities, and that these communities
were mutually hostile. This was very much a British colonial view of
Indian history and, as we all know, this colonial view was also to
influence the politics of the 20th century in the sub-continent.
Another obsession of colonial historical writing was what they called
Oriental Despotism: that Asian society, and this includes all the
Indian states and societies, were static societies that did not, in
fact, undergo any kind of historical change. There was an absence of
private property in land, they argued, and since the government was
always despotic and oppressive, poverty was endemic. The third aspect
was the study of caste, which according to them was based on racial
segregation. It was in this study that the Aryan theory of race became
central. They argued that caste was rigid and frozen and that there was
no social change, no social mobility in Indian society in all the
hundreds of years preceding British rule. This history was claimed as
enlightenment history but, in fact, it was a history supporting an
ideology of colonial dominance.
Indian historians in the late 19th and early 20th century, conforming
much more closely to the nationalist view of history, challenged some
of these theories. They did not, however, question the periodization.
This was to come later. They accepted the periodization of Hindu,
Muslim and British, a periodization that we have now rejected. They did
question the notion of Oriental Despotism but did not replace it with
an alternative theory of governance, administration and rulership.
Social history merely repeated the claims made in the normative and
prescriptive texts.
This is an important issue in reconsidering history because normative
texts such as the Dharmashastras, or the laws of Sharia, or the
constitutions of modern nation-states are prescriptive texts. They do
not describe reality except obliquely. They set out what they think
should be the ultimate goals of society. Therefore, such texts have to
be analyzed rather than taken literally. Anyway the nationalist
historians did present a counterview, as it were, to much of what was
said in colonial historical writing. But the more systematic
questioning of existing historical interpretation began among the
historians of India in the period after independence, in the 1950s and
the 1960s.
There was a drifting away from colonial and nationalist
interpretations, and there was a search for other aspects of the past.
Many of us at that time as young historians sought for something more
authentic, something more exploratory, something that would make us
understand the past better.
Almost the first problem, was that of questioning the validity of the
periodization of James Mill. Periodization tends to provide a frame and
to some degree conditions how one looks at the sources. Mill's
periodization did not reflect the flow of Indian history. There cannot
be two thousand years of the rule of Hindu dynasties, consistently
described either as backward or as a prolonged golden age, followed by
eight hundred years of the rule of Muslim dynasties, again described
either as an improvement on the previous period or as extremely
oppressive.
We know that in history, there are periods of rise and periods of
decline. No age is consistently glorious or tyrannical and no age can
be characterized only by the religion of its ruler. So the notion of
periodization came in for major reconsideration. Periodization has to
consider not just the religions of dynasties but other more significant
aspects of history: the interconnection and lives of people at
different levels of society and the kinds of issues that were important
to people throughout these ages.
During the period from the 1950's to 1970's in present day India, there
were many social science disciplines that emerged as strong
intellectual disciplines: economics, sociology, anthropology,
demography, human geography, archaeology. These were not only
established, but their concern was really with analyzing problems
relating to Indian conditions. And this really is the important
difference between just having social science disciplines and having
disciplines that are pertinent to a particular society. History then
became a very important part of this search for understanding what had
happened in the Indian subcontinent and in Indian society prior to the
modern period.
The history of early India began to shift gradually from what used to
be called Indology, which was largely the study only of texts and
events, to the social sciences which were more analytical and began to
ask questions related to how historical change took place? What brought
about the change? When did it occur and, most importantly, why did it
occur?
These were the kinds of questions we were concerned with. And I say
this with a certain amount of autobiographical inference, because this
was precisely the period when many of us were exploring these new ideas
in history and were stimulated both by the readings that we were doing,
and by the discoveries that we were making and by the very open
discussions and debates on historical interpretations. All this meant
that there was a focus within the historical discipline on what we
today call the historical method. In other words, the historian was no
longer just anybody who read a dozen books and summarized them and
called it history, to a person who had to discuss issues such as the
reliability of the evidence and the logic of the analysis. These had to
be done meticulously and rigorously. This was also tied into a much
greater emphasis on investigating the causes of events and historical
change, and ascertaining a priority in these causes.
