Day 265: The Calling of History

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

Day 174: Book Excerpt: Crossing the Bay of Bengal

In early 1870 W. L. Hathaway, subcollector of the South Indian district of Thanjavur, condemned the “traffic” in people across the Bay of Bengal. He alleged that migration between South India and Malaya was “a regularly organized system of kidnapping.” Time and again, “captives were shipped from Negapatam for Penang and other countries, where the males were employed as coolies, and the females sold to a life of prostitution.” This “traffic,” Hathaway wrote, “is contrary to the law . . .[that] makes it illegal to assist any native of India in emigrating.” He insisted that the Madras government intervene to stop the traffic, and embarrassed the authorities in a long letter to the Friend of India, a journal read by British and Indian critics of imperial policy.

Hathaway made the “traffic” his personal mission. From his base in Nagapatnam he pursued shipowners and labor contractors. At the start of 1870’s “emigration season,” he ordered a raid on a ware house where migrants waited to board ships for Southeast Asia. The problem arose when their cases came before the local magistrate. Each migrant insisted that he acted of his own free will. Young boys declared that the labor recruiters were their “fathers” or “uncles”; they hadn’t signed contracts, so there was no evidence that they were “migrating for the purposes of labor.” “It is useless to attempt to unravel the real facts of the case,” Hathaway lamented; “people themselves will not reveal the truth.” This was an old problem. The local Police Weekly Circular had reported a similar case a few years earlier. On finding a ware house full of “coolies crowded together like beasts,” the police superintendent refused to let their ship depart. Questioning the detained men, he concluded, “I fancy they had got their stories cut and dried ready for use; for they answered satisfactorily enough; and they all produced parents, uncles, or guardians.” The superintendent thought, “This coolie trade has reached such large dimensions that there is plenty of room for an Emigration Agent here.” This goal was finally secured in 1873, when a protector of emigrants was appointed to oversee migration to Southeast Asia.

By 1870 circulation between South India and the Straits Settlements was entrenched, and it looked set to grow. Already cases of overcrowded ships and fugitive shipowners had come to the government’s attention. With the planters of the Straits crying for more labor, Hathaway and his colleagues in local government argued that it would be disastrous to lift legal restraints on movement between India and Malaya. British planters and their spokesmen in the Straits responded with the case for free migration. Connections across the Bay, they argued, were entirely natural. Malaya was really an extension of India; Indian laborers hardly thought it a “foreign” land. The tension between freedom and migration would resurface time and again in the years to come.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century was pivotal in the Bay of Bengal’s history. The slow intensification of “traffic” through the nineteenth century was jolted into expansion, and the trickle became a torrent. Steam energy made the crossing faster, easier, and cheaper. Imperial power charged into the interior. By treaty and by conquest, colonial states moved beyond their coastal strongholds, preceded or followed by European, Chinese, and Indian investors. Coffee. Sugar. Tea. Tobacco. Rubber. Southeast Asia’s frontiers promised vast profit. Wherever in the world they found local communities stubborn in their economic independence— cultivators who found wage labor unattractive, or people who resisted enslavement— European settlers perpetuated the “myth of the lazy native.” “No gain,” Alexander Kyd wrote from Penang, “will induce a Malay to constant and unremitted Industry.” So labor, like capital, had to be imported. Chinese capitalists had a ready source: through their brotherhoods and regional associations they mobilized men in ever greater numbers as steamships brought the China coast nearer. Europeans, without access to Chinese networks, turned where the sugar planters of Mauritius and the Caribbean had first resorted after the abolition of slavery— to British India.
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Now consider this in a global context. Migration around the Bay was comparable in scale to transatlantic migration in the same era. Some 26 million people arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1930 from southern and eastern Europe, East Asia, and the Pacific. Add Chinese migration to Southeast Asia to the equation— around 19 million people in the century after 1840, more widely dispersed than their Indian counterparts— and it is clear that the region where the Indian Ocean met the South China Sea was home to one of the world’s great migrations. The main difference between the Asian and Atlantic circuits lies in the numbers of those who settled rather than returned. Between 6 million and 7 million people of Indian origin, and a similar number of Chinese, had settled overseas by the end of the 1930s; American demographer Kingsley Davis contrasted this with the 85 million people of British origin who lived outside the British Isles by that time.

~~Crossing the Bay of Bengal -by- Sunil S. Amrith

Day 173: Book Excerpt: India’s Princely States

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

Day 169: Book Excerpt: Patriots and Partisans

Let me begin with two epiphanies.

A few years ago, I visited a book fair held on the seafront in Kochi. The local publishers were represented, as were Indian and foreign firms. In between the stall of Oxford University Press and a shop stocking the works in Malayalam translation of Marx, Engels and Lenin, I came across a man selling, of all things, pickles from Bikaner. He had placed his wares in large open buckets, one containing aam ka murabba, another shalgam ka achar. I asked the young man how he had come from a northern desert to participate in a book fair in this southern port. ‘Maine suna ki Keral mein mela lag raha tha,’ he answered, ‘aur maine socha ki wahan ek dukan khol doon.’ (I heard that there was some kind of fair on in Kerala, so I thought, why don’t I bid for a stall there?) Thus spoke a pickle man in a salad-bowl nation, adding his charmingly naïve logic to an apparently illogical country.

