The Medieval and South Asian History (PDF)

The idea of the medieval in the writing of South Asian history: contexts, methods and politics Author(s): Daud Ali Source: Social History, Vol. 39, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE ON SOUTH ASIA (August 2014), pp. 382-407 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24246490 Acc...

The idea of the medieval in the writing of South Asian history: contexts, methods and politics Author(s): Daud Ali Source: Social History, Vol. 39, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE ON SOUTH ASIA (August 2014), pp. 382-407 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24246490 Accessed: 05-08-2024 10:04 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social History This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Social History, 2014 H Routledge Vol. 39, NO. 3, 382-407, http://dx.doi.Org/l0.I08o/0307I022.20I4.94252I g\ TaylorS.FrancisGroup Daud Ali The idea of the medieval in the writing of South Asian history: contexts, methods and politics The concept of the 'medieval' in South Asia has been a long and contested one. From its origins among colonial administrators to its present-day habitation in educational institutions, the study of the medieval in South Asia has been vexed by issues of chronological uncertainty, obscurantism, communal distortion and heavy model building. Though introduced to India during the colonial encounter, the idea of the medieval, and the periodization upon which it rests, quickly became essential chronological attributes of the nation and the presupposition of its sovereignty.1 Recently, after weathering the storms of anthropological civilizationalism, ethno-history and subalternism, South Asia before colonialism has seen renewed interest. This has in part been connected to innovative work in eighteenth-century history and the related assertion of an 'early modern' period for South Asia. But the substantive relations between this epoch and the medieval are anything but clear. We find ourselves in the curious position where medieval South Asia for many historians ends some two hundred years after when for others the early modern is thought to have begun!2 It may be useful to begin with the issue of terminology. Because terms like 'medieval' came to be used in writing about South Asia as part of the wider adoption of western historical categories during the colonial period, it may seem tempting, following the trend of some recent critique, to question their relevance for understanding the South Asian past. Such anxieties seem to have been in the minds of those who conceived of the first truly comparativist journal of medieval history in New Delhi in the late 1990s, the Medieval History Journal. Contributors to its inaugural issue asked whether the category was a 'tyrannous construct', or an 'alien conceptual hegemony' when applied to non European societies.3 While critical reflection on the usefulness of particular temporal 1See, for the European context, K. Davis, 3See T. Reuter, 'Medieval: another tyrannous Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of construct', Medieval History Journal, I, I (1998), Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics 25-46 and H. Mukhia '"Medieval India": an of Time (Philadelphia, 2008). alien conceptual hegemony?', ibid., 91 — 106. 2Personal communication, Dr Sudipta Sen, University of California Davis. 2014 Taylor & Francis This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms August 2014 The 'medieval' and South Asian history 383 categories for writing history is a necessary and even welcome part of any living field of history, the tenor of recent discussion in South Asia has been altogether different. There has been an uneven but persistent tendency among some to argue that because 'western' historical categories emerged from the development of European history, that their application to the South Asian experience is at best inappropriate and at worst Eurocentric. There are, of course, weaker and stronger versions of this position, with some scholars advancing more or less considered alternatives like 'middle' period South Asia, and others eschewing the terminology altogether.4 To date, however, no meaningful alternative temporal framework has been put forward. Too often such arguments have served simply to delegitimize particular forms of analysis without taking the risk of suggesting viable alternatives. At another level, I would suggest that 'external' analytical frameworks are not at all bad in themselves, but in some ways the very life-blood of historical and critical enquiry. Every interpretation is ultimately external to the interpreted object, and in the case of the past our conceptions are perhaps doomed to exteriority of the present — from this perspective, that there can be no 'insider' framework for the past. The relevant question, instead, is how particular temporal maps may serve as more or less useful explanatory devices for understanding the past. It is notable, however, that the epochal divisions of Indian historical writing - terms like 'ancient', 'medieval' and 'modern' - have carried burdens that are at once both heavy and light. On the one hand, they remain redolent with association and have served to structure a certain sort of historical discourse - that associated with the 'official' histories written by professional historians and embodied in the state educational system. Yet the ideological content of these categories has generally weakened over time, so that they now largely (and perhaps appropriately) serve merely as temporal place-markers. Moreover, these discourses themselves have had notably superficial consequences, and seem to have little or no connection to wide swathes of perceptions about the past that are current in much of South Asia. For our purposes, it is notable, I believe, that the term madhyakalin or 'medieval' has little ideological valence outside the universities. Recent highly charged public discourses about the persecution and genocide of Hindus under Muslim rule, and the destruction of temples, notwithstanding - and these discourses, it should be noted, do not generally depend on any notion of the 'medieval' — there seems to be little sedimented ideological ballast for the concept in any meaningful capacity. The only exception might be the invocation of terms like 'feudal' and 'semi feudal' in the rural politics of post-independence India. This is not the case in Europe, where until recently the category of the medieval had arguably formed a 'critical component of modern self-definition' — and even now forms an ideological place of 4 An extreme version of this position has been would deny that a historicist framework was put forward by Ashis Nandy who has argued introduced in India with the coming of that history itself, in