Re-searching Transitions in Indian History

Radhika Seshan, Shraddha Kumbhojkar

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429946301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The idea of transitions in Indian history emerged early when the term 'transition' denoted shifts from one period to another. The notion of transition itself has moved beyond being primarily economic to include dimensions of society, culture and ideology. This volume brings together scholarly works that re-examine and re-define the concept of transition by looking into a range of subjects including religion, culture, gender, caste and community networks, maritime and mercantile modes, ideas of nationalism and historiographies across geographical and temporal settings.

With contributions by leading scholars from South Asia, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of ancient history, modern Indian history, sociology and social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

Part I
Locating transitions

1 Questioning transitions

Stewart Gordon

The word transition stems from the Latin transitionem meaning ‘a going across or over’. Its modern usage implies movement, passage and a change from one position or state to another. Transitions are a common feature of music, in which a passage leads from one theme to another. In film, music is often used as a transition from one scene to another. Other usages are in the study of social change and in chemistry, in which a molecule goes through a transition state before settling into a stable lower energy configuration.

A story about transition

Let me tell you a story. I grew up in America during the Cold War. The nuclear standoff between the United States and Russia pervaded society, right down to the personal level. Missile counts were front-page news and missile installations ringed every major city. Everyone knew that Russia was America’s archenemy and deserved our hatred. It was a godless, communist country that crushed individual freedoms; Russians didn’t even speak English.

My friends and I built models of long-range bombers and played dropping bombs on each other’s country (one behind the sofa, the other behind the coffee table).

Fear of nuclear war affected every public institution. My father’s hospital developed a plan for shielding and treating patients in nuclear war. My school held regular air raid drills, during which students went to their lockers and stuck their heads in. Nuclear shelter signs sprouted on banks and office buildings. The government designated evacuation routes from each major city and built the interstate highway system on the basis of military necessity. Two neighbours became nuclear air raid wardens and advised my family to stockpile food and shield the basement. (My father refused, but a couple of neighbours built bunkers.) Fear was pervasive.

Only decades later did any of us know how pathetic these preparations were, or how close America came to playing out the worst of these fears. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the world was one phone call away from full nuclear war. The logic, the knowledge, the way of even defining of truth of that time led logically to war between Russia and the United States. Looking back a half century later, we can see how deeply flawed were the reasoning, the assumptions, even the way of establishing truth.

That dangerous and fearful time nevertheless transitioned to a period in which people questioned the thinking that had brought us to the brink of nuclear war, and the process of negotiated mutual disposal of nuclear weapons began.

The point of this story is that both periods and transitions are connected to specific places. If I had grown up in India rather than the United States, the very same years would not have been ones of bomb shelters and air raid wardens. Rather, they would have been years of planning, industrialization, and Nehruvian optimism. Russia would have been a very important ally and investor, not the archenemy. Throughout our analysis we must ask where as well as when.

Periods and transitions

All of us as historians assume that there are ‘periods’ in history. They have a few defining characteristics and understanding these characteristics helps one understand the past, the present which is based on that past, and have a significant effect on how we look to the future. By definition, these periods come and go. Our examination today is how these periods relate to each other. There has to be a time when one period gives way to another. Transitions are therefore important to our understanding of periods and their relation to each other.

We all assume that a period is relatively stable time followed by a much a shorter period of rapid and chaotic change, followed by periods of relative stability.

I want to make only three points about periods and transitions. I’ll make them at the outset as a frame for the chapters that follow.

1. 1 Recent brain research suggests that the search for periods and transitions may be a result of how our brains work, rather than anything we find in the historical past.
2. 2 The naming and defining of historical periods and transitions are acts of political, economic and sometimes military power. We should expect periods and transitions to be bitterly contested with no easy reconciliation even by people of good heart and rational thought.
3. 3 This follows from point 2: is the use of ‘transition’ simply a way of dismissing what a group of people are doing or thinking or founding? That is, a time of transition is not worth a name and fame of its own but was only important as the bridge to something else? Does this alert us to ask who is using the term ‘transition’ and why?

Periods, transitions and brain research

Current brain research suggests that our brains are capable of processing only two conversations at once. Anything more, and the information of one or both becomes muddled (Levitin 2014). Perhaps we need periodization not because there are intrinsic characteristics that trace out definable periods. Instead periods in history are a function of how our brains work. We simply cannot deal with ten periods or eight periods. Students can’t learn them and, as teachers, we can’t teach them. Perhaps ten periods would more accurately explain the past, but because our brains cannot learn them, we would be forever asking, ‘Now, is the invention of the steam engine in Period Six or Period Seven? I can’t sort it out.’

