SUNY series in Hindu Studies

Economy, Polity, Religious Traditions

Chetan Singh

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438475233
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Himalayan Histories, by one of India's most reputed historians of the Himalaya, is essential for a more complete understanding of Indian history. Because Indian historians have mainly studied riverine belts and life in the plains, sophisticated mountain histories are relatively rare. In this book, Chetan Singh identifies essential aspects of the material, mental, and spiritual world of western Himalayan peasant society. Human enterprise and mountainous terrain long existed in a precarious balance, occasionally disrupted by natural adversity, in this large and difficult region. Small peasant communities lived in scattered environmental niches and tenaciously extracted from their harsh surroundings a rudimentary but sustainable livelihood. These communities were integral constituents of larger political economies that asserted themselves through institutions of hegemonic control, the state being one such institution. This laboriously created life-world was enlivened by myth, folklore, legend, and religious tradition. When colonial rule was established in the region during the nineteenth century, it transformed the peasants' relationship with their natural surroundings. While old political allegiances were weakened, resilient customary hierarchies retained their influence through religio-cultural practices.

1

Introduction

FOR LONG STRETCHES in the past, historians and geographers collaborated when analysing or recounting the enduring facts about societies and civilisations. In these earlier times they brought diverse skills to the task, and the absence of rigid disciplinary divisions was a help. Humans and their natural surroundings were seen as interacting and influencing each other in bringing about long-term social and natural transformation.

But with the passage of time this collaboration became an unequal partnership. The increasing confidence of humans in their ability to alter and improve circumstances placed history in a dominant position. New theoretical perspectives accorded to history the increasingly exclusive privilege of narrating and elucidating the human saga. To geography, on the other hand, fell the muted task of providing physical props for this enactment.1 The notion of spaces – particularly central to geography – came to be gradually and unfortunately disregarded by many of the social sciences as these were practised in the English-speaking world.

In critical social theory, too, the idea of space seemed to represent something dead and inert which contributed to society only as much as man purposefully chose to take from it. With the theoretical prioritisation of history over geography, scholars ignored the fact that their “lifeworld” was “creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space …”2 By the early years of the twentieth century, the idea of spatiality had been pushed to the fringes of the intellectual arena.3 Territories and regions came to be regarded even more explicitly as the physical background or theatrical stages upon which historical actions were performed. Yet the enduring link between space and human relations could hardly be ignored. Thirty years ago, Lefebvre pointed out that “Social relations, which are concrete abstractions, have no real existence save in and through space. Their underpinning is spatial.”4

One of the difficulties was, however, that history-writing had come to be a way of articulating national aspirations and asserting the primacy of the nation-state over its regions. In Europe, the roots of national and cultural unity were now traced to an ever more distant past. Regions and provinces became reduced concerns, seen as best left to lesser historians. Modernisation created national markets and the autarky of regions was gradually weakened. National political centralisation overshadowed local governance. Provincial loyalties yielded to the assertiveness of national cultures.5 Regional scholarship, with its emphasis on local identity and political divergence, now seemed antiquated and reactionary.

Yet the relationship between the nation-state and regional history is not necessarily antagonistic. Regional political processes can be “constitutive – not always imitative – of the politics of the nation-state.”6 It is therefore important to see how regions differ from nation-states. In this context Foucault says: “It is surprising how long the problem of space took to emerge as a historic-political problem. Space used to be either dismissed as belonging to ‘nature’ – that is, the given, the basic condition, ‘physical geography’, in other words a sort of ‘prehistoric’ substratum: or else it was conceived as the residential site or field of expansion of peoples, of culture, a language or a State.”7 Regions, because of their predominantly geographical nature, are perhaps closer to being an assertion of “physical geography”. Explicitly demarcated borders of nation-states, on the other hand, are seen as an artefact of the political imagination. But the matter is immensely more complex, for regions too are the product of human engagement with the environment, not merely nature’s platform. Equally, nation-states are not wholly the result of national aspirations but are powerfully forged by the forces of historical geography.

A series of conceptual shifts enabled regional scholars to proceed beyond geographical description and environmental determinism. The idea of a region moved closer to social anthropology and thus offered a valuable “frame of reference for the study of social phenomena and processes.”8 A region or area was no longer defined through “objective attributes”; it was, in fact, the “dynamic relationship existing between an area and the social processes and ideologies that give it meaning”,9 and was “thought of as such by its residents”,10 even in some manner created by people “in their experience and in their imagination.”11 This purposeful relationship of people with regions was essentially how Knight perceived the nature and transformation of territories: “In a sense, territory is not; it becomes, for territory itself is passive, and it is human beliefs and actions that give territory meaning.”12 To give such meaning to a territory was by no means easy. Lefebvre famously wrote: “It is not the work of a moment for a society to generate (produce) an appropriated social space in which it can achieve a form of means of self-preservation and self-representation, a social space to which that society is not identical, and which is its tomb as well as its cradle. This act of creation is, in fact, a process.”13 The changing and evolving character of processes makes the empirical study of such changes doubly complicated.

