Book Review from Hindu....
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Reconstructing a cultural ecology
History possesses no fixed genre. More than questions of genre, it is the texture of the narrative that is revealing in historiography. Textures of Time recovers texts previously considered non-historical and establishes that history is not an alien import brought in by the British, says R. CHAMPAKALAKSHMI.
THIS book is about historiography. Authored by a rare combination of a historian, a social anthropologist and a literary scholar, it is refreshingly different, like their earlier work Symbols of Substance, in its enlivening way of turning the serious world of (south) Indian historiography into an enjoyable exercise of critical appraisal, through its choice of a less understood period of south Indian history, i.e., the post-Vijayanagara -Nayaka or the pre-Colonial period and its recovery, as history, a whole corpus of literary texts of the late medieval and early modern periods (16th to the18th Centuries), marginalised in the histories of this period as non-historical (folk tales). Its main aim of refuting the notion that historical consciousness did not exist in south India before the British conquest and that history is an alien import brought in by colonial rule, is achieved through a highly sophisticated approach and nuanced analysis, notwithstanding its conscious use of abstruse vocabulary, difficult to follow without some familiarity with the historical background. It covers a wide spectrum of historiographical traditions, Indian and non- Indian, to drive home the point that there is no single genre or mode for historiographical purpose and that history is written more often in the dominant literary genre of a particular community, varying with space and time. This understanding opens up an amazing richness of dynamic and internally differentiated range of perspectives. It is texture and not genre that is the central criterion for such analysis — texture, which one has to feel and listen to while reading a text i.e., listening for the logic and sensibility that have shaped an entire conceptual system. A cultural ecology needs to be reconstructed and a new way of reading introduced.
The lament that India produced no Thucydides, Herodotus or Tabari has long since been questioned and disproved by works on the Itihasa-Purana tradition of the early period and on the ethno-historical texts of pre-colonial south India. Factually oriented history and the aitihya (tradition) mode of narrating the past can and did co-exist. The authors are positioned directly opposite the post-modernist attempt to deny any distinction whatsoever between history and literature, i.e. all is discourse, internal to the language itself. They identify and define the modes of history writing in pre-colonial south India as expressed in a wide range of clearly differentiated texts on paper and palm leaf and not as lithic records (usually considered most authentic), which were meant not merely for recording or preserving but also for communication. This corpus belongs to the newly crystallising Karanam culture, of a service gentry represented by the village record keeper and accountant (amil or qanungo, munshi, kulkarni), graphically literate communities.
The battle of Bobbili (1757) between two Velama ruling houses of Bobbili and Vijayanagaram in the 'manne' or forest region forms the theme of three works representing a complete historiographical sequence with three different understandings of the events in Bobbili, although they converge on crucial matters of detail with great accuracy. The theme of an early oral epic is reworked in three different texts, using alternative modes of historiography, while narrating the heroic fight between two local chiefs (polegars) of the northern shatter zone of Andhra, in the periphery of trans-regional state structures like the Nizamat state of Hyderabad and the Mughal. Into this narrative are built the complex relations among the chiefs, their European allies, the French and the English, as also the Marathas, suggesting an ambiguous political map, in which the expansion of the Mughal and of the Nizamat states depended upon local chiefs and their incorporation as revenue farmers. It is precisely in these peripheral shatter zones that the bardic epic is the predominant mode of expressing the historical processes of change, and inspire repeated reworkings of the event in different ways, from one genre to another as it moves from one social milieu to another. The authors offer a synoptic comparison on linguistic textures and the notions of historical causality and the relative importance of individual actors. Mallesam's Bobbili Yuddha Katha is the most economical, straightforward narrative, the Ranga Raya Caritramu of Dittakavi Narayana Kavi, a drama of character, diplomacy, rational strategy and diplomacy, while the Pedda Bobbili Raju Katha uses highly emotive structures in kavya style. All three are cast in the heroic epic mould, a feature present even in the 18th-century French and English accounts of the battle. The Padmanabha Yuddhamu of early 19th Century, a counter history to the Bobbili battle, glorifies the past history of the Velama warriors from the Kakatiya times, their valour and bravery. This work, however, marks the end of an epoch and conveys a sense of despair as their world is changing with the coming of new actors and new institutions in the political arena, culminating in the complete breakdown of the late medieval moral order, with the coming of the British and the revenue settlement of Munro, a process that began decades earlier when an irreversible fission among the native ruling families set in, as described in the Dupati Kaifiyatu.