There was a gradual broadening of the issues that became important to
history. We moved away from saying that an event had a single cause.
When one starts asking the question that if an event has more than one
cause, one has to justify and explain the multiple causes, and command
a range of possible reasons as to why an event took place and why
history changed?
So there was a broadening of the historical context and there was a
demand for much fuller explanations for events. This was assisted by
new types of evidence such as the discoveries of archaeology that
filled in gaps and gave new direction to interpretation. The other area
in which there was much work was in the study of inscriptions, and more
particularly in revealing information on society and economy as
contained in the inscriptions. Inscriptions generally carry a date, and
inscriptions are precise about recording an event. There may be a
fictional element here and there, but one can see through that.
Therefore, inscriptions are useful data. Both archaeological and
inscriptional sources extend the range of evidence and thereby of
historical interpretations.
Apart from new sources, let me give you an example of the kinds of
changes in interpretation that I am talking about. Prior to this period
it was frequently said that major changes in northern India were the
result of invasions. The Indo-Greeks were coming in as were the Shakas,
the Kushans, the Huns, the Turks, and so on.
Invasion, it was held, lead to conquest and the imposition of the
conqueror's culture. It also meant that some people became rulers and
some were subordinated by these rulers. But now we ask another set of
questions, a wider set of questions, in addition to what was asked
earlier, namely, who accepted the invasion and who resisted it and why
was there this difference? What form did the resistance take and what
form did the collaboration take? Were there negotiations required? If
there were, who negotiated with whom? Invasion is not just a sudden
one-time, overnight event. It is a gradual process and adjustments
between those who are invading and those who are invaded are
complicated adjustments. Does the invasion have the same impact on all
levels of society? We all know about how ruling classes change very
rapidly during the course of an invasion. But what happens further down
in society? What happens for instance, to groups of traders? How do
they accept an invasion? What happens to artisans and labourers? What
happens to peasants? Were their lands devastated as a result? All these
become important factors linked to the event. What I am trying to
suggest in a nutshell is that in asking such questions history began to
be subjected to what we today call "critical inquiry".
This has been a crucial development. It is what differentiates pre-1947
history from post-1947 history. Not that the older kind of history has
ceased to exist or become unimportant, but the new kind of history has
opened up more stimulating ways of examining the past. Consequently,
the '60s and the '70s were a period when there was intense discussion
and debate, and the vigour and liveliness of the discipline of history
became evident.
There were a number of new areas that came to be investigated. Among
these has been the evolution and structure of the state in early times.
The focus shifted from just looking at the state as a static entity, to
examining the process by which a state is formed. There are periods in
society when there are no states, when the organization is based on
clans, and kinship is significant in determining access to power and
resources. Gradually, there is a shift towards what we call state
formation -- when kingdoms emerge, when power and authority is
concentrated in one family and the appurtenances and paraphernalia of
the state begin to get referred to: the king, his ministers, his
capital city, his treasury, the army, laws of punishment and of
control, alliances and diplomatic connections, and so on.
These were all the constituents as it were, of establishing a state;
and it is clear how there is a transition from the absence of
references to these compared to when references are made in the texts,
and when states came to be established. This then also leads to asking
the question of whether ideologies were in conflict, and the one that
is often discussed relates to social ethics and war.
They accepted the periodization of Hindu, Muslim and British, a
periodization that we have now rejected. They did question the notion
of Oriental Despotism but did not replace it with an alternative theory
of governance, administration and rulership
In certain schools of Brahmanical thinking, warfare was justified. It
was argued that the king had to protect his subjects as also the
aristocracy so they had to go to war. But there were other schools of
Buddhist and Jain thinking that maintained that war was not always
necessary and that persuasion was a better alternative. This was
interestingly reflected in the inscriptions of the king whose name many
are familiar with -- the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who made a point of
saying that war should be forsaken and people should be persuaded to
adopt a peaceful life. It raises the issue of how conflicts were
resolved when there were conflicting interests.
