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History
and interpretation
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IF one
looks back at 1947 to find out in what ways it brought about changes in
the approach to the medieval (that is, the post-ancient, pre-British,
and, in much of earlier discourse, the 'Muslim') period of India's
history, a few major shifts of emphasis could, perhaps, be immediately
identified. First of
all, Partition meant that the two communalist camps, Hindu and Muslim,
found two different 'national' homes. Until 1947 there had been a
running debate between the advocates of the two communities. But with
1947, the Muslim side in the communal historical debate shifted entirely
to Pakistan, where in its seemingly final version, the history of
'Muslims in India' was now projected as a struggle for a separate nation
right from A.D. 712, when Muhammad ibn Qasim entered Sind at the head of
an Arab army. This was the reading of history pursued with much energy
by the late Ishtiaq Husain Quraishi, and as recently as January this
year the publication has been announced of a two-volume Road to
Pakistan, its Vol.I comprising a 653-page account of "the
period from A.D. 712 to 1858", written by "eminent historians
and scholars of Pakistan" and edited by Hakim Mohammad Said of
Hamdard (Karachi). In India,
the contrary interpretation found its high priest in the well-known
historian R. C. Majumdar. To him the entire period from c. 1200 onwards
was one of foreign rule; Muslims were alien to Indian (Hindu) culture;
the Hindus, oppressed and humiliated, wished nothing better than to
slaughter "the Mlechhas" (Muslims); the British regime
was a successor more civilised than "Muslim rule"; yet real
opposition to the British came from Hindus, not Muslims, even in 1857;
and, finally, the national movement's course was throughout distorted by
concessions made to Muslims by Gandhiji, who was so much personally to
blame for Partition. This view runs like a red thread in the volumes of History
and Culture of the Indian People (first volume issued 1951),
published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan with financial assistance from
the Government of India, and edited by R. C. Majumdar, whose great
industry must extract admiration from his worst critics. (An early
critic was D. D. Kosambi, who wrote that if Islam was so alien to India
as the original patron of the series, K. M. Munshi, and its editor R. C.
Majumdar thought, then they should have worried about their own
"good Muslim professional names"!). Majumdar went on to author
texts on the Rebellion of 1857 and the freedom movement in which the
same stance was firmly maintained. Though after Majumdar's death (1980),
there has not appeared on the scene a historian of similar calibre in
the Hindutva (or even the 'soft Hindutva') camp, the often unproven
hypotheses and inferences that he bequeathed have all become firm truths
for a very large number of educated people in India. It is not
often perceived that both the Hindu and Muslim communal schools share a
very large area of common ground. Both see the two religious communities
as constant political entities, and, therefore, in effect, separate
nations. The slogan "Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan", raised by the
pre-1947 forebears of the present Sangh parivar, was the exact
counterpart of the "Pakistan" slogan of the Muslim League and
both equally implied adherence to the Two-Nation theory. Often,
therefore, in the historical writings of the two schools, the heroes and
villains are simply interchanged, while large areas of history have been
ignored by both. THE
mainstream nationalist tradition of historiography presented, in
contrast, a much broader and critical view of history. This could be
seen in two early works on medieval Indian history, namely, Tara Chand's
Influence of Islam on Indian Culture, and Mohammad Habib's
monograph on Mahmud of Ghaznin, both published in the 1920s. Nationalist
historiography presented a consistent affirmation of the compositeness
of India's heritage. It also felt called upon to controvert the official
British claim of improvement in Indian economic life that the colonial
regime had brought about, in contrast to its 'native' predecessors. W.H.
