Sarkar was a child of the empire, embraced its highest abstract ideals, and struggled all his life— with loyal, fraught, but constant support from his friend Sardesai— to give Indian history a “scientific” and academic status, to free it of what he saw as the shortcomings of histories popular in the public domain. But all of this embroiled him in lifelong controversies with other historians, both amateur and professional, and their conflicts sometimes took even ugly or unpleasant turns. Sarkar’s attempt to sever the connection between populist histories and their academic counterparts failed. This book tries to show how enmeshed the academic and the popular domains were in colonial India in the period 1900– 1950, in terms of history as a knowledge form. This in turn has indeed had long- term effects on debates within and about the discipline in independent India.
What made Sarkar’s work particularly contentious to many were the two figures much of his research focused on: the last great Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1618– 1707; r. 1658– 1707), who was an orthodox Sunni Muslim, and the Maratha ruler Shivaji (1627/30– 1680; r. 1674– 1680), who remained, for much of his later life, a rebel in Aurangzeb’s empire and eventually (1674) declared himself an independent Hindu king. Aurangzeb was a debated figure in his own time and attracted loyalties in the twentieth century that were often divided along religious- political lines. Hindus considered him an “intolerant” Muslim ruler in a predominantly Hindu land, while many if not most Muslims respected his strict observance of Islamic tenets both in personal life and in his policies, especially in the latter half of his rule. Shivaji, on the other hand, emerged by the early twentieth century as a symbol of Maratha and Hindu pride at a time when nationalist politics in India began to be fractured along the lines of cleavage that religion, language, and caste provided. So just as most Hindus came to look upon Akbar (1542– 1605; r. 1556– 1605) as the ideal Mughal ruler, Shivaji became both a hero of the non- Brahman movement in the twentieth century (in addition to being a hero to Hindus in general) and anathema to many Muslim nationalists.
As we will see, Sarkar found himself often at the center of many of these debates. Many Maratha historians and admirers of Shivaji felt unhappy at Sarkar’s criticisms of their hero. They blamed this on Sarkar’s dependence on Mughal sources and his pro- Mughal sympathies. Many Muslim intellectuals, on the other hand, were unhappy with Sarkar’s praise of Shivaji and with his criticisms of Aurangzeb’s religious orthodoxy. Through all the disputes and argumentation recounted in this book, it is clear that the historical debates that have informed and constituted modern South Asia have mostly concerned personalities from the early- modern period, mainly the Mughal times, and in particular from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sarkar was the preeminent historian of two such debated— and celebrated— personalities: Shivaji and Aurangzeb.
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Sarkar’s reputation as a historian survived the debates of his lifetime. Immediately after Sarkar’s death, the eminent Bengali historian, Professor N. K. Sinha, prophesied: “It is not likely that Sir Jadunath Sarkar will ever be displaced. His wonderful accuracy will secure to him immunity from the common lot of historical workers. So far as we can visualize, in the near future, in his chosen field, there will be only scanty gleaners after his copious harvest.” So probably it seemed in Calcutta in 1958. But even as Professor Sinha was writing these lines, a group of younger scholars at Allahabad, Aligarh, and Oxford were conducting research that would ensure that by the time someone like me came into the world of South Asian history as a young novice in Calcutta in the early 1970s, Jadunath Sarkar’s name would be all but forgotten among the prominent historians of India. Everybody, of course, knew his name and knew that he was without doubt once the greatest authority on Mughal India— particularly for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries— but his academic status suffered a steep decline in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. We dutifully bought copies of his five-volume history of Aurangzeb, his four volumes of the Fall of the Mughal Empire, and some of his other works when the Indian publisher Orient Longman reprinted them in the 1970s. But we did this with the knowledge that Sarkar’s approach to history had been discredited. Our teachers did not do emperors, battles, and the character of kings anymore. Unlike Sir Jadunath Sarkar and other historians of his time, they did not believe in the role of heroes in history. Heroes had been replaced by “causes.” As Satish Chandra said, “[Sir Jadunath] . . . projected Aurangzeb’s struggle to conquer the south as a Greek tragedy . . . [but] the search for causal relationships cannot be given up by historians.”