One of the most interesting cases, I think, is that of peasants
objecting to taxation and oppression. There is a contrast in this
matter between India and China. Whereas in China there is frequency of
peasant revolts, in India they are rare. What is more frequent are
peasant migrations or the threat of these. At that time the population
was small, land was plentiful and available, and when peasant groups
felt they were being oppressed by heavy taxes they could migrate and
settle elsewhere. Books on state craft, warn the king not to overtax
the peasants lest they migrate. The loss of revenue in the one case
could mean additional revenue for the kingdom to which they might have
migrated. But I think the contrast in itself is of interest as
alternate ways of dealing with opposition to oppressive taxation.
There is also the question of the variation in the kinds of states, the
typology of states. We tend to refer to the Mauryas, the Guptas, the
Moghuls as if these states were organized and administered in the same
way, and we generalize about centrally controlled uniform
administration and of highly bureaucratic systems. This was not so: the
Mauryan Empire is different from the Gupta kingdom, which is again
different from the Moghul Empire. How did the administrations differ?
Not merely in terms of designations of officers, but in terms of the
structure of administration. One of the most important issues is the
relation between the central authority and local authority, and taking
it further, the linkage between local authority and both caste, and the
predominant economy.
In other words these linkages differed in time and space. They varied
in different parts of the subcontinent and during different periods.
Therefore, one is inevitably looking at typologies of states.
Historians distinguish between one and the other on the basis of
detailed evidence. What this underlines is that the nation-states of
today cannot be assumed to have existed in the past, because the
nation-state is a different kind of state from that of the Mauryas, the
Guptas, the Moghuls, and such like. The nation-state emerges at the
time of modernization, and through the process of modernization, and
therefore cannot be taken back to pre-modern times.
Economic change has also been discussed quite extensively and again
covers two broad areas: the agrarian economy and the commercial
economy. Discussions on the agrarian economy have moved away from the
colonial reading that all land was owned by the state and there was no
private property in land. It is now established that in different
periods there were various categories of ownership -- clan, family,
state, and private ownership, often co-existing, or else one
predominated over the others. There could be a predominance of state
ownership and/or private ownership, but there were varieties of other
forms that also existed, and these were more important in earlier times
than they are now. But in terms of the economy, perhaps the most
interesting change has been to bring trade into centre stage from the
early first millennium AD.
It moved into centre stage as an activity of commerce and exchange but
it was also important to tracing cultural cross-currents. Wherever
trade goes cultural forms travel along with the traders. Often monks
are the fellow-travellers of the traders. Central Asia, for example,
came under the auspices, as it were, of Buddhist institutions, because
as the traders went from oasis to oasis, the Buddhist monks followed
and set up their monasteries and their organization. There has been the
discovery of an immense amount of Buddhist art and of documents
relating to trade and to Buddhism. So there are cultural cross-currents
and there are, of course, migrations because together with the traders
groups of people also migrated. The old idea that migration occurred
largely when there were invasions has been given up. Trade is equally
important in encouraging migration and new settlements. The really
exciting aspect of commerce and trade has been the realization of the
importance of maritime trade.
This has led to historians looking at the subcontinent not from the
perspective only of the mountains of the north but from the perspective
of the Indian Ocean. The world from the latter perspective, shows that
the subcontinent lay at the heart of a huge trading circuit; and the
circuit extended from Tunis and Morocco in the West, all the way across
the Indian Ocean to South China in the east. What does this actually
mean in terms of trade and culture? We have, for example, the early
evidence of traders from the Roman Empire, from Alexandria and Egypt
coming down the Red Sea, across the Arabian Sea, and trading with
Indians along the west coast but particularly in Kerala, in South India.
