HOW NATIONALIST HISTORIANS RESPONDED TO IMPERIALIST HISTORIANS?

HOW MARXIST HISTORIANS

MAKE A SHIFT IN EARLY INDIAN HISTORY WRITING? WHAT ARE THE RECENT TRENDS IN HISTORICAL
INTERPRETATIONS OF GENDER IN ANCIENT INDIAN HISTORY?

The modern writing of Indian history began with colonial perceptions of the Indian past that were to be
seminal to its subsequent interpretations. European scholars searched for histories of India but could
find none that confirmed to the familiar European view of what a history should be. The only exception
according to them was the twelfth century history of Kashmir, the Rajataringini, written by Kalhana.
That there could be other ways of perceiving the past or that Indians might have seen their history in a
different manner was discounted. Societies were divided into those who have a sense of history and
those who lack it. Indian civilization was described as a-historical. The 18 th and 19th centuries were
dominated by the writings of European scholars, referred to as Orientalists or Indologists, such as,
William Jones, Henry Colebrooke, Nathaniel Halhead, Charles Wilkins and Horace Hyman Wilson. Many
of them worked for the East India Company or the British Government of India. 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. The founding of the
Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 provided an institutional focus for scholars working in fields such as
textual study, epigraphy, numismatics, and history. The continuous presence of petty states and the
absence of large political systems or their periodic presence owing to foreign influence, beginning with
the Aryan invasion; the absence of popular participation in local affairs; Indians as people immersed in
religion or the search for things spiritual and the harmonious, unchanging self-sufficient village are
among the ideas whose origins go back to this historiography. In the course of investigating what came
to be known as Hinduism, many were baffled by a religion that was not monotheistic, had no historical
founder or single sacred text, or dogma and was closely tied to caste. This was a contrast to the
European experience where a single religion- Christianity, received royal patronage. So also the
communal periodization of Indian history into Hindu India, Muslim India, etc. owes its emergence to
James Mill’s multi-volume History of British India. India's culture was seen as stagnant. This attitude was
perhaps best typified in Macaulay's contempt for things Indian, especially traditional Indian education
and learning. The political institutions of India, visualized largely as the rule of Maharajas and Sultans,
were dismissed as despotic and totally unrepresentative of public opinion. And this, in an age of
democratic revolutions, was about the worst sin. Stages in history do not end or begin with the going or
coming of rulers with particular religious beliefs and practices. Changes in economy, society, and culture
help us to mark a break between periods in history. India being characterized by diversity on grounds of
multiple regions, religions, languages and ethinicity and ever threatening to fall apart was yet another
invention of colonial Indology.

No ideological development came into being to challenge the mighty British imperialism for a long time
to come in India. With the spread of new education, press, means of communication, economic
exploitation of India’s resources, political awakening began to usher in different regions of the country.
Besides, a process of founding the political organizations started at the regional and local levels during
the mid of 19th century. All these factors paved way for the emergence of a national organization which
was deemed essential by the newly educated classes. This organization is popularly known as the Indian
National Congress founded in 1885 by 72 members from different parts of India. This organization
launched in a small hesitant and mild way but in an organized manner became instrumental in leading a
powerful campaign against the British imperialism. Prominent among the Indian Historians were R. C.
Dutt, A. S. Altekar, H. C. Raychaudhuri, R. K. Mookherjee, R. C. Majumdar, and H. C. Ojha. Historical
interpretation often drew from existing views but could be changed to what was now regarded as a
legitimate nationalist interpretation. Nationalist historians tended to endorse the more favorable views
from colonial readings of the early past, but criticized the unfavorable. Thus, it was asserted that some
institutions such as democracy and constitutional monarchy were familiar to the Indian past. References
to the mantriparishad, the council of ministers, were compared to the working of the British Privy
Council. There was an objection - not surprisingly - to the theory of Oriental Despotism, but an
endorsement for the ancient past being a 'Golden Age'; such an age being a prerequisite for claims to
civilization. This view was an inevitable adjunct to nationalist aspirations in the early twentieth century.
The Golden Age was either the entire Hindu period that was seen as unchanging and universally
prosperous, or else the reign of the Gupta kings which historians, both Indian and British, had associated
with positive characteristics and revival of the brahmanical religion and culture. Emphasis on dynastic
history endorsed the division of Indian history into three major periods, Hindu, Muslim and British, with
a later change of nomenclature to Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, which is still prevalent as a
periodization. Since the time brackets remained the same, the earlier division prevailed despite the
change of nomenclature. Indian historians initially tended to follow the pattern established by European
historians and wrote largely on dynastic history. But, with the growing presence of a nationalist
ideology, the nationalist interpretation of Indian history gained importance. Seminal to this approach
was the Indian liberal tradition of the early nineteenth century - as in the writings of Rammohun Roy -
and the questioning of negative features attributed to the Indian past, as in the theory of Oriental
Despotism. History, as a major component in the construction of national identity and culture, became a
subject of contestation between the anti-colonial nationalists and those supporting colonial views,
although some colonial views such as those of the Orientalists found a sympathetic echo in nationalist
writing. Nationalism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject.
Even if nationalist history did not introduce a new explanation of the Indian past, it was nevertheless a
powerful voice in the debate on the past.