“Cause” was a code word for institutional analysis. Into the list of “causes” fell economy, institutions, parties and politics at the Mughal court, money, wages, exploitation, histories of the state and of revenue crisis, peasant revolts, provincial autonomy, and so on. Chandra’s generation studied the Mughals with an eye on the question of India’s transition to capitalism. Could India have become a capitalist economy on her own, without the mediation of British colonial rule? Were underdevelopment and “distortions” of Indian institutions results of colonial rule? Those were their (and our) questions. We were decidedly anti- empire in our attitude. We knew that Sir Jadunath was not. This transition in historiography is captured well in something Satish Chandra wrote in 1989, discussing “Mythifying History” in the Indian journal Seminar. For Jadunath Sarkar, “the personal qualities of Aurangzeb . . . became a negative point,” wrote Chandra; current research, he contended, showed Aurangzeb to be “neither a hero nor a villain,” but someone representing an old order that could not “recognize . . . the stirrings and incipient growth of a new socio- economic system.”
Chandra’s criticisms were backed up by the work of his student M. Athar Ali, whose pathbreaking study The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, a revised version of a PhD thesis submitted to the Aligarh Muslim University in 1961, was published in 1966. Ali emphasized the need to study in detail “all the elements of the structure of the Mughal Empire” before its decline could be attributed to what he called “text- book formulae” such as “personal degeneracy of the kings, luxurious life at the court, inefficiency of administration,” all reminiscent, as we shall see, of Sarkar’s analyses in his multivolume Fall of the Mughal Empire. The historiography of Mughal India underwent further significant changes with the publication of Muzaffar Alam’s The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India in 1986, based on research conducted under the supervision of Satish Chandra and S. Nurul Hasan, both trained at the University of Allahabad and later professors at the Aligarh Muslim University. As a matter of fact, much of the ire and sarcasm of Athar Ali’s introduction to the second edition of his Mughal Nobility was directed at Alam (and the perceived congruence of Alam’s propositions with those made by Christopher A. Bayly of Cambridge). Yet, it is interesting to see how, in spite of all the vitriol that Ali reserved for Alam and Bayly, Alam’s own position on Sarkar remained consistent with the criticisms that Sarkar’s work had already received from the generation that taught Alam, in which Ali was included. Alam described Sarkar’s attribution (and that of Sarkar’s mentor William Irvine, an Indian Civil Service officer) of “the decline of Mughal power” to “a deterioration in the characters of the emperors and their nobles” as failing to “lead us beyond the perspective of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ Persian chroniclers, with the difference that Sarkar also read evidence of a ‘Hindu reaction’ in the Rathor, Bundela, Maratha and Sikh wars against the Mughal[s].” “Sarkar’s views,” Alam concluded, “are to be set against the ambience of the times that lent legitimacy to communal interpretation of Indian history in the late- nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
However, a silent but perhaps the most magisterial dismissal of Sarkar came in the form of Irfan Habib’s 1958 doctoral thesis from Oxford, eventually published in 1963 as the awesome The Agrarian System of Mughal India, a classic in its own right, which played a key role in displacing Sarkar from the canon. Habib wrote about the “agrarian crisis” that plagued the Mughal Empire and contributed to its “destruction,” but he did so without any reference to Sarkar’s propositions in the latter’s Fall, as if the volumes did not exist for Habib. Sarkar features rarely in Habib’s book. No mention of him is to be found in the original preface, dated Aligarh, August 1962, and the few references in footnotes are mostly confined to Sarkar’s The India of Aurangzib (1901) and his errors of translation or his mistakes in dating events. The one time Sarkar figures directly in the text is in an appendix on revenue statistics, where Sarkar is acknowledged as one of the pioneers, after Edward Thomas’s The Revenue Resources of the Mughal Empire in India (1871), who “attempted a study of . . . [Mughal] statistics.”
~~The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth -by- Dipesh Chakrabarty
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