IntroductionWho else but poets resembling prajapatis [in creative power]
and able to bring forth beautiful compositions,
can place the past times before the eyes of men?1
‘When the Imperial standards were for the first time borne aloft in the garden of perpetual spring’, wrote Abul Fazl in the Ain-i-Akbari, ‘a book called Rajatarangini written in the Sanskrit tongue containing an account of the princes of Kashmir during a period of some four thousand years was presented to His Majesty’.2 Abul Fazl was writing about the Mughal conquest of Kashmir in 1586 and about the emperor Akbar's entry there as its new ruler. The gift of the Rajatarangini to Akbar underscores the perceived importance of history as a necessary requisite for the effective exercise of political power. Kings needed to know about the past experiences of their subjects, about lines of prior rulers and acts of governance associated with the latter. These were valuable both as points of reference and as an archive of memory. As historical productions of premodern societies, not just in India, but from all over the world indicate, it was not just kings who were interested in the actions of their predecessors, subjects too considered their rulers and acts of royal policy to be pre-eminent topics of history.3 Narratives about kings and their actions do not, of course, exhaust the substantive topics covered by pre-modern history, but they comprise a common and conventional subject of historical discourse.
The core theme of this book involves an exploration of the cultures of history writing in early modern Bengal. The seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first decade or so of the nineteenth centuries provide the temporal framework for this study—a period which witnessed the (p.2) consolidation of the Mughal political and cultural order, its subsequent political decline and the transition to early colonial rule. A related theme which runs through the book is the connection between culture and the production of history and specifically, between a Persianized Mughal political culture and history writing. The linguistic-cultural region of Bengal serves as the reference point for the exploration of these themes. The debates and soul-searching among professional historians in contemporary times about the dilemmas of accepting or rejecting the notion of history as a modern and liberal practice based on universal and rational principles are well known. For the early modern period (and generally for all pre-modern periods), as practitioners and audiences of the art and craft of history understood quite clearly, the narrative modes through which history was presented were firmly grounded in the conventions and styles of the linguistic and literary registers in which they were articulated. The study, thus, of early modern Indian/Bengali historiography makes sense in the context of the polity, society, and culture in which they were produced.
Linked to the two themes mentioned above is the issue of the cultural environment in which history was produced and used. The Persianized political culture associated with the Mughal imperial state represented a cultural formation which transcended the South Asian subcontinent and was current in many parts of the Islamic world during the medieval and early modern periods. The focus of this study, on the nexus between history writing and culture, also brings us to an issue which is significant both historically as well as in today's context. This touches upon the question of the interaction and relationship among Islamic culture and diverse non-Islamic cultural traditions that the former encountered in various parts of the world. In the context of this book, this topic is discussed with particular reference to an Islamicate culture associated in the South Asian subcontinent with Mughal rule and a range of regional traditions rooted in Bengal.
Composing History The commemoration of the past constitutes one of the basic and most ubiquitous of human endeavours from ancient times. As Michel de Certeau, among others, notes, all history is actually about the present.4 It is a dialogue of the present with the past. The past enabled its consumers to situate themselves vis-à-vis peoples, events, and things which had existed earlier and thereby, created antecedents for their (p.3) present identities, values, and preoccupations. History, therefore, in its most general sense, constitutes a form of remembrance and also a sense of rootedness because it provides pathways back to the origins whether of a lineage, a person, or a royal dynasty. Its very nature as the medium through which events and processes of past times, together with their outcomes, are remembered makes it eminently appropriate to be a repository of cautionary tales and morals. If the term culture is taken in its broadest sense to denote those practices and ideas which help to make sense of the world, then the connection between history and culture becomes obvious since history constitutes an important medium through which we can understand the present world better, particularly in the context of its past.
The rationale for a study of early modern/late pre-colonial historiography lies in the fact that an exploration of the nature, substantive content and function of history writing allows us to gain valuable insights into the cultural and intellectual parameters of such societies. Such an endeavour also opens up the cultural and literary idioms through which history was articulated. This is particularly significant in the case of South Asia where certain types of scholarship oriented to the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have tended to characterize pre-colonial India as a sort of featureless terrain whose main function seems to have been to serve as a foil and contrast to the colonial period.5 There is no question of minimizing the significant transformations brought about by colonial rule to key areas of Indian society, culture, and economy. However, to view the period prior to colonialism as mainly a foil to what followed, is to ignore the richness, distinctiveness, and dynamism of the centuries prior to the onset of a colonial modernity. An emergent corpus of recent scholarship on early medieval, medieval, and early modern India has served to stimulate and re-energize the study of these eras by moving away from the convention of writing chronologically-structured dynastic histories or concentrating exclusively on the history of administrative institutions. This body of work also serves to underscore the importance of understanding the literary and cultural idioms of these societies.6 Yet, the predilection to use modern notions and concepts to characterize pre-modern eras may not yet have been laid completely to rest. Such characterizations, I suspect, lie at the heart of the many centuries-old view that pre-colonial India lacked the ability to write proper history which arrived on the subcontinent as a ‘cargo cult’7 associated with the modernizing effects of British rule. Much of pre-colonial—and, in the case of this book, (p.4) early modern—history writing is still defined in terms of this critique. Hence it is necessary to first engage in a discussion of such views before embarking on an effort to describe early modern historiography in India/ Bengal on its own terms.