A paradigm shift in the understanding of historical change in India was introduced by Marxist
interpretations that began as historical debates from the 1950s onwards. The historical writings of D. D.
Kosambi, in particular, encapsulated this shift. The interpretation of the Marxist historians derived from
historical philosophy of Karl Marx, the dialectical materialism. The essence of this new approach lies in
the study of relationship between social and economic organization and its effects on historical events.
Instead of political history they gave more emphasis on the history of common people and the history of
history less people. The Marxist historians turned their attention on the inner contradictions of the
Indian society, the marginalised sections like peasants and workers, and highlighted their role in the
movement, women’s role etc. They even questioned communal periodization of India.
For well over a hundred years or more, women have been ‘missing’ from the teaching and learning of
history as have some other categories of the marginalized: peasants, workers, tribals, and dalits among
others. In India, it is only in the post-independence period that the frameworks of history really
changed, especially since the 1980s, but even so women remained on the margins, sometimes
subsumed under other categories of the margins such as ‘peasants’ and ‘tribals’. Only from the late 80s
and onwards have women become a category in themselves, the legitimate focus of a historical
framework that has opened up the way we think about history and the paradigms that were
conventionally associated with it. Half a century later, A. S. Altekar (1929), an influential writer, was still
attempting to conclude the debate on the status of women in the ‘ancient past’ on a positive note. He
argued that the community ‘on the whole’ showed proper concern and respect for women, allowing
them considerable freedom in the different activities of the social and political life of that time. Feminist
‘her’storians began their work on gender by countering the nationalist reconstructions of history. For
example, Chakravarti and Roy (1988, 322) pointed out that the parameters for the exploration of
women’s roles were set by the nationalist historians, who, in their search for the nation’s past, had
confined themselves to a limited set of questions regarding the status of women. These were
determined by a focus on women in the upper-caste households, the economic vulnerability of widows,
property rights for women, the right to education and so on. In short, the perspective of women was
confined to seeing them within the family. Feminist historians instead turned the spotlight on women
outside the family, upon women who laboured in the homes of wealthy landowners. They argued that
there were innumerable women who had no property and whose place within the family had no
relevance to wider society, which merely viewed them as sources of cheap labour (Chakravarti and Roy,
332). In this they showed that women could not be homogenized under a single category, rather they
drew attention to the differing social locations of different categories of women.

Scholars writing a gender inclusive history have had to use a number of strategies to literally ‘excavate’
texts in order to tease out what they contain. Ancient Indian history has been written by using texts,
inscriptions and archaeological material. Texts have been used extensively to write the many histories
that have become a solid body of interpretations. Some scholars have gone back to these earlier
writings and deployed strategies such as reading against the grain: that is, countering the way the text
presents itself to those it intends to influence. To provide an example: there are a number of hymns that
sing praises of the goddess of dawn, Ushas. While this is evidence of an early acknowledgement of a
goddess tradition which is important, other hymns refer to the gods smashing her chariot, clearly
suggesting a certain hostility towards her. In conjunction with other references a more complex picture
of gender may be drawn, taking us away from simple questions of high or low status attributed to
women by scholars to apply to our earliest texts. In recent years the study of inscriptions, which has a
long history of scholarly attention, but without any attention to gender, has experienced a significant
change. While many inscriptions were inscribed on behalf of kings and important men to claim
recognition for a range of deeds accomplished by them, substantial bodies of inscriptions were carved in
stone by humbler donors too. They provided support for the construction of stupas and monasteries to
claim merit for their piety. These studies have led to important issues being looked at, such as the
proportion of women donors to men donors and the way women describe themselves in the
inscriptions: through familial categories as wives, mothers and daughters, or through other ascriptions
such as bhikkhunis. These have led to a lively debate on women’s access to property or to incomes, and
the agency displayed by them in seeking to record their piety as individuals rather than being content to
be subsumed within the piety of the men around them.

All of these developments in writing history have led to a deeper understanding of gender as an
important element of exploring history.

But none of the moves described here have led to a paradigm shift in thinking and writing history. This is
because the world of production and the world of reproduction have been framed as binaries with
history dealing either with power or with production, but not as yet including reproduction as a critical
element in understanding social relations. A real paradigm shift will happen only when these binaries
give way and all of human experience is brought into the framework of history without creating a
hierarchy of social and cultural relations. An important beginning has been made in the works of a few
practitioners of gender history. They have outlined the importance of reproduction and social
reproduction so that all categories of women can be brought into the framework of history. The
relationship between class, caste, patriarchy and the state and its institutions is being outlined, thus
seeking to break down the false divide between gender history and ‘mainstream’ history. Such studies
demonstrate how our understanding of the past deepens when gender is included as a category of
analysis.