During British colonial rule, the map of India had two colours representing two Indias, known as the ‘British India’ and the ‘Indian’ India. The latter consisted of two-fifths of the territory – one-quarter of the population of the entire country was outside the direct jurisdiction of the colonial state. Expediency, ethnocentrism, lack of understanding of an alien and complex society on the part of the colonizers, simplistic models of evolutionary and functionalist anthropology, along with the ideology of Orientalism, all made their contribution to the development of a conceptual framework and vantage point in which India was identified with ‘British India’ alone. Hence, in the historiography of colonial India, inferences drawn from British India are applied to the whole of India. I have previously characterized this tendency as the colonial mode of historiography. I have further argued that in order to correct this distortion, agrarian relations, power structures and ideologies of the princely states during the period of British colonial rule deserve to be studied in their own right
In a different context, Perlin points to a similar distortion in Indian historiography of the pre-colonial period. He calls it ‘Mughal-centrism’, that is, a tendency to treat the economic and political institutions of Mughal India as representative of the whole of India. He rightly argues that Mughal-centrism is a serious impediment to any recognition of regional diversity in pre-colonial agrarian relations and power structures. He emphasizes the urgent need to investigate the regional systems of landholding, class structures and ideologies in order to overcome the limitations of a Mughal-centric history of India. While Perlin’s critique of Mughal-centrism is well taken, his explanation for this tendency is rather misplaced. According to him, it is a result of a conscious choice on the part of historians based in Aligarh to paint Mughal India in a positive light in order to counter the distortions by obscurantist (communalist) historians. However, this tendency is not confined to the historians of the Aligarh school alone. It is far more pervasive and is found in the Orientalist, colonial, nationalist, as well as the Marxist schools of historiography. Indeed, the tendency to focus on Mughal India, by peripheralizing the rest of the subcontinent, is common to both the pre-colonial and colonial history of India, with the only difference that in the latter, Mughal India is replaced with British India.
De-colonizing colonial historiography: discarding the notion of ‘indirect rule’
Why were there ‘two Indias’ during British colonial rule? This is a serious question from a theoretical and historical point of view that has not received the attention it deserves. ‘Indirect rule’, the most commonly used notion in conventional historiography to describe the relations between the paramount power and the princely states, has been partly responsible for the marginalization of princely India in the historical discourse on India’s colonization. It is in fact a conceptual tool of the colonial mode of historiography and misrepresents the history of colonial rule and resistance. According to the notion of ‘indirect rule’, the landed aristocracy in India was ‘preserved’ by the colonial state as a means to its functional requirements. However, the alliance between the colonial state and the landed aristocracy in India was a two-way process of compromise and accommodation, which the colonial state entered in the face of resistance by the latter. The notion of ‘indirect rule’ eschews the element of resistance, negotiation and mutual accommodation, making it a one-way process in which the colonial state reigned supreme. While privileging the metropolis, it denies Indian subjects their agency, excepting as instruments or ‘puppets’ of the supreme power. Moreover, it ignores the complexities of the alliance between supreme power and Indian landed aristocracy. The repudiation of the notion of ‘indirect rule’ is a necessary step towards decolonizing the historiography of colonial and princely India.
De-objectifying the princely states
In order to appreciate the critical importance of indigenous resistance and agency, it is important to consider the legacy of earlier theories of colonial rule and social change. In addition to celebratory accounts, we can identify three main strands of historiography of colonialism, which influenced critical debate since India’s Independence in 1947: the liberal approach (represented here by Barrington Moore), critiques of political economy in the Marxist tradition, and populist perspectives such as the Subaltern Studies school. The most serious limitation of Moore’s approach is his attempt to analyse the transition from tradition to modernity both in the metropolis and the colony exclusively within a national context, whereas historically the context of this transition has been transnational in character. Moore, for instance, treats the ‘success’ of England to modernize, and India’s ‘failure’ to do so, in isolation from each other. In reality, however, as Hamza Alavi points out, the changes in England and India were shaped by each other.
The critical Marxist theories of the 1960s and 1970s in particular recog- nized the intrinsic connection between colony and metropolis in the process of transition to modernity. However, the central thesis was that colonial capitalism destroyed all elements of pre-capitalist economy and polity and turned them into capitalist political economy. Furthermore, economic changes in the colony were seen to have been accompanied by changes in the political formations. It was, for instance, argued that the imperialist bourgeoisie and the colonial state completed the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the colonies, by creating a bourgeois state, bourgeois property and a bourgeois legal and institutional apparatus as a necessary condition for its economic domination.6 Contrary to these claims, the evidence from specific states (such as the princely states in Rajasthan), showed that the land was not commodified. Nor was the peasantry expropriated from the land. There was no ‘new mode of surplus extraction’ in which the use of extra-economic coercion was neither required nor provided for, that is, the system of land tenure was not characterized by a ‘de-fusion’ of economic and political power. Like the economic system, the political structure of the princely states was characterized, above all, by the personal authority of the princely rulers (the darbars) and the landlords (thikanedars). As I have discussed elsewhere, until the 1880s, there was no formal procedure for the implementation of civil or criminal justice in the princely states of Rajasthan, for example. Instead, the rulers and the landlords adjudi- cated justice within their respective jurisdictions according to religious precepts and local customs. As a norm, justice was administered in the name of God. In other words, the economic-political system and the juridical structure of the princely states remained essentially pre-modern/ pre-capitalist.
The most serious limitation of the critical theories based on Marxist critiques of political economy was privileging the metropolitan capital and the colonial state, treating pre-colonial structures as essentially passive, always at the receiving end. However, colonialism was a contested terrain. The history of continuity and change in the agrarian relations and power structures of colonial India is in fact a history of resistance, struggle, accommodation and compromise between the colonizer and the colonized.
~~India’s Princely States -ed- Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati
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