South Asian Historiography Research Articles

New Trends in the Historiography of Pakistan: A Case Study of Writings by Prof. Muhammad Iqbal Chawla

One of the recent developments in South Asian historiography is the adoption of new approaches for each of its sub-disciplines. Historiographical scholarship has also discovered new avenues including exploration of the ignored and marginalized aspects of history. Muhammad Iqbal Chawla is one of such academicians who has left a strong mark on the field of historiography by making multifaceted and original contributions. These can be ascertained by a comprehensive assessment of his entire intellectual cum scholarly sojourn. Dr Chawla has attempted to create to put a new face in the varied field of historiography in Pakistan and he has largely succeeded in his endeavour. The main aim of this research paper is to assess his contribution. This objective can best be achieved by a thorough perusal of his contributions to historiography from multiple perspectives as the author has tried to do so in this article.

Immodest flirt or competent governor: translating gender in colonial and post-colonial South Asian historiography

AbstractThis article examines how an eighteenth-century woman, Mughlani Begum, is depicted in the most informative contemporary Persian auto/biography and how the descriptions, anecdotes, and analysis of her life contained therein, including the brief period she was Punjab's governor, changed as the primary source was translated into or summarised in English. The original Persian and colonial English translations and histories are read alongside an Urdu history of the Punjab, which begs the question: why was the life of a female governor reduced to that of an ‘immodest flirt’ in English sources, while her identity is incredibly nuanced in Persian and Urdu sources? Indeed, post-colonial historians writing in English rarely reference Persian originals: hence, they reproduce what colonial-period English writers before them said, and they completely ignore Urdu histories. While it is nearly impossible to understand the reasons why historians writing in English choose to depict Mughlani Begum in such a flattened way, we can be more critical of our readings of histories written in English, especially when original accounts are available. This article argues for consideration of how transmission of knowledge, language politics, and gender biases inflect historiography and misrepresent historical events and people of the Punjab—especially women.

Hijras and South Asian historiography

AbstractSince the 1990s, scholars of South Asia have framed the hijra community in a variety of ways, for instance, as a third gender, a transgender group, and an identity made through more than gender difference. Both interdisciplinary and historical accounts have debated the relationship between “hijra” and other gender, sexual or social subjectivities and categories. Hijra histories suggest that the community has often been at the center of historical transformations in governance, households, gender, embodiment, epistemologies, and political economies. Yet historical research has especially focused on the 19th century, raising questions about what a deeper genealogy of the term hijra might reveal about longer trajectories of historical change in gendered categories and practices. I argue that hijra histories may provide openings for gender historians to think critically about what precisely they mean by “gender.” Moreover, because hijra and transgender studies from South Asia have foregrounded the geopolitics of translation, this literature prompts fruitful questions for the field of transgender history.

Rudra Kavi and the Mughal Elite: A Codicological Reappraisal

AbstractThis essay offers a codicological analysis of three manuscripts—Bühler 70a (Ms. 7089), Bühler 70b (Ms. 7304) and Bühler 70c (Ms. 7303)—of the British Library, which contain some panegyrics composed by Rudra Kavi (fl. 1570s–1650s). Based on a critical appraisal of handwriting, colophons, watermark and other textual attributes, this essay shows that the three Bühler manuscripts constitute a composite volume of an incomplete anthology of Rudra's panegyric poems. Furthermore, it corroborates how deftly and faithfully all three manuscripts were copied by just one scribe sometime between 1840 and 1880. His exemplar, however, was a draft edition of a few unfinished panegyrics that the poet had been composing simultaneously in praise of some prominent members of the Mughal elite. These findings about the material production and reception history of the Bühler manuscripts illuminate both the craft of an adept scribe and the creative imaginings of a court-poet. For want of a rigorous codicological analysis, previous scholarship has held the scribe responsible for the ‘fragmentary’ and ‘corrupt’ condition of these manuscripts and applauded the Brahmin poet for his literary prowess. This essay distances itself from such unwarranted privileging of a court-poet and marginalisation of a skilled scribe. Instead, it seeks codicological and textual evidence in determining the roles played by poets and scribes in the production of literary manuscripts. This essay ultimately reaffirms the value of codicological reflections in the fields of South Asian historiography and literary studies.

