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.
...
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 92 : Book Excerpt : Deep History

History is a curiously fragmented subject. In the conventional disciplinary structure of academia, the study of the human past is scattered across a number of fields, notably history and anthropology but also folklore, museum studies, philology, and area-studies programs. Together, these fields constitute a dense layer cake of time. The bottom layer, by far the thickest, is grounded in deep time. The deep time of a discipline is not a specific date range or era: it is simply the earliest period to which the discipline pays attention. Among archaeologists and human evolutionary biologists, deep time is represented by the paleoanthropology of the simple societies of the Paleolithic, from the earliest known stone tools (dated to 2.6 Ma) to the origins of agriculture. Among historians, the deep time of the discipline is located in Greco-Roman antiquity. Though the Paleolithic and the ancient world are dramatically offset in absolute time, each provides the bedrock that supports disciplinary narratives. The middle layers of the cake are given over to the archaeology of complex societies and, among historians, to the study of “early modern” societies. On the very top is a veneer of modern frosting. Seldom more than a few centuries deep, this upper layer is what attracts the interest of most fields of contemporary historical research and almost all fields of cultural anthropology.

The entire span of time may come together in teaching: in the grand sweep of general anthropology, say, or in survey courses of world history. In their own research, however, most scholars limit their work to a single chronological layer and feel ill-equipped to move beyond this layer. In the great age of historico-anthropological writing of the nineteenth century, authors like Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Edward Tylor ranged across vast reaches of human history, producing conjectural arguments characterized by spectacular vision and very little in the way of hard evidence. Today, the pattern is reversed. As methods of analysis improve and knowledge of the recent and deep past rapidly accumulates, the division of intellectual labor has become exceedingly precise. Conjecture and grand vision have given way to hyperspecialization, an intensified focus on ever-smaller units of time and space, and a pervasive reluctance to build analytical frames that can articulate deep history and the recent past.

A century ago, modern historiography was built on the scaffolding of progress, a story line rooted in the rise of civilization and the break with nature that supposedly took place some five thousand to six thousand years ago. This narrative enshrined a triumphalist account of human achievement. In the words of an observer from the 1920s, history describes “the processes by which the chaotic chatter of anthropoid apes has been organized in the wonderful fabric of human speech.” It offers a panoramic vision of man “in every stage of his long climb up from his feeble and brutish beginnings.” The imagination of the age was suffused with sentiments that today seem almost unbearably trite. Cringing at such naiveté, we congratulate ourselves on having purged our anthropologies and histories of this exuberant evolutionism. But the congratulations are premature. The belief in human exceptionalism that drove earlier models of history still shapes narratives of progress, which are now told using the vocabulary of political modernization, economic development, and cultural emancipation from past prejudices. When telling these tales, we sometimes reverse the moral charges of the narrative of progress. We celebrate the merits of the simple and traditional and note the obvious dangers in the modern and complex. This stopgap solution does not eliminate the underlying problem. It leaves in place the idea that human evolution (or the emergence of culture, or the growth of historical consciousness) entails, for good or ill, an ever-increasing mastery of culture over nature, of cultivation over mere subsistence, of civilization over mere habitation. Seeing the humanity of others means recognizing their historical movement toward various forms of mastery, even if the movement is modest and still in its formative stages.

In the wake of the Darwinian revolution, the problem of human origins was transformed from a matter of speculative philosophy into a scientific research program. This transition, which required a radical reassessment of the older, biblical cosmology, was initially made intelligible by linking it to ideas of progress that had proliferated during the Enlightenment. Over the course of the twentieth century, which witnessed two world wars and the collapse of the European colonial order, historians and anthropologists grew increasingly skeptical of Enlightenment ideas, and Victorian-style social evolutionism was rejected as a justification for racism, class privilege, and global imperialism. In cleansing historical and cultural analysis of their nineteenth-century ideological baggage, most of the high modern (and postmodern) versions of cultural anthropology and history turned their backs on the deep human past, leaving problems of evolution to the archaeologists, paleontologists, and historical linguists. The goal of this book is to remove the barriers that isolate deep histories from temporally shallow ones. These barriers have a complex history of their own, but they need not dominate future studies of the human past. Moving them aside solves multiple intellectual and political problems, and this renovation project is not as difficult as it might at first seem. The necessary analytical tools already exist. Some, like genetic mapping and radiocarbon dating, are recent innovations; others, like genealogies, bodily analogies, and predictive modeling, are older than written history itself. The gap between deep and shallow history, we believe, can easily be bridged; indeed, great efforts must be exerted simply to keep the gap in place. What motivates these efforts? How did they develop? And why do so many scholars think it is important to keep prehistory in its place?

