Historiography of India

The historiography of India refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of India.

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In recent decades there have been four main schools of historiography in how historians study India: Cambridge, Nationalist, Marxist, and subaltern. The once common "Orientalist" approach, with its image of a sensuous, inscrutable, and wholly spiritual India, has died out in serious scholarship.

Sources

Very few known Indian texts recording history before 15th century C.E. exist, hence, historical evidence for much of India's history comes through foreign historians like:

Main schools

In recent decades there have been four main schools of historiography in how historians study India: Cambridge, Nationalist, Marxist, and subaltern. The once common "persian" approach, with its image of a sensuous, inscrutable, and wholly spiritual India, has died out in serious scholarship.[7]

The "Cambridge School", led by Anil Seal,[8] Gordon Johnson,[9] Richard Gordon, and David A. Washbrook,[10] downplays ideology.[11] However, this school of historiography is criticised for western bias or Eurocentrism.[12]

The Nationalist school has focused on Congress, Gandhi, Nehru and high level politics. It highlighted the Mutiny of 1857 as a war of liberation, and Gandhi's 'Quit India' begun in 1942, as defining historical events. This school of historiography has received criticism for Elitism.[13]

The Marxists have focused on studies of economic development, landownership, and class conflict in precolonial India and of deindustrialisation during the colonial period. The Marxists portrayed Gandhi's movement as a device of the bourgeois elite to harness popular, potentially revolutionary forces for its own ends. Again, the Marxists are accused of being "too much" ideologically influenced, and also ironically, elitist.[14]

The "subaltern school", was begun in the 1980s by Ranajit Guha and Gyan Prakash.[15] It focuses attention away from the elites and politicians to "history from below", looking at the peasants using folklore, poetry, riddles, proverbs, songs, oral history and methods inspired by anthropology. It focuses on the colonial era before 1947 and typically emphasises caste and downplays class, to the annoyance of the Marxist school.[16]

More recently, Hindu nationalists have created a version of history to support their demands for "Hindutva" ("Hinduness") in Indian society. This school of thought is still in the process of development.[17] In March 2012, Diana L. Eck, professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University, authored in her book "India: A Sacred Geography", that idea of India dates to a much earlier time than the British or the Mughals and it wasn't just a cluster of regional identities and it wasn't ethnic or racial.[18][19][20][21]

Debate continues about the economic impact of British imperialism on India. The issue was actually raised by conservative British politician Edmund Burke who in the 1780s vehemently attacked the East India Company, claiming that Warren Hastings and other top officials had ruined the Indian economy and society. Indian historian Rajat Kanta Ray (1998) continues this line of attack, saying the new economy brought by the British in the 18th century was a form of "plunder" and a catastrophe for the traditional economy of Mughal India. Ray accuses the British of depleting the food and money stocks and imposing high taxes that helped cause the terrible famine of 1770, which killed a third of the people of Bengal.[22]

Rejecting the Indian nationalist account of the British as alien aggressors, seizing power by brute force and impoverishing all of India, British historian P. J. Marshall argues that the British were not in full control but instead were players in what was primarily an Indian play and in which their rise to power depended upon excellent cooperation with Indian elites. Marshall admits that much of his interpretation is still rejected by many historians.[23] Marshall argues that recent scholarship has reinterpreted the view that the prosperity of the formerly benign Mughal rule gave way to poverty and anarchy. Marshall argues the British takeover did not make any sharp break with the past. The British largely delegated control to regional Mughal rulers and sustained a generally prosperous economy for the rest of the 18th century. Marshall notes the British went into partnership with Indian bankers and raised revenue through local tax administrators and kept the old Mughal rates of taxation. Professor Ray agrees that the East India Company inherited an onerous taxation system that took one-third of the produce of Indian cultivators.[24]

Insecurity of the Raj

In the 20th century historians generally agreed that imperial authority in the Raj had been secure in the 1800-1940 era. Various challenges have emerged. Mark Condos and Jon Wilson argue that the Raj was chronically insecure.[25][26] They argue that the irrational anxiety of officials led to a chaotic administration with minimal social purchase or ideological coherence. The Raj was not a confident state capable of acting as it chose, but rather a psychologically embattled one incapable of acting except in the abstract, the small scale, or short term.[27]

See also

References
  1. Allan Dahlaquist (1996). Megasthenes and Indian Religion: A Study in Motives and Types. Motilal Banarsidass. ISBN 978-81-208-1323-6.
  2. "The Travel Records of Chinese Pilgrims Faxian, Xuanzang, and Yijing" (PDF). Columbia University.
  3. Kitab al-Bīrūnī fī Taḥqīq mā li-al-Hind, Hyderabad: Osmania Oriental Publication Bureau, 1958
  4. Kegan, Paul, ed. (1910), Alberuni's India, 2, translated by Sachau, E.C., London: Trench, Truebner
  5. Dunn 2005, pp. 310–11; Defrémery & Sanguinetti 1853, pp. 9–10 Vol. 1
  6. Deeg, Max (2007). „Has Xuanzang really been in Mathurā? : Interpretatio Sinica or Interpretatio Occidentalia — How to Critically Read the Records of the Chinese Pilgrim.“ - In: 東アジアの宗教と文化 : 西脇常記教授退休記念論集 = Essays on East Asian religion and culture: Festschrift in honor of Nishiwaki Tsuneki on the occasion of his 65th birthday / クリスティアン・ウィッテルン, 石立善編集 = ed. by Christian Wittern und Shi Lishan. - 京都 [Kyōto] : 西脇常記教授退休記念論集編集委員會; 京都大���人文科學研究所; Christian Wittern, 2007, pp. 35 - 73. See p. 35
  7. Prakash, Gyan (April 1990). "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 32 (2): 383–408. doi:10.1017/s0010417500016534. JSTOR 178920.
  8. Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century (1971)
  9. Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism: Bombay and the Indian National Congress 1880–1915 (2005)
  10. Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, eds. Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives (2011)
  11. Aravind Ganachari, "Studies in Indian Historiography: 'The Cambridge School'", Indica, March 2010, 47#1, pp 70–93
  12. Hostettler, N. (2013). Eurocentrism: a marxian critical realist critique. Taylor & Francis. p. 33. ISBN 978-1-135-18131-4. Retrieved 6 January 2017.
  13. "Ranjit Guha, "On Some Aspects of Historiography of Colonial India"" (PDF).
  14. Bagchi, Amiya Kumar (January 1993). "Writing Indian History in the Marxist Mode in a Post-Soviet World". Indian Historical Review. 20 (1/2): 229–244.
  15. Prakash, Gyan (December 1994). "Subaltern studies as postcolonial criticism". American Historical Review. 99 (5): 1475–1500. doi:10.2307/2168385. JSTOR 2168385.
  16. Roosa, John (2006). "When the Subaltern Took the Postcolonial Turn". Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. 17 (2): 130–147. doi:10.7202/016593ar.
  17. Menon, Latha (August 2004). "Coming to Terms with the Past: India". History Today. Vol. 54 no. 8. pp. 28–30.
  18. "Harvard scholar says the idea of India dates to a much earlier time than the British or the Mughals".
  19. "In The Footsteps of Pilgrims".
  20. "India's spiritual landscape: The heavens and the earth". The Economist. 24 March 2012.
  21. Dalrymple, William (27 July 2012). "India: A Sacred Geography by Diana L Eck – review". The Guardian.
  22. Rajat Kanta Ray, "Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, 1765–1818", in The Oxford History of the British Empire: vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall, (1998), pp. 508–529.
  23. P. J. Marshall, "The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion, 1700–1765," in The Oxford History of the British Empire: vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall, (1998), pp. 487–507.
  24. Marshall, "The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion, 1700–1765"
  25. Mark Condos, The Insecurity State: Punjab and the Making of Colonial Power in British India (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
  26. Jon Wilson, India conquered: Britain's Raj and the chaos of empire (Simon and Schuster, 2016).
  27. Joshua Ehrlich, "Anxiety, Chaos, and the Raj." Historical Journal 63.3 (2020): 777-787. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X1900058X

Further reading
  • Balagangadhara, S. N. (2012). Reconceptualizing India studies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
  • Bhattacharjee, J. B. Historians and Historiography of North East India (2012)
  • Bannerjee, Dr. Gauranganath (1921). India as known to the ancient world. Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, London.
  • Bose, Mihir. "India's Missing Historians: Mihir Bose Discusses the Paradox That India, a Land of History, Has a Surprisingly Weak Tradition of Historiography", History Today 57#9 (2007) pp 34+. online
  • Chakrabarti, Dilip K.: Colonial Indology, 1997, Munshiram Manoharlal: New Delhi.
  • Palit, Chittabrata, Indian Historiography (2008).
  • Indian History and Culture Society., Devahuti, D. (2012). Bias in Indian historiography.
  • Elliot, Henry Miers; John Dowson (1867–77). The History of India, as told by its own historians. The Muhammadan Period. London: Trübner and Co.
  • Inden, R. B. (2010). Imagining India. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press.
  • Jain, M. The India They Saw : Foreign Accounts (4 Volumes) Delhi: Ocean Books, 2011.
  • Kahn, Yasmin. "Remembering and Forgetting: South Asia and the Second World War' in Martin Gegner and Bart Ziino, eds., The Heritage of War (Routledge, 2011) pp 177–193.
  • Mantena, R. (2016). Origins of modern historiography in India: Antiquarianism and philology 1780-1880. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Mittal, S. C India distorted: A study of British historians on India (1995), on 19th century writers
  • R.C. Majumdar, Historiography in Modem India (Bombay, 1970) ISBN 9782102227356
  • Rosser, Yvette Claire (2003). Curriculum as Destiny: Forging National Identity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (PDF) (Dissertation). University of Texas at Austin. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-09-11. Retrieved 2018-09-17.
  • Arvind Sharma, Hinduism and Its Sense of History (Oxford University Press, 2003) ISBN 978-0-19-566531-4
  • E. Sreedharan, A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000 (2004)
  • Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 9789351365914
  • Trautmann, Thomas R. (1997). Aryans and British India. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-585-10445-4.
  • Viswanathan, G. (2015). Masks of conquest: Literary study and British rule in India.
  • Antonio de Nicolas, Krishnan Ramaswamy, and Aditi Banerjee (eds.) (2007), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis Of Hinduism Studies In America (Publisher: Rupa & Co.)
  • Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee: The Nay Science: A History of German Indology. Oxford University Press, New York 2014, ISBN 978-0199931361 (Introduction, p. 1–29).
  • Warder, A. K., An introduction to Indian historiography (1972).
  • Winks, Robin, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume V: Historiography (2001)
  • Weickgenannt, T. N. (2009). Salman Rushdie and Indian historiography: Writing the nation into being. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
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