Genealogies of exception: Writing histories of North‐East India

AbstractThe North‐East in India is a shorthand for a territory built on violence, commodity extraction and exceptional laws. For years now, the region has nurtured a stygian discontent. However, instead of succumbing to the despair and disapproval of technocrats and security personnel such crises usually evokes, one can find political and analytical sustenance in such turbulent histories. Often in the histories of ‘failed’ states, ‘disturbed’ frontiers and borderlands, one finds cyphers to modern governance. In this sense, the North‐East is quite au courant. In this analytically productive sense, the essay will discuss the recent and older trends of historiographies of the North‐East. How is the North‐East located within South Asian historiography? How does it speak to academic collectives beyond the Indian/South Asian historiography? How does the political discord and potential of the region shape academic engagements? Answers to these questions will provide insight into the production and nature of academic silos or lumps as the North‐East simultaneously poses as a political problematic at the heart of Indian democracy and a component of an emergent field of South‐Asian, South‐East Asian and global scholarship.

Empire, sociality, and political economy in colonial Bengal

AbstractHow to conceptualize the broad dissemination of economic concepts in colonial South Asia? This article uses an essay by a mid-nineteenth-century Bengali, Peary Chand Mittra, as a point of departure to approach this problem in South Asian historiography. In the first part, the essay locates the conditions of possibility for Mittra's political-economic analysis of Bengal's agrarian social order within an imperial and commercial space of extended interdependencies. The aim is not to explain the specificity of Mittra's politics so much as to highlight his recourse to political-economic concepts to ground his analysis. In the second part, the essay suggests that the grounding of political economy's colonial histories within histories of imperial space needs to be supplemented by closer attention to new normative impulses and aspirations emerging directly from agrarian society in the region. This second emphasis provides better grounds for grasping the depth and durability of political economy's reach into political and ethical claims across social space in the Subcontinent in the twentieth century. It thus broaches the necessity of subaltern histories of political economy.

Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap

Revisiting the History and Historiography of Mughal Pluralism

The concept ofṣulḥ-i kullis well known as a core feature of the Mughal Empire's state ideology, one that made it, comparatively speaking, arguably the most tolerant and inclusive state in the entire early modern world. Often translated as “peace with all,” the term has become almost synonymous in South Asian historiography with the policies of religious pluralism promoted by the dynasty's most celebrated emperor, Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar “the Great” (r. 1556–1605) and his famed courtier and biographer, Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak (1551–1602). Surprisingly enough, however, despite its ubiquity in discussions of Mughal attitudes toward religious and cultural pluralism, a comprehensive intellectual history of the termṣulḥ-i kulldoes not, in fact, appear to have ever been attempted. It is often taken for granted thatṣulḥ-i kullwas the obvious term to express the ethos of civility, universal reason, and inclusiveness that Akbar wanted to promote. But why did Akbar and Abu al-Fazl choose this term, specifically? What exactly did they mean by it? And how was the term actually understood in practice, not just in Akbar's era but also in the subsequent decades and indeed centuries? These are the kinds of questions this article seeks to address.

“Modernization” and Agrarian Development in India, 1912–52

India's agrarian history has for the most part been cast within colonial and nationalist frameworks or in analyses of modernity and development in the South Asian historiography on both sides of the independence divide. This leaves plenty of space to discuss both the vast engagement of American actors with Indian elite formations and modifications to the agrarian projects contingent upon those interactions. A focus on the Americanist drive for agrarian modernization in India allows for exploring the distinct cultural location of modernization in a long-term perspective and its engagement with colonial “development.” A study of their mutual interaction gives insights into modernization's somewhat distinct itinerary on the subcontinent and provides specificity to the history of the otherwise spatially wider American intervention in global and inter-Asian contexts.

