India's History, India's Raj : Essays in Historical Understanding

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India's History, India's Raj: Essays in Historical Understanding highlights the myriad facets in the story of how Indians themselves participated in the construction not only of the Indian Raj but of Indian history. Due to distortions, omissions, or ideological bias, much of this story remains unbalanced or simply misunderstood. Never before in history has the whole 'continent' of geographic India, surrounded by mountain ranges to the north and oceans to the south, been unified under a single political system. That is until modern times. However long each monarch reigned, neither lasted their entire length of the political system over which they ruled. Maurya Empire began with Chandragupta and lasted beyond Ashoka; and Mughal rule began with Babur and Humayun and lasted beyond Aurangzeb. Yet, some micro-systems, such as villages, defied this trend and continued to flourish. How and why was this so? Within the pages of this volume are essays that, in one way or another, and from one perspective or another, seek to address this central question. Whatever the size or durability of a given political system, and however much rulers from outside India might have had a hand in its development, each political system was mainly the product of Indian manpower, Indian money, and Indian methods. The resulting structures were invariably a hybrid of cultures precariously melded together to achieve something larger. So much so that an amalgamated Indian-English (or 'Indish') language, and an 'Anglo-Indian' or 'Indo-British' culture spread over the entire subcontinent, and is still active and alive today, as are thick layers of blended Sanskritic and Persianate cultures that pervade and persist across almost all of the Indian subcontinent.

Robert Eric Frykenberg is Emeritus Professor of History and South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. His publications include Guntur District, 1788-1848: A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (1965); India: Today's World in Focus (1968); and Christianity in India: Beginnings to the Present (2008, repr, 2010). Frykenberg has edited Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (1969; revd. edn. in paperback 2020); Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia (1977; revd. edn. in paperback 2020); Delhi Through the Ages: Essays on Urban History, Culture, and Society (1986; revd. edn. in paperback 1993); Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communication Since 1500, With Special Reference to Caste, Conversion, and Colonialism (2003); and co-edited with Judith M. Brown, Christians, Cultural Interactions and India's Religious Traditions (2002).

'Without justice, the state is a great robber-band; but what are robber- bands if not little states?' So famously wrote Augustine over 1600 years ago. Yet, has there ever been a state system in any place or time where there was no injustice? Such issues are well understood by virtually all critical and serious historians. Since, likewise, no historical understanding is total or perfect, but only partial and invariably tainted, even in some small measure, a measure of humility in the face of what is not known is called for in any and all historians. Contrary to much prevailing, and fashionable, historiography that has tended to be too Eurocentric in outlook or, alternatively, too driven by one ideological dogma and theoretical abstraction or another, essays in this volume have aimed to apply various possible tools to tease out of existing data or evidence what might explain the rise and fall of regimes large and small, as well as principles by which to understand and systems of sociocultural coherence and governance.

For a number of years, conscious that articles and chapters produced for various kinds of publication, such as books and journals, tend to gradually disappear and forever vanish from sight, so that later generations would scarcely know of their existence, even if many were previously often cited, I have contemplated putting together a volume of such essays, so that they might become more easily accessible. Indeed, this project has long been at the back of my mind. Yet, a continuous flow of demands and immediate pressures of life, along with the inevitable and inescapable slowing down of one's capacities with advancing years tend to make doing things more difficult; this project's possibility lay on the 'back-burner, so to speak. Card catalogues in libraries, after all, cite books by their authors and titles, sometimes listing chapters that edited books contain. Bibliographic guides to journals, while they provide leads to journal articles, also tend to be far less accessible and/or far less used. Access to internet search engines, such as Google, can be less reliable or thorough, so that one must painstakingly try to gain access to the inside workings of journals to find chapter titles or authors, perhaps tracking journal contents chronologically. Moreover, search engines are rarely exhaustible in uncovering all relevant items, whether articles in journals or chapters in books. A book, on the other hand, resurrects and increases the likelihood that such items may not only be found, or known, but they may be more readily accessible. Thus it was that, when contacted by Primus about the possibility of putting together a volume of my essays, I was glad to oblige. This was a prime example of an occasion when 'preparation meets opportunity!

It is one thing, however, to come to an agreement, and quite another to: (1) gather together the materials required for such a volume; (2) get each of these items transformed into digitized format; and finally (3) acquire permissions and/or write-offs from publishers, especially when some of these no longer exist. These tasks looked daunting. Yet, quite soon, rescue came from members of the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department at the Memorial Library of the University of Wisconsin- Madison. I do not know what I would have done had I not received much help from Ms Kerry Kresse, who called upon local staff to both acquire and then make digitized copies of virtually every article or chapter that I wished to consider to include in this volume. Apart from this, she gave this technologically challenged scholar advice and tips on how to proceed. In short, I am not sure this project could have been accomplished without her generous help.