Some months after this encounter, I was travelling by car from Patiala to Amritsar. It was a hot day, and the countryside was monotonous. I fell asleep, and woke when the car slowed down. We were now in the market town of Khanna. I scanned the buildings and their signs.

One, particularly, caught my attention: it read, ‘Indian Bank, Khanna Branch, Head Office, Rajaji Salai, Chennai’. I was charmed and uplifted, sentiments that (especially for the young) perhaps need explaining. For, ‘Rajaji’ was C. Rajagopalachari, the scholar–statesman who had been governor-general of India, chief minister of Madras State, founder of the free-market Swatantra Party, and author of bestselling versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. In his person he embodied all Punjabi stereotypes about the Madrasi; he was slight, wore thick glasses, had never played a single sport or consumed an alcoholic beverage, and was vegetarian. Yet here was evidence of his enduring legacy in the Punjab, where—as that sign informed me—there were many whisky-guzzling, chicken-eating Sikh farmers banking their savings in an institution headquartered in Chennai on a road named after a dhoti-wearing, rasam-drinking, austere Tamil scholar.

The writer Wallace Stegner once remarked that ‘the tracing of ideas is a guessing game. We can’t tell who first had an idea—we can only tell who first had it influentially, who formulated it in some form, poem or equation or picture, that others could stumble upon with the shock of recognition.’ So it is with ‘the idea of India’. Rabindranath Tagore used the phrase in a letter to a friend in 1921, writing that ‘the idea of India is against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others, which inevitably leads to ceaseless conflicts’. There may have been others who used the phrase before him. But it was only in 1997, when Sunil Khilnani used it as the title of his wonderful book, that his fellow citizens stumbled with a shock of recognition at what the idea of India represented.

As citizens, we ubiquitously use a humdrum manifestation of the miracle of India—namely, our currency notes, which have a portrait of Gandhi on one side and the national Parliament on the other, and its denomination written in seventeen languages, indeed seventeen different scripts, each encoding a distinct, sophisticated, ancient and proud literary culture. Since rupee notes are an artefact of everyday life, we do not see or sense their significance. However, in its own way our paper currency is as marvellous and strange as the Bikaneri achar-vendor in Kochi or the signboard of the southern bank in the Punjab.

The plural, inclusive, idea of India has three enemies. The best known is the notion of a Hindu Rashtra, as represented in an erratic fashion by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and in a more resolute (not to say more bigoted) manner by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, and other associated organizations. When Khilnani published his book in 1997, Hindutva appeared to be the major challenge to the idea of India. To the ‘theoretically untidy, improvising, pluralist approach’ of Gandhi and Nehru, he wrote, the Sangh Parivar offered the alternative of ‘a culturally and ethnically cleaned-up homogeneous community with a singular Indian citizenship, defended by a state that had both God and nuclear warheads on its side’.

Living in north India between 1988 and 1994, I experienced this challenge at first-and second hand—by seeing my Muslim friends board trains under assumed Hindu names, by visiting Bhagalpur after the riots provoked by Lal Krishna Advani’s rath yatra, by witnessing a more general polarizing of public opinion on religious lines. The poisonous residues of those years carried on well into the next decade, as illustrated by the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

Shortly after the Gujarat riots, I was driving to the Mumbai airport from the south of the city, when I noticed the tricolour hanging out of every home on Muhammad Ali Road. As I proceeded northwards, beyond Parel into Dadar and Shivaji Park, the flags were not visible any more. The contrast puzzled me, till I reached the airport and saw a live telecast of an India-Pakistan cricket match. It remains one of the saddest memories of my life—the memory of how, intimidated by decades of harassment and violence at the hands of Hindutva bigots, so many of my fellow citizens had to shame themselves into a public display of patriotism solely on account of their faith.

One reason that Hindutva has been so successful is that it speaks in different voices. Arun Jaitley can be trotted out to calm the liberals; Narendra Modi to appeal to the hardliners. The BJP can distance itself from the RSS when it suits, but at other times can claim to be tied by an umbilical cord to it. The RSS in turn can opportunistically own or disown the trishul-waving goondas of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal.

~~Patriots and Partisans -by- Ramachandra Guha

Day 138: Book Excerpt: The Past As Present

In 2011, the number of rapes amounted to almost one every hour, for the whole year. This is a horrendous fact and it’s something that should make us all think about what we can do. We have to understand how it is that we allow this to happen, and why it happens, and what can we as citizens do to make it happen less often. We cannot prevent it altogether so at least a decrease in numbers will be an achievement.