The Materials of Home: Studying Domesticity in Late Colonial India

Abstract In this essay I argue for opening up South Asian historiography on the home to explore not just ideals of middle-class domesticity, but also the material goods and spaces of home lives. This helps to rethink class, as ideals of middle-class respectability were often worked out in buildings and through goods shared with lower classes, deploying caste hierarchies to articulate definitions of proper home life. At the same time, taking materials and spaces seriously allows attention to the role of men in shaping and experiencing homes, whether as designers, retailers, planners, or residents themselves. Drawing on the specific example of the iconic firm Kamdar Ltd., which created modern home interiors in mid-century Bombay, I argue that thinking through the materials of home allows attention to the global engagements of home life defined in class and caste terms, by men and women alike.

Introduction.

Introduction Prakash Kumar (bio) The history of technology of South Asia should justifiably reflect the particularities of South Asian colonial pasts and the trends that became palpable at its postcolonial moment. In what historically specific ways has coloniality intersected with technology in South Asia? The particular questions of colonial power and exclusions, the autonomy of the subaltern voice, and the imagined futures as India at independence grappled with a new socio-economic order in the midst of colonial legacies call upon historians to make purposeful selection of archives and to deploy specific methods. These choices should determine the nature of South Asian technological history. In other words, a technological history of South Asia cannot simply be a history of technology "in South Asia," a one-sided imposition of historiography of technology on a new geographical site.1 The contributors to this volume agree that South Asia should not be treated simply as an empirical site to which the already existing analytics and methodologies of the broader field of history of technology can be "extended." Our implicit claim in writing these technological stories is that South Asia should be (and it already is) also a location to unravel new analytics and methods. The contributors thus aim to demonstrate how looking at the history of technology from South Asia changes what it means to do history of technology. Calling the approach followed by the contributors to this volume post-Marxist and post-nationalist would be eminently inadequate, if a safe label. Just as much as they are distanced from older Marxist and nationalist [End Page 933] approaches, the contributors are also heirs to standard critiques of modernity within a certain mode of analysis in South Asia. Readers will find in these articles a direct engagement with the question of the modern and the place of technology in the construction of the modern. Political modernity and its various institutions, Dipesh Chakrabarty told us, "all bear the burden of European thought and history."2 In a sign that such questioning of modernity's universal claims have become mainstream, all South Asianists proceed with the assumption that the metanarrative of modernity may after all be inadequate to assess all of the lived experiences in South Asia. This reflexivity to "modern" defines all of the contributors' technological histories, and perhaps sets them apart. While questioning modernity is a staple in the historiography of technology, the contributors in this volume will critique modernity from a position firmly within South Asian scholarly conventions. Approach and Themes The articles in this volume display a distinctive crossdisciplinarity that is not out of sync with trends in the field of South Asia, and reflects the way the field has evolved and honed its disciplinary practices over the years. A distinct porosity of the discipline of history in South Asia can be traced to its earliest incarnations. The 1960s works of Bernard Cohn, a pioneer in the field, are instructive. Cohn's work is distinctive, among other things, for exploring conjointly the methods, practices, and theories of two disciplines, what Cohn referred to as "Anthropologyland" and "Historyland." Later, writing a foreword in an omnibus to Cohn's work, Dipesh Chakrabarty celebrated the ease with which Cohn was known to navigate the disciplines of history and anthropology and to call them both "home."3 The 1960s trend was further consolidated with the emergence of the subaltern studies in the 1980s that emerged as a critique of historicism across several disciplines. The active crossdisciplinarity of the subaltern and postcolonial arms of South Asian historiography accelerated the field's spread into disciplines of social sciences and invited the involvement of postcolonial theorists from multiple disciplines.4 The same crossdisciplinarity marks the [End Page 934] approaches in South Asian technological history broadly, which have come to incorporate the practice of radical social history, a new political economy, historical and cultural anthropology, ethno-history, and literary and textual analysis. Historians of technology in South Asia marshal this crossdisciplinarity to address a number of questions that can be seen as central to the historiography of technology. To review every pertinent question would be a herculean task even for a start. But in trying to keep the review of...