Historians contextualize. They not only do this with what they write, but with conclusions they draw, and significances they try to tease of out their analyses. Understanding the past cannot be recaptured, ertainly not in all its manifold comprehensiveness and variegated ances. They try to uncover understandings of fragments that remain om deeds and events from the past. Trying to understand complexities of how historians do what they do, and what they learn, has been a life- long preoccupation. Some of what was learned, at least up to 1986, is contained in a book entitled History and Belief. Another way to contextualize what is to be found in this anthology of essays is to examine a detailed track-record, showing 'foot-prints in the sand, left over the past sixty years or more.

It is a great honour to be asked to write a foreword to this important book of essays. Robert Eric Frykenberg has been one of South India's leading scholars. To the extent to which I have command over any region, it is over Bengal (later divided), its diaspora, and the eastern United Provinces and Bihar areas in colonial times known as 'up country' I approach this task, therefore, with profound humility.

It remains important to this day to engage with Robert Frykenberg's one-of-a-kind classic, Guntur District, 1788-1848, first published by Oxford University Press in 1965 almost sixty years ago. A history of 'local influence and central authority' in South Asia, it brought Indian agency at the district-level under Company rule into the spotlight. Some of the essays on this book pick up on themes raised in Guntur and develop them further. Others represent departures from it. Every one is in its way magisterial, and calls for close reading.

Certain essays thus pick up on the fragile nature of the Company state, (and indeed all states in South Asia), which could only succeed if they went with the grain of Indian society's larger harmonising 'secular' traditions, whether Hindu or Muslim. Frykenberg suggests that the Company State and the Raj were 'Hindu' in their orientation towards public order. He asks what their legacy has been after 1947. These fascinating themes are the subject of a number of essays on Indian modes of secularism and secularisation.

Many years ago, Hugh Tinker, reviewing Land Control and Social Structure in India (1969), observed that while it deserved 'to take its place in the mainstream of historical studies, its essays were with what he called 'chapati English. By this, he meant essays were loaded with Indian, Persian, and/Arabic terms-such as daftarkhana, dubashi, haveli, inam, jamabandi, mamool, taccavi, vakil, waqf, zaft, zillah, etc.,-as a matter of course. Such usage we now call 'Indian English'-or, as I prefer, 'Indish. This tongue represents, after North America, the second largest English-speaking population in the world. Without it, there would be no India. Without it, India would probably fall apart, and be ungovernable. Aristocratic and patrician forms of Indian English have made a remarkable impact upon the entire English-speaking world. Indeed, new and rising cultural elite of India produce some of the finest works in English literature, law, science, and technology, among its many other by-products.

What most characterizes the history of India during the past three or more centuries has been its utter, and inescapable, 'Indianness. Yet, even daring to suggest this is to fly in the face of much fashion within recent or current historiography. Preoccupations within much modern historiography have been either on imperial or national, colonial, anti- colonial, neo-colonial or post-colonial, subaltern and various forms of 'discourse analysis. Too often some rhetorical claim of 'theory' has served as a cover for ideology, with an agenda and bias attached thereto. While denying that any scholar is completely exempt from unconsciously held biases, in one form or another, the Indo-centricity or 'Indianness' of approach of the essays in this volume presupposes a respect for concrete particularities of empirically derived data pertaining to local elements and events 'native' to the subcontinent (or, more accurately, the continent) of India itself. This approach, or bias, has entailed a reticence about the easy translatability of such things into ostensibly cognate categories of the West. The central feature of 'Indianness'-indeed, virtually intrinsic to it-is hybridity. The terms are inextricably linked. Essays contained within this volume, as these have emerged over the past fifty years, unapologetically reflect such hybridity. The very term 'India, as it has evolved since it first emerged into the full light of day during the 1770s, is itself a culturally hybrid concept. What emerged and became integrated 'under' the rule of the East India Company, was always an 'Indo-British' amalgam. Quite simply, it was 'Indian'-or, in other words, 'native. It was composed of indigenous ingredients, or elements, without which, there could have been no India. Such elements-manpower, money, and methods, as well as cementing symbols-made things work. Did the earliest English agents in India ever fully understand such elements? Hardly-or, perhaps only partially. A 1639 golden tablet, or 'sasanam, inscribed in the Sri Venkateswara Temple at Tirupati and ratified by Sri Ranga Raya III, granted permission for the English (i.e. Francis Day) to establish a fortified station on the wide Coromandel beaches of Chennaipatnam and/or Madraspatnam. A small gold coin (hun, or 'pagoda") stamped with the image of Sri Venkateswara and issued from the same temple for the use of the local merchants gave legitimacy to this rising city-state. Later, after the sway of Company rule under the symbolic guise of Mughal authority had spread far and wide, the legitimacy of this rulership was reflected in the silver sikka rupee. Whatever the realities of power, this fictional façade of the rupee did not vanish until the 1830s, thirty years before the final extinction of the Mughal masnad (throne) and of the East India Company itself. Later, even as the Raj of the Crown succeeded that of the Company, embryonic forces of putative Indian nationalisms were already about bout to make their presence known. Hybridity and 'Indianness' characterized this entire history.