one Interpretations of Indian History: Colonial, Nationalist, Post-colonial Romila Thapar t he modern writing of Indian history dates to about 200 years ago and begins with a disjuncture. When British scholars started asking about histories of India, they were told that there were no historical works as history was a subject which was of no interest to pre-colonial Indian scholarship. This led to the theory that Indian civilisation was unique because it was ahistorical. It had no sense of history. This is a theory which is very widespread and very often accepted, and which some of us are trying to question and, hopefully, to eventually overthrow. As a result of this theory British scholarship took upon itself the task of ‘discovering’ the Indian past. This, of course, had its own problems and orientations. The disjuncture meant that initially, at least, the European imprint on Indian historical scholarship was extremely strong; slowly and gradually, one can trace the receding of this imprint and the coming of an Indian point of view, as it were. Although, of course, with This is the opening address given at the conference on Contemporary India in Transition held at Lisbon in June 1998.26 Romila Thapar the consciousness of modernisation, it is very difficult to sharply distinguish between a modern European and a modern Indian understanding of history. This chapter, therefore, is concerned with a series of questions. How did this disjuncture occur? What is the nature of these im- prints? And to what extent is historical interpretation today in India reflective of intellectual concerns which may have a global context but which, nevertheless, grew out of an Indian understanding of both history and of its context? The Colonial Interpretation Quite apart from the fact that there was a disjuncture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and there was a presumed need on the part of colonial scholars to ‘rediscover’ Indian history, it is important to note that from the early 19th century onwards, the reconstruction of Indian history was tied to European precon- ceptions and debates about the Orient. The intellectual history of Europe was therefore extremely pertinent to the interpretation of the history of India, and this is particularly true of the 19th century. Writing about India, thus, was like holding a mirror to European. society. India was, to use the fashionable term, the ‘Other’; and the ‘Other’ is always important to understanding the ‘self’. This was done through drawing comparisons, and consequently much of the writing, the reconstruction of the Indian past, derived from this concern with how the ‘Other’, by contrast, had a history which was different from European history. Apart from these ideological, intellectual concerns, there was also one other very basic concern, which was the colonial belief in knowledge as a source of power. This belief was rampant through- out the 19th century. Knowing the history of an area provided control over it. What Curzon refers to in a famous statement as ‘the necessary furniture of empire’, a curiosity about the past of the colony, becomes extremely central, and the desire then is to control the colony through re-casting its knowledge about itself and particularly about its past. Colonial historiography, therefore, does have a big agenda and certainly not always a hidden agenda. The 19th century throws up some very recognisable themes. Initially, there was the activity of what has been called orientalistInterpretations of Indian History 27 scholarship. This is a tricky word, because it should not be confused with Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism per se. Orientalist scholarship included what Said writes about, but it also included varieties of oriental scholarship; the study of languages, for ex- ample, or the study of texts thought to be value-free prior to the theoretical discussion of Orientalism. Orientalist scholarship, as embodied in people like William Jones and in the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, and a number of others, explored the new terrain of the Indian past and tried to link it to the European past. For ex- ample, linguistic links were sought between Sanskrit on the one hand and Greek and Latin on the other. This is not something that was developed only by British orientalist scholars; both Italian and, Iam told, Portuguese scholars had earlier made these links. It was now developed into a theory, a theory of the interconnection of ancestral languages, and of their monogenesis. There was also an attempt to draw conceptual and chronological links with Biblical history. The story of Noah's Ark has an almost parallel story in the Indian texts of Manu, of the god Vishnu convert- ing himself into a fish and directing the boat, lodging it on the top of a mountain, and so on. These early scholars saw these connec- tions, linked them immediately to Biblical thinking and tried to produce a chronology that was the equivalent of Biblical chronology. The focus was essentially on texts that dealt with social laws— for example, the Dharmashastras, which focus on the social and rit- ual obligations of different castes in Indian society — and religious texts. Both were functionally important to understanding the earlier institutions. Their study was thus not just intellectual curi- osity, it also had an administrative function. The notion of con- trolling the society by understanding its earlier institutions became an