one

Interpretations of Indian History:

Colonial, Nationalist, Post-colonial

Romila Thapar

he modern writing of Indian history dates to about 200 years

ago and begins with a disjuncture. When British scholars started
asking about histories of India, they were told that there were no
historical works as history was a subject which was of no interest
to pie-colonial Indian scholarship. This led to the theory thatlndian
civilisation was unique because it was ahistorical. It had no sense
of history. This is a theory which is very widespread and very
often accepted, and which some of us are trying to question and,
hopefully, toeventually overthrow. Asaresultof thistheory British
scholarship took upon itself the task of ’discovering’ the Indian
past. This, of course, had its own problems and orientations. The
disjuncture meant that initially, at least, the European imprint on
Indian historical scholarship was extremely strong; slowly and
graduallymnecantracetherecedingofthisimprintand thecoming
of an Indian point of view, as it were. Although, of course, with

This is the opening address given at the conference on Contemporary India in

Transition held at Lisbon in June 1998.
26 Romila Thapar

the consciousness of modernisation, it is very difficult to sharply

distinguish between a modern European and a modern Indian
understanding of history.
This chapter, therefore, is concerned with a series of questions.
How did this disjuncture occur? What is the nature of these im-
prints? And to what extent is historical interpretation today in India
reflective of intellectual concerns which may have a global context
but which, nevertheless, grew out of an Indian understanding of
both history and of its context?

The Colonial Interpretation

Quite apart from the fact that there was a disjuncture in the late
18th and early 19th centuries, and there was a presumed need on
the part of colonial scholars to ‘rediscover’ Indian history, it is
important to note that from the early 19th century onwards, the
reconstruction of Indian history was tied to European precon-
ceptions and debates about the Orient. The intellectual history of
Europe was therefore extremely pertinent to the interpretation of
the history of India, and this is particularly true of the 19th century.
Writing about India, thus, was like holding a mirror to European
society. India was, to use the fashionable term, the 'Other’; and
the ’Other’ is always important to understanding the ‘self'. This
was done through drawing comparisons, and consequently much
of the writing, the reconstruction of the Indian past, derived from
this concern with how the ‘Other’, by contrast, had a history which
was different from European history.
Apart from these ideological, intellectual concerns, there was
also one other very basic concern, which was the colonial belief in
knowledge as a source of power. This belief was rampant through-
out the 19th century. Knowing the history of an area provided
control over it. What Curzon refers to in a famous statement as
’the necessary furniture of empire’, a curiosity about the past of
the colony, becomes extremely central, and the desire then is to
control the colony through re-casting its knowledge about itself
and particularly about its past. Colonial historiography, therefore,
does have a big agenda and certainly not always a hidden agenda.
The 19th century throws up some very recognisable themes.
Initially, there was the activity of what has been called orientalist
 Interpretations of Indian History 27

scholarshipJ'hisisa trickyword,becauseitshouldnotbeconfused
with Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism per se. Orientalist
scholarship included what Said writes about, but it also included
varieties of oriental scholarship; the study of languages, for ex-
ample, or the study of texts thought to be value-free prior to the
theoretical discussion of Orientalism. Orientalist scholarship, as
embodied in people like William Jones and in the Asiatic Society
in Calcutta, and a number of others, explored the new terrain of
theIndianpastand triedtolinkittotheEumpeanpast. Forex-
ample, linguistic links were sought between Sanskrit on the one
hand and Greek and Latin on the other. This is not something that
was developed only by British orientalist scholars; both Italian and,
I am told, Portuguese scholars had earlier made these links. It was
now developed into a theory, a theory of the interconnection of
ancestral languages, and of their monogenesis.
There was also an attempt to draw conceptual and chronological
links with Biblical history. The story of Noah's Ark has an almost
paraflelstoryirrtliehidiantextsofManmofthegodVishnuconvert-
ing himself into a fish and directing the boat, lodging it on the top
of a mountain, and so on. These early scholars saw these connec-
tions, linked them immediately to Biblical thinking and tried to
produce a chronology that was the equivalent of Biblical chronology.
The focus was essentially on texts that dealt with social laws-
for example, the Dharmashastms, which focus on the social and rit-
ual obligations of different castes in Indian society- and religious
texts. Both were functionally important to understanding the
earlier institutions. Their study was thus not just intellectual curi-
osity, it also had an administrative function. The notion of con-
trolling the society by understanding its earlier imtitutions became
an important item on the intellectual agenda of these scholars.
India was regarded as an exotic area in terms of orientalist schol-
arship. Not surprisingly, it had a tremendous influence on German
romanticism throughout the 19th century. The literary movement
of German romanticism was imbued with excitement about the
discovery of Sanskrit and what it taught of the Indian past; many
thought that it was the Indian present as well. This is in part a re
flection of an escape from 19th century European industrialisation
and the changes which this industrialisation brought, which were
somehow difficult to comprehend. Colonial intervention, therefore,
was not concerned with trying to change the society of India or
28 Romila Thapar