To understand why rape is so prevalent in our society, perhaps we should discuss some of the more obvious aspects of the phenomenon—in particular two crucial aspects. : one, the creation of the general mindset in relation to women in our country, which is extremely important particularly in terms of how we use the past to create this mindset, and then in turn use it to influence the present; and the second is the present situation and what needs action.

I would like to begin with discussing the mindset. Unfortunately, it requires repeating yet again, that the attitudes of those who claim to be the leaders of our society—politicians in high office and the so-called ‘god-men’ are often the most influential in creating an unacceptable mindset. And what some of them have said in public and in the media, about women being raped, was I think, outrageous. This is why I think that the mindset is extremely important and needs attention, in addition to whatever we choose to do about what is currently happening. I think the statements that were made again and again were bizarre, thoughtless, jejune and frequently inane. Examples of these are that young women must be incarcerated at home after dark, girls must be forced to wear overcoats to cover themselves from head to foot, girls must not be allowed cellphones because they can then contact boys, a woman about to be raped should recite the Sarasvati mantra, and women must observe the Lakshman Rekha to avoid trouble—and of course we all know who marks the Lakshman Rekha. The most disgusting was the statement that, a raped woman is like a ‘zinda lash’, a living corpse. Little in all of this was said about the kind of men that rape women, and how they can be stopped from doing this? It is almost as if the men are invisible and rape somehow happens on its own. These attitudes assume that rape is inevitable if women are liberated. So the best way to avoid rape is to oppress women. This is the prevalent view in a society that is conditioned by the belief that men make the rules and women cannot question them. There may be something ridiculous about this lopsided view of society, yet it is the mindset of many.

How the mindset spills out into action was recently demonstrated in the riots of Muzaffarnagar. Ostensibly the call to rioting and violence was to object to ‘love jihad’, the fear that Hindu young women were falling into the clutches of and marrying Muslim young men. The other slogan was ‘bahu-beti-bachau’, but in the process of protecting the bahu and the beti, raping women was considered perfectly in order. Raping women is the age-old method of certain kinds of men asserting power over women, especially if the women belong to a community that they wish to humiliate. In communal conflicts it is resorted to as a weapon and a trophy of victory. Inevitably the easiest targets in situations of civil disturbance are Dalit women and those of the minority communities, since they have the least protection from the agencies of law and order, and belong to the subordinated sections of society.

It is nevertheless crucial to the discussion on how we visualize the kind of society that we want. The oppression of women has been characteristic, let me add, of most pre-modern societies the world over. As far as the past is concerned this is not an unusual situation. But we now claim to be a contemporary, modern society. We are in a position today to understand why this mindset came about and to change it in favour of a society governed by the rights that we think are essential. So let me revert to the mindset. What goes into the making of a mindset? We refer to cultural traditions from the past. Do we even examine the implications and nuances of what we assume these traditions to be? Let’s just look at some of them in relation to attitudes to women, or of why they came into existence because of how society was constituted at a particular time. Or whether, given that social norms now endorse the equality of men and women, should we not change the mindset to accord with the new social requirements? If the norms of a tradition no longer hold, the question to be debated is why this is so, and if the norms need to be changed then this should be advocated, even if it means the earlier ones being jettisoned.

We are told that in the Vedic period women as a general category had a high status and were greatly respected. The Upanishads are quoted which refer to brilliant women philosophers such as Gargi and Maitrayi, Vedic rituals are referred to in which the patron of the ritual had to have his wife beside him otherwise the ritual would not be effective, and so on. Such actions underline status. But historians, such as Uma Chakrabarty and Kumkum Roy, have asked pertinent questions about the other women so frequently mentioned. For instance, what happened to the Vedic dasi? Why does she never come into this picture? She was the slave woman, the servant in the household, who is mentioned frequently in the Vedas, Mahabharata and Ramayana, but seldom features in our current picture of the utopian past. What was her condition? She is repeatedly listed in these texts together with the animals—cattle and horses—as chattel. They are all the property of the owner to do what he likes with them. The larger numbers of women therefore are treated as commodities. Given the references to unnamed dasis who are the mothers of brahmanas—the dasi-putra brahmanas or students such as Jabala, mentioned in the Vedic corpus—it is clear that the dasi was expected to do more than just household chores. Such activities doubtless required of a dasi should at least be acknowledged wherever they apply, when referring to the pedigree of authoritative figures. The social values of elite groups in those ancient societies and the society of today are different. In earlier times the dasis are hardly visible. Modern society demands their visibility. We today maintain that all women have equal rights among themselves and with men, but this was not the prevalent ethic of ancient times.

From the Valmiki Ramayana the most frequently quoted reference is to Sita and to the Lakshman rekha; when she inadvertently crosses it her troubles start. Because she was kidnapped, the onus is on her to prove her chastity. And this is the prototype pattern: a woman has always to prove her chastity. This Sita does by going through an agnipariksha, the fire ordeal. When she is asked to repeat the same thing a second time, consequent on some gossip about her, she decides that enough is enough. The Valmiki Ramayana is in origin an epic story that became a sacred book of the Vaishnavas and is a powerful text in the propagation of Rama bhakti, the worship of Rama. There are passages of exquisite poetry that give it a high literary status. But at the same time we have to keep in mind that it is a classic text of Hindu patriarchy. The man is a god and the woman has to repeatedly prove her chastity. And do we today consider what might have been the thoughts of Sita as she experiences the testing of her chastity? Have we really thought about her side of the story?