comparison with myth Europeans, and while it is of course true that and other ways of knowing the past, has been 'history' as a discipline was linked, and even complicit in the violence and exploitation integral to various 'Orientalist' representational produced by modernity. See A. Nandy, registers connected to forms of social 'History's forgotten doubles', History and dominance, it would be grossly reductive to Theory, xxxiv, 2 (1995), 44-66. While few assume this was its sole importance. This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 384 Social History vol. 39 : no. 3 'escape' in popular culture.5 In South Asia, filmic and popular invocations of the past provide no stable referent to the professional historian's 'medieval' period, presenting instead an often romantically infused and generically Islamicate world.6 So it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to begin an undergraduate class through an unpacking of what is already known from popular culture or any 'inherited' cultural baggage regarding the medieval as such in South Asia.7 This is all to say that the idea of medieval India, perhaps like some aspects of the modern itself, remains confined to very limited institutional spheres in South Asia. Yet the actual 'content' of medieval history has often in South Asia formed part of a wider and more popular cultural imagination which has on occasion become entangled with the subject of this history, academic history writing. PLACING THE MEDIEVAL Colonial scholars and administrators in the latter half of the nineteenth century were the first to subject South Asia to modern historicist scrutiny. Using coins, inscriptions and chronicles, they determined the dates and identities of numerous kings and dynasties. From the 1930s, with the rise of nationalist sentiment, South Asian scholars began to write about their own past, in many ways continuing and refining the research agendas they inherited from colonial historians. The particular configurations of colonial and early nationalist historiography of South Asia have proved immensely consequential for subsequent generations of historians.8 Not only did this historiography value certain types of evidence, particularly Indie language epigraphy, Persian chronicles and archaeology (while at the same time devaluing others like literature and religious texts), it set some of the enduring thematic and topical parameters which have shaped the course of the field. The initial focus was on the careers and personalities of rulers or the genius of races as the key causative forces in history, but eventually dynastic history became the dominant mode of writing about the past. To make sense of the myriad dynasties and lineages discovered in the sources, Orientalists, company administrators and historians had divided the past either into civilizational ages, including the concept of the 'golden age', or into the apparently more descriptive categories of 'Hindu', 'Muslim' and 'British'. Monstuart Elphinstone in his 1841 History of India, following Mill before him, divided India neatly into 'Hindu' and 'Mahometan' periods, reasoning that India's 'sequestered' ways were for the first time truly disturbed by the coming of Islam to the subcontinent.9 By the early decades of the twentieth century, both colonial and nationalist historians had begun to map the tripartite 5SeeJ. M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: 8Discussed at length in R. Thapar, Ancient Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Indian Social History: Some Interpretations Cultural Identity (London, 2008), 4-5. (Delhi, 1978); R. Thapar, Early India: from 6See U. Mukhopadhyay, The Medieval in Film: Origins to AD ljoo (Harmondsworth, 2002), Representing a Contested Time on Indian Screen 1-36; and R. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, (1920s—1960s) (Delhi, 2013), 1-5. 1990). 7A strategy usefully explored in European 9M. Elphinstone, A History of India, 2nd edn history by M. Bull, Thinking Medieval: An (London, 1843), 497. Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages (London, 2005), 7-41. This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms August 2014 The 'medieval' and South Asian history 385 scheme of 'ancient', 'medieval' and 'modern' on to the latter framework. The rise of nationalist sentiment meant that a number of complex ideological inflections came to bear on this periodization. Among these was a tendency to construct, drawing on earlier Orientalist scholarship, a 'glorious age', which acted as an originary moment in historical narratives. While there were differences among writers as to what empire or sub-period should hold this honour (typically the Mauryan or Gupta empires), an inevitable corollary of this idea was an ensuing period of political, economic and cultural decline, deemed as a 'dark', 'ominous' or, at best, 'difficult', period of national history. For many mainstream and right of centre scholars, the Turkish conquests and establishment of the Delhi Sultanate between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, seen in historiography to herald a 'Muslim' or 'medieval' period, provided a convenient watershed. In his preface to volume five of the twelve-volume avowedly nationalist History and Culture of the Indian People, K. M. Munshi proposed an even earlier date for the commencement of medieval India: 'AD 1000 was a fateful year for India. In that year, Mahmud of Ghazni first invaded it. That event, in my opinion, divides Ancient from Medieval India.'10 Underlying such epochal ruminations was the growing problem of communal conflict between Hindus and Muslims in British India and the consolidation of a geographical imagination of national territorial integrity for pre-modern India which excluded (problematically) the peoples of Central Asia as 'foreigners'. The Turkish campaigns in northern India thus became a violation of Indian territorial sovereignty — an 'invasion' — and Muslim rule inaugurated a 'dark' period from the days of glorious Hindu rule. More secular or inclusive versions of this approach typically attributed medieval decline not to the rise of Muslim power in South Asia, but to the development of a kind of national malaise, which had taken root in India before the Turkish conquests. Describing the situation in India on the eve of the Turkish conquests in his The Discovery of India, Nehru says that 'there was decline all along the line —intellectual, philosophical, political, in technique and methods of warfare, in knowledge of and contacts with the outside world, and there was a growth of local sentiments and feudal, small-group feelings at the expense of the larger conception of India as a whole'.11 Among historians there emerged a kind of common sense about the attributes of medieval India, one voiced perhaps most