On Interpretations of Indian History : Colonial history of India

This is a summary of a part of the first chapter 'Perceptions of the Past', from Romila Thapar's book Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300.

Prinsep Ghat, Kolkata, in memory of James Prinsep, an English scholar, orientalist and antiquary.

Romila Thapar lends great simplicity to her writing by sparing the amateur from crashing into a wall of academic babble. Instead she slowly introduces the reader to nuances of the subject. In the book's introduction, she brings clarity to the nature and meaning of history as a subject, when she says "History is no information that is handed down unchanged from generation to generation". In a line, she demolishes the common myth surrounding history, as an objective series of events, as a narrative that cannot be otherwise, as a true story. She further says "Historical situations need to be explained and explanations draw on analyses of the evidence, providing generalizations that derive from the logic of the argument. With new evidence or fresh interpretations of existing evidence, a new understanding of the past can be achieved". So the job of making history is something Sherlock Holmes might understand better, when he unearths new evidence and tries to string together all the evidences to form a story of how the crime unfolded, from the start to the end. The police might disagree with him on the series of events, but unlike Sherlock's stories, historical evidence is even more scarce and debates more fierce. Hence, history becomes a matter of interpretation. How does one argue all the facts to cause and affect each other to come across as a solid narrative, is what constitutes historiography. In this regard Thapar says "interpretations derive from prevalent intellectual modes. These constitute shifts in the way history is read", and this brings us back to her statement at the outset, when she said that history is no information that is handed down, but narratives that are stated, challenged and reviewed.

Indian history, in the form that is read today in school textbooks today, didn't obviously exist long ago. Indians in fact have a rather poor history of writing history, making the job of historians rather difficult. This is in contrast to the ancient Greeks who were lucky to have historians like Thucydides back in the 5th century BC. The closest Indians had to what erstwhile historians considered history, was Kalahana's Rajataringini, from 12th century AD, or atleast, that's what the Britishers felt when they arrived in Indian in mid 18th century. Hence modern writing of Indian history began with colonial perceptions of Indian past that were to be seminal to its subsequent interpretations. Thapar classifies major interpretations of Indian history since, under the headers of Colonial, Nationalist and Marxist. Colonial interpretations can be further divided into Orientalist and Utilitarian.

Professor Thapar argues that our colonialists viewed India only as a Hindu and Sanskritic civilisation, hence setting aside other parts of our collective history like chronicles of Turkish, Afghan and Mughal rulers. These were set aside as being alien to Indian civilisation, even though they concerned Indian society and polity. A "concession", so to say, was made, but only later, to Buddhist contributions to Indian civilisation. If the role of Islam was conceded at all, it was said to be negative and such judgements were made with little or no evidence, an attitude probably driven by their own historical hostility toward the muslim. Such a view of history surprisingly, also reeks of Hindu nationalism and is telling of their own naivety. Since there was no recognizable connected narrative of the happening in the Indian subcontinent since what have come to be the earliest times, the modern writing of history began with narratives constructed from this early European enquiry.

Initially, there were two major strands in the European interpretation of Indian civilisation, which came to be known as Orientalist and Utilitarian. These developed from the studies made by the British working for the British East India Company. Much of this activity was fostered by the belief that knowledge about the colony would enable a greater control over it and would provide a firm foundation to the power that the colonial authorities exercised. Nonetheless, there was also a genuine element of curiosity and fascination, only abetted, by the centuries of myth and legend surrounding the mystical subcontinent in the West. Such activities encouraged what have come to be called Orientalist studies, and the major British scholars associated were William Jones, James Prinsep, Henry Coolbrooke and others. William Jones was infact the founder of Asiatic Society of Bengal, in 1784. These studies also led to the development of fields like comparative philology and comparative religion and mythology.

Orientalism, in it's impact, fueled the fantasy and the freedom sought by the European Romanticism. It was believed that this oriental renaissance would liberate European thought and literature from the increasing focus on discipline and rationality that had followed from the earlier Enlightenment. Also. the fruits of Orientalism, although intended to serve the needs of company servants and European academics, had a profound impact on India's intellectual and cultural elite too. For the first time the bhadraloka in Bengal gained a systematic overview of its Sanskrit Hindu culture, making them keenly aware of the grand accomplishments of their cultural past. Ultimately the success of British Orientalism was the source of its downfall. As knowledge of India’s ancient past (however selective and biased it maybe) became evident, Christian missionaries and other colonial interests soon began to wonder in whose favor Orientalism was intended, that of the rulers or the ruled. Moreover, the early colonial enthusiasm changed, to conform with the emphasis later on the innate superiority of European civilisation. Enter the Utilitarian critique.

The utilitarian interpretation of Indian history is best represented in the views of James Mill and Thomas Macaulay and was well endorsed by aforementioned Evangelicals among Christian Missionaries. Mill, writing his History of British India in the early nineteenth century was the first to periodize Indian history. His division of the Indian past into Hindu civilization, Muslim civilization and British period has been so deeply embedded in the consciousness of those studying India that it prevails to this day and pervades our political discourse too. Professor Thapar reports with much despondence, about how Mill's attempt led to a distorting of  India history and has frequently thwarted the search for causes of historical change other than those linked to a superficial assessment of the religion of the ruler. 

But the major force of the Utilitarian conception is that it finds flaws in Indian society and history and attempts to establish European superiority. By suggesting the absence of rational thought and individualism in India, it asserted that Indian culture was stagnant. The political institutions of India, visualized largely as the rule of Maharajas and Sultans were dismissed as despotic and totally unrepresentative of public opinion. A view popularly known as Oriental Despotism. "And this in the age of democratic revolutions, was about the worst sin", Thapar scathingly reports. Essentially, the Utilitarian critique argued that the backwardness of India could be remedied by appropriate legislation. This view reflected in the colonial administrators who came to India in the early nineteenth century and reflected in aspect of colonial policy.