The Critique of Pre-Modern Indian HistoriographyBritish colonialist writers and commentators recognized that India possessed ancient traditions to write about the past. These, however, were loose, untidy, and irrational narratives which fell far short of qualifying for the status of proper history. The modern concept of history as a scientific and rational intellectual practice, which developed in academic institutions, is usually traced back to nineteenth century Europe and is regarded, above all, as a quest for ‘past reality’ based on rational, verifiable evidence which had to be judged by deploying a carefully cultivated objectivity.8
This understanding of history created a boundary between western professional history writing on the one hand and the multiple traditions of commemorating the past that it encountered around the world. From Latin America to Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, traditions about the past produced by these societies were deemed to be unworthy of being treated as history.9 India was placed among all those societies which had been incapable of generating their own cultures of proper history writing. Neither did European observers of the nineteenth century enjoy a monopoly in the exercise of remarking on this inadequacy of Indian society. Many centuries earlier, Al-Biruni had expressed similar opinions about the alleged inability of Indians to produce history.10
The establishment of British colonial rule over India made it necessary for the English East India Company's government to take an interest in the state of, or, in their view, the lack of appropriate historiographical cultures in India as part of a broader interest in the culture and intellectual traditions of its subjects. British writers such as James Mill, William Ward, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and others expressed disdain about the inability of Indians to write proper history11 and extended it to draw further deductions regarding the nature of Indians and Indian culture, that is, the lack of reason and scientific temperament among Indians generally, especially Hindus, the excessive influence of religion which inclined Indians to resort to religious myths, the despotic nature of the Indian state and the oppressive hierarchical nature of its society. In any case, the perceived lack of proper histories of India motivated British colonial officials, scholars, and commentators about India to launch a (p.5) programme of writing what they considered to be the first ‘scientific’, rational and, therefore, modern histories of the subcontinent.
These colonialist histories also became models or templates—mainly methodological—for the emergent class of Indian, colonial middle class literati. Disseminated, not exclusively, but primarily through the institutions of colonial education, the notion of history as a rational-positivist discipline exerted considerable influence on the middle class in India, particularly during the mid to later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the emergence of the first generation of professional Indian historians and scholars who were trained in modern, western-style universities which had developed in India during the nineteenth century, this methodology became the basic premise for the production of academic histories of India which could measure up to current standards that had been put in place for history writing. To this generation of professional Indian historians too, the older pre-modern materials which had circulated in India for centuries, that is, the Puranas, ancient and medieval chronicles, and genealogies of royal dynasties, and such others underscored the lack of a proper historical tradition in ancient and medieval India.12 By the yardstick of reason, objectivity, and factuality these fell into the category of ancient traditions, myths, and folklore. A similar trend is noticeable among middle class intelligentsia in almost all colonial and semi-colonial societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and also in regions such as Turkey or Japan.13
Discussions about history continued to revolve largely around its manifestation as one of the symptoms of colonial modernity, until a distinguished body of more recent scholarship alerted us to its potential as a powerful site for national and cultural self-expression during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This corpus of writings demonstrated that under colonial conditions in India, the writing of history became a contested terrain between the colonial state and its associates on the one hand and its middle-class Indian subjects on the other. The works of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Sudipta Kaviraj, and Dipesh Chakrabarty transformed the topic of history writing in colonial India from an isolated, perhaps somewhat dry, topic of study to one whose vital possibilities for the articulation of a nationalist identity and imagination were revealed.14 Indeed, the construction of an Indian historical past—in keeping with the disciplinary parameters of history as an evidence-based, rational, and objective practice—by the nationalist Indian literati became at once the manifestation as well as the site of (p.6) India's nationhood. The discourse about the nature and character of Indian history, whether emanating from colonialist writers, professional Indian historians and scholars of the early twentieth century, or more recent post-modernist scholarship, converge on the issue of its ‘new-ness’ vis-à-vis the mass of history-like materials which had circulated in India as a poor surrogate for true history during the many centuries preceding the beginning of colonial rule. Thus, the two latter groups of scholars also accept, as colonialist observers did, that pre-nineteenth century India lacked a proper historical consciousness. It emerged in India as a result of conditions created by colonialism and it was methodologically derived from western, metropolitan concepts of formal disciplinary history as an evidencebased, rational, scientific knowledge-practice. Its potential for Indian nationalism lay in the use that was made of it by the nationalist bourgeoisie. The literature on nationalist Indian historiography also characterizes it as representative of a rupture with earlier indigenous traditions and modes of commemorating the past. In fact, the Indian cultural and intellectual environment in this respect is portrayed implicitly as a sort of blank slate on which colonialism introduced its own unmediated impact in terms of history writing.15 Consequently, the possibility of the interaction of earlier pre-modern modes of commemorating the past with the modern rational practice of history writing was effectively precluded for the most part.
Pre-Modern Indian HistoriographyThis study derives from a perceived need to interrogate the assumptions about the nature of pre-modern Indian historiography discussed above—in this case, with reference to Bengal during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and very early nineteenth centuries—and to show that the forms, style, and content of history writing during this period were closely linked to contingent cultural imperatives. Colonialist writers, and other scholars who have provided insights about the flowering of a nationalist historiography, have defined history in terms of its modern incarnation as an objective, rational, and academic discipline. In projecting this concept backwards, one is bound perhaps to come up with little that corresponds identically to the state of historiography during the early modern period. As Marshall Sahlins writes, ‘if the past is a foreign country, then it is another culture’.16 In the Indian case, this led to the characterization of premodern historiography as a practice that was characterized by its ‘lack’, that is, its inadequacy with respect to what it was expected to be. Rao-ShulmanSubrahmanyam (p.7) accurately point out that earlier modes of commemorating the past need to be understood on their own terms, in the context of their own milieus and literary-cultural and political environments.17 This is a more sensitive way of understanding these materials rather than divorcing them from their material and cultural environments and attempting then to measure them in terms of criteria that were anterior to them or external to them, or both. It is indeed true that the turn of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth saw the crystallization of a methodologically and institutionally different kind of history from the regimes of historiography that held sway earlier. It cannot be automatically assumed that pre-modern India did not possess a historical consciousness. By that token, almost all societies in premodern times lacked a clearly rational-positivist sense of history.