emblematically by Niharranjan Ray in his General President's Address to the Indian History Congress in Patiala in 1967, where he speculated on a 'medieval factor' in Indian history, eventually including a variegated, but well-familiar, list of attributes: supremacy of the scriptures and religious texts; subordination of reason and spirit of enquiry to faith and acceptance of authority; absolute obedience to priests and preachers; regionalism in territorial vision and in the pattern of political action; regionalism in art, language, literature, and script; relative paucity of secular literature; preponderance of commentarial thinking and writing over the creative; relative disregard for science and technology; proliferation of religious cults and sects; multiplication of gods and goddesses, 10K. M. Munshi, 'Preface' in R. C. Majumdar l'Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (ed.), The Struggle for Empire, vol. 5 of The (Delhi, repr. 1985), 226. History and Culture of the Indian People (Bombay, 1957), viii. This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 386 Social History vol. 39 : no. 3 and increasing conventionalization of iconic representations of them; accentuation of sectarian rivalries and jealousies; proliferation of the administrative machinery and extension and multiplication of bureaucracy; feudalization of land-ownership and fragmentation; relative dependence on land and agriculture in preference to trade, commerce and industry; preponderance of natural economy over what is known to economists as money economy; and a fatalistic and fearful attitude toward life; pre-disposition toward the supernatural and pre-determined destiny.12 Here we have in condensed form the entire gamut of stereotypes and associations that one could hope to find on the subject — one implicitly held by the modernizing elites of India's first decades of independence. Yet despite the apparently modern, rationalist and secular presumptions of such elaborations, and the fact that intellectuals and historians alike rejected the reductiveness of the Hindu-Muslim-British periodization, when religiously marked periods were finally abandoned for the terminology of 'ancient', 'medieval' and 'modern' in post-independence university history departments, chronological divisions ensured not only a persistent identification of 'ancient' with 'Hindu—Buddhist,' and 'medieval' with 'Muslim', but a continued association of ancient India with Hindu glory and medieval India with decline under Afghans and Turks. Empirically, there were, of course, uncomfortable aspects of this periodization, particularly around its edges. The centuries between the decline of the Gupta empire (325 — 550 CE) and the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century, for example — a period of almost 700 years — formed an awkward interim, when the proliferation of numerous royal dynasties throughout the subcontinent could hardly be cast as a period of Hindu glory or 'national unity', yet was before the commencement of Sultanate rule — being at once 'post-ancient' but 'pre-medieval'. As early as the 1920s both British and Indian scholars had conceived of a 'Hindu Medieval India' to resolve this problem.13 There were geographical problems, as well. The model was seriously biased toward north India, for at the very onset of an apparently Muslim-dominated 'medieval' India (or alternatively, at the nadir of 'Hindu medieval India') south India seemed to witness its day in the sun, with the powerful Hindu empires of the Cholas, Pandyas, Calukyas and Sangamas. The chronological and regional applicability of the idea of medieval India was thus fairly unstable. Yet even as these qualifications and refinements were accounted for, academic departments were consolidated and established in Indian universities around the broad divisions of'ancient' and 'medieval', implicitly understood as Buddhist/Hindu and Muslim, respectively. Nevertheless, research continued in post-Gupta history using Sanskrit and other Indie language sources, conceiving of itself as distinct from the departments of'ancient' history where it was institutionally situated. 12Niharranjan Ray, 'General President's section on 'Medieval Hindu kingdoms' within Address', Indian History Congress: Proceedings the larger division of 'Ancient and Hindu of the Twenty-ninth Session, Patiala tç6y (Patna, India'; see also C. V. Vaidya, History of 1968), 28. Mediaeval Hindu India: Being a History of India 13See, for example, V. Smith, Oxford History of from 600 to 1200 AD, 3 vols (Poona, 1921-6). India (Clarendon, 1919), which includes a This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms August 2014 The 'medieval' and South Asian history 387 EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIA The history of pre-Sultanate India from the 1930s was dominated by dynastic and regional historians, often of a generically nationalist orientation, who became the 'founding fathers' of the field. The more prominent of these, like R. C. Majumdar and K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, produced both regional and national histories of the period, and led an entire generation of scholarship energized by the 'historical optimism' of national independence.14 This generation continued the methods introduced by earlier colonial antiquarians and historians, particularly in their heavy reliance on the evidence of Indie language epigraphy. So important was epigraphy for this field that from the outset nearly all of its most prominent historians were also trained epigraphists. Conversely, some of the greatest epigraphists of the era may be equally counted as historians — figures like D. C. Sircar, V. V. Mirashi and H. V. Trivedi. Together, this generation of historians and epigraphers, many active as late as the 1980s, advanced the field immeasurably by bringing new sources to light and erecting reliable chronologies on to which later historians could write more differentiated forms of history.15 The late 1950s and 1960s, however, saw the rise of social history, as historians turned to new sorts of evidence and new topics of historical research. The legal, documentary and economic aspects of inscriptions, farmans, court chronicles and revenue records were carefully scrutinized for information on state institutions, political structures, revenue systems and agrarian relations, while archaeology and numismatics were used to gauge levels of trade and economic activity. Marxist scholars led the way in this innovation, proposing 'mode of production' and 'social formation' as analytical models for research.16 Those working on earlier sources elaborated a theory of'Indian feudalism'. These scholars argued that the alienation of rights to land revenue from higher to lower levels of political authority, through land grants, a process which