important item on the intellectual agenda of these scholars. India was regarded as an exotic area in terms of orientalist schol- arship. Not surprisingly, ithad a tremendous influence on German romanticism throughout the 19th century. The literary movement of German romanticism was imbued with excitement about the discovery of Sanskrit and what it taught of the Indian past; many thought that it was the Indian present as well. This is in part a re- flection of an escape from 19th century European industrialisation and the changes which this industrialisation brought, which were somehow difficult to comprehend. Colonial intervention, therefore, was not concerned with trying to change the society of India or28 Romila Thapar the society of the colony; the intervention was, at this point, without plans for any radical change. One of the major theories that emerged out of orientalist scholar- ship which was dominant in the middle of the 19th century and which is now again very prominent particularly with the ideology of Hindutva being encouraged politically, is the theory of the Aryan race. This theory was developed in the 19th century, and, in its re- lationship to Indian history, was intended to explain the origins of Indian society and provide the beginnings of Indian history. It maintains that Indian history begins with the invasion of the Aryans, the superior people who came from Central Asia, sub- jugated the whole of northern India and established an Aryan civilisation. The theory evolved in Europe, but it was applied both in Europe and in India. It evolved in Europe through the discussion of what in the 19th century was known as race science, which was con- cerned with theories of biological race and drew its strength from both natural science and other disciplines. For example, the botan- ist Linnaeus worked out a whole ordering of genus and species with reference to plants, which was taken as the model for working ‘out genus and species with reference to human groups. Social Darwinism, the theory of the survival of the fittest, was also brought into the discussion. The question of who, in fact, were the fittest, was answered by indicating that the fittest were the European Aryans, because they dominated world civilisation. Max Miller, the famous German Sanskritist at Oxford, was the first to superimpose this theory of Aryan race on India. The theory basically stated that race and language were identical. People who spoke a particular language inevitably belonged to the same race and, if two languages were similar, then the speakers of those lan- guages belonged to the same race. The argument was that there was a language called Aryan which was spoken by a race called Aryan, and this race traced itself back to the Indo-European people and the Indo-European languages. Equating a language label with a racial label was, of course, a major blunder; and although Max Miller stated that the two had to be kept separate and could not be equated, he nevertheless confused the issue himself. For ex- ample, he referred to Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the social reformer of the early 19th century, as a member of the Bengali Indo-Aryan race which spoke Bengali and the Indo-Aryan language.Interpretations of Indian History 29 Further, caste was seen essentially as racial segregation, each caste being visualised as a separate race. It was argued that Indian society was extremely advanced because it had managed to segregate all these racial groups in a social system known as caste. And, of course, the idea of the purity of caste, derived from the Portuguese word casta meaning ‘pure’, gave acertain kind of direc- tion to the way in which studies of caste in the early period were conducted. The upper castes, it was argued, were of Aryan stock, and the lower castes were indigenous and mixed. Thus the theory also influenced ethnology and the discussion of Indian society. Max Miller's statement that the Aryans were of a superior race and had brought civilisation to India was much appreciated by the colonialist historians, who saw in the Aryan conquest of India parallels to the British conquest of India. The comparison was fre- quently endorsed. This was not the only trend, however, in the 19th century. There was another group of historians who contested the interpretations of orientalist scholarship. They were known as the utilitarian his- torians, because they drew much of their inspiration from the writings of the British philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. They took an alternative view to the romanticism of exotic India, emphasising, instead the weaknesses of Indian civilisation and society. They argued that there was a tremendous need for rationality and indi- vidualism if the society was to progress, the term ‘progress’ being used very much in its early 19th century meaning. Therefore, there was a need to legislate change. This was a departure from the orientalist scholars, who were quite happy to leave things as they were and simply write about the past of India, about how Indians were all given to loving nature, or, as Max Miller says, meditating peacefully for endless years in their little village communities. The utilitarians maintained that all of this had to be changed, because India was a backward, stagnant society. India was clearly, then, the ‘Other’ in terms of British society, and it is interesting that much of this writing is as much a critique of British society, in an oblique