If history is seen, particularly for the pre-nineteenth century period—not in terms of the formal, academic definition of it that emerged in European universities in the later nineteenth century—but merely as a set of practices that were used to commemorate the past, then it leaves open the possibility of envisioning it in terms of multiple cultures that were rooted in the narrative styles and conventions unique to the cultural and political contexts in which they were composed. The scholarly literature and its critiques of pre-modern Indian historiography referred to above, posit a distinction exclusively between the premodern lack of history on the one hand and the hegemony of formal academic history on the other. However, what gets excluded from this critique is the recognition that even in contemporary times, there is a large sphere of history which cannot be restricted by the formal academic definition of it. This is a point to which I shall return at the very end of the book. An emergent body of scholarship on pre-modern Indian historiography has eroded some of the earlier generalizations about modes of history writing prior to the nineteenth century. I refer here to the works of Rao-Shulman-Subrahmanyam, Cynthia Talbot, Sumit Guha, Prachi Deshpande, Ramya Sreenivasan, and others.18
Indian epistemologies do not contain any term or concept which corresponds totally to the modern notion of history as a rational, objective knowledge-practice linked to certain specific methodological protocols. The terms that are closest to it from within the Indic tradition and possibly some of the most ancient are itihasa and Purana. Etymologically derived as iti ha asa or, ‘thus it was’, itihasa, from very ancient times, denoted a body of stories about past times and past events. The term ‘Purana’ generally meant ancient or old, but more (p.8) specifically, indicated literature which contained accounts of kings, sages, and such others of ancient times. Many other terms and concepts bearing nearsynonymous meanings in different vernacular Indian languages were also used to narrate accounts of past times. From around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Islamic tradition of tarikh writing—typically a tradition of chronologically recording the reigns of successive rulers—entered India and enjoyed a vigorous career in the Indian subcontinent for many centuries. A more detailed genealogy of the ranges of meanings associated with itihasa, Purana, tarikh and their evolution has been sketched out in Chapter 1 which discusses the most characteristic features of pre-modern historiography in general terms.
Itihasa in pre-modern India was not a specialized practice associated exclusively with formal institutions of higher learning. As Rao-Shulman-Subrahmanyam insightfully point out, it was not a shastra (a formal intellectual discipline), it was not associated with a fixed genre (prose/verse) or form (biography, chronicle, annal, and others), and it was not necessarily practised by specialists.19 It was manifest in a variety of languages, genres, and forms but not identifiable by a specialized methodology. As Romila Thapar observes, it was a practice which was ‘embedded’ in various kinds of narratives, thereby sometimes rendering it difficult for modern readers, accustomed to regarding history as a self-contained exclusive discipline, to identify it in materials which defied such characterization.20 The closeness of itihasa, in fact its virtual sameness with kavya or literature, further reinforces this difficulty for readers with modern sensibilities. The current tendency to distinguish between ‘literature’, understood most generally as fictional narrative, and ‘history’ as a rationalpositivist academic discipline seems inappropriate for pre-modern historiography. Even if one does not go so far as accepting Hayden White's virtual reduction of history to a form of rhetoric,21 many contemporary historians are probably not uncomfortable about recognizing a degree of literariness about the historians' craft. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century concept of history as scientific and uncompromisingly factual perhaps made it inevitable that ancient, medieval, and early modern modes of history writing, in their capacity as kavya (poetic literature) would be deemed unacceptable. Kavya was also expected to appeal to the emotions—the Sanskrit literary tradition is associated with a distinguished theory of poetic aesthetics (rasa). Here too lay a major distinction between the conceptualization of history as rational and objective science on the one hand and the close, virtual inseparability of pre-modern historiography with kavya.
Much of the commentary on the a-historical nature of Indian historiographical traditions prior to the nineteenth century seems to be based on the epic and Puranic literature, that is, narratives which, through repeated tellings over centuries, came to embody tradition (aitihya) itself. In these materials, time is indeed perceived to be cyclical and composed of giant chronological units which were different for the gods, human beings, and demons. The protagonists in these materials, similarly, were not restricted to the human species, but accommodated a variety of other beings. The plots of these narratives were characterized by layers of nested stories within them. The ‘original’ authors of these stories were perceived to be sages, themselves the subject of many stories and traditions. The powerful influence of epic-Puranic traditions on historiographic narratives in pre-modern India does not require reiteration here. However, this commentary overlooks the inherent diversity and heterogeneity of Indian historiographical cultures. These included biographical narratives about kings, sages, heads of lineages, continuous chronicles which recorded the reigns of successive generations of kings, and materials which recorded quotidian administrative practices, as well as the evolution of political and social institutions. Ancient and medieval historiography was not only couched in the form of the Puranas and the epics, but in a variety of forms. The terms used to describe these forms were also vast and varied and differed from one region to another; these forms themselves were neither timeless, nor unchanging, and could moreover perform different cultural and political functions over time.22 Even truly ancient materials, such as the Puranas, for example, which are regarded as embodying aitihya, have to be examined much more critically instead of accepting at face value their claims to be unchanging.