began in Gupta times and accelerated afterwards, led to a generally 'feudalized' polity.17 Archaeological evidence of the decline of many major Gangetic cities after 300 CE was interpreted as part of a wider economic transformation that involved the ruralization and isolation of the economy to the autonomous village.18 Economic exchange was gradually and substantially demonetized, as coins became scarce, and internal and overseas trade declined. In many ways, Marxists developed a historical model of feudalism which was heavily indebted to particular studies of European history like those of Henri Pirenne and Marc Bloch. One of the notable effects 14R. C. Majumdar was the general editor of 15For two notable examples of later works that The History and Culture of the Indian People extend traditional dynastic history into new (London, 1951-74), and author of numerous directions, see D. Devahuti, Harsha: A Political monographs, including Hindu Colonies in the Study (Oxford, 1970) and K. Mohan, Early Far East (Calcutta, 1963) and History of Ancient Medieval Kashmir, with Special Reference to the Bengal (Calcutta, 1971). K. A. Nilakanta Sastri Loharas AD 1003-1171 (Delhi, 1981). was similarly prolific and wrote numerous 16D. D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of works, including A History of India (Madras, Indian History (Bombay, 1956); R. S. Sharma, 1950); The Cojas (Madras, 1937); and History of Indian Feudalism (Calcutta, 1965). South India from Prehistoric Times til the Fall of 17ibid, and Kosambi, op. cit., 295-405. Vijayanagara (Madras, 1955). Dynastic and 18R. S. Sharma, Urban Decay in India (300-1300) regional histories of pre-Sultanate India (Delhi, 1987). written during this period are simply too numerous to cite. This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Social History vol. 39 : no. 3 of the turn to social history and the thesis of'Indian feudalism' was to accentuate an already perceived distinction between pre- and post-Gupta India. The idea of an 'early' or 'incipient' medieval period from the Gupta empire to the Sultanate was slowly gaining ground. The theory of Indian 'feudalism' was widely discussed, debated and refined in historical monographs and journals throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and produced a literature which continued well into the last decade.19 By the late 1970s debates over modes of production, partly driven by the moment of high theory in Marxist social science, climaxed in heated discussions regarding the relevance of'feudalism' to Indian history.20 By the late 1980s, however, some fundamental assumptions of the feudalist model had been undermined on evidentiary grounds. These empirical challenges included a dispute over the interpretation of the land grants and the supposed urban decay and decline in trade and coinage. It was pointed out early on that the numerous land grants which the feudalists took to represent the alienation of state revenues to political subordinates were in fact usually gifts to religious functionaries, and thus did not contribute to a feudalization of political authority, but rather a system of 'landlordism'.21 The theory of urban decay was seriously complicated by the suggestion that the decline of ancient urban centres was accompanied by the growth of denser networks of rural settlements.22 Whereas the urban centres of ancient India were linked 'horizontally' in a thin but geographically dispersed network of regular exchange, those of post-Gupta India seem to have been more rooted in regional context and local exchange networks. Trade did not decline, and new research explored trading organizations and overseas trade.23 This seriously undermined the feudalist notion of a rural world composed of isolated, self-sufficient villages. And finally, economic historians, using methods different from those of numismatists, argued that coinage in post-Gupta India, while not constituting a great variety of types distinguished by issuing authorities, nevertheless increased in numbers, indicating that the volume of exchange in post-Gupta times was comparable to that of other periods in north Indian history.24 19The literature is voluminous, but for some 20See the special issue 'Feudalism in non key studies, see L. Gopal, The Economic Life of European societies' of the Journal of Peasant Northern India, c.700-1200 (Delhi, 1965); K. K. Studies, XII, 2—3 (1985), and the later collection Gopal, Feudalism in Northern India c.700—1200 included in H. Mukhia (ed.), The Feudalism CE (London, 1966); B. N. S. Yadava, Debate (Delhi, 1999). 'Immobility and subjection of Indian 21 See D. C. Sircar, 'Indian landlordism and peasantry in early medieval complex', Indian European feudalism', Studies in the Political and Historical Review, I, 1 (1974), 18-27; B- N. S. Administrative Systems of Ancient and Medieval Yadava, Society and Culture in Northern India in India (Delhi, 1974), 13-32. the Twelfth Century (Allahabad, 1973); D. N. 22B. D. Chattopadhyaya, 'Urban centres in Jha (ed.), The Feudal Order: State, Society and early medieval India: an overview' in Ideology in Early Medieval India (Delhi, 1987); S. Bhattacharyya and Romila Thapar (eds), D. N. Jha (ed.), Studies in Early Indian Economic Situating Indian History (Delhi, 1986). For south History (Delhi, 1980); R. K. Verma, Feudal India, see R. Champakalakshmi, Trade, Social Formation in Early Medieval India: A Study Ideology and Urbanization: South India 300 BC of the Kalachuris of Tripuri (Delhi, 2002). For to AD 1300 (Delhi, 1996). south India, see M. G. S. Narayanan, Re 23See the later articles in R. Chakravarti, Trade interpretations in South Indian History in Early India (Delhi, 2001). (Trivandrum, 1977) and Kesavan Veluthat, 24See J. Deyell, Living without Silver: The Political Structure of Early Medieval South India Monetary History of Early Medieval North India (Delhi, 1993). (Delhi, 1990). This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms August 2014 The 'medieval' and South Asian history 389 The effect of these criticisms was partly to discredit a kind of 'checklist' approach to feudalism adopted by some Marxist historians, where the Indian evidence was simply slotted into received models of historical development from Europe. These debates, however, did not discredit Marxist or social scientific approaches as such. By the end of the 1980s, however, the dominant interpretation of the state in medieval historiography, led by B. D. Chattopadhyaya and Hermann Kulke, came to be known as the 'integrative' or 'processural' model.25 It stressed agrarian expansion, urban transformation, localization and regional state formation as productive rather than regressive or fragmenting developments during the putative period of'Indian feudalism'. The medieval state in these formulations was seen neither as