the society of the colony; the intervention was, at this point, without
plans for any radical change.
Oneofthemajortheoriasthatemergedoutoforientalistscholar-
ship which was dominant in the middle of the 19th century and
which is now again very prominent particularly with the ideology
of Hindutva being encouraged politically, is the theory of the Aryan
race. This theory was developed in the 19th century, and, in its re-
lationship to Indian history, was intended to explain the origins
of Indian society and provide the beginnings of Indian history. It
maintains that Indian history begins with the invasion of the
Aryans, the superior peeple who came from Central Asia, sub-
jugated the whole of northern India and established an Aryan
civilisation.
The theory evolved in Europe, but it was applied both in Europe
and in India. It evolved in Europe through the discussion of what
in the 19th century was known as race science, which was con-
cerned with theories of biological race and drew its strength from
both natural science and other disciplines. For example, the botan-
ist Linnaeus worked out a whole ordering of genus and species
with reference to plants, which was taken as the model for working
out genus and species with reference to human groups. Social
Darwinism, the theory of the survival of the fittest, was also
brought into the discussion. The question of who, in fact, were the
fittest, was answered by indicating that the fittest were the
European Aryans, because they dominated world civilisation.
Max Muller, the famous German Sanskritist at Oxford, was the
firsttosuperimposethistheoryofAryanraceonIndia.'l'hetheory
basically stated that race and language were identical. People who
spoke a particular language inevitably belonged to the same race
and, if two languages were similar, then the speakers of those lan-
guages belonged to the same race. The argument was that there
was a language called Aryan which was spoken by a race called
Aryanandthisracetraceditselfbacktothelndo—Europeanpeople
and the Indo-European languages. Equating a language label with
a racial label was, of course, a major blunder; and although Max
Muller stated that the two had to be kept separate and could not
be equated, he nevertheless confused the issue himself. For ex-
ample, he referred to Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the social reformer of
the early 19th century, as a member of the Bengali Indo—Aryan
race which spoke Bengali and the Indo-Aryan language.
 Interpretations of Indian History 29

Further, caste was seen essentially as racial segregation, each

caste being visualised as a separate race. It was argued that Indian
society was extremely advanced because it had managed to
segregatealltheseracialgroupsinasocial systemknownascaste.
And, of course, the idea of the purity of caste, derived from the
Portuguese word casta meaning 'pure’, gave a certain kind of direc-
tion to the way in which studies of caste in the early period were
conducted. The upper castes, it was argued, were of Aryan stock,
and the lower castes were indigenous and mixed. Thus the theory
also influenced ethnology and the discussion of Indian society.
Max Muller’s statement that the Aryans were of a superior race
and had brought civilisation to India was much appreciated by
the colonialist historians, who saw in the Aryan conquest of India
parallels to the British conquest of India. The comparison was fre-
quently endorsed.
This was not the only trend, however, in the 19th century. There
was another group of historians who contested the interpretations
of orientalist scholarship. They were known as the utilitarian his-
torians, because they drew much of their inspiration from the
writings of the British philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. They took
an alternative view to the romanticism of exotic India, emphasising
instead the weaknesses of Indian civilisation and society. They
argued that there was a tremendous need for rationality and indi-
vidualism if the society was to progress, the term ’progress’ being
used very much in its early 19th century meaning. Therefore, there
was a need to legislate change. This was a departure from the
orientalist scholars, who were quite happy to leave things as they
were and simply write about the past of India, about how Indians
were all given to loving nature, or, as Max Muller says, meditating
peacequy for endless years in their little village communities. The
utilitarians maintained that all of this had to be changed, because
India was a backward, stagnant society. India was clearly, then,
the 'Other’ in terms of British society, and it is interesting that
much of this writing is as much a critique of British society, in an
oblique way, as it is, in fact, a critique of Indian society.
The person best remembered from this group is the historian
James Mill, who wrote a massive three-volume history of British
India in the early 19th century. This became what has been called
the ’hegemonic text’ on Indian history. He periodised Indian
30 Romila Thapar