way, as it is, in fact, a critique of Indian society. The person best remembered from this group is the historian James Mill, who wrote a massive three-volume history of British India in the early 19th century. This became what has been called the ‘hegemonic text’ on Indian history. He periodised Indian30 Romila Thapar history into the Hindu civilisation, the Muslim civilisation and the British period. This periodisation became so popular that in the middle of the 19th century, Christian Lassen, an orientalist philosopher in Germany, described the three periods as the Hindu thesis, the Muslim anti-thesis, and the British synthesis. Mill argued that the pre-British Hindu and Muslim civilisations were not only backward and stagnant, but conformed to the image of ‘oriental despotism’. Oriental despotism became the key concept in the 19th century to explain the situation in India prior to the coming of the British. Incidentally, these views also coincided with the views of a number of Christian missionary groups, particularly those working under the aegis of the British administration, who also wanted a major legislation to change the basis of Indian society. This kind of historical thinking was not something that was abstract or confined only to Britain. It is interesting that both Max Miller and James Mill never actually visited India, although they were frequently invited. This is a very interesting little vignette on the way in which they approached India as a colony. This his- torical thinking also coincided with a change in colonial policy. We must keep in mind that, by the middle of the 19th century, the British conquest of India had been completed, or more or less so. The emergence of British industrialisation at this time gave rise to the need to reconstruct the economic structure of the colony, so that it would supply resources and provide markets for industries in Britain. Consequently, this historiographic urging for legislative change, for change in the nature and structure of the colony, came in extremely handy for British colonial policy. Let us also remember that this is the latter half of the 19th century, when aggressive capitalism was changing into imperi- alism with its much more intensive exploitation of colonies. Therefore, ideologies geared to legitimising change in the colonies became imperative. Indian society as the ‘Other’ of Europe was a major theme. This is perhaps best illustrated in the writings of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Marx, in his Asiatic mode of production, argues that Asian societies are distinctively different from European societies, and that they present in some ways the reversal of the explanations that are offered for European history and modes of production. He argues that because there was no private property in land, there were no class contradictions, no dialectic of change, no classInterpretations of Indian History 31 conflict. India was, in essence, a stagnant society. Therefore, even though British colonialism did much harm, it was a necessary inter- vention because it broke the stagnancy of the Indian past. Weber argues that the absence of the puritan ethic in the religions of both India and China was the main reason why capitalism did not emerge at this time in Asia. There was no possibility of accom- modating the rationality of economics in Indian religions. The basic question for both Marx and Weber, and for a number of scholars looking at the Indian past, was why capitalism devel- oped in Europe and not in Asia. The contrast with Europe became a primary concern. Europe was unique because it developed capitalism. There is a noticeable disregard in the writings of Marx and Weber for empirical data which might suggest the contrary. This disregard in itself forms a very interesting subject for study in European considerations of the Indian past. The focus is so con- centrated on theory and on contesting theory that empirical data was frequently either marginalised or ignored altogether. The uniqueness of India was said to be caste, there was a considerable emphasis on textual views of caste and, consequently, on the dominance of the idea that Brahminism was responsible for the creation of caste. This emphasis has continued from the early 19th century up to the present. The writings of Louis Dumont, for example, are very much in this tradition. The Nationalist Interpretation So much for colonial historiography. Let us turn now toan Indian perspective. Towards the end of the 19th century there emerged the beginnings of what have been called nationalist interpretations of Indian history, interpretations that had become much more forceful by the early 20th century. The context of nationalist historiography in India was not similar to that in Europe, because it was not initially geared to the emer- gence of a nation state. This came later. Rather, it grew from an anti-colonial movement for independence. History was used for two purposes. The first was to establish the identity of Indians by asking questions such as who we are, where we began, what we are, what our history is, and how we have arrived at where we are. The second was to establish the superiority of the past to the32 Romila Thapar present. The remote past, referred to by Mill as Hindu civilisation, became the golden age. This was always very convenient, because the more remote the golden age, the more imaginative were its reconstructions, as they could not always be tested factually. Mill's