So, let’s assume that however we divide the historical past, we’re only going to get three or at the most four useable periods. In European history, there is Rome/Medieval, Renaissance/Modern. Our task is to make something meaningful from comparing and analyzing these few categories.

Let us consider the three great periods of the history of India, as first laid out by James Mill: Hindu/ Muslim/ British.

Who gained and who lost by this periodization? Obviously, the British colonial effort gained legitimacy as the ‘natural’ heir to the Muslim kingdoms and the Mughal Empire. High castes gained, as they were the carriers of the ancient ‘Hindu’ great tradition. This formulation legitimized the caste hierarchy as ancient and of central importance to the culture of India. Princely states also gained legitimacy as connected to India’s ancient Hindu past. (Muslim princely states were, however, deeply suspect.)

In this formulation many people lost out – Buddhists, Jains, tribal folk, Dalits. None of them mattered in a first phase that was ‘Hindu’. Muslims also lost out. According to this periodization, the Muslim had their time – and kept it by force – but that time was past and they had little to offer to the Age of British Supremacy. Muslims were characterized as reactionary, bound by their religion and past and only impediments to British plans for India.

Marathas also lost out. The whole period of Maratha rule was relegated to a ‘transition’ between Mughal and British. In this formulation the century of broad Maratha rule produced no useful administrative techniques, no art worth noticing, no military strategies worth studying, and no heroes worth emulating.

Other periodization, other problems

I want to mention briefly two other schemes of periodization proposed over the last half century.

The first is a Marxist formulation pioneered by Irfan Habib and other scholars at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). In spite of many doctrinaire disagreements within this group of scholars, there was broad agreement on a periodization that focussed on means of production as the critical factor differentiating one period from the next. Habib defined one ‘age’ as that of iron, with significant markers in agriculture, war, government and institutions. The bulk of the millennium until 1000 CE was a feudal period, characterized by relentless, crushing exploitation of peasants by landholders, religious institutions and other elites. Little changed in the following millennium, as agriculture and other means of production remained stagnant. Marxist historians had to wrestle with the failure of India to develop capitalism early, since its economy was larger and its trade more sophisticated than the colonial powers when they conquered India. Therefore, central to the Marxist periodization was a colonial period that featured de-industrialization, de-urbanization and drain of money from India to Britain.

In the 1980s and 1990s the Subaltern Group in Bengal brought a new perspective to periodization of the later centuries. They termed the eighteenth century ‘pre-Modern’, but their focus was firmly on a ‘sharp break’ between the pre-colonial and the colonial, that is, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The eighteenth century was characterized as continuing all the older forms of landholding, taxation and general exploitation of peasants. The nineteenth century was a time of the colonial introduction of new forms of numeric records, capitalism, archives, scientific medicine and a pervasively intrusive government. All of these changes were in the service of exploitation, shifting capital from the colony to the home country.

Today there is, among at least some historians of India, agreement on three broad periods: ancient, medieval and modern. There are problems with all three periods, as follows:

1. 1 Many historians have viewed the ancient period as a time of great tolerance of various religious and philosophical systems, kingly and noble patronage of religious institutions and an enormous and important flowering of philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, grammar, the foundation of a zone of shared Sanskrit learning across a wide swath what is now Pakistan, India and Southeast Asia. They see the Ancient Period as a kind of Golden Age. Currently, younger historians are questioning all of this. They see intense warfare as typical and intense competition between sects and religions for patronage. They have discovered the importance of traders, even foreign traders, in the maintenance of monasteries and other places of learning.
2. 2 The term Medieval (Middle Ages in Latin) of course comes from European history. In the nineteenth century it was defined as the period between the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Renaissance, roughly 500–1500. Scholars of European history have questioned virtually every aspect of this periodization, such as the fall of Rome and the collapse of Western civilization, the demonetization of the economy, how ‘barbarian’ were the Germanic tribes, and on and on. The term Medieval seems doubly problematic when applied to India. After all, few of the centrepiece institutions or practices of the European Middle Ages were present in India, such as feudal relationships between landowner and cultivator, chivalry, a single religion with a broadly supported infrastructure, and a single overarching religious authority (like the pope in Europe).
3. 3 The ‘Modern’ period also has its problems, such as when exactly it began. What are its few defining characteristics – numerical-based administration, written judicial proceedings, attention to infrastructure, expansion of schools, representative government, rapid transportation and communication, government intervention in previously unregulated parts of life? Some of these features appear in the sixteenth century, some in the eighteenth century, some in the British colonial nineteenth century and some only in the twentieth century. With a wide variety of ‘moderns’ emerging at different places in the world, it is hard to know what to include in the term ‘modern’ and what to leave out.