history into the Hindu civilisation, the Muslim civilisation and

the British period. This periodisation became so popular that in
the middle of the 19th century, Christian Lassen, an orientalist
philosopher in Germany, described the three periods as the Hindu
thesis, the Muslim anti-thesis, and the British synthesis.
Mill argued that the pre-British Hindu and Muslim civilisations
were not only backward and stagnant, but conformed to the image
of ’oriental despotism’. Oriental despotism became the key concept
in the 19th century to explain the situation in India prior to the
coming of the British. Incidentally, these views also coincided with
the views of a number of Christian missionary groups, particularly
those working under the aegis of the British administration, who
also wanted a major legislation to change the basis of Indian society.
This kind of historical thinking was not something that was
abstract or confined only to Britain. It is interesting that both Max
Muller and James Mill never actually visited India, although they
were frequently invited. This is a very interesting little vignette
on the way in which they approached India as a colony. This his-
torical drinking also coincided with a change in colonial policy.
We must keep in mind that, by the middle of the 19th century, the
British conquest of India had been completed, or more or less so.
The emergence of British industrialisation at this time gave rise to
the need to reconstruct the economic structure of the colony, so
that it would supply resources and provide markets for industries
in Britain. Consequently, this historiographic urging for legislative
change, for change in the nature and structure of the colony, came
in extremely handy for British colonial policy.
Let us also remember that this is the latter half of the 19th
century, when aggressive capitalism was changing into imperi-
alism with its much more intensive exploitation of colonies.
Therefore, ideologies geared to legitimising change in the colonies
became imperative.
Indian society as the ’Other’ of Europe was a major theme. This
is perhaps best illustrated in the writings of Karl Marx and Max
Weber. Marx, in his Asiatic mode of production, argues that Asian
societies are distinctively different from European societies, and
that they present in some ways the reversal of the explanations
that are offered for European history and modes of production.
He argues that because there was no private property in land, there
were no class contradictions, no dialectic of change, no class
 Interpretations of Indian History 31

conflict. India was, in essence, a stagnant society. Therefore, even

though British colonialism did much harm, it was a necessary inter—
vention because it broke the stagnancy of the Indian past. Weber
argues that the absence of the puritan ethic in the religions of both
India and China was the main reason why capitalism did not
emerge at this time in Asia. There was no possibility of accom-
modating the rationality of economics in Indian religions.
The basic question for both Marx and Weber, and for a number
of scholars looking at the Indian past, was why capitalism devel-
oped in Europe and not in Asia. The contrast with Europe became
a primary concern. Europe was unique because it developed
capitalism. There is a noticeable disregard in the writings of Marx
and Weber for empirical data which might suggest the contrary.
This disregard in itself forms a very interesting subject for study
in European considerations of the Indian past. The focus is so con-
centrated on theory and on contesting theory that empirical data
was frequently either marginalised or ignored altogether. The
uniqueness of India was said to be caste, there was a considerable
emphasis on textual views of caste and, consequently, on the
dominance of the idea that Brahminism was responsible for the
creation of caste. This emphasis has continued from the early 19th
century up to the present. The writings of Louis Dumont, for
example, are very much in this tradition.