periodisation of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods, which many of us are now contesting, was accepted by these historians. A dichotomy was projected of a spiritual India as against a materialist West. This dichotomy is evident in all historiographies of colonial history, and makes for a fascinating comparative study, for example, with the notion of Negritude which developed in African and Caribbean societies. What the nationalists did not do was provide an alternative theory of explanation for Indian history. While they rejected some ideas like oriental despotism, which they disapproved of, they accepted others like the Aryan theory of race, which they were willing to incorporate. Nevertheless, the fact that they were ques- tioning some of these theories, irrespective of whether they arose out of orientalist scholarship or out of utilitarian writing, meant that a debate had been started. By the early 20th century, it was recognised that history is not unbiased information; it involves interpretation. This was a very major departure from the earlier histories. Nationalist interpretations gave rise to certain tangential inter- pretations, emerging partly from its own concerns and partly out of the politics of the 1920s and the 1930s. One of these, regarded as a fringe activity at the time but which has become much more central in the last ten years, was the writing of history based on religious nationalisms and relating primarily to the identities of communities as Hindu or Muslim. This gave rise to communal interpretations of India’s past. They were motivated primarily by the politics of the 1920s and the 1930s, and became extremely influ- ential in interpreting the pre-modem period in particular, because itwas during this period that the Hindu community and the Muslim community as identifiable communities or, as many people argued, as identifiable nations, were thought to have been established. Historical explanation from this perspective is based ona single, monocausal explanation, which is always religious. It is either religious confrontation or religious conformity between Hindus and Muslims which is seen as the causal factor in history. This kind of historical writing is opposed to that which examines socialInterpretations of Indian History 33 and economic history, because the latter shows up the poverty or even the inappropriateness of monocausal explanation. Its prominence in the last ten years is largely the result of the rise of political parties that draw support from: ionali as the Hindu nationalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).Such political ideologies constantly reiterate communal interpretations of Indian history. These interpretations, I would argue, are in fact distortions of Indian history. They are ideologically limited and intellectually even somewhat illiterate, because history becomes a kind of cate- chism in which the questions are known, the answers are known, and there is adherence to just those questions and those answers. No attempt is made to explore intellectually beyond this catechism. The aim is to define the identity of the Indian as specifically Hindu and to choose the one identity. This goes against the grain of Indian civilisation, which has been a civilisation of multiple identities. The potential and actual contestation now is over iden- tities, and the rights of these identities, forgetting that identities in history are never permanent; that they change constantly over time, and that present-day identities cannot in any manner be pushed back onto the past. The Post-colonial Interpretation I turn, finally, to post-colonial theories of interpretation. One of the theories that continues or has been revived is the communal interpretation which, of course, has received a lot of political sup- port, but is now becoming a highly contested theory. There have been, however, two other directions in which Indian history has moved, two very interesting and intellectually stimulating direc- tions, unlike communal historical writing. One of these is was Marxist historical writing, which was a major influence in the 1960s and 1970s. What is interesting about Indian Marxist historical writing is that although it used Marxist analysis, the dialectical method and historical materialism, it moved away from the given patterns that Marx and Engels had worked out for Asian history. For example, the major questioning of the Asiatic mode of production has come from Marxist historians. There has34 Romila Thapar been, therefore, a creative use of Marxist analysis in grappling with the issue of modes of production. Debates have also centred around questions such as whether Mary's five-stage theory of European history — primitive commun- ism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism —can also be applied to India, or whether there should be a completely new period- isation, using historical materialism but not necessarily conforming either to the five-stage theory or to the Asiatic mode of production theory. The focus of these debates, known as the transition debates, has frequently been on periods of change. In the 1970s, the question was whether there had been incipient capitalism in India prior to the colonial expansion in the 19th century. What was the state of the Indian economy? The famous ‘drain theory’ came into play here, the argument being that with industrialisation in Britain and the latter’s need for resources and markets, much of