The writerly self: Literacy, discipline and codes of conduct in early modern western India

This article examines Marathi discourses of good writing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critical scholarship on literacy has highlighted reading and writing as historically situated practices, with complex interactions with orality. South Asian historiography on early modern scribal practices has also addressed the expansion of state power, regional historical imaginations, literary cultures and the sociology of scribal caste groups. Writing proliferated in seventeenth-century Maharashtra with the establishment of the independent Maratha state, and the spread of various religious movements, and generated diverse norms about ideal literate practices. This article closely reads a collection of accountancy manuals called ‘mestak’, alongside literate practices idealised by the poet-saint Ramdas in the Dāsabodha. While pointing to divergences across these bureaucratic and devotional contexts, the article teases out common emphases of moral conduct and self-fashioning between them. These overlaps, it suggests, are critical to understand the religio-political horizons of Maratha scribal communities; they also help trace a longer, complex history of language practices, history and community in western India.

NEPALESE HISTORY IN A EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE: A CASE STUDY IN TRANSCULTURAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

ABSTRACTIn March 2013, a group of German, Nepalese, and Swiss historians, Indologists, and an architectural historian gathered for a workshop in Nepal to develop a new approach to the understanding of South Asian historiography, especially the Nepalese chronicles from the nineteenth century. The outcome is the present collaboratively written article. It is argued that, in the past, the analysis of South Asian historiography has been preoccupied by arguments based on an understanding of history that highlights facts and events. A transcultural and multidisciplinary approach, however, would overcome the common dichotomies of factuality and fictionality, history and myth, or evidence and truth. Recognizing the specificity of South Asian historiography, the article develops an approach to bridge asymmetries and entanglements in the academic use of the past in a way that also opens up a new perspective on Western historiography. By analyzing the religious, spatial, literary, and historical, and contemporary or context‐related aspects of a nineteenth‐century chronicle and by using “fieldwork” as a methodological tool for studying historiography, it is proposed to understand the framing of time and the making of sequences and historical periods as an open process that results in the constant and synchronic creation of chronological spaces.

Political Turbulences and the Rebelliousness of the Madras Presidency Army

This article necessarily explores the dissensions and differences arising from the British domination over the Tamil-speaking regions of the erstwhile Madras Presidency before and during the Great Uprising of 1857. It seeks to explore the role played by the Madras Army during this period. The narrative of events vindicates the fact that the situation in Tamil districts was by no means tranquil and there were instances of resistance, if not rebelliousness, on the part of the native inhabitants to the Company’s government. The discontent in the lower ranks of the Company’s army was also very much evident, which has seldom received attention in the mainstream South Asian historiography. The reasons behind these occasional bouts of discontent were not simply related to financial and pecuniary reasons. In this context, it becomes imperative to unearth the possible hidden links, if any, between the rebellious incidents of north India and the brewing discontent within the Madras Army. The most important issue that needs to be taken into consideration primarily relates to the different types of responses that were noticed among the indigenous social groups.

From forest to delta: recent themes in South Asian environmental history

ABSTRACTThis article will follow the field of South Asian environmental history from its insular beginnings in the 1980s and 1990s, through its initial contact with other fields, to its current integration into the heart of contemporary South Asian historiography. It will argue that 1999 represented a turning point in the field. Three works published that year – S. Sivaramakrishnan’s Modern Forests, Sumit Guha’s Environment and Ethnicity in India, and Ajay Skaria’s Hybrid Histories – reached out from environmental history to incorporate a diverse range of theoretical and methodological influences. Since then, environmental historians have become more geographically and intellectually eclectic, just as historians from other fields have begun to borrow and incorporate environmental optics into other historical work. This new work, both that which takes the environment as the central focus of analysis, and that which draws on environmental optics in writing other histories, highlights the breakdown of an epistemology in which the environment was only visible or important in a limited range of social geographies. Through this process of integration, environmental historians have also begun to re-incorporate the environmentalist ethic which in many ways propelled the field’s beginnings, but which was eclipsed by the intellectual imperative to complicate the simplistic blame-narratives of many early environmental and anti-colonial histories.