Why do we also never refer to other versions of the story? Neither the Buddhist nor the Jaina version, for example, is centrally concerned with the chastity of Sita. Over the centuries there have been many versions of what has come to be called the ramakatha. Some followed the Valmiki narrative but others differed from it, as obviously his version did not appeal to them. And in some cases they even contested it. In medieval times, in what we today disparagingly call ‘feudal’ society, some people seem not to have approved of the fire ordeal because there was a well-known version in which that event was altered. When the fire was blazing forth Sita was made to step aside and the chhaya Sita, a shadow Sita, entered the fire and came out unscathed. The question one has to ask is why was a chhaya Sita invented? The answer usually given is that at this time the philosophy of maya, illusion, was at its height and illusory figures were popular. But perhaps one has also to see it more realistically. Why did the shadow Sita replace the earlier version of Sita in this rendering of the story? Did some people see the fire ordeal as craven, and as Sita having to submit to injustice?

~~The Past As Present: Forging Contemporary Identities Through History -by- Romila Thapar

Day 137: Book Excerpt: Engines Of Change

Railroads for India were proposed initially in the mid-1830s. Fifteen years of promotion and debate ensued until key decisions in favor of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (hereafter GIPR) and the East Indian Railway (hereafter EIR) were made in March 1849. Thus, finally, railroad building in Britain’s largest imperial possession began in 1850. The ceremonial turning of the first sod for the GIPR occurred at Bombay on October 31, 1850. Work on what became the main railroad in Bengal and in the Gangetic Valley, the EIR, began near Calcutta in 1851.

In 1853, the governor-general of India, Lord Dalhousie (in office 1848–1856) laid out a comprehensive plan for the development of the trunk lines. The capable, hard-working, and assertive Dalhousie was a committed technological modernizer. His political responsibilities before he went to India had made him familiar with British railroads. Dalhousie later claimed he had unleashed in India the “great engines of social improvement, which the sagacity and science of recent times had previously given to Western nations—I mean Railways, uniform Postage, and the Electric Telegraph.”

Dalhousie’s influential, lengthy (216 pages handwritten in a sprawling, bold hand) memorandum—a “minute” in the language of the day—deserves close study. It provided justifications and guidelines for the system of railroads that was developed in South Asia under British auspices in the third quarter of the 19th century. The governor-general emphasized the political and military benefits railroads would provide. “Immeasurable” advantages would accrue to a colonial administration composed of a “comparative handful” of British administrators and soldiers scattered over the subcontinent. Railroads would enable Britain “to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bear upon any given point in as many days as it would now require months, and to an extent which at present is physically impossible.”

Dalhousie also noted the “commercial and social advantages” of railroads. These advantages included an increase in trade between India and Britain: more Indian “produce,” including raw cotton, would be transported to Britain, and more manufactured British goods would be sold in India. Railroads would encourage enterprise, multiply production, facilitate the discovery of latent resources, increase national wealth, and encourage “progress in social improvement” similar to that which occurred in Europe and the United States of America.

The hardheaded Dalhousie stressed the political, military, and economic benefits accruing largely to Britain, to the Anglo-Indian connection, and to the colonial regime. He sought to influence calculating decision makers in London: his political masters, and also potential British investors from whom the bulk of the financing for India’s railroads had to be obtained. Thus, in the 1850s and for many decades, India’s railroads were conceived and executed as a colonial project. British authorities, with little input from Indians, decided when and where lines would be built—and a good deal more. India’s railroads were meant to serve British interests first and foremost, among which military and administrative security and economic benefits were central. The interests of Indians were incidental although, as represented in the writings of Dalhousie and many Britons, the progressive consequences for India of the railroads was a self-evident truth: an assertion accepted then as later by many Indians even though Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj (1921) about the railroads’ contribution to the British control of India. Gandhi, in fact, went further. He denounced railroads as “evil” since “good travels at a snail’s pace.”

Gandhi was a central figure in the Indian struggle for independence from 1919 to his assassination in 1948. His views on railroads, however, were not widely accepted—and he himself used railroads to travel across India in the nationalist cause. Most nationalists’ denunciation of the railroads came to focus on the ways in which the system operated and on the British dominance of the upper echelons of the workforce: railroads per se and their progressive presence were not questioned. More typical of Indian views held in the 1870s (and in the 1970s) were those of Framjee Vicajee who published a forty-four page pamphlet titled Political and Social Effects of Railways in India (1875). The pamphlet praised the many interconnected, progressive changes railroads had set in motion across South Asia, “the great economical and social changes, due partly to railways and partly to other instruments of civilization” through which India was “silently passing.”