a pre-given entity, as in nationalist scholarship, nor the result of political fragmentation, as in feudalist historiography, but instead as having developed in a 'continuous process from below'. More generally, Chattopadhyaya argued that the transition to 'early medieval' India should not be seen primarily as a 'cessation', 'fragmentation' or 'decline' of existing structures, but instead as positive development of new social phenomena.26 The purported political fragmentation of post-Gupta India was explained as a proliferation rather than a devolution of'state structures'. Integral to such a perspective was the re-evaluation of the early or classical 'state' which had been inherited intact from nationalist historians, who had seen the Mauryan and Gupta empires as strong centralized polities with great territorial reach. These supposedly centralized bureaucratic entities had formed the backdrop against which feudalism was theorized by nationalist and Marxist historiography, as a fragmentation of authority. But revisionist work on the Mauryan empire argued it to be a more nodal and loosely structured entity than earlier scholarship had assumed.27 This meant that the emergence of polities in the peripheral zones of former Mauryan polity, for example, could be seen as new and onward developments 'catalysed' by the Mauryan state rather than the devolving fragments of an earlier central authority. The nationalist claims of a centralized Gupta empire stood on much less firm ground from the outset, and with the statist image of the Mauryas called into question, the Gupta empire came increasingly to be seen as the inauguration of a new political dispensation rather than the final stage of an earlier one. Preoccupations with a golden age of political unity and economic prosperity, usually associated with the ancient empires, were largely abandoned.28 In a series of influential articles Chattopadhyaya argued that early medieval society from Gupta times saw several important socio-economic and political changes — including the increased clearing and settlement of uncultivated lands (often through the deployment of land grants to Brahmins), the growth of networks of nucleated rural settlements, the growth of new political lineages and the transformation of non-state 25B. D. Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early provincial administration in ancient India: the Medieval India (Delhi, 1994); H. Kulke, 'The problem of the Mauryan empire', Indian early and imperial kingdom: a processural Historical Review, xiv, 1-2 (1987-8), 43-72. model of integrative state formation in early 28Thapar, Mauryas Revisited, and D. Lorenzen, medieval India' in H. Kulke (ed.), The State in 'Historians and the Gupta empire' in B. C. India 1000-1700 (Delhi, 1995), 233-62. Chhabra (ed.), Reappraising Gupta History: For 26Chattopadhyaya, Making, op. cit., 34—6. S. R. Goyal (Delhi, 1992), 47-60. 27R. Thapar, The Maury as Revisited (Calcutta, 1987). See also G. Fussman, 'Control and This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 390 Social History vol. 39 : no. 3 societies to 'state-society', the peasantization of cultivators and hunter-gatherers as a part of this process, and the concomitant incorporation of non-caste peoples into the varna hierarchy. The publication of Chattopadhyaya's book The Making of Early Medieval India enunciated what had been long in the making, that of a refined periodization of 'early medieval' India that was here to stay. Notably, unlike earlier applications of the 'medieval' applied to India's past, this idea emerged after sustained consideration and debate around specific social, economic and political developments. By the 1980s, historians had begun to introduce new methodologies and theories inspired by anthropology and sociology as much as Marxist or processualist frameworks. While the central concern of this literature remained an analysis of the state, it sought to explain the particular features of Indian states outside traditional explanatory frameworks. The insights of anthropology were brought to bear on questions of state, caste and kingship. Ronald Inden, drawing on the work of A. M. Hocart, proposed the notion of the state as a hierarchy of human and divine lordships which incorporated caste as an integral element of polity.30 In south India, Burton Stein drew on Aidan Southall's study of acephalous societies in Africa to propose a 'segmentary' model of the Chola state, while Nicholas Dirks explored the changing role of kingship and caste as the 'little kingdom' of the ancien regime was gradually hollowed out by the colonial policy.31 Interestingly, this literature and its categories, whether as segmentary polity, ethno history or imperial formation, generally did not articulate clearly with the trends and camps of medieval historiography well established in India and were largely ignored or refuted, though their contributions have arguably been just as formative for later developments in the field. Important too has been the work of Inden and others on medieval kingship, theorizing specific forms of kingship that were closely articulated with Hindu theistic and Jain religious orders.32 The lion's share of early medieval historiography was focused on state, society and economy. The study of culture was given far less attention by historians. Nationalist and dynastic historians, when they were not mining cultural materials for historical facts, framed literature and plastic art as expressions of the spirit of the age, patronized by beneficent monarchs. Literature, art and religion were entombed safely in dynastic histories as ancillary chapters alongside administration, taxes and municipal affairs, almost 29See B. D. Chattopadhyaya, Aspects of Rural 31B. Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval Settlements and Rural Society in Early Medieval South India (Delhi, 1980); N. Dirks, The Hollow India (Calcutta, 1990); B. D. Chattopadhyaya, Crown: Ethno-history of an Indian Kingdom 'Political processes and the structure of polity in (Cambridge, 1987). early medieval India' in Chattopadhyaya, 32R. Inden, 'Hierarchies of kings in medieval Making, op. cit., 195-232. These theories were India' and 'Hindu temple and chain of being', not without criticism. See the extended critique reprinted, with several other essays, in Ronald of Chattopadhyaya's theory of rural expansion Inden, Text and Practice, op. cit.; T. Arai, 'Jain in V. Jha, 'Settlement, society and polity in kinship in the Prahandhacintamani' in J. F. early medieval rural India', Indian Historical Richards (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Review, XX, 1-2 (1993-4), 34-65. Asia (Delhi, repr. 1998), 92-i32;J. Cort, 'Who 30R. Inden, 'Lordship and caste in Hindu is a king? Jain narratives of kinship in medieval discourse', reprinted, with