Kerala was the land where the pepper grew and this was a major item
sent to the West. The traders from the west brought high value currency
in silver and gold, coins from the imperial treasury. They exchanged
them for pepper and textiles. The pepper trade all across the
Mediterranean and Europe was based on this linkage of the trade across
the Arabian Sea. Incidentally, they also brought quantities of
excellent Mediterranean wine, much appreciated it would seem from the
enthusiasm of the early Tamil poems. This trade dates to the early
centuries of the Christian era from about 50BC to 200AD. Later in the
8th century, the Arab traders came across the Arabian Sea, and unlike
their predecessors they settled in India. They settled along the west
coast, married into existing communities and this gave rise to a number
of local communities such as the Khojas, the Bohras, the Navayats, the
Mapillas, with an intersection of Islamic and local custom resulting in
some of the most interesting cultural articulations.
Indian intervention both in trade and the formation of new cultures was
marked in South-east Asia and extended to south China. The Indian Ocean
was a bustling, booming, trading area. The initial period of the coming
of the Portuguese is better viewed as their following the existing
circuit. Later when these circuits were brought into the European trade
the relationship between the European traders and Indian traders begin
to change.
From the historical perspective this trade also advanced other kinds of
exchange which was not restricted to maritime connections but possibly
heightened by these. There was an exchange of knowledge, mathematics,
astronomy, medicine, alchemy -- from about the 7th century AD to the
14th century AD. The Chinese were very impressed with Indian alchemy
but also complained that the Indian alchemists were so successful that
they could even convert pebbles into precious stones, with disastrous
economic consequences!
This is wild exaggeration but is nevertheless an interesting comment.
The Indians took their knowledge of astronomy and mathematics to the
Arab world, especially to Baghdad, and the Arabs added it to their own
knowledge and took it to Europe. There was a continuous going back and
forth; and knowledge shifted from one area to the other, enriching each
as it traveled. This makes for a tremendous need to understand not just
the history of isolated segments -- China, India, the Arab world,
Europe -- but to see these interconnections as absolutely essential.
There were a number of new areas that came to be investigated. Among
these has been the evolution and structure of the state in early times.
The focus shifted from just looking at the state as a static entity, to
examining the process by which a state is formed. There are periods in
society when there are no states, when the organization is based on
clans, and kinship is significant in determining access to power and
resources
The second aspect is that intensive trade often brings about
bilingualism. Traders have to use a language as they have to
communicate. This can encourage bilingualism. Indian traders were using
Sanskrit and Prakrit in dialogue with Greek-speaking Mediterranean
traders and later with Arab traders. Those who were going beyond trade
to forms of knowledge had to be familiar with both Sanskrit and Arabic
texts. There was also bilingualism with Javanese in South-east Asia and
with Chinese. Some essential Buddhist texts that we have access to
today are texts that were translated from Sanskrit to Chinese, and
which happened to have been preserved in China although they are now
lost in India.
Trade, in a visible sense, broke the boundaries of the supposed
self-contained civilizations. Contrary to what we have been led to
believe about the rigid demarcation of each civilization, what this
reveals is that no civilization is an island unto itself. Civilizations
as single units have been virtually non-existent because they have been
constantly impinged upon by other civilizations. Culture is porous.
There are always features being introduced which contribute to the
making of the subsequent culture.
An important area of interest has been the history of religion in
India, and what I mean by this is not just the reading of texts and the
familiarity with the teaching of the major teachers, but the historical
treatment of religion which is quite different and significant to the
study of history. Sects and texts and teachings have a focus and have
an interface with society. They do not exist in a vacuum because they
have an audience, and they relate to that audience. The historian then
has to discover why is it that religious texts change or are modified
or whatever because of their interface with an audience. Why is it that
the Bhakti movements, for example, focusing on the devotion of a
worshipper to his deity, were movements that also had dialogue with a
number of Sufi traditions later on? Why did these movements become
visible and articulate in different parts of the subcontinent at
different times. There were historical reasons for this and the
historian has to place religious movements, in their broader historical
context, a placement that may not always please the religious orthodoxy.
