Historiography of India

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The historiography of India refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of India.

Ancient India

According to D. P. Singhal, Indians in ancient times did not neglect the discipline of historiography.^[1]

Medieval India

According to Peter Hardy, Muslim historiography on medieval India is often motivated by Islamic apologetics, which tries to justify "the life of medieval Muslims to the modern world".^[2] There is a shortage of historical works by Hindus before the Muslim conquest. D.P. Singhal says that contrary to the popular belief, Indians did not neglect historiography.^[3] James Tod said that Muslim invaders and rulers destroyed much Hindu, Jain and Buddhist literature, including historical works.^[4]

British India

According to James Mill's influential 'The History of British India' (1817), a scholarship of proper historiography was never developed in Ancient India.^[5] This theory was widely accepted and created a sense of 'tabula rasa'.^[6] Indian nationalists like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–1894) advocated the writing of a ‘truly Indian historiography of India’.^[7]

Independent India

In post-Indepence India, a historiography based on a Marxist interpretation of history was very influential.^[8] The historians belonging to the Marxist Phase adopted a materialistic interpretation of history and focused on the study of the effects of social and economic factors on history.^[9] In India, D. D. Kosambi is considered the founding father of Marxist historiography. The senior-most scholars of Marxist historiography are R. S. Sharma, Irfan Habib, D. N. Jha and K. N. Panikkar.^[10]

One debate in Indian history that relates to a historical materialist schema is on the nature of feudalism in India. D. D. Kosambi in the 1960s outlined the idea of "feudalism from below" and "feudalism from above", with which R. S. Sharma largely agrees.^[11] Such Marxist historians argue that the economic origins of communalism are feudal remnants and the economic insecurities caused by slow development under a "world capitalist system."^[12]

B. R. Ambedkar criticised Marxists, as he deemed them to be unaware or ignorant of the specifics of caste issues.^[13] A number of historians have also debated Marxist historians and critically examined their analysis of history of India.^{[14][15][16][17]} One critique is Arun Shourie's Eminent Historians (1998), which does not identify any scholarly shortcomings but only minor inefficiencies and bureaucratic corruption.^[18][19]

Since the late 1990s, Hindu nationalist scholars especially have polemicised against the Marxist tradition in India for neglecting what they believe to be the country's 'illustrious past.' Marxists are held responsible by the Indian right-wing for aiding or defending Muslims, who are considered as 'enemies within'^[20] or 'internal threats'^[21] by Hindutva ideologues.^[22]

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the subaltern historiography was developed. By highlighting the struggles of the workers and the peasants, this historiography has challenged not only conventional historiography but even Marxist historiography.^[23]

See also

• History of India

Further reading

• Balagangadhara, S. N. (2012). Reconceptualizing India studies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Bhattacharjee, J. B. Historians and Historiography of North East India (2012)
• Bannerjee, Dr. Gauranganath (1921). India as known to the ancient world. Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, London.
• Bose, Mihir. "India's Missing Historians: Mihir Bose Discusses the Paradox That India, a Land of History, Has a Surprisingly Weak Tradition of Historiography", History Today 57#9 (2007) pp 34+. online
• Chakrabarti, Dilip K.: Colonial Indology, 1997, Munshiram Manoharlal: New Delhi.
• Palit, Chittabrata, Indian Historiography (2008).
• Indian History and Culture Society., Devahuti, D. (2012). Bias in Indian historiography.
• Elliot, Henry Miers; John Dowson (1867–77). The History of India, as told by its own historians. The Muhammadan Period. London: Trübner and Co.
• Inden, R. B. (2010). Imagining India. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press.
• Jain, M. The India They Saw : Foreign Accounts (4 Volumes) Delhi: Ocean Books, 2011.
• Kahn, Yasmin. "Remembering and Forgetting: South Asia and the Second World War' in Martin Gegner and Bart Ziino, eds., The Heritage of War (Routledge, 2011) pp 177–193.
• Mantena, R. (2016). Origins of modern historiography in india: Antiquarianism and philology 1780-1880. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Mittal, S. C India distorted: A study of British historians on India (1995), on 19th century writers
• R.C. Majumdar, Historiography in Modem India (Bombay, 1970) ISBN 9782102227356
• Rosser, Yvette Claire (2003). Curriculum as Destiny: Forging National Identity in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (PDF) (Dissertation). University of Texas at Austin.
• Arvind Sharma, Hinduism and Its Sense of History (Oxford University Press, 2003) ISBN 978-0-19-566531-4
• E. Sreedharan, A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000 (2004)
• Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 9789351365914
• Trautmann, Thomas R. (1997). Aryans and British India. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-585-10445-4.
• Viswanathan, G. (2015). Masks of conquest: Literary study and British rule in India.
• Antonio de Nicolas, Krishnan Ramaswamy, and Aditi Banerjee (eds.) (2007), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis Of Hinduism Studies In America (Publisher: Rupa & Co.)
• Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee: The Nay Science: A History of German Indology. Oxford University Press, New York 2014, ISBN 978-0199931361 (Introduction, p. 1–29).
• Warder, A. K., An introduction to Indian historiography (1972).
• Winks, Robin, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume V: Historiography (2001)
• Weickgenannt, T. N. (2009). Salman Rushdie and Indian historiography: Writing the nation into being. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

References