[రమా సుందరి మంతెన (Rama S Mantena) ఇల్లినాయ్ యూనివర్సిటీ – షికాగో, చరిత్ర విభాగంలో అధ్యాపకురాలు. మిషిగన్ యూనివర్సిటీ నుంచి 2002లో పిహెచ్.డి పొందిన రమా సుందరి, వలసపాలనలో, వర్తమానంలో దక్షిణాసియా, భారత సంస్కృతి, చరిత్రలను ప్రత్యేకంగా పరిశీలిస్తుంటారు. 2004 లెడెరర్ పోస్ట్ డాక్టరల్ ఫెలో – బ్రౌన్ యూనివర్సిటీ. 2005 క్లూగ్ ఫెలో – లైబ్రరీ ఆఫ్ కాంగ్రెస్‌. ప్రస్తుతం వలసపాలనలో భారతదేశంలో వచ్చిన ఆధునిక రాజకీయ దృక్పథంపై ఒక పరిశోధనా గ్రంథాన్ని వ్రాస్తున్నారు.]

I have been engaged in the study of everyday practices surrounding the acts of collecting, surveying, and antiquarianism in the early colonial period in south India. It is through this study that I have come to argue that new practices of history were disciplined by an intellectual encounter, rather than suggest that there was a diffusion of ideas and concepts as a result of the imposition of colonial rule. In other words, the discipline of history was not simply a European ‘import.’ The modern idea of history and history writing was not a neatly packaged body of knowledge that had been formed back in England and had then been simply transported and disseminated in India. Instead, it might be more apt to view historical practice as undergoing profound change and as a culture of historicism that was taking root simultaneously in England and India in the last decades of the eighteenth century[1]. In England, antiquarian practices converged with the practices of philosophical history to produce a new emergent historicism[2]. In India, precolonial practices of history were being appropriated by colonial antiquarian practices, which produced a new historical method that was embraced by both Indians and colonial officials. Conceptualizing it as such disrupts the narrative that colonialism in India was a rule of simple domination[3]. If we consider colonialism or colonial rule to be solely about a rule of dominance, then we might neglect to unravel the discourses that surround practices of history in precolonial India in all their complexity and overlapping allegiances. The explanatory power of the rule of dominance would be at a loss to demonstrate the emergence of new practices of history taking shape in the encounter itself.

In the past few decades, in our zeal to overturn earlier assumptions that colonialism successfully undermined Indian intellectual traditions and practices through the introduction of English education and European knowledge systems, we may have neglected to pay attention to the particular ways in which colonialism enabled Indians to creatively reconfigure Indian traditions and cultures after confronting Western modes of intellectual inquiry. The questions that animate my inquiry are concerned with how we can understand these encounters to get at the emergence of new ideas and concepts while still keeping attuned to the strength of colonial power and the asymmetrical relations that it fostered and sustained. In other words, how do we give weight and power to new ideas without succumbing to the binarism of imperial logic that posits impenetrable differences between European and Indian traditions? One significant practice (amongst multiple enduring practices that emerged in this productive intellectual encounter between Britain and India) was the modern practice of history—especially so its positivist variant.

In my book, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), I examine the work of Colin Mackenzie and his Indian assistants, especially the Kavali brothers, to illuminate the generative nature of the intellectual encounter in the making of an archive for South India. Mackenzie, a Scotsman, was sent by the then governor-general to conduct topographical surveys of the regions after the Mysore wars. Mackenzie’s primary duties were to map the territories and to report on the conditions of the lands. Mackenzie became very intimate with the geography of Hyderabad and the Carnatic regions and therefore played a central role in the military campaigns against the Mysore state. His surveying duties required him to inquire into the revenue systems and the actual state of the lands. Still, over and above these duties, Mackenzie began to amass an archive for writing south Indian history. His collection included manuscripts, transcription of inscriptions, translations, and sketches of archaeological curiosities. Mackenzie’s collections ran into hundreds of journals and manuscripts that are currently spread across India and Britain. He exemplified the antiquarian impulse with his focused energy on collecting all textual and material objects relating to the diverse pasts of south India. Mackenzie took an interest in philological researches as he was tied closely with some prominent philologists in Madras, such as Francis Ellis and John Leyden and also maintained correspondence with such renowned philologists as H. H. Wilson and Charles Wilkins. However, Mackenzie himself was not a philologist as he lacked training in languages.

It is clear that Mackenzie provided for south India a monumental colonial archive. However, because he was not well versed enough in any of the south Indian languages to be able to read and translate them, he relied on native assistants to provide him with translations and summaries. Mackenzie employed numerous Indian assistants to help him collect manuscripts of literature and history in the region, which resulted in over 200 fascinating journals in English. Beyond these journals, Mackenzie amassed a vast manuscript collection encompassing the languages of the Dekkan: Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Marathi. There were also in his collection over 2000 sketches and drawings of ruins and archaeological remains of religious sites. Indeed, the archive comprised both visual and textual material resulting in a unique and immensely rich collection. It was Mackenzie’s belief that there were valuable texts and material objects spread across the villages in south India—remains of a rich political and religious past—that led him to amass a vast archive in order to make historical sources available for narrating a more accurate history of south India. The archival project was to precisely centralize those historical sources and to make them accessible for the British and Indians.

The Kaifiyat

With an assumption that the Indian textual record is mired in poetical forms and sometimes even in legendary tales, Mackenzie set out to wade through the textual record to find the truest historical record that was free from legend and myth and that could consequently come the closest to resembling its counterparts in European historical traditions. The memorandum of 1804 that the Madras government sent to its district officers lists carefully the kinds of records that Mackenzie was seeking: Vamsāvali (genealogies); Dandakāvali (chronological registers); Charitra (historical tales); Mahatyam and Purāanam (religious legends); Sāssanum (inscriptions); Dāna Patram (grants); ancient coins; and sculptures from temples and other historical buildings[4]. As an antiquarian, Mackenzie certainly did not want to exclude any document, whether relating to legendary tales or historical tracts, whose sole purpose was to preserve information for posterity. Furthermore, the list indicates that Mackenzie was highly aware of what kinds of documents were circulated in and were preserved in south India. The emphasis was laid on those records that were solely devoted to preserving historically useful information. The primary written documents that were highlighted concerned village records—land grants, deeds and genealogies of prominent families, etc.

Not surprisingly, Mackenzie’s search for authentic Hindu history led him to the institution of the village karanam (accountant) in the Telugu speaking regions of the Madras Presidency and the kaifiyat (village records). Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam have convincingly proposed that a distinctive style of history emerged under the influence of karanams[5]. They have called this karanam historiography. This historiography is defined by the particular prose that it generated. Karanam prose paid close attention to the constitution of historical facts and historical truths. They argue that history was in fact written in many genres throughout south Indian history, which demonstrates that there was a longer tradition of forms of historical consciousness or awareness in south Indian textual traditions. Karanams in particular were centrally placed to take on the mantle of the preservation of historical memory because of their critical bureaucratic roles that gave them access to and placed them in intimate proximity with record-keeping practices.