Undisciplined History

Abstract

In 1856 a colonial administrator wrote a historico-cultural compendium called Ras Mala on the Western Indian province of Gujarat. Since the work was written in English, it has remained beyond the reach/awareness of most Gujaratis. Aimed at training local officers of the East India Company, the Ras Mala was created from a mixture of oral tales and Company proceedings. This amazing combination of history and sociology, tradition and tale precludes any kind of simplistic classification or labelling. This paper aims to explore the Ras Mala with a view to locating it within the context of some current debates on the nature of historiography in the light of theoretical developments in the social sciences in general and postmodernist questioning of foundations and truth claims in particular. Within the discipline of history, as within other disciplines, such questioning has generated a sense of crisis as well as of liberation. We attempt to place A. K. Forbes' Ras Mala as a phenomenon looking backward towards the chronicle and forward towards present postmodern theoretical justifications of the provisional and textual nature of truth claims as well as multiple methodological strategies of presentation. It was composed in this way at the very moment when history was beginning to be institutionalized as a scientific discipline in Britain. However, since the immediate purpose of the writing was to provide information for practical administrative use, the work certainly carries implicit truth claims. And the multiplicity of raw materials used is clearly intended to be the best way to approximate as closely to objectivity as possible.