History and interpretation:
Irfan Habib Courtesy: South Asia Documents http://www.ercwilcom.net/indowindow/sad/article.php?child=16&article=8 If one looks back at 1947 to find out in what ways it brought about changes in the approach to the medieval (that is, the post-ancient, pre-British, and, in much of earlier discourse, the 'Muslim') period of India's history, a few major shifts of emphasis could, perhaps, be immediately identified. First of all, Partition meant that the two communalist camps, Hindu and Muslim, found two different 'national' homes. Until 1947 there had been a running debate between the advocates of the two communities. But with 1947, the Muslim side in the communal historical debate shifted entirely to Pakistan, where in its seemingly final version, the history of 'Muslims in India' was now projected as a struggle for a separate nation right from A.D. 712, when Muhammad ibn Qasim entered Sind at the head of an Arab army. This was the reading of history pursued with much energy by the late Ishtiaq Husain Quraishi, and as recently as January this year the publication has been announced of a two-volume Road to Pakistan, its Vol.I comprising a 653-page account of "the period from A.D. 712 to 1858", written by "eminent historians and scholars of Pakistan" and edited by Hakim Mohammad Said of Hamdard (Karachi). In India, the contrary interpretation found its high priest in the well-known historian R. C. Majumdar. To him the entire period from c. 1200 onwards was one of foreign rule; Muslims were alien to Indian (Hindu) culture; the Hindus, oppressed and humiliated, wished nothing better than to slaughter "the Mlechhas" (Muslims); the British regime was a successor more civilised than "Muslim rule"; yet real opposition to the British came from Hindus, not Muslims, even in 1857; and, finally, the national movement's course was throughout distorted by concessions made to Muslims by Gandhiji, who was so much personally to blame for Partition. This view runs like a red thread in the volumes of History and Culture of the Indian People (first volume issued 1951), published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan with financial assistance from the Government of India, and edited by R. C. Majumdar, whose great industry must extract admiration from his worst critics. (An early critic was D. D. Kosambi, who wrote that if Islam was so alien to India as the original patron of the series, K. M. Munshi, and its editor R. C. Majumdar thought, then they should have worried about their own "good Muslim professional names"!). Majumdar went on to author texts on the Rebellion of 1857 and the freedom movement in which the same stance was firmly maintained. Though after Majumdar's death (1980), there has not appeared on the scene a historian of similar calibre in the Hindutva (or even the 'soft Hindutva') camp, the often unproven hypotheses and inferences that he bequeathed have all become firm truths for a very large number of educated people in India. It is not often perceived that both the Hindu and Muslim communal schools share a very large area of common ground. Both see the two religious communities as constant political entities, and, therefore, in effect, separate nations. The slogan "Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan", raised by the pre-1947 forebears of the present Sangh parivar, was the exact counterpart of the "Pakistan" slogan of the Muslim League and both equally implied adherence to the Two-Nation theory. Often, therefore, in the historical writings of the two schools, the heroes and villains are simply interchanged, while large areas of history have been ignored by both. The mainstream nationalist tradition of
historiography presented, in contrast, a much broader and critical view of
history. This could be seen in two early works on medieval Indian history,
namely, Tara Chand's Influence of Islam on Indian Culture, and
Mohammad Habib's monograph on Mahmud of Ghaznin, both published in the
1920s. Nationalist historiography presented a consistent affirmation of
the compositeness of India's heritage. It also felt called upon to
controvert the official British claim of improvement in Indian economic
life that the colonial regime had brought about, in contrast to its
'native' predecessors. W.H. Moreland's rather cautious statement of this
case brought forth challenges from Brij Narain (1929) and Radhakamal
Mukerji (1934), who presented favourable views of the economic performance
of the Mughal Empire. In the subsequent period, possibly owing to the difference in the main source-languages, there were two points to which Marxist-influenced research came separately to be directed. In his Indian Feudalism (1965), R. S. Sharma studied in detail the basic relationships in early medieval society down to the eve of the Ghorian conquests. He argued in favour of a "feudalism largely realising the surplus from peasants mainly in kind through superior rights in their land and through forced labour, which is not found on any considerable scale... after the Turkish conquest of India." These conclusions were largely underlined for the period immediately preceding c. 1200 by B.N.S. Yadava (1973). \ The other effort was directed to establishing what the later medieval class structures were like, whether different from those of the earlier period or not. Satish Chandra made an initial attempt to delineate the main features of the Mughal Indian political and social order (1959). I presented (1963) a detailed study of the agrarian system of Mughal India, in which I argued that there were two ruling classes, the centralised nobility and the dispersed landed gentry (zamindars); and that the Mughal Empire collapsed because of agrarian uprisings in which the zamindars utilised the desperation of the oppressed peasantry. In later writing (1969), I denied that the Mughal Empire had any potentialities for capitalistic development, despite a considerable presence of commodity production. The last thesis has been contested by Iqtidar A. Khan (1975), while S. Moosvi (1987) has patiently reworked the basic statistics in the Ain-i-Akbari on which all work on Mughal economic history must necessarily rely. M. Athar Ali (1966), emphasising the centralised nature of Mughal polity, and the ethnic and religious compositeness of the nobility, has argued against my thesis of an agrarian crisis in that Empire. From the 1970s, historical research in Medieval India began to be influenced by two distinct but converging currents. Burton Stein (1980) applied the theory of "segmentary state", evolved in African anthropology, to medieval South India, and this became a signal for its application, notably by A. Wink (1986), to both Mughal and Maratha sovereignty. The tendency here is to deny the historicity of the process of centralisation as well as systematisation in pre-colonial governments. The other current originated from Cambridge, with C.A. Bayly (1983), who, arguing for a continuity between the previous indigenous polities and the colonial regime, saw the operation of innovative "corporate groups" behind the Mughal imperial decline, groups that later shifted their loyalties to the East India Company. The Indian supporters of the Bayly thesis include Muzaffar Alam (1986) and S. Subrahmanyan. Neither thesis has been accepted by most Indian historians, and there has been a notable disavowal of both in the West itself, in J. F. Richards's volume on the Mughal Empire in the New Cambridge History of India (1993). The Indian (in part NRI) counterpart of the two western theories has been the "Subaltern" school, whose members have worked as a "collective" since 1982. Sharing the Cambridge School's scepticism of Indian nationalism, these historians have emphasised "the cultural autonomy" of tribal and local communities, and protested against those (including such as are conveniently termed "Nehruvian Marxists") who have assumed cultural syntheses and unifying factors to be an important element in Indian history. While the Subalterns' work has been mainly concerned with the period of the national movement, their beliefs enmesh fairly well with the criticism of nationalist and Marxist historiography of pre-colonial India that historians like Stein and Bayly have initiated. That different views on medieval India
should be influenced by the individual historian's subjective views of the
contemporary world is only to be expected; these must, however, first meet
the criterion of support from historical evidence. In fact, so long as new
views appear and provoke a fresh or extended exploration of the historical
documentation, one can only welcome the tendency not to take the given
history on trust. But historical evidence must always remain the
touchstone. A major problem today is that only a small and declining
number of people in India have access to Persian, in which language so
much of the source material of medieval India is to be found. Not only
does this large body of material need to be studied, but the collection of
documents in all languages has also to be encouraged, as well as local
antiquarian and archaeological work. With every passing day the evidence
on paper, metal or brick or stone is being destroyed. If the hand of
destruction is to be stayed, the people's interest in the country's past
needs to be aroused. In this effort all those who, without necessarily
being professional historians themselves, have yet a care for all aspects
and phases of our heritage, can play a most crucial part. |
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