~~Engines Of Change: The Railroads That Made India -by- Ian J. Kerr

Day 133: Book Excerpt: Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees

From the beginning of my Indological studies, I have been quite convinced that Hindu society was much less divided ideologically, that the top and the bottom were not so utterly alien to each other, than was usually contended, particularly among anthropologists. Being myself of classical philosophical training, I could not imagine how to convince others, including anthropologists, of this belief, and I was prepared to say that, after all, it was a philosophical matter that should not be debated in scholarly circles, because everyone had his own opinion beforehand. I now think, however, the Hindu gods have been with me, and even more so the Hindu goddess.   

It was years ago, when I started studying the goddess both through texts and through fieldwork in South India, that my attention was drawn to a series of minor carnivorous gods who were all guardians and devotees of the goddess. Actually, although the texts taught me one side of the situation, fieldwork brought me another type of data which by and by started to make sense through my classical background. The more or less poor and local goddess temples I visited contained some lesser known deities who had the common property of being subordinate to the goddess. Quite by chance, I started in coastal Andhra and noticed in front of the so-called gramadevata,or village goddess temples one of these minor gods called Potu Raju. By now I have published a few small articles about him, and especially about his usual shape as a wooden stake and its similarity to the Vedic sacrificial stake, the yupa. I have since been interested in following this plastic motif of the post under different versions in different parts of South India, and I am preparing a book on the whole subject.
   
For the present I want to select two of these versions, but not    mainly from the viewpoint of the post, which in our present cases can no longer be so easily compared to the yupa, but from the angle of myth and ritual, which also introduces a number of classical references. The two versions are found in Mariyamman temples, one in the lower Kaveri basin mainly among temples on the north bank of the delta area, and the other in Kongunad. It is mainly the posts and rituals that differentiate the two, but these elements are both connected with mythic differences as well. Everywhere my visits to the temples were quite brief, and I never attended the festivals personally.
   
I shall discuss only two examples of the first category, which have in common at first sight an impalement stake in front of the temple. Mariyamman's shrine is always considered to be in the center of the village. Usually the local landlord caste is that of the Vanniyar, or exceptionally the Kallar.
   
The Valattur temple (Papanasam Taluk, Thanjavur District) is a Mariyamman temple, as usual facing east. It is trying to revive its traditions. The Kallar are the dominant caste. The festival takes place in the month of Cittirai (April-May). The Kallar informants, including the headman of the village, explain that Vaisnava and Smarta Brahmans live on the northern side of the temple, as do the Acari; all the Kallar live on the southern side. One Velalar family provides Mariyamman with a priest. In front of the temple are a balipitham 3and an impalement stake that served originally to impale Kattavarayan, that demon king who stole a Brahman woman. But Kattavarayan's friend, Cinnan, helped him out of the difficulty. A Cettithat is, one of those rich merchants who used formerly to be attacked and robbed of their goods by the Kallarpassed by the kalumaram (a high hook-swinging post and not the low one now there) and asked what it was. Cinnan advised him to climb it and see for himself. So the Cetti did, and Cinnan quickly impaled him. Soon after, some eagleskalakucameand plucked out his eyes. Since then the Cetti has been worshipped on the kalumaram as Kaluvutaiyan: the Master of the impalement stake.

We can bypass most of the ritual, but must note some characteristic details. Inside the temple mandapam are several painted wooden statues of Kattavarayan with his two wives, Kaluvutaiyan, Cinnan, and Karuppucami. There is a festival to the god Aiyanar that is celebrated at the same time as Mariyamman's in Cittirai. Some he-goats are offered both on Mariyamman's side and on Aiyanar's side, but in each case they are offered to the subordinate demon guardians, so that the distinction between the vegetarian Mariyamman and Aiyanar and the meat-eating demons is well marked. One or two days after the conclusion of the seventeen-day festival, there comes the day of "human sacrifice." This takes the form of kavati offerings, which are of three types: alaku-kavati,in which long needles (alaku)are stuck under the skin of those who stand under the vow; pal-kavati,in which a stick is carried on the shoulder with a pot of milk at each end; and ter-kavati,in which a tiny ter or rath (a war chariot) is drawn by a rope and a hook fixed under the skin of the offerer's back. These offerings are brought to the goddess at the end of a rather long walk. Kallar are non-vegetarian people. But they show all respect to the vegetarian diet of Mariyamman and Aiyanar, who are the protectors of their village. The "tortures" for which they take vows are of a rather mild type and do not seem to upset the goddess, though the needles and hooks are removed as soon as the votary arrives at the temple.   