A Dalit Paradigm: A new narrative in South Asian historiography

This is the meaning of Negro History Week. It is not so much a Negro History Week as it is a History Week. We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice. There should be no indulgence in undue eulogy of the Negro. The case of the Negro is well taken care of when it is shown how he has influenced the development of civilization.1

Azad’s Mecca

In recent years, historians and postcolonial critics have illuminated several trends of universalist thought among a group of Indian intellectuals and activists who articulated forms of humanist anti-imperialism within the circuits of publication and translation in the transregional Indian Ocean public sphere. While this recent work has done much to open up a discursive space for forms of non-Western universalism, it has, whether intentionally or not, reiterated the claims of a transcendent liberal secular humanism in a new guise. But what would this Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism look like when grounded in the politics of place rather than in the domain of the transcendent? Willis’s article considers the heated debate over the future of Mecca after the Sa‘udi occupation in 1924, both from its discursive position as a quintessential cosmopolitan “open city” and as the site of a material struggle over urban space. In particular, it considers the writings of the South Asian scholar and activist Abul Kalam Azad, a major figure in the Indian Khilafat movement and the Indian National Congress, who was simultaneously a critic of the nation form and communalism (on the basis of universal humanism) and a vocal supporter of Ibn Sa‘ud’s conquest and government of the holy cities. While Azad has been lauded in South Asian historiography as a paragon of secular humanism, how do we reconcile his cosmopolitanism with his support of the exclusionary religious policies of the Sa‘udi state?

The world of the Sylheti seamen in the Age of Empire, from the late eighteenth century to 1947

AbstractThis article examines the maritime activities and emigration of Muslim Sylhetis, from what today is north-eastern Bangladesh. Among the Bengali people, Sylhetis were the pioneers in crossing the sea in the Age of Empire. In their voyages, they worked as crewmen on merchant ships, and then began to settle abroad, mainly in Britain and the USA. Some of those who settled in Britain started restaurants and lodging houses. One of the unexplored questions of South Asian historiography is: why was it the Sylhetis who became seamen and emigrants, even though they lived about 300 miles away from the sea? This article traces the socioeconomic, religious, and ecological environment of Sylhetis to understand their transnational mobility, notably within the increasingly interconnected realms of the British empire.

THE CANNIBALIZED CAREER OF LIBERALISM IN COLONIAL INDIA

The interpretation of liberalism as a project that not only masks, but enables, political domination has long held currency in South Asian historiography. Recently, the subject of liberalism and empire in both francophone and anglophone contexts has returned to discussions in broader imperial historiography. One especially pressing question that emerges from these approaches is how to analyze intellectuals of colonized countries, such as India, who themselves claimed liberal terminologies and pressed forth liberal arguments. Are they to be assessed by the same criteria as European liberals who argued for the rights of the individual, the free press, and individual property rights?

Haimanti Roy. Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–1965.

The Partition of India, which had multiple layers of meaning for the people of the subcontinent, represents the most contested terrain of South Asian historiography. In recent years it has been widely acknowledged that the Partition was not just an event that happened in August 1947; it had a long afterlife. The historiography of Partition therefore has shifted its focus from a preoccupation with its causes and the allocation of blames to an increasing interest in recovering the experiences of its victims, as these had profound consequences for the subsequent nation-building processes and community relations in the subcontinent. As Gyan Pandey once argued, the “truth” of the Partition lay in the violence it produced; the history of Partition should therefore reflect how this violence was conceptualized, executed, experienced, and remembered by those who lived through it—as victims, aggressors, or onlookers. A series of studies following this line of inquiry have appeared in recent years. Among these the works of Pandey, Urvashi Butalia, Subir Kaul, Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon, Ravinder Kaur, Vazira Zamindar, and Neeti Nair have focused on the Partition in Punjab and the experiences of the Punjabi refugees. If Bengal was initially neglected in this literature, that imbalance has been somewhat redressed by the appearance of a few significant studies by Prafulla Chakraborty, Ranabir Samaddar, Willem van Schendel, Jasodhara Bagchi,, Subhoranjan Dasgupta, and most recently Joya Chatterji. These studies have explored the uncertainties created by the new borders, the experiences of displacement of the Bengali refugees and focused on the politics of rehabilitation. Above all, they have underscored the differences in the trajectories of Partition histories in Punjab and Bengal.