several other essays, western India' inj. Cort (ed.), Open Boundaries: in R. Inden, Text and Practice: Essays in South Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History Asian History (Delhi, 2006). (New York, 1998), 85-110. This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms August 2014 The 'medieval' and South Asian history 391 as if they were reports on governmental or academic departments. There were of course exceptions to this kind of treatment. A handful of historically minded critics of literature, art and religion made richly textured contributions to the evolution of culture and religion in this period.33 These scholars were pioneers in the field of cultural history, but little attempt was made to incorporate such findings into the action of historical narratives. Historians of the 1960s and 1970s, heavily influenced by Marxian analysis, took more creative approaches to art and literature. Martial and erotic themes were taken to reflect the aggressive and lascivious tendencies of an exploitative feudal class, or read against the backdrop of feudal economic and social relations.34 Processualist approaches to the state tended to read literary representations of royalty and imperially patronized art rather blandly as the 'legitimation' of authority. Their interpretations of religion, however, were more nuanced. R. Champakalakshmi, for example, interpreted the long development of south Indian Tamil Saiva and Vaisnava bhakti cult from its early stages as a popular movement of wandering saints to its canonization and codification under the Chola state as undergoing a gradual shift from dissent to dominance.35 Other scholars, borrowing heavily from anthropological theories of cultural interaction, combined Marxist and processualist concerns over the peasantization and the proliferation of agriculture in early medieval India with theories of the spread of temple Hinduism through the incorporation of tribal deities into the Brahmanical Puranic pantheon.36 Brahmanical and Puranic localization, negotiation and incorporation of tribal, regional and vernacular religions throughout the medieval period became powerful templates for the historical understanding of the development of Hinduism in medieval India.37 33See R. G. Bhandarkar, Vaisnavism, Saivism Buddhism: A History of the Tantric Movement and Minor Religious Systems (Strasbourg, 1913); (New York, 2002). C. Sivaramamurti, Royal Conquests and Cultural 35R. Champakalakshmi, 'From devotion and Migrations in South India and the Deccan dissent to dominance' in R. Champakalakshmi (Calcutta, 1955); V. S. Agrawala, The Deeds and S. Gopal (eds), Tradition, Dissent and of Harsha [Being a Cultural Study of Bana's Ideology: Essays in Honour of Romila Thapar Harshacarita] (Varanasi, 1969); V. S. Pathak, (Delhi, 1996), 135-63. Ancient Historians of India: A Study in Historical 36See the landmark study by A. Eschmann, H. Biographies (New York, 1966). Kulke and G. Tripathi (eds), The Cult of 34See, for example, the articles of D. D. Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa Kosambi in B. D. Chattopadhyaya (ed.), (Delhi, 1986). See also H. Kulke, Kings and D. D. Kosambi: Combined Methods in Indology Cults: State Formation and Legitimation in India and Other Writings (Delhi, 2002); D. Desai, 'Art and Southeast Asia (Delhi, 2001). For a learned under feudalism in India (c. AD 500-1300)' in discussion of the anthropological context of D. N. Jha (ed.), Feudal Social Formation in Early these ideas, see K. Chakrabarti, India (Delhi, 1987), 391-401; and the very 'Anthropological models of cultural important B. N. S. Yadava, Society and Culture interaction and the study of religious process', in Northern India in the Twelfth Century Studies in History, VIII, 1 (1992), 123-49. (Allahabad, 1973). For a recent restatement of 37See the exemplary work by K. Chakrabarti, this line of argument in relation to Indian Religious Process: The Pur a (las and the Making of religion, at once more comprehensive than a Regional Tradition (Delhi, 2001). For an earlier Marxist interpretations but at the same historically authoritative south Indian time with little of the understanding of the perspective, see R. Champakalakshmi, social and economic analyses put forward by Religion, Tradition and Ideology in Pre-colonial this tradition, see R. Davidson, Indian Esoteric South India (Delhi, 2011). This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 392 Social History VOL. 39 : NO. 3 SULTANATE AND MUGHAL INDIA The period of so-called 'Islamic rule' - from the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate at the beginning of the thirteenth century to the fall of the Mughal empire at the beginning of the eighteenth — had from colonial times formed the proper and indisputable referent of India's 'medieval' history. The Mughal empire and the Rajput states that grew up with it held an intrinsic interest for the British. For a variety of reasons, partly because Persian chronicles provided a historical sensibility more familiar to colonial administrators, but also because the recent imperial past was a heritage the British sought variously to patronize, romanticize, contest and even symbolically appropriate, the Mughal empire formed one of the most researched fields in India's past before independence. The study of the Mughal empire, and the Islamic polities before it, was built on the foundation of Persian texts that were collected, edited and translated by colonial scholars in substantial numbers. Perhaps the most influential translation project, one that has been formative for the interpretation of medieval India more generally, was the publication of an extensive collection of selected excerpts from a great number of Persian chronicles arranged in chronological fashion, by H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson, known as The History of India as Told by its Own Historians,38 Though this multi-volume work has been criticized both methodologically and empirically for its decontextualized, misleading and even inaccurate presentation of passages from Persian chronicles as well as its underlying imperial agenda and preconceptions regarding Islamic polity, it continues to be drawn upon by scholars.39 Though the 'Sultanate Period' has usually been referred to as an era commencing with the emergence of Delhi as the centre of an independent polity under the manumitted Ghurid slave, Qutb-uddin Aibak in 1209 CE, and ending with the defeat of the last Lodi Sultan of Delhi by the Mughal Babur at the battle of Panipat in 1526, colonial and nationalist historians often extended its beginnings as far back as the beginning of the eighth century, when the Umayyad general Muhammad bin Qasim created an Arab military outpost in Sindh, or the beginning of the eleventh century, when the Ghaznavid emperor Mahmud