The Indo-Persian tarikh tradition which enjoyed a long and vigorous life within the Indian subcontinent and was a primary mode of commemorating the political/administrative acts of rulers together with their moral/ethical principles of governance has most often been treated as a category of narrative that is separate from the various others mentioned above. What lies behind this tendency is the proclivity to treat epics, Puranas, vamshavalis, charitras, and such others in Sanskrit and the various regional vernaculars as representative of Hindu or Indian historiographical traditions, while the tarikhs, associated historically with Muslim rulers in India, are treated separately as though they cannot be placed under the Indian label. Furthermore, scholars who have typically written about pre-modern historical cultures have explicitly and (p.10) implicitly adopted the position that there existed two separate cultural and intellectual traditions in India. As manifest in historiography, they were embodied by the Indian/Hindu forms on the one hand and by the Indo-Islamic tarikh form on the other and the possibilities of interaction between them have received little or no attention.
Pre-modern historiography is also contrasted vis-à-vis the perceived attributes of the modern, scientific-empirical practice of history. These points of contrast are many and range from the former's lack of proper methodology, lack of a clear demarcation between the factual and the fantastic, lack of connection to contingent material concerns, the notion of cyclical time, and the use of verse rather than the exclusive use of prose, and many others. The discussion in the subsequent chapters underscores the need to modify and adjust many of these notions. For now, it is enough to point out that pre-modern historiography was not oblivious of methodology and concepts of authority; evidence and the qualifications of the author were acknowledged to be important. However, these can be appreciated only through an understanding of pre-modern notions and conventions which were not identical to those current in the modern academy. Regarding the absence of a clear demarcation between the factual and the fantastic, Rao-Sulman-Subrahmanyam suggest that contemporary audiences were able to determine such matters by what they term the ‘texture’ of the narrative, that is, textual markers comprising syntax, lexical choices, metrical devices, and the like.23 The concept of texture has its critics.24 But, it is also true that a contemporary audience would be much more sensitive and attuned to distinguishing between factuality and the fantastic in narrative texts than us. More importantly, the uses and functions of pre-modern historiographical narratives varied according to genre and the immediate context. A matter of fact recording of dynastic succession would certainly not be read in the same manner as the telling of the exploits of a deity. The notion of cyclical time is upheld by critics of pre-modern history as yet another instance of the irrational and a factor that may have impeded the development of proper history in India.25 In certain types and forms of pre-modern narratives, time was indeed represented as looping around in giant spans. But such characterization misses the point that linear, diachronic time was often paired with a cyclical chronology and that each performed different functions. Hayden White associates pre-modern historical writing with the annal and chronicle forms, both of which, in his characterization, aspired to narrativity, but typically failed to achieve it. The full-blown historical narrative, by contrast, succeeded in achieving (p.11) a narrative closure and was characterized by ‘a well-marked beginning, middle and end phases’.26 In White's view, the annal and the chronicle fell short of being admitted to the realm of proper history but functioned as steps leading to the efflorescence of genuine history. This book shows that chronicles and texts which achieved narrative closure coexisted contemporaneously and, therefore, it is not valid to regard them as representing successive stages of historical consciousness. It is more useful to acknowledge their simultaneous existence, but to be aware that they may well have performed different historiographic functions.
The points discussed above provide detailed points of contrast between history in its modern sense vis-à-vis its pre-modern incarnation. But the broadest, and possibly one of the best-known distinctions, drawn between history and something which is not history, but resembles it, revolves around the attempts to distinguish between history and memory. Starting with Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s to the more recent work of Idith Zertal and others,27 the history/ memory debate posits the distinction between the two in terms of naturalness versus artificiality. Memory is regarded as the spontaneous, natural act of remembrance by individuals and collective entities such as communities. Halbwachs, in fact, emphasized the socially and communally collective context of all memory, even individual memory. History, by contrast is characterized as artificial, even manipulative and associated with the powerful and the successful. The artificial, contrived nature of history is seen to lie in the methodological protocols which characterize its modern, professional practice. Following Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and Yosef Yarushalmi, among others, have lamented the hegemony of history at the expense of collective memory. Nora actually portrayed history almost as a destructive and negative force that ‘besieges memory deforming it…penetrating and petrifying it’.28 The pre-modern narratives studied in this book cannot be characterized as invariably detached from the politics of power and to this extent they do not conform to definitions of memory in those terms. But, by the other criteria used by Nora, Yarushalmi et al., they might well fall under the rubric of memory since pre-modern narratives did not follow the methodological protocols of modern, disciplinary history.
However, the conceptualization of history and memory as so very sharply contrasted seems exaggerated. As Jacques Le Goff points out, memory is not necessarily innocent of the problematics of power and is equally subject to manipulation.29 Rather than viewing history as a sinister antithesis to memory, I find Le Goff's suggestion of a complementarity (p.12) between the two to be much more persuasive. ‘Memory’, according to Le Goff, ‘is the raw material of history. Whether mental, oral, or written, it is the living source from which historians draw…moreover the discipline of history nourishes memory’.30 Finally, the common tendency to think of history in the modern form as focussed on the subject of the nation-state, I believe, needs to be modified as does the lament for the loss or marginalization of ‘memory’ or any practice of remembering the past which does not fit the model of modern, academic history. I offer a brief discussion of some of these issues in the last chapter of the book.