One more thing: Kattavarayan seems to have some special link with the Kallar, because the latter spare him even though usually the impalement stake is meant for him as the one who stole a Brahman woman. The Kallar, although formerly a "criminal caste," regard themselves as Ksatriyas, because there are Kallar kings. Kattavarayan is also a Ksatriya, if we remember that he is the same as Arjuna Kartavirya, the oppressive king who stole the cow of the Brahman Jamadagni, whose wife Renuka is herself identical with Mariyamman. But this is not the only place where Kattavarayan is spared: it would be difficult to assume that he is forever sitting on the impalement stake and at the same time permanently staying with the goddess as her guardian and devotee. But the Tamil stories about Kattavarayan are very far from the epic and Puranic ones. One feature remains, though: he is still a warrior, and the cow turns into a Brahman woman in order to retain the classical pattern of distorted relations between Brahmans and Ksatriyas.

~~Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees -ed- Alf Hiltebeitel

Day 122: Book Excerpt: Punjab- A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten

Historians disagree on whether Ranjit Singh was born in Gujranwala, the Sukerchakia seat, or close to the town of Jind at the southern end of Punjab’s Malwa region—his mother’s father was Jind’s Sikh chief. At an early age, the dark-skinned Ranjit was hit by small-pox, which blinded his left eye and left permanent pits on his face. Short in stature—his head dominated the body—Ranjit loved horses. Apparently his ugly appearance was transformed the moment he mounted a horse. Well before entering his teens he became an expert horseman and shot, but he never learnt to read or write.

Though among the smaller misls to start with, the Sukerchakias had acquired substantial tracts in and around Gujranwala, which Ranjit inherited. Three years after marrying Mehtab Kaur—daughter of Sada Kaur, the widow who owned the Kanhiya misl’s lands—Ranjit Singh took a second wife, Raj Kaur, a sister of the chief of the Nakkai misl. Both marriages were aimed at augmenting Sukerchakia power, for Ranjit had also inherited the fierce ambition that had driven his father Maha Singh and grandfather Charhat Singh.

Ranjit seemed to covet power more than affection, of which he did not receive much from Mehtab or her mother. The child Mehtab’s betrothal to Ranjit was above all the political response of a cornered woman whose husband had been killed by the boy’s father. Like her son-in-law, Sada Kaur separated feelings from interests. If the Sukerchakias expected gains from an alliance with the Kanhiyas, the latter hoped to profit from the Sukerchakias’ rapid ascent.

Young Ranjit Singh’s willingness to become a king revealed boldness, for it went against his Jat background and against Sikh tradition as well. It was also bound to invite hostility within his misl and from chiefs of rival misls. Ranjit Singh reckoned, however, that the populace, longing for a return of Mughal-era stability, would welcome a monarchy. Moreover, he and his advisors remembered that Punjab’s numerous chiefs offered allegiance and money to a king or viceroy in Lahore.

Some of these chiefs, especially in the hills, were called rajas, and Abdali had designated the Patiala chief a raja too. In these circumstances, why shouldn’t Lahore’s ruler be a maharaja? Also influencing Ranjit Singh’s step was the birth of Kharak Singh, a son from his Nakkai wife, Raj Kaur. That the child could be turned into an heir-apparent was evidently an ‘irresistible’ pull for the father.

Wishing, however, to be a people’s monarch, Ranjit Singh sat in a chair or on a carpet while granting an audience, rather than on a throne. The new coins he ordered carried Guru Nanak’s name, not his. While the Khalsa Sarkar, as his government was called, and the new Khalsa Durbar (the court), bore a clear Sikh-Hindu imprint (few at the time stressed differences between Hindu and Sikh beliefs), Ranjit Singh desired Muslim loyalty as well. As far as he was concerned, he would be a king for all Punjabis.

Even during his first takeover of Lahore, which occurred two years before his investiture as Maharaja, Ranjit Singh’s earliest public acts had been to pay homage at two mosques: the city’s greatest, the Badshahi Mosque built by Aurangzeb, and the most-frequented one, the Wazir Khan Masjid that Shahjahan’s Chiniot-born governor had created. Also, he made a Muslim, Imam Baksh, the city’s kotwal.

Disregarding objections to monarchy from Muslim clerics, Mughal kings had claimed that they were upholding Islam from the throne. Ranjit Singh similarly ignored Guru Gobind Singh’s warning to Banda Bahadur against princely dreams. But he treated Sikh religious leaders with respect.

In the years to come, these religious leaders would at times censure Ranjit Singh. ‘In personal terms, he was not a model of uprightness or chastity,’ observes Amrik Singh, adding, ‘he had a number of concubines.’ His ‘countless acts of dalliance’ were objected to. Once ‘it was even decided to flog him publicly’ for a transgression. Not wanting a confrontation, Ranjit Singh submitted to the punishment, which however was not carried out.

Following Ranjit Singh’s coronation, many were drawn to his court and to Lahore: sons of chiefs, doctors and scholars, artisans and craftsmen, and others.
...
Defeating, in the year 1800, the Kasur-Bhangi-Ramgarhia combination (which was also a Muslim-Sikh combination) in the Battle of Bhasin, Ranjit Singh had also cultivated the prestigious Ahluwalia misl and its leader, Fateh Singh. Given the hold on the Sikh imagination of the late Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, and the abilities of his successor, Fateh Singh, this made sense.