The Nationalist Interpretation

So much for colonial historiography. Let us turn now to an Indian
perspective. Towards the end of the 19th century there emerged
the beginnings of what have been called nationalist interpretatiom
of Indian history, interpretations that had become much more
forceful by the early 20th century.
The context of nationalist historiography in India was not similar
to that in Europe, because it was not initially geared to the emer-
gence of a nation state. This came later. Rather, it grew from an
anti-colonial movement for independence. History was used for
two purposes. The first was to establish the identity of Indians by
asking questions such as who we are, where we began, what we
are, what our history is, and how we have arrived at where we
are. The second was to establish the superiority of the past to the
32 Romila Thapar

present. The remote past, referred to by Mill as Hindu civilisation,

became the golden age. This was always very convenient, because
the more remote the golden age, the more imaginative were its
reconstructions, as they could not always be tested factually.
Mill’s periodisation of Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and
British periods, which many of us are now contesting was accepted
by these historians. A dichotomy was projected of a spiritual India
as against a materialist West. This dichotomy is evident in all
historiographies of colonial history, and makes for a fascinating
comparative study, for example, with the notion of Negritude
which developed in African and Caribbean societies.
What the nationalists did not do was provide an alternative
theory of explanation for Indian history. While they rejected some
ideas like oriental despotism, which they disapproved of, they
accepted others like the Aryan theory of race, which they were
willing to incorporate. Nevertheless, the fact that they were ques-
tioning some of these theories, irrespective of whether they arose
out of orientalist scholarship or out of utilitarian writing, meant
that a debate had been started. By the early 20th century, it was
recognised that history is not unbiased information; it involves
interpretation. This was a very major departure from the earlier
histories.
Nationalist interpretations gave rise to certain tangential inter-
pretations, emerging partly from its own concerns and partly out
of the politics of the 19205 and the 19305. One of these, regarded
as a fringe activity at the time but which has become much more
central in the last ten years, was the writing of history based on
religious nationalisms and relating primarily to the identities of
communities as Hindu or Muslim. This gave rise to communal
interpretations of India's past. They were motivated primarily by
the polities of the 19205 and the 19305, and became extremely influ-
ential in interpreting the pre-modern period in particular, because
itwasduringthisperiod thattheHinducommunityandtheMuslim
community as identifiable communities or, as many people argued,
as identifiable nations, were thought to have been established.
Historical explanation from this perspective is based on a single,
monocausal explanation, which is always religious. It is either
religious confrontation or religious conformity between Hindus
and Muslims which is seen as the causal factor in history. This
kind of historical writing is opposed to that which examines social
 Interpretations of Indian History 33

and economic history, because the latter shows up the poverty or

even the inappropriateness of monocausal explanation. Its
prominence in the last ten years is largely the result of the rise of
political parties that draw support from religious nationalism, such
as the Hindu nationalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Such
political ideologies constantly reiterate communal interpretations
of Indian history.
These interpretations, I would argue, are in fact distortions of
Indian history. They are ideologically limited and intellectually
even somewhat illiterate, because history becomes a kind of cate-
chism in which the questions are known, the answers are known,
and there is adherence to just those questions and those answers.
No attempt is made to explore intellectually beyond this catechism.
The aim is to define the identity of the Indian as specifically
Hindu and to choose the one identity. This goes against the grain
of Indian civilisation, which has been a civilisation of multiple
identities. The potential and actual contestation now is over iden-
tities, and the rights of these identifies, forgetting that identities'in
history are never permanent; that they change constantly over time,
and that present-day identities cannot in any manner be pushed
back onto the past.

The Post-colonial Interpretation

I turn, finally, to post-colonial theories of interpretation. One of

the theories that continues or has been revived is the communal
interpretation which, of course, has received a lot of political sup-
port, but is now becoming a highly contested theory. There have
been, however, two other directions in which Indian history has
moved, two very interesting and intellectually stimulating direc-
tions, unlike communal historical writing.
OneoftheseiswasMarxisthistoricalwritingwhichwasamajor
influence in the 19605 and 19705. What is interesting about Indian
Marxist historical writing is that although it used Marxist analysis,
the dialectical method and historical materialism, it moved away
from the given patterns that Marx and Engels had worked out for
Asian history. For example, the major questioning of the Asiatic
mode of production has come from Marxist historians There has
34 Romila Thapar