~~Deep History -by- Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail

Day 78 : Book Excerpt : The Folly of Fools

False historical narratives are lies we tell one another about our past. The usual goals are self-glorification and self-justification. Not only are we special, so are our actions and those of our ancestors. We do not act immorally, so we owe nothing to anyone. False historical narratives act like self-deceptions at the group level, insofar as many people believe the same falsehood. If a great majority of the population can be raised on the same false narrative, you have a powerful force available to achieve group unity. Of course, leaders can easily exploit this resource by coupling marching orders with the relevant illusion: German people have long been denied their rightful space, so Dass Deutsche Volk muss Lebensraum haben! (German people must have room in which to live!)—neighbors beware. Or the Jewish people have a divine right to Palestine because ancestors living in the general area some two thousand years ago wrote a book about it—non-Jewish occupants and neighbors better beware. Most people are unconscious of the deception that went into constructing the narrative they now accept as true. Nor are they usually aware of the emotional power of such narratives or that these may entrain long-term effects.

There is a deep contradiction within the study of history between ferreting out the truth regarding the past and constructing a false historical narrative about it. As we have seen in this book, we make up false narratives all the time, about our own behavior, about our relationships, about our larger groups. Creating one for one’s larger religion or nation only extends the canvas. Usually a few brave historians in every society try to tell the truth about the past—that the Japanese army ran a vast, forced system of sexual slavery in World War II, that the United States committed wholesale slaughter against Koreans during the Korean War and against Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians in the Vietnam War, that the Turkish government committed genocide against its successful subgroup of Armenians, that the Zionist conquerors of Palestine committed ethnic cleansing against some 700,000 Palestinians, that the United States has waged a long campaign of genocide and murder against American Indians, from the nation’s founding to the murder by proxy of more than a half million in the 1980s alone, not counting before or after, and it has sought through military means to determine the fate of the entire New World for well over a century. But most historians will tell only some version of the conventional, self-aggrandizing story, and most people in the relevant countries will not have heard of (or believed) the factual assertions I just made.

One noteworthy fact is that the younger the recipient of the knowledge, the greater the pressure to tell a false story. So we are apt to tell our children a heroic version of our past and reserve for our university students a more nuanced view. This of course strengthens the bias, since views learned early have special power and not everyone attends college, or studies history if they do. Fortunately, the young often appear naturally to resist parental and adult nonsense, so there is at least some tendency to resist and upgrade. Just the same, there are strong pressures on professional historians to come up with a positive story, in part to undergird what is taught more widely.

Make no mistake about it. People feel strongly about these matters. One person’s false historical narrative is another’s deeply personal group identity—and what right do you have commenting on my identity in the first place? Many Turkish people may well feel that I have slandered their country regarding its Armenian genocide, while I believe I have merely told the truth. The same may be true (though less strongly) for some Japanese people regarding their country’s practice of sexual slavery during World War II. Most Americans could hardly care less. So we wiped out the Amerindians—so what? So we repeatedly waged aggressive war on Mexico and stole nearly half their country. They probably deserved it. And, yes, since then we have fought a staggering series of wars ourselves and by proxies—even recently supporting genocide in such diverse places as Central America, Vietnam, Cambodia, and even East Timor, while blocking international action against it in Rwanda—but so the hell what? Only a left-wing nutcase would dwell on such minor details. Isn’t that what great powers do, and aren’t we the greatest?

Israel is no different from any other country or group in having its own false historical narrative, and Israel’s is especially important because it exacerbates a set of troubled international and intergroup relations. The narrative is also one that is accepted almost wholesale in the United States, the most powerful military nation in the world. As the old joke goes, why doesn’t Israel become the fifty-first state? Because then it would have only two senators. Again, feelings run high. Some regard as anti-Semitic any attack on the behavior of Israel (or its underlying narrative). I regard this as nonsense and follow instead what seem to me to be the best Israeli (and Arab) historians—and their (largely Jewish) American counterparts—in describing a false historical narrative used to expand Israel at a cost to its neighbors by waging regular war on them to seize land and water (with near-constant US support), all in the name of fighting terrorism, while using state terrorism as the chief weapon. The narrative inverts reality: Israel wants only peace with its Arab neighbors (from as early as 1928), who to this very day reject peace at every turn and seek the total destruction of Israel and its Jewish population.

~~The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life -by- Robert Trivers