Moreland's rather cautious statement of this case brought forth
challenges from Brij Narain (1929) and Radhakamal Mukerji (1934), who
presented favourable views of the economic performance of the Mughal
Empire. In the
subsequent period, possibly owing to the difference in the main
source-languages, there were two points to which Marxist-influenced
research came separately to be directed. In his Indian Feudalism
(1965), R. S. Sharma studied in detail the basic relationships in early
medieval society down to the eve of the Ghorian conquests. He argued in
favour of a "feudalism largely realising the surplus from peasants
mainly in kind through superior rights in their land and through forced
labour, which is not found on any considerable scale... after the
Turkish conquest of India." These conclusions were largely
underlined for the period immediately preceding c. 1200 by B.N.S. Yadava
(1973). The other
effort was directed to establishing what the later medieval class
structures were like, whether different from those of the earlier period
or not. Satish Chandra made an initial attempt to delineate the main
features of the Mughal Indian political and social order (1959). I
presented (1963) a detailed study of the agrarian system of Mughal
India, in which I argued that there were two ruling classes, the
centralised nobility and the dispersed landed gentry (zamindars);
and that the Mughal Empire collapsed because of agrarian uprisings in
which the zamindars utilised the desperation of the oppressed
peasantry. In later writing (1969), I denied that the Mughal Empire had
any potentialities for capitalistic development, despite a considerable
presence of commodity production. The last thesis has been contested by
Iqtidar A. Khan (1975), while S. Moosvi (1987) has patiently reworked
the basic statistics in the Ain-i-Akbari on which all work on
Mughal economic history must necessarily rely. M. Athar Ali (1966),
emphasising the centralised nature of Mughal polity, and the ethnic and
religious compositeness of the nobility, has argued against my thesis of
an agrarian crisis in that Empire. FROM the 1970s, historical research in Medieval India began to be influenced by two distinct but converging currents. Burton Stein (1980) applied the theory of "segmentary state", evolved in African anthropology, to medieval South India, and this became a signal for its application, notably by A. Wink (1986), to both Mughal and Maratha sovereignty. The tendency here is to deny the historicity of the process of centralisation as well as systematisation in pre-colonial governments. The other current originated from Cambridge, with C.A. Bayly (1983), who, arguing for a continuity between the previous indigenous polities and the colonial regime, saw the operation of innovative "corporate groups" behind the Mughal imperial decline, groups that later shifted their loyalties to the East India Company. The Indian supporters of the Bayly thesis include Muzaffar Alam (1986) and S. Subrahmanyan. Neither thesis has been accepted by most Indian historians, and there has been a notable disavowal of both in the West itself, in J. F. Richards's volume on the Mughal Empire in the New Cambridge History of India (1993). The
Indian (in part NRI) counterpart of the two western theories has been
the "Subaltern" school, whose members have worked as a
"collective" since 1982. Sharing the Cambridge School's
scepticism of Indian nationalism, these historians have emphasised
"the cultural autonomy" of tribal and local communities, and
protested against those (including such as are conveniently termed
"Nehruvian Marxists") who have assumed cultural syntheses and
unifying factors to be an important element in Indian history. While the
Subalterns' work has been mainly concerned with the period of the
national movement, their beliefs enmesh fairly well with the criticism
of nationalist and Marxist historiography of pre-colonial India that
historians like Stein and Bayly have initiated. THAT
different views on medieval India should be influenced by the individual
historian's subjective views of the contemporary world is only to be
expected; these must, however, first meet the criterion of support from
historical evidence. In fact, so long as new views appear and provoke a
fresh or extended exploration of the historical documentation, one can
only welcome the tendency not to take the given history on trust. But
historical evidence must always remain the touchstone. A major problem
today is that only a small and declining number of people in India have
access to Persian, in which language so much of the source material of
medieval India is to be found. Not only does this large body of material
need to be studied, but the collection of documents in all languages has
also to be encouraged, as well as local antiquarian and archaeological
work. With every passing day the evidence on paper, metal or brick or
stone is being destroyed. If the hand of destruction is to be stayed,
the people's interest in the country's past needs to be aroused. In this
effort all those who, without necessarily being professional historians
themselves, have yet a care for all aspects and phases of our heritage,
can play a most crucial part. |
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