Differences obviously exist between the outsider’s “etic” viewpoint and the insider’s “emic” understanding. Nevertheless, points of convergence are possible to find.14 More complex, however, are the divergent theoretical perspectives that emerge from the different academic disciplines. For regional geographers, “the roles of region and society are reversed: region as institutional shape, is the object; society is its property or attribute.”15 The challenge lies in adopting a multidimensional perspective of a region, one that combines spatiality with several other social variables. Even then, it would be almost impossible to describe a region in all its aspects.16 For practical reasons, therefore, regions have been delineated on the basis of “convenience”. The scale or size of the region chosen and the purpose of the study have, therefore, been the two main considerations.17

In her presidential address to the Panjab History Conference in the mid 1970s, Romila Thapar dwelt upon the “scope and significance of regional history”. She suggested that this was particularly relevant in the study of interludes between the collapse and rise of empires.18 Regional history in India could therefore be seen as “a corrective to the earlier tendency to generalize about the subcontinent …”19 These “inter-imperial” phases also saw the socio-political reordering of regions that once constituted the empire. The periodic fragmentation of imperial power encouraged the emergence of provincial elites and regional identities.

There was another dimension to the issue: the growth of nationalist writing in India had probably kindled interest in regional history, which had then encouraged a wide range of differing interpretations and explanations. New socio-political groups and identities emerged in response to subcontinental developments. Regional historians highlighted the significance of provincial events. But the larger context that stimulated their work was history written on a national scale.20

Such a development was not unique to India. The United States, too, witnessed the tendency, though “by the end of the 1960s, the study of national character and the respect for national myths was collapsing, not only in history but also in the other social sciences. The principal writers of consensus history were falling silent …”21 Consequently, studies of the cultural diversities of the major regions of the United States declined.

The interlinkages between historiographies at different levels are fairly evident. The idea of the nation had certainly stimulated regional histories. Yet regions were not merely sites upon which national-level ideologies and processes were played out. Regional histories, while being influenced by a larger national history, were also equally a rejoinder to it. By implication, regional and national histories came to be mutually constructed.

In approaching their work as a political construct, regional historians often particularised national developments to accommodate provincial sensitivities. As a result, their histories resonated deeply within regional cultures. This engagement with mainstream developments could be either confrontational or participatory, depending upon the shifts in power equations in the region. Popular memory, has the ability to refashion historical characters or depict events in a different light. It therefore contributed substantially to the emergence of regional narratives and alternative histories. Precolonial events and political entities of subcontinental significance shaped regional traditions in the different parts of the subcontinent. Mewar’s resistance to Mughal rule, for instance, and the long-drawn Sikh and Maratha struggle in the seventeenth century are an important part of popular historical memory in some parts of India. It is a memory enlivened by regional heroes who successfully defied imperial functionaries shown as being tyrannical and oppressive. Both in victory and defeat, Mughal power and its imperial image had a large presence in regional historical consciousness. Subsequently, under colonial rule and in recent times, too, national-level historiography has influenced regional historiography. The grand narrative and regional accounts have always been closely connected.

However, even counter-narratives and alternative histories were accounts of dominant politico-cultural elites, albeit at the regional level. Though the lesser or subordinated sections of society were indispensable in the emergence of a broad regional identity, they remained peripheral to the creation of the assertive regional consciousness which overshadowed the undercurrents that are invariably a part of historical processes. As a result, Rajasthan’s history has largely been about the military exploits of Rajput rulers rather than the story of communities such as the Bhils, Meenas, Jats, and Gujjars who (together with the Rajputs) collectively gave the region its fundamental social character. Folklore in Maharashtra recalls the inspiring struggle of Shivaji and his Maratha warriors against Aurangzeb, but relatively little is written about the unstinted support they received from other sections of society that contributed critically to the growth of Maratha power. Here a word of caution is necessary. Historians and chroniclers have always been fascinated by dramatic events, military contests, the glory of victory, and the grandeur of power. This was the predisposition that the Subaltern Studies historians had originally set out to redress by unearthing many of the numerous smaller stories that collectively constituted the history of the nation.

Do we then need to replicate the Subaltern Studies endeavour for the regions? Subaltern scholarship had questioned and enriched the dominant national narrative by highlighting regional and local accounts. Does it follow that influential regional narratives too should incorporate the hitherto muted stories of communities lower in the social hierarchy? If writing a better history of the nation requires the inclusion of perspectives and contributions of the subordin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Defining Spaces, Constructing Identities: Regional History and the Himalaya
• 3 Defining Community: Territory and Transformation in the Western Himalaya
• 4 Geography, Religion, and Hegemony: Constructing the State in the Western Himalaya
• 5 Nature, Religion, and Politics: Keonthal and Kumharsain
• 6 Myth, Legend, and Folklore in Himalayan Society
• 7 The Dum: Community Consciousness, Peasant Resistance, or Political Intrigue?
• 8 Between Two Worlds: The Trader Pastoralists of Kinnaur
• 9 Strategy of Interdependence: Gaddi, Peasant, and State
• 10 Migration and Trade in Mountain Societies
• 11 Pastoralism and the Making of Colonial Modernity in Kulu, 1850–1952
• 12 Diverse Forms of Polyandry, Customary Rights of Inheritance, and Landownership in the Western Himalaya
• 13 Thresholds in the Wilderness: Identities, Interests, and Modernity in Western Himalayan Borderlands
• 14 Riverbank to Hilltop: Pre-colonial Towns and the Impact of British Rule on Urban Growth
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover