‘Historiography’, or the History of history-writing: Examples from South Asian history
Consider this quote from an article on Indian/South Asian history: “It has been only in recent years that the influence of ideologies on the interpretation of Indian history has been recognized; perhaps now for the first time, a history of the changing interpretations of ancient India can be written.” Considering how much the public discourse in India has been dominated in recent times by the supposed rescuing of history from the ‘nefarious ideologies’ of ‘leftist’ and ‘Marxist’ historians, one might surmise that this quote is from some recent article or book by one of many Hindutva-propagandist engineer/MBA/economist/etc.-turned historywriters. That assumption, however, would be leaps and bounds away from the truth. The lines are actually from an article which appeared in a scholarly journal more than half a century ago in 1968. It was written by a 37-year old Indian historian named Romila Thapar.
In this essay I will use that 1968 article, titled ‘Interpretations of Ancient Indian History’, to explain the basics of what academic historians call ‘historiography’. This is perhaps the most elemental of the research concepts that one learns as a historian. Historiography has several related meanings, the most common being the study of the different ways in which writers from different time periods or backgrounds etc. have written the history of a particular topic. That is, historiography is the history of history-writing. A simple example will make this more clear: Folks who were writing the history of India in the late 1800s produced narratives very different to the narratives of those who wrote the (same) history of India in the early 1800s or the late 1700s. Besides, native Indian writers in the late 1800s produced a narrative of Indian history quite different from that of contemporaneous British writers, and Dalit writers in the 20th century wrote histories substantially different from those of 20th-century elite-caste writers.
[I have started a website titled University of History, which I am planning as a helpful resource for history-related stuff, including my own past writings on history. This post emanates from that new venture.]
In the article under consideration, which was published in the journal History and Theory, Romila Thapar examines how historians/writers since the late 1700s have interpreted and written the history of the Indian subcontinent (or South Asia as we better understand it today). To the East India Company-employed Orientalists and Indologists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the primary motivation for exploring and writing Indian history was the requirement that the Company’s “officers, in order to administer properly the territories which it had acquired, become familiar with the laws, habits, and history of the people they were governing.” Many Orientalists also had “a genuine interest in the culture of India,” although “the ancient Indian past was seen almost as a lost wing of early European culture.. If the Orientalists tended to exaggerate the virtues they saw in Indian society [of the past], it was in part because they were searching for a distant Utopia to escape from the bewildering changes taking place in nineteenth-century Europe, and in part to counteract the highly critical attitudes current among Utilitarian thinkers in Britain.” [Note how Thapar contextualizes the historians and the history-writing of this time, providing a good example of what historiography is.]
Perhaps the most relevant point about these early Orientalist narratives is the almost complete reliance of the writers on Sanskrit sources and on Brahmans. Thapar writes that “the reliance on pandits was not the most reliable — although undoubtedly the most convenient — access to ancient history. Many of the contemporary ideological prejudices of the pandits were often incorporated into what was believed to be” ancient Indian history.
However, “the first important history of India did not come from the Orientalists, but from a totally different source.” That is, the Utilitarian thinker James Mill, who published in 1817 The History of British India. [Side note — In the book’s Preface, Mill writes that he “has never been in India; and, if he has any, has a very slight, and elementary acquaintance, with any of the languages of the East.”] Mill’s “division of Indian history into three periods — the Hindu, the Muslim, and the British — became the accepted periodization of Indian history.. He was a firm believer in the Utilitarian principle that legislation can improve a society. In the Indian context this belief implied that British administrators in applying legislation could change India from a traditional, unchanging society to a progressive and dynamic society, “tradition” and “progress” being defined in Utilitarian terms.. Mill was a radical in the British context, and, as was the case with quite a few other radicals of this period, he tended to exaggerate the conservatism and backwardness of India in order to accentuate his own radicalism.” [Again, note how Thapar focuses on the backgrounds of historians and the contexts in which they write histories.]
In the early 1900s came “perhaps the best known of the administrator historians, Vincent Smith. Smith’s historical training was in European classical scholarship. He was enthusiastic about the activities of the ancient Greeks and took their achievements to be the yardstick by which to measure all civilizations. His pro-Greek bias is shown in attempts to suggest that the finer qualities of Indian civilization were derived from Greece.”
The turn of the twentieth century was also the time “that Indian historians first began writing on ancient Indian history, the most eminent among them being R. G. Bhandarkar. At this stage they did not have any new perspective on Indian history, but followed the models set by British historians. Historical writing was mainly a narrative of dynastic and political history or else work of a largely antiquarian interest in fact-finding.. Many of the early writers came from brahman and kayastha families, largely because they were the ones who had the quickest access to a knowledge of the required classical language.”
“The following generation of Indian historians, however, differed from their elders in one fundamental assumption. Historians writing in the 1920’s and 1930’s felt the impact of the national movement, and this was reflected in their historical thinking. Historians such as H. C. Raychaudhuri, K. P. Jayaswal, R. C. Majumdar, R. K. Mookerjee, and H. C. Ojha, among others, continued to write political and dynastic history in the main, but their interpretations were based on a clearly nationalistic point of view. There was an unashamed glorification of the ancient Indian past. This was in part a reaction to the criticism of Mill and other writers and in part a necessary step in the building of national self-respect. The glorious past was also a compensation for the humiliating present.. It was felt that nineteenth-century historians had belittled the achievements of ancient India by, among other things, denying its antiquity and by suggesting that its achievements were borrowed mainly from Greece. [Remember how, e.g., Vincent Smith suggested that the finer qualities of Indian civilization were derived from Greece.] There was an attempt, therefore, to place literary sources as early in time as was reasonably feasible and to prove that the more worthwhile aspects of Indian culture were entirely indigenous.”
Note here how Thapar effortlessly provides an answer to the question that nags many Indians all the time: Why do so many of our compatriots like to claim that every great thing in the world originated “first in India”?!
Thapar’s article is 18 pages long, and she has a lot to say on the historiography of Indian history written by Indian historians, among other things. A PDF of a 1982 update of that essay, titled Ideology and the Interpretation of Early Indian History, can be found here.
To those of us reading it today, one short segment of Thapar’s 1968 article carries some poignancy and discomforting relevance: In the writings of early 20th-c nationalist historians, “there was a tendency to regard the ancient period as one of considerable prosperity and general contentment, in fact a period of which the Indian people could justifiably be proud. This was legitimate for its purposes except on occasions when there was a reluctance to admit to blemishes on the culture.. Mill’s periodization was accepted without much questioning, and a very sharp distinction was drawn between the Hindu/Ancient and the Muslim/Medieval periods.. The communal atmosphere in Indian politics in the late 1930’s and the 1940’s tended to vitiate the study of ancient and medieval history.. Many of the ills of India were ascribed to the Muslim invasions and rule.. The identification of ancient India with Hindu culture became so marked that even the Buddhists were regarded with some suspicion.”
We can hope that just as Thapar and others, post the “communal atmosphere” of the 1930s and 1940s, were able to infuse the writing of Indian history with scholarly rigor and dissociate it from non-evidence-based interpretations, scholars today will get their opportunity to provide a similar service in the coming years and decades.