Questioning periods and transitions

We normally assume that transitions are located chronologically between two identified periods. So, does that mean that no change happens in a period and change happens only in a transition? Is the assumption that all the people of the region experience the transition the same? What did people of the time think about their own time?

Let me suggest some other ways to think about transitions in history. As I hinted in the introduction, perhaps transitions are more about space – geography. Is there a space between two regions perceived as more unified or more organized, with a transitional space between them? Would this be a space of multi-linguality, trade and piracy? Nomadism? Heterodox religions? Unexpected marriage alliances? Warfare? Unexpected art? Is there a parallel to the ecological definition of a ‘transitional zone’, from one type of ecology to another, that is, a different top predator, different prey, different patterns of predation? Is a tidal zone a transition from the water to the land? On a less theoretical level, it certainly seems that the three commonly used broad periods of Indian history have very little relevance to, for example, the northeast.

Or are transitions in peoples’ minds? Do they feel that their world has changed in unimaginable ways in their lifetime? And the transition is reflected in the contrast between the person and their children?

Or are transitions institutional, that is when the basic ways they operate shift? A coinage could be termed transitional when a new kingdom continues to mint coins in the name of the previous dynasty, in an attempt to provide stability and gain legitimacy. A country giving up on public schools and going fully to private schools would be in transition. When marriage expands to include same-sex couples, do we see this as a time of transition? What about the transition from coal to oil as the principal source of energy?

If we accept the position now common in anthropology that culture is always contested and is always about the power to force compliance upon weaker groups and individuals, then what do we mean when we say that a culture is in transition? Is transition then a dependent variable, with political, economic or military power as the independent variable?

We need to be careful of our metaphors. If we view transition in society as like a chemical phase change, then the result is a material or social form that has utterly different characteristics and behaviour from the previous state – water becoming ice or carbon molecules becoming nylon. Thus the metaphor of the ‘tipping point’, the last little change that tumbles the whole edifice.

Transitions and the medieval

In conclusion I want to suggest some important changes in the long period currently designated the Medieval, which many historians assume had little or no change.

1. 1 The emergence of widely shared practices of loyalty, honour and service, which allowed for relatively easy movement of hundreds of thousands of (mainly) men to find service far from their native place. This shared system connected many ethnicities, crossed religions and connected India with the rest of Asia. This was the system that allowed Rajputs, Marathas, Persians, Central Asians and men from the Middle East to honourably serve, for example, in the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughal Empire.
2. 2 The development of an enhanced export industry, which sent cotton cloth, medicines, spices, aromatic oils and woods, and ivory throughout Asia and North Africa. India, along with China, was perceived as the ‘richest’ country on earth.
3. 3 From the eighth century onwards, conversion of large numbers throughout Asia and Africa to Islam. There was a broad perception that conversion to Islam widened prospects, not just in trade, but also in many forms of entrepreneurship. Note the concomitant emergence of Sufi leaders spearheading this entrepreneurship, especially in Bengal.
4. 4 The gradual decline of Buddhism from a dominant position both in number of Buddhist kings and accompanying patronage of monasteries, stupas and universities.
5. 5 The continuing creation of local elites with rights to a share of the agricultural produce. Rather than being a fixed feature of the period, the process quite possibly accelerated through the period and climaxed with many new militarized elite families in the eighteenth century.
6. 6 A gradual standardization of the settlement of agricultural and urban taxes, peaking in the Mughal settlements of the late sixteenth century, which carried on well into the eighteenth century.

These changes are ones we should be keep in mind as we seek transitions both before and after the broad Medieval period.

One final thought. Periodization generally favours and showcases empires, treating successor states as unfortunate interludes. I would like to suggest that because we read empires – whether Roman, Gupta or Mughal – largely through their own documents, they appear powerful, enduring epoch-making things. Rather, they were (and are) fragile and fraught with factions and external threats throughout their relatively short existence. We need to take successor states seriously, both as entities on their own and as the nursery of new big states and kingdoms.

Reference

Levitin, Daniel, 2014. The Organized Mind. New York: Penguin Group.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: rethinking transitions
• Part I Locating transitions
• Part II Early India
• Part III The sea
• Part IV Numismatics
• Part V Colonial India
• Part VI Regions