Political Culture and History: The Mughal Empire and Persianization The historiographic narratives explored in this book were composed in Bengal under Mughal rule during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Mughal empire is the subject of a large body of scholarly literature. Most studies concentrate on and provide valuable insights into the administrative and military institutions associated with the government of the empire.31 Investigating the perceived weakening and decline of the empire in the eighteenth century has also been a topic of abiding interest for scholars.32 By contrast, there has been surprisingly little research on the cultural dimensions of the Mughal imperial polity.33 This polity was indeed long-lived, admittedly in a much weakened condition from the eighteenth century onwards. However, the image of the Mughals as the paramount source of political authority and sovereignty within the Indian subcontinent lingered on long after it had lost most of its territories and had been reduced to dire financial straits. The continuing perception of the Mughals as legitimate political overlords through the eighteenth and, at least, part of the nineteenth centuries, indicates a need for scholarly explorations of the cultural phenomena and practices associated with the empire. In the absence of such studies, it is harder to understand the remarkably long-lived hegemony in the Gramscian sense, enjoyed conceptually at least by the Mughal polity. The ‘hegemony’ referred to here was admittedly symbolic and a matter of perception during the eighteenth century and later. But who would argue that symbols and perceptions are unimportant? Thus, a study of the cultural dimensions of the Mughal polity can provide invaluable insights into the ability of the empire to function not only as an efficient military/administrative entity, but also in some sense, as a cultural exemplar.
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam have emphasized the need for the development of this trajectory in studies of Mughal India.34 Some scholarly strides in this direction have occurred since then; other scholarly steps had already been taken in this direction at the time of Alam and Subrahmanyam's reminder about the need for more work along these lines. J.F. Richards' study of the development among Mughal bureaucrats of a tradition of loyal, devoted service to the empire represents a landmark in the study of the political culture of this imperial polity.35 Richard Eaton's exploration of the simultaneous expansion of the agrarian frontier, and the initial spread of Islam in eastern Bengal, during the period of Mughal rule indicates a significant break from the established paradigm of studying Mughal revenue-collection mechanisms.36 Ruby Lal's recent monograph is a sophisticated study of the processes by which the Mughal haram emerged, both as a concept and as a spatial, institutional entity.37 Also representative of research which is focused more directly on the cultural dimensions of the Mughal state are the researches of Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam on the significance of a Persianized culture both within Mughal India and beyond it.38
A feature which was closely associated with Mughal governance was the Persian language and associated with it, a Persianized political culture. Muzaffar Alam's study of the Mughal pursuit of Persian emphasizes the function of this language as a tool of administration, but perhaps, even more importantly, its ability to contribute to the creation of a political culture, ‘arching over diverse Indian religious and cultural identities, Persian in the existing circumstances promised to be the appropriate vehicle to communicate and sustain such an ideal’.39 Persian also served as a trans-regional, cosmopolitan language and associated culture which was followed not just by political elites within India during and prior to Mughal times, but also by their counterparts in a wider Islamic and Islamicate world. Deriving from its status as the language of high culture in large parts of the Islamic world, Persian had for long been used for the composition of histories. These narratives, called tarikhs, provided connected accounts of reigns of successive kings and their government. The authors and audiences of tarikhs were most often people who were closely connected with courtly society. In pre-Mughal as well as in Mughal times, the tarikh came to represent a pre-eminent type of historiographic narrative which was linked to the culture prevailing among courtly and political elites.40
This book studies the transmission of a Persianized, Mughal political culture among the aristocracy and gentry of Bengal. In particular it (p.14) seeks to trace the shadows cast by the Indo-Persian tarikh tradition on a variety of historiographic narratives that were produced here during that period. The Persian language and a Persianized political culture are understood to be important factors which linked together in particular the higher ranks of Mughal imperial officials in different parts of the empire. This study focuses in particular on how provincial aristocracy and gentry—many of whom had direct and indirect links with Mughal provincial government—appropriated aspects of this Persianized culture. One of the findings of this study is that although historiographic narratives current in Bengal during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were embedded within well-established literary forms and conventions (primarily Sanskritic and regional/vernacular), during this period, they exhibited significant shifts and changes in terms of content and idiom. Many of these ‘newer’ features, I argue, were inflected with elements drawn from a Persianized culture. The experience of Mughal rule, the necessity of understanding the subcontinental configuration of political power, and the perceived attractiveness of assimilating aspects of a Persianized political culture —these factors collectively explain the newer features manifest in certain types of historiographic texts current in the region. Persian tarikhs composed in eighteenth century Bengal also showed sensitivity to the immediate political and cultural contexts in which they were produced. The English language narratives composed by employees of the English East India Company were equally attuned during this period to a Persianized historiographical and cultural tradition. The ability of early modern historiographic texts to adjust to contingent political contexts and to mirror prevailing issues and anxieties, sometimes in new and different idioms and political vocabularies, is a powerful reminder that history writing in pre-modern and early-modern India was not necessarily an exercise in repeating formulaic, unchanging notions of the past. Instead, they functioned as political and cultural statements derived from their immediate environments.
The appropriation of a Persianized political culture by the elites of Mughal Bengal is related to an issue of considerable weight and significance, that is the reception of empire by its subjects, particularly in terms of its political culture. The issue is actually part of an even larger question regarding the cultural interactions and tensions between the imperial polity on the one hand and a range of regional, local, vernacular cultures in different parts of the empire on the other. Catherine Asher's description of what was effectively a double-sided movement between the two is more than valid.41 Asher demonstrates how Bengal's vernacular (p.15) architectural style became an element in Mughal architecture following the conquest of the region in the later sixteenth century; Shantanu Phukan studies the reception of the Hindi/Awadhi romance, the Padmavat by Mughal readers;42 Lizzie Collingham sketches out the processes by which the humble khichri, a staple of the peasant's diet, was integrated into the royal cuisine of the Mughals, albeit after it was made richer and more sophisticated.43 Scholars of music demonstrate how regional musical traditions were admitted into an evolving tradition of Hindustani classical music.44 The concern of the present study with the relationship between a Persianized Mughal culture and its resonance in the province of Bengal, is located within this broad topic. Although fully aware of its connection to this broader topic, in this book, I concentrate on a smaller, delimited aspect of it, that is, the appropriation by a segment of Bengal's society of aspects of a Mughal, Persianized political culture and its manifestation in historiographic narratives composed in this region during a selected period of time.
Existing historiography on the Mughals has not had much to say so far about how the empire and its culture were received and perceived by its subjects.45 This is particularly true for Bengal where the received picture tends to portray it for the most part as an oppressive, ‘foreign’ regime which was seriously alienated from its subjects. Bengal itself is regarded as a distant, peripheral part of the Mughal polity. The prevalence of Persian among the Bengali gentry has long been acknowledged by older traditions of scholarship on this subject.46 But this corpus of scholarship does not go far enough in assessing the extent and depth not just of the Persian language, but a Persianized political cultural phenomenon in this region. Persian is treated either as a new philological influence, or as a utilitarian medium for career advancement.47 The status of Persian as a medium of sophistication, refinement, and cosmopolitanism among the Bengali gentry and aristocracy of this period tends to be overlooked. Also, the Mughal phase in Bengal's history has not generated much scholarly attention in the last several decades.48 It is worthwhile, in the light of a newer wave of scholarship about Mughal India to explore the provincial manifestations of an imperial political culture.
Interactions between Islamicate and Indic Cultures Persianization in the Mughal and pre-Mughal contexts also represented an element in a broader Islamicate culture that had enjoyed currency (p.16) in India for several centuries. The exploration of patterns of interaction among Bengali narrative genres and a Persianized tradition therefore indicates an effort to study the dynamics between Islamicate culture on the one hand and an Indic, vernacular, regional culture on the other, together with the manifest limitations of such an encounter. Scholars of South Asian Islam in recent years have shown a remarkable sensitivity towards the question of the interactions between Islamic cultural traditions and the many Indic, vernacular traditions in different parts of the subcontinent.49 Regarding historiography though, the tendency has still been to study the Indo-Persian tarikh tradition separately from the many regional, Indic, vernacular literary and historiographical traditions. The narrative materials studied in this book support the position that a Persianized culture and perhaps, more specifically, the Indo-Persian tarikh literature, may well explain the emergence of certain newer features in the former. This does not imply that such a process involved the virtual transplantation of features associated with tarikhs into Bengal's genealogical traditions or other types of narratives during the early modern period. Instead, as the substantive chapters of the book demonstrate, this process was associated with a deliberate and selective assimilation of particular idioms and vocabularies primarily from a Persianized political culture.
The Book and its Plan This work is based on Bengali, Sanskrit, Persian, and English materials. The main corpus of primary sources though are drawn from Bengali materials composed around the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—local histories, family chronicles, and such others provide invaluable information and insights to reconstruct the environment in which Bengali aristocracy and gentry embraced a Persianized culture and allowed some of its features to be reflected in particular kinds of narrative and historiographic texts that they patronized, composed, and read. The issue regarding the type of sources used is significant—it speaks to the importance of writing Mughal history, based not on just Persian materials, but of combining these with materials in regional, vernacular languages. Persian sources must remain predominant for reconstructing many important aspects of Mughal history—administrative history certainly, but also cultural history. But to view the empire and its culture through the prism of vernacular literature (p. 17) yields a picture which is different in many important respects. It allows us to track the imprints left by the empire and its political culture on regional traditions and cultures.
This study of early modern historiographical narratives produced and used in early modern Bengal does not pretend to be comprehensive. I have selected and studied materials that are indicative of certain genres and traditions that were used widely in this region for many centuries. This is true of the genealogies explored in Chapter 2 and the performance narratives, particularly its Mangalkavya genre studied in Chapter 3. Some other materials were in a sense unique to the exact time and context in which they were produced: the accounts studied in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 for instance, are illustrative of it. The texts discussed in Chapter 4 are Bengali narratives composed in circumstances that cannot be envisioned in the absence of a colonial state in Bengal during the later eighteenth century. However, they also need to be positioned vis-à-vis a longer tradition of ‘accounts of kings’ that transcend the immediate moment of their production. The narratives discussed in Chapter 5 are also ‘accounts of kings’. These belong to a long tradition of Persian and Indo-Persian accounts regarding rulers and their modes of governance. The timing, substance, and the context of their composition were also unique to the situation produced in Bengal in the late eighteenth century by the decline of the Mughal polity and the concomittant rise of an English East India Company's state. The English language narratives studied in Chapter 6 were composed by officials of the English East India Company, impelled by the dilemmas generated by the sudden transition of the Company to the status of ruler during the later eighteenth century. Chapters 2 through 6 explore the content and function of these different types of narratives as well as their material contexts. An effort has also been made to tease out and examine what, if any, newer textual features are evident in these narratives— whether in terms of substance, idiom, or political imagination. Chapter 1 sketches out the political, cultural, and literary environment of Mughal and very early colonial Bengal. Chapter 7 discusses the phenomenon of Persianization both as an aspect of Mughal political culture within India as well as a broader trans-Indian, Islamicate cultural phenomenon. The extent of Persianization in Mughal Bengal, as well as its limits, are also addressed here. The last chapter serves both as a conclusion and as a place for afterthoughts—it engages too with the notion that the coming of colonialism and modernity to India erased older modes of commemorating the past and left the field clear for the dominance of objective, rational academic history written by specialists.