Who were the people that supported these sects and these religions? We
must know which strata of society they came from. One of the
interesting aspects of the Bhakti tradition is that very often such
movements began with ordinary people at the lower levels of society.
But when they acquired popularity and an impressive following, then
rulers also became their patrons, and this patronage brought them a
wide support. Royal patronage could be motivated by a religious urge,
but because it came from royalty it also had a political edge. The
social function of religion and religious texts becomes a major issue
in the study of both social and political history, as well as the
history of religion.
The other aspect of patronage is that most established and formal
religions manifest their patronage in the form of monuments. They have
monuments by which they are identified: the Buddhists have stupas, and
viharas; the Hindus have temples; the Muslims have mosques; the
Christians have churches. And what we are concerned with is how did
these monuments come into existence? Who financed them? Who were the
patrons? Why was it necessary to patronize these enormous religious
edifices? Was it just to glorify a particular religion or were they
making other statements? Such monuments have in the past been studied
primarily as an expression of religious sentiment. Now they are also
being studied as symbols of the state where the patron is the ruler;
and they are symbols of wealth, because they could not have been built
without a very substantial outlay of wealth. Therefore, they are making
statements which are more than just religious statements.
Social history has focused on caste now seen as more flexible and
mobile than it had been before as well as the adoption of
characteristic features of what can be seen as caste in the other
religions known to the sub-continent. An interesting aspect of caste
mobility has been the study of dynasties in the periods from about the
9th to 10th century onwards, where frequently those that claimed
aristocratic status came from rather obscure backgrounds. One is then
interested to see the methods they employ by which they change their
status; they claim to be of higher status and frequently they actually
establish that higher status, although people around the area knew that
they came from rather obscure origins. This process of social change --
upward social mobility or people moving up in social status -- has its
own interest because the process goes back to early society and can be
traced, with greater or lesser intensity, in every century.
But the equally important aspect of new work in social history is
gender history: the demonstration that women are central to the
organization of society -- that women cannot be dismissed or made
marginal, and that the structure of society cannot be discussed without
considering the role and function of women. Despite what the
prescriptive texts may say there is much evidence to indicate that
women of all groups were subordinated, although the degree may have
varied. The question to be asked is why this was so. The answer lies in
many facets of life, one being that the subordination of women
permitted a social control over marriage alliances and these were and
are, crucial to the way in which a society is organized and what powers
vest with whom. This also relates to the question of inheritance where
laws were drawn up to consolidate property. Such laws were often
detrimental to the status of women for when they were applied the laws
did not always uphold the status of women.
In this connection historians are now beginning to listen to the voices
of women. What I mean by this is that there are texts and documents
that capture, as it were, the views and feelings of women. Let me give
you two examples: in the Buddhist tradition, women were permitted to
become nuns. Some among them composed hymns and poems as did the monks.
The Theri Gatha, put together at the turn of the Christian era, is a
large collection of hymns composed by them. It is somewhat amazing
because they write in a forthright manner about the world that they
have come from and its joys and sorrows, they tell us why they have
become nuns, and what it means to them -- not as a formality but in a
personal way. Such statements are now being analyzed as sources for the
history of women. Similarly among the Bhakti teachers, the hymns of
some of the women who preached and sang, such as Andaal in the Tamil
area and Mirabai in Rajasthan, are also being seen as the legitimate
perspectives of women on the world of their times.
Another method of assessing the status of women involves a fresh
approach to creative literature. Literature may be fictional, but can
be analyzed as an artifact of history, indicating this status in an
indirect way. I have tried to do this with the well-known narratives
about Shakuntala: a young woman who lives in the forest and is met by
the king one day when he is out hunting. They fall in love and he
proposes a marriage by mutual consent. He returns to the capital and
when she arrives some time later bearing his child he rejects her. But
ultimately the matter is resolved and the story ends happily.
