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South Asia Research | 1990
Burton Stein
Though this is inevitably a personal assessment, few with an interest in South Asian history could deny that the past decade has witnessed some stunning developments. That is to take ’stunning’ in two senses: some very brilliant achievements and some confused overtures. It could just be that we South Asian historians are under the ambiguous Chinese curse of living in times that are interesting. This is easier to state than to demonstrate convincingly because the publications being evaluated are too recent for the durability of their quality to be confidently assessed. Speaking personally, the past decade was the most productive of my professional life with the publication of three monographs,l yet I am bound to confess uncertainty about the impact of what I have written upon the history practice of others. For example, in the first of my three monographs I argued that the Chola kingdom could not be conceived in terms of a centralised, bureaucratic monarchy, as proposed half-a-century ago by K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, and this argument has found wide acceptability. But I drew some heavy criticism for the application to India of a conception drawn from a wider world of historical and social analysis. My proposed alternative conception of a ’segmentary state’ was rejected by many on a variety of grounds, some valid, others less so, though I accept responsibility for having failed to provide a better, more persuasive formulation to replace that which I had some part in displacing about medieval Indian monarchies, and for leaving it to others to complete a revision of our understanding of these polities. I might well be thought to be in better company than I deserve, though, if I compare my uncertainties with the fixed purpose, not to say the obduracy, of Irfan Habib and his colleagues at Aligarh Muslim University. They have sustained an unchanging fidelity to a particular view of the Mughal state and its demise during the early eighteenth century, as well as to a particular view about the remaining decades of that century. Habib’s argument in The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 15561707 ~ was no less a striking achievement for being a restatement of William Moreland’s classic studies of forty years before. But that means that the historiography of the mightiest of the pre-colonial kingdoms of India has not been .
South Asia Research | 1985
Burton Stein
Peasant insurgency has been an awkward subject for the Indian scholar, and thus for comparativists usually historical sociologists who more often than South Asianists, have studied the matter. The awkwardness arises from the following paradoxes. India is one of the most ancient peasant societies in the world, and one in which it is possible to speak of a peasantry in many of its parts even when India is also one of the major industrial and advanced technical and scientific societies in the world. Yet, despite its provenance as an histor-
South Asia Research | 1996
Burton Stein
colleagues have achieved. This large volume was obviously organised as a collective and composed in the same way. Its several authors seem to have agreed on the general content and the contributions of each, which were fitted into parts of chapters here and there in the text. The result is a more focused argument about modem India than could have been expected from a collective, except by a reader who knows some or all of the contributors. The five centuries of the Indian past examined here are demarcated in a rather unusual
South Asia Research | 1996
Burton Stein
The editors of the new Cambridge history series deserve praise for the inclusion of this volume by George Michell, for it assures that there is a cultural study for southern India to match the attention that was given to the volume of the series dealing with the Vijayanagara kingdom; in addition this volume balances the contemporary focus upon northern India, whose first volumes have included a history of the Mughals as well as books on Mughal and Rajput painting, by Milo C. Beach, and Mughal architecture by Catherine Asher. These several volumes pertaining to the earliest period covered by the Cambridge history achieve a high and comprehensive standard for subsequent contributions on later times to emulate. Moreover, Michell’s volume defines a new chapter in the history of Indian art, establishing the art and architecture of southern India from the time of the Vijayanagara kingdom of the fourteenth century to the decline of the Vijayanagara successor states in the mid-eighteenth century. The scope of this undertaking is impressive: the region considered for these several centuries consists of some 400,000 square kilometres, nearly twice the area of the United Kingdom. Within this vast space, major concentration has been focused on four subregions: the uplands of western Karnataka, and three zones of Tamil country: the north, around the Palar basin, the centre, in the Kaveri valley, and the far south of the Tambrapani. The subject is new, it is complex and it is vast, and that so coherent a study emerges says much for the experience and the abilities of its author. He has been involved in detailed studies of the Vijayanagara site of Hampi for the past fifteen years, together with an international collective of scholars from whom there have come a valuable set of
South Asia Research | 1995
Burton Stein
on places like Turkey, Brazil or Indonesia. ’Bourgeois revolution’ is an expression borrowed from the sociologist Barrington Moore to designate an epoch of change in India that has been led by the twin processes of capitalism and parliamentary democracy. The bases for both were laid down in colonial times and were supposedly the direct consequence of top-down, imperial policies. In recent times the transformative thrust has shifted to what
South Asia Research | 1995
Burton Stein
The Cjqpp£RWm (lay of the Anklet~, which dates from about 600 A.D. and is attributed to Ilafiko Atikal, a prince in the Cera kingdom on the west coast of south India, has twice before appeared in English, but Parthasarathy’s translation stands in a league of its own. First, it is highly readable, no mean feat given that the poetic language and events are so distant from the English reader. Second, it is readable because (not despite the fact that) it is literal: he does not gloss or paraphrase, and thus the poem’s every flower, every allusion, is given to us. Third, the translation retains (as much as is possible) the pace and rhythms of the original. Erotic, didactic, tragic, The Lay of the Anklet’ has found a proper translator. Parthasarthy’s brief Introduction and long Postscript cover much ground. He rightly highlights three issues in the epic poem: its Tamil identity; its Jaina slant, and its place in folklore. The first and last have endured. To the Tamil categories of love (akam) and war (puram), the poem adds a mythic dimension and inscribes the political geography of the ancient Tamil country. Shorn of its Jaina morals and political statements, the story of Kovalan and Kannaki continues to be told and sung because it follows a pattern deeply etched in Tamil culture: the abuse of power (by the king), revenge, and the deification of a woman. As a female-centred epic, the Cilappatikaram stands in contrast to the Sanskrit epics but is not unusual among the epics in India (including folk versions of the Rainayapa and Mahabharata). However, the translator also makes claims for this text that cause even an unashamed Tamilist, like this reviewer, to squirm. I cannot agree that it ’is the story of their [Tamil] civilisation’ or that Kannaki’s apotheosis has parallels with the Assumption of Mary. Parthasarathy is on firmer ground when he discusses the innovations of Tamil literary tradition in the epic. This translation, clearly, is the result of many, many years of work, and we must thank Parthasarathy for giving everyone the chance to read and enjoy this major text of Indian literature. Stuart Blackburn
South Asia Research | 1994
Burton Stein
a new social formation which was brought to maturity during the Vijayanagara age. The present volume presents the detailed argument for that proposition, and it has all the marks of Karashima’s scholarship: concentration on epigraphical sources, attempts to reset some of the inscriptional data in statistical form from which inferences are drawn, and a general framing according to rather old-fashioned Marxist concepts. And
South Asia Research | 1985
Burton Stein
At a time when students of social and political change in nineteenthand twentieth-century India have begun to question that caste is an absolute category, as it is invariably inscribed by the theologies both of conventional Hinduism and Western social science, rather than relative and contingent, this most able study may seem a Weberian throwback. However, in its facts and in its arguments, it is not that, but the contrary, even though some careless readers will get that wrong. O’Hanlon examines the formation of a non-Brahman ideology in Maharashtra; it is centred upon the formulations of caste identity and caste politics constructed by Jotirao Phule during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In this study of Phule’s life, works, and the context of both in colonial Maharashtra, we are provided with a critical understanding of the creation of that powerful counter-ideology which has shaped a century of politics in west-
South Asia Research | 1996
Burton Stein
South Asia Research | 1996
Burton Stein