Finally, a brief note about the use of the term ‘history’ in this book. This book is centred around the writing of history in early modern India. However, as the discussion above has hopefully made clear, history in its seventeenth and eighteenth century senses was different from what it came to denote from the later nineteenth century onwards—particularly in terms of the specialized, professional definition of it. I use the term ‘history’ in this book primarily to denote narratives about the past. The particular context of its usage indicates whether I refer to it as an early modern practice or as a modern, professional practice of a rational-positivist character. Trying to avoid using the term ‘history’ for the early modern period would have meant a recourse to using phrases such as ‘narratives of the past’ all the time—a practice that seemed somewhat clumsy. In the same vein, I use the term historiography to indicate works of history. Here too, the specific context determines whether such usage refers to histories of the early modern Indian/Bengali type, or the rational-empirical, professional histories of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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Notes:(1.) Kalhana's Rajatarangini, M.A. Stein (ed. and tr.), Delhi, 1987, vol. 1, p. 2.
(2.) Ain-i-Akbari of Abul Fazl Allami, H.S. Jarrett (tr.), with further annotations by Sir J.N. Sarkar, Calcutta, 1949, vol. 2, p. 375.
(3.) See Chapter 4 for a discussion on this point.
(4.) Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, New York, 1988.
(5.) Similar critiques have been voiced earlier by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South Asia, New Delhi, 2001, pp. 255–6; Sheldon Pollock, ‘Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia: Introduction’, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 24, no. 2, 2004, pp. 19–21.
(6.) Representative works include, Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamil Nadu, New Delhi, 1992; Brajdulal Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India, New Delhi, 1994; Cynthia Talbot, Pre-Colonial India in Practice: Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra, New Delhi, 2001; Ronald Inden, Jonathan Walters, Daud Ali, Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia, New York, 2000; Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India, Cambridge, 2004; Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, Berkeley, 2003; Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India, Berkeley, 2006, and others.
(7.) Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History, New York, 2002.
(8.) Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice, Cambridge, Mass., 2000, p. 119; Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell, Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, Syracuse, N.Y., 1990; Donald R. Kelley, Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga, New Haven, 2003; Julia Robin Solomon, Objectivity in the Making: Francis Bacon and the Politics of Inquiry, Baltimore, 1998.
(9.) See for example, James Mill, History of British India with Notes by H.H. Wilson and Introduction by J.K. Galbraith, New York, 1968, vol. 2, p. 107.
(10.) Qeyamuddin Ahmed (ed.), India by Al-Biruni, New Delhi, 1995, p. 193.
(11.) William Ward, A View of the History, Literature and Mythology of the Hindoos, part 1, New York/London, 1970 (rpt.), p. clxxiii; Thomas Babington Macaulay, Selected Writings, John Clive and Thomas Pinney (eds) and with an Introduction, Chicago, 1972, pp. 242–3.
(12.) See for example, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar and Kalyan Kumar Bandyopadhyaya, ‘Introduction’, Bharate Itihasa Rachana Pranali, Calcutta, 1979, no pp.
(13.) Bernard Lewis and P.M. Holt, Historians of the Middle East, London, 1962; David C. Gordon, Self-Determination and History in the Third World, Princeton, 1971; Margaret Mehl, History and the State in Nineteenth Century Japan, New York, 1998; Patricia Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past, Durham, 2002.
(14.) Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth Century Agenda and its Implications, Calcutta, 1988; Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History, New York, 2002; Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds), Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 1–39; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, 1993, pp. 76–94, 95–115; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, 2000, pp. 27–46, 97– 113.
(15.) See for example R. Guha, History at the Limit of World History; P. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, pp. 76–115.
(16.) Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa, Chicago, 2004, p. 2.
(17.) Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800, New Delhi, 2001, pp. 1–23.
(18.) Cynthia Talbot, ‘The Story of Prataprudra: Hindu Historiography’, in David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (eds), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, Gainesville, 2000, pp. 282–99; RaoShulman-Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time; Sumit Guha, ‘Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India, 1400–1900’, American Historical Review, vol. 109, no. 4, October 2004, pp. 1084–1103; Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960, New York, 2007; Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India C. 1500–1900, Seattle, 2007.
(19.) Rao-Shulman-Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, pp. 1–23.
(20.) Romila Thapar, ‘Society and Historical Consciousness: the Itihasa-Purana Tradition’, in Romila Thapar and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (eds), Situating History: Essays in Honour of Sarvepalli Gopal, New Delhi, 1986, pp. 353–83.
(21.) Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Western Europe, Baltimore, 1993.
(22.) S. Guha, ‘Speaking Historically’.
(23.) Rao-Shulman-Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, pp. 5, 6, 19, 253–55, 260.
(24.) S. Guha, ‘Speaking Historically’.