Also, Ranjit Singh had enlisted a talented young Muslim aide with a Sufi background, Fakir Azizuddin Bokhari. Azizuddin, son of a hakim called in to check Ranjit Singh’s eyes, was learning Unani medicine in Lahore, but his gifts lay in diplomacy and flowery, persuasive speech. Recruited as the new ruler’s mouthpiece, Azizuddin soon became Ranjit Singh’s chief confidant and minister for foreign affairs. Two brothers of his, Nuruddin and Imamuddin, also entered Ranjit Singh’s service.

~~Punjab- A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten -by- Rajmohan Gandhi

Day 119: Book Excerpt: Begums, Thugs And White Mughals

JANUARY 1828 – Leap Year – I before mentioned we had accomplished one-third of our way to heaven, by planting an avenue; we now performed another portion of the journey, by sinking a well. As soon as the work was completed, the servants lighted it up with numerous little lamps, and strewed flowers upon its margin, to bring a blessing upon the newly-raised water. From Hissar we received six cows and a bull, very handsome animals, with remarkably fine humps, such as are sold in England under the denomination of buffalo humps, which are, in reality, the humps of Indian cows and oxen.

Tame buffaloes are numerous at Prāg. The milk is strong, and not generally used for making butter, but is made into ghee (clarified butter), useful for culinary purposes. Some most beautiful Barbary goats arrived with the cows; they were spotted brown and white or black and white and almost as beautiful as deer. The Bengali goats yield a much larger portion of milk. I had also a Jumnapār goat, an enormous fellow, with very broad, long, thin, and silky ears, as soft as velvet. The Jumnapār are the best adapted for marching. Unless they can go into the jungle and browse, they become thin and lose their milk. These goats, bred on the banks of the Jumna, thence called ‘Jumnapār’, are remarkably fine, and of a large size.

We had a Doomba ram at Prāg. The Doomba sheep are difficult to keep alive in this climate. Their enormous tails are reckoned delicacies; the lambs are particularly fine flavoured.

January – Our garden was now in good order; we had vegetables in abundance, marrowfat peas as fine as in England, and the water-cresses, planted close to the new well, were pearls beyond price. Allahabad is famous for the growth of the finest carrots in India. At this time of the year we gave our horses twelve seer each daily; it kept them in high health, and French-polished their coats. The geraniums grew luxuriantly during this delightful time; and I could be out in the garden all day, when protected by an enormous chatr, carried by a bearer. The up-country chatr is a very large umbrella, in shape like a large flat mushroom, covered with doubled cloth, with a deep circle of fringe. Great people have them made of silk, and highly ornamented. The pole is very long, and it is full employment for one man to carry the chatr properly.

The oleander (kaner), the beautiful sweet-scented oleander, was in profusion – deep red, pure white, pink, and variegated, with single and double blossoms. I rooted up many clusters of this beautiful shrub in the grounds, fearing the horses and cows might eat the leaves, which are poisonous. Hindu women, when tormented by jealousy, have recourse to this poison for self-destruction.

The Ice-pits

January 22nd – My husband has the management of the ice concern this year. It is now in full work, the weather bitterly cold, and we are making ice by evaporation almost every night. I may here remark, the work continued until the 19th of February, when the pit was closed with 3000 mann – a mann is about 80lb. weight. There are two ice-pits; over each a house is erected; the walls, built of mud, are low, thick, and circular; the roof is thickly thatched; there is only one entrance, by a small door, which, when closed, is defended from the sun and air by a jhamp, or framework of bamboo covered with straw.
[ … ]
It is amusing to see the old ābdār who has charge of the ice concern, walking up and down of an evening, watching the weather, and calculating if there be a chance of making ice. This is a grand point to decide, as the expense of filling the pans is great, and not to be incurred without a fair prospect of a crop of ice (barf) the next morning. He looks in the wind’s eye, and if the breeze be fresh, and likely to increase, the old man draws his warm garment around him, and returning to his own habitation – a hut close to the pits – resigns himself to fate and his hubble-bubble. But should there be a crisp frosty feeling in the air, he prepares for action at about six or seven o’clock, by beating a tom-tom (a native hand-drum), a signal well known to the coolies in the bazaar, who hasten to the pits. By the aid of the little cup fastened to the long sticks, they fill all the rukābees with the water from the jars in the pathway. Many hundred coolies, men, women, and children, are thus employed until every little pan is filled.

If the night be frosty, without wind, the ice will form perhaps an inch and a half in thickness in the pans. If a breeze should blow, it will often prevent the freezing of the water, except in those parts of the grounds that are sheltered from the wind.

About three o’clock the ābdār, carefully muffled in some yards of English red or yellow broad cloth, would be seen emerging from his hut; and if the formation of ice was sufficiently thick, his tom-tom was heard, and the shivering coolies would collect, wrapped up in black bazaar blankets, and shaking with cold. Sometimes it was extremely difficult to rouse them to their work, and the increased noise of the tom-toms – discordant native instruments – disturbed us and our neighbours with the pleasing notice of more ice for the pits. Each cooly, armed with a spud, knocked the ice out of the little pans into a basket, which having filled, he placed it on his head, ran with it to the icehouse, and threw it down the great pit.