A similar historiography exists for the story of Desingu Raja (Tej Singh, a Bundela Rajput) of Senji, first in a French letter, then the Marathi Jayasingha Raja kaiphiyata of the Mackenzie collection, the Desingu Raja Katai in Tamil, the Arcot Puranams, where the story of Teivika Rajan is told in a long narrative of regional history or local purana. A simple story of bravery and tragic death in a battle against the Arcot Nawab, moved the imagination and inspired multiple retellings, marking a cultural continuity, recycling vital images and themes in an oral milieu. Arcot and Senji are also in the unsettled periphery of state systems (warrior king of the pastoral and hunting zone) with Left Hand, mobile non-ascriptive warriors at heart. Here the Brahmins are less visible, while the Rajput and Muslim are twined in friendship and the Hindu gods accept a dead Muslim hero into their heaven. A Persian dynastic history the Sa'id nama on Sa'adatullah Khan of Arcot, Desingu's enemy, written by a Brahmin from Ghazni, Jaswant Rai, well versed in Persian, gives the other side of the picture, an interesting interplay with the Karanam text and together with the Kongu Rakjakkal savistara Caritram commissioned by a British collector and written by a Senji Narayanan in early 19th Century, it treats Desingu as a rebel, not so much a hero but as a foolhardy obstinate and immature young man and Sa'adatullah Khan as a patient, prudent ruler. All these texts are situated in a huge archive (the Mackenzie Collection) still waiting for the historians (Col. Mackenzie employed the same Karanam group to collect histories and make other kinds of surveys).
Thus a distinct historiographical mode developed in the 18th Century, which the authors label as the Karanam historiography, within a cultural ecology which distinguishes the historical from the non-historical text. Written in prose by a new middle level elite literati, they focus retrospectively on the great Telengana state of the Kakatiyas and the trans-regional state of Vijayanagar, marking a continuous collective historical memory reworked in the Karanam vision of the past. Starting from the Prataparudra caritramu of Ekamranatha (16th Century) it progresses through the bardic Kumara Ramuni Katha on the Kampili rulers, culminating in the more sophisticated texts of the Vijayanagara-Nayaka courtly style, like the Rayavacakamu (17th Century) and the Krsna Raya Vijayamu (a poem of the 18th Century) reaching its final phase in the Kaifiyats of the early 19th Century Mackenzie Collection, including the more full fledged history, Tanjavuri Andhra Rajula Caritra... Some of these texts also use the Kalajnana mode, "knowledge of time", a notion of temporality different from the sequential linear narrative of typical historical texts i.e., a double movement and recursive loops of time.
Karanam texts reflect the shift in historical awareness. They organise historical memory, its place at the centre of the emerging Nayaka system... They introduce increasing sophistication in their elaborate and reflective narratives, not committed to any mono-generic model. Karanam historiography has striking contrasts with the Perso-Arabic tradition in Arabia, Central Asia and Egypt, in its autonomy, pragmatism and strategic thinking, critical irony, distance from the court (although a part of the administration) not being court chronicles or institutional production of history by official appointees. Even European history of the period was an official or semi-official biography of the state. Historiography had established a significant place for itself in the South Asian ecology of genres. The authors have provided an interesting overview of the development of the Arabic and Persian historiographies and the broad modes or epistemic canopies under which they can be classified. The rich Indo-Persian historiography down to Jaswant Rai's Said nama, belongs to a different milieu related to the Karanam historiography. The Karanam historians borrowed freely from the lexicon of the Indo-Persian administration. Yet, the rise of historiography in south India is independent of either the Indo-Persian tradition or the Western Positivist influence with its "objective" history .
Comparing the Caritra (Telugu, Tamil and Sanskrit), Tarikh (Persian) and Bakhar (Marathi), and giving examples of all of them, the authors uphold the 18th Century as the richest of all centuries in terms of historiographic diversity and depth. It is the sphere of circulation (a public sphere) through paper and palm leaf manuscripts and copies of them, as found in many collections, and the interpenetrating cultures and languages, i.e. Persian and all other vernaculars, that led to this richness of historical writing, in which literati of different ethnicities, religions and stances participated, in order to discuss issues ranging from statecraft to astronomy. History possesses no fixed genre. It is the problem of genre that leads to the confusion between historical and non-historical texts. Central to the authors' judgment, therefore, is texture — framing, intention (who is remembering and why he/she is reconstructing the past), mode of narration, the language and in short, texture which takes us into the warp and weft of a text and demands attention to each of its threads. Thus Kalhana, we are told, was writing a poem ("Rajatarangini"), although he is often hailed as the only historian of early India. Ganga Devi was not "the first historian of South India" and was not writing history but a pseudo-history called historical kavya, a hollow category , as her Madhura Vijayam (of the 1350s) is aimed at eulogising Kampana, not in war but in the harem, for, his conquest of the south for the nascent Vijayanagara state turns out to be analogous to a vigorous raid on the boudoir.
To the historian this work is revealing and insightful in its historiographical reach. More important, it sounds a note of caution to the non-historian who meddles with history.
Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800, Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Permanent Black, Rs. 550.
R. Champakalakshmi is a noted historian who has specialised in South Indian History. She is the author of Tradition, Dissent and Ideology.
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