(25.) Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Introduction’, in Diane Owen Hughes and Thomas R. Trautmann (eds), Time, Histories and Ethnologies, Ann Arbor, 1995, p. 1; Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
(26.) Hayden White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, in Hayden White, The Content of the Form, pp. 1–25.
(27.) Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, New York: Harper and Row, 1980; Idith Zertal, ‘From the Peoples' Hall to the Wailing Wall: A Study of Memory, Fear and War’, Representations, vol. 69, Winter 2000, pp. 96–126. The literature on history and memory is large and it is not possible to provide a comprehensive reference of all works. I cite below works to which I have directly referred in the text, or those I found particularly relevant.
(28.) Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, vol. 26, Spring 1989, pp. 7–25; Yosef Hayim Yarushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish Memory and Jewish History, Seattle, 1982, and others.
(29.) Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, Steven Randall and Elizabeth Claman (tr.), New York, 1992; see also, Yasmin Saikia, Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India, Durham, 2004, pp. 14–15; Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts, pp. 3–4.
(30.) Le Goff, History and Memory, p. xi.
(31.) Some of the classics of this literature include, Sir J.N. Sarkar, Mughal Administration, Calcutta, 1920; Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707), Bombay, 1963; Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, Bombay, 1966; N.A. Siddiqui, Land Revenue Administration under the Mughals:1700–1750, Bombay, 1970; S. Nurul Hasan, Thoughts on Agrarian Relations in Mughal India, New Delhi, 1973; Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court 1707–1740, New Delhi, 2002 (rpt).
(32.) Sir J.N. Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, 4 vols, Bombay, 1964–72 (rpt); M. Athar Ali, ‘The Passing of Empire: the Mughal Case’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 1975, pp. 385–96; Karen Leonard, ‘The Great Firm Theory of the Decline of the Mughal Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 21, no. 2, April 1979, pp. 161–7; C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870, Cambridge, 1982; Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707–1748, New Delhi, 1986.
(33.) Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Mughal State 1526–1750, New Delhi, 1998, pp. 1–71.
(34.) Ibid.
(35.) J.F. Richards, ‘The Formulation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jahangir’, in Alam and Subrahmanyam (eds), The Mughal State: 1526–1750, pp. 126–67; ‘Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officials’, in Barbara Daly Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, Berkeley, 1984, pp. 255–89.
(36.) Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204–1760, New Delhi, 1994.
(37.) Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, Cambridge, 2005.
(38.) Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200–1800, Chicago, 2004; ‘The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan’, in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, pp. 131–98; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 51, no. 2, 1992, pp. 340–62; and ‘Persianization and “Mercantilism” in Bay of Bengal History, 1400–1700’, in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, New Delhi, 2004, pp. 45–79.
(39.) Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, p. 134.
(40.) Chapter 1 contains more discussion of the Indo-Persian tarikh genre.
(41.) Catherine B. Asher, ‘The Architecture of Raja Man Singh: A Study of SubImperial Patronage’, in Barbara S. Miller (ed.), The Powers of Art: Patronage in Indian Culture, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 191–6.
(42.) Shantanu Phukan, ‘Through A Persian Prism: Hindi and Padmavat in the Mughal Imagination’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2000.
(43.) Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, New York, 2006, pp. 22, 25, 33.
(44.) Francoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye, ‘The Thematic Range of Dhrupad Songs Attributed to Tansen’, in Alan W. Entwistle and Francoise Malleson (eds), Studies in South Asian Devotional Literature: Research Papers, 1988–1991, New Delhi, 1994, pp. 406–27; Madhu Trivedi, ‘Hindustani Music and Dance: An Examination of Some Texts in the Indo-Persian Tradition’, in Muzaffar Alam, Francoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye and Marc Gaborieau (eds), The Making of Indo-Persian Culture, New Delhi, 2000, pp. 281–306.
(45.) Articles on rebellions by the lower orders against the Mughal regime, such as those studied by Gautam Bhadra, ‘Two Frontier Uprisings in Mughal India’, in Alam and Subrahmanyam (eds), The Mughal State, pp. 474–90, provide a sense of subaltern perceptions of the Mughal state. Richards, ‘Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officials’, pp. 255–89 and ‘The Formulation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jehangir’, pp. 126–67, provide insights into the perceptions of empire by mansabdars.
(46.) K.K. Datta, Studies in the History of the Bengal Subah, Calcutta, 1936; Ali Vardi Khan and his Times, Calcutta, 1939; Mohammed Enamul Huq, Muslim Bengali Literature, Karachi, 1957; Abdul Karim, Murshid Quli Khan and his Times, Dacca, 1963; Sir J.N. Sarkar, History of Bengal, Muslim Period 1200– 1757, Patna, 1973 (rpt); Sukumar Sen, Bangla Sahityer Itihasa, vols 1 and 2, 1405 BS, Calcutta, (rpt); Sukhamoy Mukhopadhyaya, Banglar Itihaser Du'sho Bachar: Svadhin Sultander Amal, Calcutta, 1980.
(47.) Such views are exemplified for example in Sarkar, History of Bengal and Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Origin and Development of the Bengali Language, Calcutta, 2002 (rpt).
(48.) Aniruddha Ray, Adventurers, Landowners and Rebels: Bengal c. 1575–1715, New Delhi, 1998 is an exception.
(49.) Richard M. Eaton, Islam and the Bengal Frontier, in Richard M. Eaton (ed.), India's Islamic Traditions 711–1750, New Delhi, 2003; and David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (eds), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, Gainesville, 2000, are representative examples.