When all the pans had been emptied, the people assembled around the old ābdār, who kept an account of the number at work on a roll of paper or a book. From a great bag full of pice (copper coins) and cowrie-shells, he paid each man his hire.
~~Begums, Thugs And White Mughals- The Journals Of Fanny Parkes -Ed- William Dalrymple

Day 42 : Book Excerpt : The Strides of Vishnu

One evening in early August 1943, Brigadier General Mortimer Wheeler was resting in his tent after a long day of poring over maps, drawing up plans for the invasion of Sicily. Wheeler was a tall, rugged-looking man who sported a bushy moustache in the fashion of English officers of his time. Through the open flap of his tent, he spotted the corps commander, General Sir Brian Horrock, hurrying across the encampment, waving a telegram in his hand. Barely concealing his excitement, Horrock handed the telegram to Wheeler and exclaimed: "I say, have you seen this—they want you as [reading] ‘Director General of archaeology in India!’—Why, you must be rather a king-pin at this sort of thing! You know, I thought you were a regular soldier!"

Thus in the hot Algerian evening, with his eyes cast across the Mediterranean on the historic battle ahead, Mortimer Wheeler begins his heroic autobiographical narrative about archaeology in India. The moment in the desert reads as both trivial and momentous: the redirected career of one British officer ushers in a new era for Indian archaeology. Of course, the general noted, he could not leave his post before the invasion. He finally boarded his ship— the City of Exeter— to join a convoy of allied ships headed east in February 1944.

Mortimer Wheeler had been invited to become the director general of archaeology by the India Office of the British government in its last years of rule in South Asia, and by the viceroy of India (Lord Wavell), who governed on behalf of the Crown in Delhi. Summoning  a general from the battlefields of Europe was an extraordinary measure, an admission both of the desperate condition of Indian archaeology and an acknowledgment of its vital importance. By the 1940s, India had distinguished itself as one of the great archaeological locations in the world, along with Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. A succession of eminent archaeologists preceded Wheeler at the directorship of Indian archaeology, even before its official found founding in 1871, when Alexander Cunningham became its first official director. The renowned scientists who followed Cunningham at the post included James Burgess, John Marshall, N. G. Majumdar, and K. N. Dikshit. These men— and many others— had supervised some of the most remarkable discoveries in archaeological science and brought India its prestige as a storehouse of great historical treasures.

Cunningham’s colleague James Prinsep not only discovered the famous rock edict of King Ashoka at Dhauli, Orissa, he was the man who between 1834 and 1837 deciphered the Brahmi and Kharoshthi scripts in which the Indian king had his pronouncements written down. This achievement was critical in establishing a firm toehold for dating in India’s history, which had been notoriously lacking in datable evidence. Decades later, it was John Marshall who excavated the Indus River cities of Harappa and Mohenjodaro and pushed back the age of Indian civilizations to the early centuries of the third millennium BCE— contemporary with the Nile and Mesopotamian civilizations and far earlier than Greece. It was Marshall, too, who excavated Taxila— the great Indian Hellenistic center in northwest India and the first place on Mortimer Wheeler’s itinerary as he set out to survey his vast new realm.

The new director took the Frontier Mail train from Bombay to Delhi and from there to Rawalpindi— the British military base in what was then called the North-west Frontier, the northern region of Punjab and Kashmir. Taxila, or Takshasila, was a further 20 miles from the city, in a valley bounded by the massive Himalaya range. Wheeler described a valley covered with yellow mustard seed and flooded with sunlight as he arrived. As he surveyed the beautiful scene and the long-neglected archaeological dig at the four sites of Taxila, Wheeler knew that it was time to fix Indian archaeology and that Taxila was the perfect place to launch his campaign. After all, it was here that the young Macedonian king, Alexander, had begun his own conquest of the lands of the Indus River and its six tributaries in 327 BCE— the anchor date for Indian historiography. But it was Taxila, too, that made Wheeler conscious of what exactly ailed Indian archaeology and what had to be done.

Despite impressive early discoveries, Indian archaeology suffered from a number of serious flaws. Too much work was invested in uncovering spectacular objects, "treasures of the past," which then found their way into  museums. Monuments— especially religious objects such as Buddhist stupas, Hindu temples, statues, and artwork—were highly prized, drawing both attention and money for exploration and preservation. Though valuable and inspiring, such archaeological work contributed far too little to the scientific reconstruction of past cultures in their contemporary and sequential settings. Worse, Marshall, who had focused on a small number of prestigious digs, failed to apply the principle of stratification to his work, opting instead for what Wheeler contemptuously called the bench-level method. The cure for this, Wheeler insisted, was stratigraphy.


~~The Strides of Vishnu - Hindu Culture in Historical Perspective -by- Ariel Glucklich