been, therefore, a creative use of Marxist analysis in grappling

with the issue of modes of production.
Debates have also centred around questions such as whether
Mads five-stage theory of European history — primitive commun-
ism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism—can also be applied
to India, or whether there should be a completely new period-
isation, using historical materialism but not necessarily conforming
either to the five-stage theory or to the Asiatic mode of production
theory.
The focus of these debates, known as the transition debates, has
frequently been on periods of change. In the 19705, the question
was whether there had been incipient capitalism in India prior to
the colonial expansion in the 19th century. What was the state of
the Indian economy? The famous ’drain theory’ came into play
here, the argument being that with industrialisation in Britain and
the latter’5 need for resources and markets, much of India’s wealth
was drained away into Britain, fundamentally impoverishing
Indian society. In the 19805, the debate shifted to a different mode
of production: feudalism. The debate, in fact, still continues on
whether the feudal mode of production existed in India.
The focus of interest therefore has been very much, as is to be
expected, on social and economic history, on questioning the exist-
ing periodisation. It has encouraged a large number of new trends
and departures. It has opened up the study of Indian history, with
even people who did not conform to Marxism being influenced
by these new perspectives from which history has been viewed.
Emphasis has also been laid on recognising the difference between
pre-modern societies and modern societies. Are pre-modem
societies embedded societies or are they open societies? There has
been a focus on pre-capitalist economies and how they differ from
modern economies, and on changes in society that go along with
the fundamental change from clan to caste. The historical changes
within caste have also received attention; this was not the case
earlier because of the widespread belief that caste was rigid and
frozen and, once it had come into existence, has continued without
change. This focus has provided material for comparative histories
raising questions for other disciplines: more recently, for example,
such questions as religion as a social ideology. Because religion is
often reduced to textual study, its dimensions get marginalised.
 Interpretations of indian History 35

This approach of seeing religion as social ideology challenges a

number of existing theories about the nature of religion.
The other group that has recently played an important part is
the group known as the subaltem historians. They are largely
historians of modern Indian history who have initiated a new pers-
pective on the study of Indian nationalism, arguing that the studies
conducted in the 20th century were dominated by an elitism that
focussed on either the colonial state or the indigenous elites, the
bourgeois nationalists or the middle class. They stress the need to
look at the participation of the subaltem groups as defined by
Gramsci. ’History from below’ became their slogan.
The subaltem historians use diverse sources, moving away from
archives and official papers to a variety of local sources, private
and popular. They have also emphasised the importance of the
oral tradition as legitimate historical source material. They en-
courage the investigation of the minutiae of what goes into the
making of an event, of the author, of the audience, of the intention.
This investigation can be of either a written or an oral text.
This kind of history then challenges the validity of making broad-
based historical generalisations. Each study is self-contained.
Eventually, there are a large number of well-documented studies
with little cross-connection. This, frankly, is the level at which I
have problems with this particular group, because I am a suffi-
ciently old-fashioned historian to ask for generalisations. In focus-
sing on the fragment, on the little piece that is being pulled apart,
analysed and perhaps put together, there is a tendency to ignore
the whole to which the fragment belongs. Is there a nation? Is there
a national movement? We do not know, because what these
scholars are concerned with is a manifestation of something which
is very localised and very minute. It cannot, therefore, provide an
alternative theory of nationalism, which may have been the original
intention of those who founded the group. There is no framework
of explanation which relates itself to a central point and to which
each study can refer.
There are multiple readings of texts, and these are encouraged,
but priorities regarding these readings are not apparent. This is
certainly the influence of post-modemism. I find it difficult to
accept, because I do believe that some readings are more significant
than others, and do not give equal priority to all readings irres-
pective of what they are. History then becomes something of a
36 Romila Thapar

narrative, and there is a return to some 19th century historio-

graphy, although of course the context and the framework are
different.
What is interesting is that this kind of historical writing has so
far had no impact on pre-modem Indian history. This may be
because of the nature of sources and the way in which historians
handle these sources. It has, however, had a tremendous impact
on many aspects of third world history outside India, partly per-
haps because it is closely associated with post-modernism in its
more recent phase. It therefore has international visibility, and this
has encouraged comparative studies which historians are now
taking much more seriously.
To conclude, I have tried to suggest that in the modern writing
of Indian history, there is a continuing dialogue and debate with
colonial interpretations, with nationalist interpretations and with
the evolution of theoretical formulations in the post-colonial
period. This has resulted in Indian perspectives modifying or
altering even the use of theoretical explanations in the histories of
other parts of the world. This has not only enriched historical
theory, even in areas other than India, but has also sharpened the
debate and evaluation of comprehending the Indian past. Hope-
fully, it has also provided a more perceptive understanding of the
past, which I think is essential in order to understand the present.