sent military expeditions into north-western India. These events were regarded as the first depredations of Muslim conquerors in India, inaugurating what would become a historiography fraught with the burden of modern communal identity and conflict.40 38H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson, The History of r928), and after independence, A. L. Srivastava, India as Told by its Own Historians, 8 vols The Sultanate of Delhi (711-1526) including the (London, 1871). Arab Invasion of Sindh, Hindu Rule in 39For an excellent discussion of the limitations Afghanistan, and the Causes of Hindu Defeat in of this work and the overall use of Persian the Early Medieval Age (Agra, 1959). The 1970s sources, with special focus on the Deccan, see and 1980s saw the publication of more G. T. Kulkarni, 'Persian texts, documents, avowedly communal works like K. A. epigraphs and Deccan history' in R. Seshan Srivastava, The Position of Hindus under the (ed.), Medieval India: Problems and Possibilities Delhi Sultanate, 1206-1526 (Delhi, 1980), and (Mumbai, 2006), 36-53. See also S. H. the later works of K. S. Lai, including Growth of Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History: Muslim Population in Medieval India AD 1000 A Critical Commentary on Elliot and Dowson's 1800 (Delhi, 1973) and Indian Muslims: Who Are History of India as Told by its Own Historians, 2 They? (Delhi, 1990). I do not include here vols (Bombay, 1939-57). works clogging the book market and internet 40See W. Haig (ed.), The Cambridge History of by self-styled historians associated with India, vol. 3, Turks and Afghans (Cambridge, contemporary Hindutva. This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms August 2014 The 'medieval' and South Asian history 393 Most of this historical writing followed colonial historiography in its positivist and sometimes even naïve readings of Persian court chronicles. Because the Delhi Sultanate itself was not a single polity but a succession of several dynastic lineages that ruled Delhi between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, as more serious scholarship evolved in the 1960s and 1970s, it tended to divide into distinctive historiographies around lineages and periods.41 Despite its potential for controversy and an extensive body of source material in Persian and vernacular languages, the Sultanate period has remained comparatively under studied.42 As the last great political formation before the establishment of Company rule, the Mughal empire (1526-1707) has long received special attention, first from British administrators and writers, and later from nationalist historians. Even today the Mughal empire continues to elicit a very lively historiography. Colonial historians sought variously to emphasize its majesty and beneficence or its despotism, depending on whether they wished to cast themselves as inheritors of its mantle of authority or harbingers of change. In the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a richer historiography around the Mughals than any earlier dynasty in South Asian history. Much of this historiography centred on the policies and personalities of the Mughal emperors - particularly those of Babur, Akbar and Aurangzeb.43 The Mughal empire continued to play a role in debates in the first decades of the twentieth century, spurred by the rise of nationalism in India, particularly in the economic sphere. To counteract theories of British exploitation and the 'drain of wealth' from India put forward by nationalist economists like Dadhabai Naoroji and Romesh Chander Dutt, W. H. Moreland argued in an evaluation of the economic history of the Mughal empire that key economic problems attributed to British policy, including low standards of living and widespread poverty, actually had deeper roots in the Mughal past, and were thus long standing elements of Indian political economy.44 Given this legacy, it is not surprising that early Indian writers on the pre-colonial past should turn to the Mughals and take up similar themes. Jadunath Sarkar, the first historian of pre-British India to gain eminence, began his career with a five-volume study of the last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb (r. 1658 — 1707), using Persian and Marathi sources, and later wrote four further volumes, Fall of the Mughal Empire, which treated Aurangzeb's successors in the eighteenth century.45 Sarkar's mastery of the sources was at the time unparalleled and set the standard for historical scholarship for many decades. His focus, however, remained on the Mughal emperors and their personalities. While the character of Aurangzeb was vilified as bigoted and narrow, 41 See, for example, M. Habib, Some Aspects of 43These three, along with Asoka and various the Foundation of the Delhi Sultanate (Delhi, British governors general and viceroys formed 1968); the early work of K. S. Lai, History of the the subjects of historical biographies, in the Khaljis, 1290-1320 (Bombay, 1967); and K. A. Men Who Ruled India series, begun in 1899. Nizami, Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in 44W. H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar the Thirteenth Century (Bombay, 1961). (London, 1920); and W. H. Moreland, From 42For a recent attempt to rewrite the political Akbar to Aurangzeb (London, 1923). history of the Sultanate along more considered 45J. Sarkar, History of Aurangzeb, Based on and scrupulous empirical lines, see P. Jackson, Original Sources, 5 vols (Calcutta, 1924-30) and The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military Fall of the Mughal Empire, 4 vols (Calcutta, History (Cambridge, 1999). 1932-50). This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 394 Social History vol. 39 : no. 3 Akbar was celebrated as a tolerant and benevolent despot. Sarkar attributed the decline of the Mughal empire (and their latter-day rivals, the Marathas) to a moral degeneration and the stoking of communal tensions, particularly under Aurangzeb. Such explanations, however, were challenged by historians writing from Aligarh Muslim University in the 1960s from a largely Marxist perspective like Irfan Habib, Athar Ali and Nurul Hasan. These scholars presented a penetrating analysis of the dynamics of the Mughal state and offered very different accounts of its decline. For Habib, the decline of the Mughal empire had its origins in the ever increasing land revenues demanded by the imperial centre to fund its wars, causing large-scale rural exploitation and an agrarian crisis which led to migration, rebellion and a weakening of the state's hold on its provinces — a breakdown between the imperial estate holders and the peasantry.46 Athar Ali argued that the causes of the political crisis of the empire were rooted in a shortage of prebends and military estates to distribute to the imperial nobility, thereby fuelling an administrative crisis, while Nurul Hasan pointed to tensions between the state and the rural gentry, or zamindars.47 All these scholars, however, emphasized socio-economic factors for Mughal decline instead of the personality-based explanations. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, historians associated with Aligarh, much like their counterparts in early medieval history, sought to understand the power of the Mughal state through a combination of various factors: its agrarian base, its revenue system and its political structure. A substantial amount of research was conducted under this Marxist framework, which was also extended back to Sultanate times.48 Overall, there was a broad consensus that the power of the Mughal empire lay in a highly rationalized system of military estates, a cohesive imperial elite and an effective cash revenue-collecting apparatus backed up by military power.49 The main spokesman of what came to be known as the Aligarh school, Irfan Habib, did not conceive of this as 'feudalism' but a unique 'medieval Indian system', a vast agrarian landscape overlaid by a prebendal system supporting an imperial centre with a fiscalist outlook.50 In contrast to feudal polity, the Mughal state maintained a powerful hold on its subordinates through the mansabdari system. The accumulation of over four decades of research from Aligarh has produced a substantial historiographical tradition carefully grounded in the sources. While other 46I. Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 49See I. Habib, An Atlas of the Mughal Empire (1556-1707), 2nd edn (Delhi, 1999), 364-405. (Delhi, 1986). See also I. Habib (ed.), Essays in 47M. A. Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perception Aurangzeb (Bombay, 1966); N. Hasan, (London, 2002); Habib, Medieval India 1, op. 'Zamindars under the Mughals' in cit.; T. Rayachaudhuri, Bengal under Akhar and R. Frykenberg (ed.), Land Control and Social Jahangir: An Introductory Study in Social History Structure in Indian History (Madison, 1969). (Delhi, 1966), and Rayachaudhuri and Habib's 48See S. B. P. Nigam, Nobility under the Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 1 Sultans of Delhi (Delhi, 1968); I. Habib, 'The (Cambridge, 1982). M. A. Ali, The Apparatus of formation of the Sultanate ruling class of the Empire: Awards of Ranks, Offices and Titles to the thirteenth century' in I. Habib (ed.), Mughal Nobility 1574-1658 (Delhi, 1985); and Medieval India 1: Researches in the History of N. A. Siddiqi, Land Revenue Administration India 1250-1700 (Delhi, 1992); H. K. Naqvi, under the Mughals, 1700—1750 (Bombay, 1970). Agricultural, Industrial and Urban Dynamism 50See the remarks in 1. Habib, 'Classifying pre under the Sultans of Delhi 1206-1255 (Delhi, colonial India', Journal of Peasant Studies, Xlll, 1986). 2-3 (1985), 44-53 This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms August 2014 The 'medieval' and South Asian history 395 theories of the Mughal state have been put forward, most begin from the premise central to the Aligarh school, that the mansabdari system created a kind of 'steel frame' for a centralized state. Historians, including some trained partially at Aligarh, began to challenge various elements of this model from the 1980s - a development largely contemporaneous with criticism of feudalist models in early medieval historiography.52 One vector of critique was an attack on the claim for a centralized political and fiscal structure of the Mughal empire. It was argued that an over-reliance on and highly literalist reading of Persian chronicles and other key sources, most notably Abu'l Fazl's Ain-i Akbari, allowed historians to present a distorted picture of the Mughal state as a kind of highly centralized revenue-gathering machine, one ultimately driven by fiscal concerns.53 This was accompanied by a critique of the Aligarh school's dependence on state-sponsored documents at the expense of local sources in vernacular languages, particularly in provincial regions of the empire. By a close attention to either Persian or vernacular sources from the outlying regions and provinces of the empire, historians argued that local elites were often able to pursue their own agendas within the framework of Mughal power, and that local considerations constrained imperial appointments and policy to a considerable extent.54 Cumulatively, such studies had the effect of throwing into question the presumed immutability of the mansabdari system itself as the centrally administered 'steel frame' of the Mughal state. In their magisterial survey of Mughal historiography, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have suggested a move away from an approach to the state as a kind of pre-constituted (and hence ahistorical) object towards one that recognizes its historically situated and highly contingent nature. By showing how imperial policy had to make adjustments for local contexts as new domains were incorporated into its control, Alam and Subrahmanyam show how the Mughal state was 'fashioned and refashioned' as it expanded. The Mughal empire in the end thus resembled a "'patchwork quilt" rather than a "wall to wall carpet'" — a topography of contingent and shifting relationships which evolved over time and in which imperial control was uneven rather than uniform across space.55 Cultural production during Sultanate and Mughal times was for the most part treated much the same as its early medieval counterpart, in that literature, religion, architecture, and now painting, were generally seen as realms to be mined for facts or deemed simply as the accessories of the subject of 'real' historical writing — the state. The histories of a number of these fields, particularly architecture, painting and literature, were to a lesser 51 For other formulations, see S. Blake, 'The 54For a general argument and evidence relating patrimonial bureaucratic empire of the to Punjab, see C. Singh, 'Centre and periphery Mughals', Journal of Asian Studies, xxxix, I in the Mughal state: the case of seventeenth (t979), 77-94; more recently see J. F. Richards, century Punjab', Modern Asian Studies, xxu, 2 The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1993). (1988), 299-318; for Gujarat more recently, see 52For an overview of this scholarship, see F. Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam, Power Relations in Western India l^yg-iyjo 'Introduction' in The Mughal State, 1526-1750 (Cambridge, 2004). (Delhi, 1998), 1-70. 55Alam and Subrahmanyam, 'Introduction', 53M. Alam and S. Subrahmanyam, 'L'Etat op. cit., 57. moghol et sa fiscalité', Annales: Histoire Sciences Sociales, 1 (1994), 189-217. This content downloaded from 103.199.204.234 on Mon, 05 Aug 2024 10:04:58 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 39