In the first version of the story which occurs in the Mahabharata, the
young woman makes the marriage conditional to his recognizing their son
as his heir to which the king agrees. When she takes the child born
thereafter to the king's court he rejects her. But she stands her
ground and there is an exchange of choice abuse. She is a spirited and
independent woman. She finally decides to leave her son at the court
and to go back. At this point a heavenly voice proclaims that what she
has said is correct. The king, true to type, says that he wanted the
legitimacy of his son to be established and now that that had been
done, he accepts her.
The story recurs in a much better known version in the famous play by
Kalidasa written a few centuries later and called
Abhijnana-Shakuntalam. The core of the story remains the same, but it
is no longer for recitation among a society of epic heroes. It is now a
drama to be performed at the royal court. Consequently, Shakuntala
becomes a reserved and shy woman, conforming to the romantic ideal.
When she is rejected by the king she is desperate, and her prayers for
help lead to her being whisked away by her mother. This story plays on
the idea of a lost ring and a loss of memory. Finally, there is a
resolution to the problem and they come together, but the treatment of
the woman is different and one sees it as partially, the difference
between the ethos of the court and of the heroic society of the epic,
each constituting a different audience.
And then, in the 18th century, a version of the story is told in braj
bhasha, which as a language gradually improved its status from being a
popular language to being used in some of the courts of northern India.
Shakuntala in this version is more akin to the Shakuntala of the epic
and expresses herself through a dialogue which is quite racy. She
treats the king as she would an ordinary man. The social context is
again different as is the attitude of the author to the woman. The
history of the story becomes even more interesting because the Kalidasa
play is translated into English and then into German. It becomes a
symbol of German romanticism in which Shakuntala is projected as the
child of nature. Then in the 19th century, when the British colonial
authors and scholars take it up, they are disturbed by the marriage
being a marriage by mutual consent and not a formal marriage. So there
are objections to the moral and erotic aspects of the play, which are
disapproved of. The point that I am trying to make is that in each
case, the woman is treated differently by the different set of authors
or commentators. What we are becoming conscious of now is that although
this is fiction and has no historicity, nevertheless, the versions of
the narrative reflect a series of historical moments and locations, and
each of these indicates a change in the way in which particular social
groups perceive the role of women.
Let me conclude with a few remarks on another aspect of history which
has become important in contemporary India: regional history. The
visibility of regional history was brought into focus by two
developments in particular. One was that the view of Indian history,
the subcontinental history, moved away from the Gangetic valley and
began to be looked at from a regional perspective. The other was that
the search for new data -- texts and artifacts -- required a study of
regional history in greater depth than before. The artifacts suggested
the need to look in detail at more localized cultures. The texts were
not always in Sanskrit or Prakrit and more often were in early forms of
the regional languages. These provided a fresh perspective of the
history of the region, as well as some reorientation of sub-continental
history.
But regional history has also gradually become the history of the
present-day states of the Indian Union, with their contemporary
boundaries. The state tends to be imposed on the region. There have
been attempts at tracing state boundaries back to earlier times.
Historically, this is an anachronistic exercise because present day
boundaries are, in fact, the result of a long historical process which
culminates in the present, and consequently, one cannot talk about
present-day states having existed in the past; they exist only in the
present.
History makes it clear that boundaries of states are not static.
Boundaries change sometimes from decade to decade, sometimes from
century to century, and they change together with the changes brought
about by historical events. Attempts to trace current boundaries to
earlier times seem futile. The more significant question concerns the
defining of a region. It hinges in part also on the nature of the
states that have preceded the present. In the 1950s, the nation-state
of India re-organized the boundaries of the constituent states on the
basis of language or what has been called linguistic states. The
boundaries are relatively recent and historically there has been some
overlap and some fading into neighbouring areas.
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