India’s wealth was drained away into Britain, fundamentally impoverishing Indian society. In the 1980s, the debate shifted to a different mode of production: feudalism. The debate, in fact, still continues on whether the feudal mode of production existed in India. The focus of interest therefore has been very much, as is to be expected, on social and economic history, on questioning the exist- ing periodisation. It has encouraged a large number of new trends and departures. Ithas opened up the study of Indian history, with even people who did not conform to Marxism being influenced by these new perspectives from which history has been viewed. Emphasis has also been laid on recognising the difference between pre-modern societies and modern societies. Are pre-modern societies embedded societies or are they open societies? There has beena focus on pre-capitalist economies and how they differ from modern economies, and on changes in society that go along with the fundamental change from clan to caste. The historical changes within caste have also received attention; this was not the case earlier because of the widespread belief that caste was rigid and frozen and, once it had come into existence, has continued without change. This focus has provided material for comparative histories raising questions for other disciplines: more recently, for example, such questions as religion as a social ideology. Because religion is often reduced to textual study, its dimensions get marginalised.Interpretations of Indian History 35 This approach of seeing religion as social ideology challenges a number of existing theories about the nature of religion. The other group that has recently played an important part is the group known as the subaltern historians. They are largely historians of modern Indian history who have initiated a new pers- pective on the study of Indian nationalism, arguing that the studies conducted in the 20th century were dominated by an elitism that focussed on either the colonial state or the indigenous elites, the bourgeois nationalists or the middle class. They stress the need to look at the participation of the subaltern groups as defined by Gramsci. ‘History from below’ became their slogan. The subaltern historians use diverse sources, moving away from archives and official papers to a variety of local sources, private and popular. They have also emphasised the importance of the oral tradition as legitimate historical source material. They en- courage the investigation of the minutiae of what goes into the making of an event, of the author, of the audience, of the intention. This investigation can be of either a written or an oral text. This kind of history then challenges the validity of making broad- based historical generalisations. Each study is self-contained. Eventually, there are a large number of well-documented studies with little cross-connection. This, frankly, is the level at which I have problems with this particular group, because I am a suffi- ciently old-fashioned historian to ask for generalisations. In focus- sing on the fragment, on the little piece that is being pulled apart, analysed and perhaps put together, there is a tendency to ignore the whole to which the fragment belongs. Is there a nation? Is there a national movement? We do not know, because what these scholars are concerned with is a manifestation of something which is very localised and very minute. It cannot, therefore, provide an alternative theory of nationalism, which may have been the original intention of those who founded the group. There is no framework of explanation which relates itself to a central point and to which each study can refer. There are multiple readings of texts, and these are encouraged, but priorities regarding these readings are not apparent. This is certainly the influence of post-modernism. I find it difficult to accept, because I do believe that some readings are more significant than others, and do not give equal priority to all readings irres- pective of what they are. History then becomes something of a36 Romila Thapar narrative, and there is a return to some 19th century historio- graphy, although of course the context and the framework are different. What is interesting is that this kind of historical writing has so far had no impact on pre-modern Indian history. This may be because of the nature of sources and the way in which historians handle these sources. It has, however, had a tremendous impact on many aspects of third world history outside India, partly per- haps because it is closely associated with post-modernism in its more recent phase. It therefore has international visibility, and this has encouraged comparative studies which historians are now taking much more seriously. To conclude, I have tried to suggest that in the modern writing of Indian history, there is a continuing dialogue and debate with colonial interpretations, with nationalist interpretations and with the evolution of theoretical formulations in the post-colonial period. This has resulted in Indian perspectives modifying or altering even the use of theoretical explanations in the histories of other parts of the world. This has not only enriched historical theory, even in areas other than India, but has also sharpened the debate and evaluation of comprehending the Indian past. Hope- fully, ithhas also provided a more perceptive understanding of the past, which I think is essential in order to understand the present,