Daud Ali

Invoking the past : the uses of history in South Asia

This collection of 13 essays by some leading scholars explores the variety of uses (and abuses) of history in South Asia from different perspectives. The first two sections deal with colonial and nationalist themes, including the racialization of history and its political appropriation by various political parties along the ideological spectrum, as well as the nationalist and Hindutva recasting of the past at the hands of Indologists, scientists, doctors, and travel writers. The third and final section focuses on a wide range of pre-colonial themes, ranging from Sanskritic uses of the past in the theory of mixed castes to Sri Lankan and north Indian debates about religious community and history, from Mughal imperial history to south Indian innovations. The essays reveal a complexity of traditions rarely acknowledged by those who would attribute history to the coming of modernity. They alert us to the need for a more nuanced and sustained examination of the often stereotyped attributes of pre-colonial, colonial, and nationalist history.

Technologies of the self: Courtly Artifice and Monastic Discipline in Early India

This paper attempts to link the growth of courtly and monastic practices as related historical phenomena in early historic India. The consolidation of urban courts and monastic communities represented a departure from the Vedic way of life in the context of new social relations and increasing urbanisation. Urban society and Buddhist monasticism, as scholars have pointed out, were linked materially and sociologically. This paper explores this linkage further. At the level of practice, courtly comportment and monastic discipline, centred around artifice and discipline, respectively, can be seen as direct inversions of one another. This opposition, however, was complementary and reveals a number of shared assumptions about “reality” leading to a common “hermeneutics” of phenomena, despite contrary ontological approaches and implications for practice.

Temporality, narration and the problem of history: A view from Western India c. 1100–1400

The articles in this issue contribute to a paradigm shift in our approaches to historical discourse in precolonial South Asia. Rather than posing again the well-worn question of whether the Rājataraṅgiṇī should be considered a properly ‘historical’ text or a work of poetry, they focus on the complex and often hybrid sytlistic, thematic and aesthetic ‘lineages’ of the text, to understand how Kalhaṇa was able to articulate a unique vision of the past—and one that created the space for further iterations in later times. This final article seeks to at least partly test the value of such an approach through a similar examination of largely contemporaneous materials from Western India. Long noted for its peculiar combination of tantalising historical detail with magical elements and chronological anachronisms, the prabandha literature of Gujarat has recently been interpreted as an expression of a ‘Jain’ approach to kingship, morality and biography. Without denying this obvious connection, this article approaches the prabandhas by contexualising them against the wider background of temporalities and narrational styles in Sanskrit literature. It argues that the peculiar conventions of prabandha literature in Western India may best be explained through the interaction of distinctive narrative traditions and temporal orientations in Sanskrit writing that may have broad parallels in Kashmir’s literary history.

The Historiography of the Medieval in South Asia

Colonial scholars and administrators in the latter half of the nineteenth century were the first to subject South Asia to modern historicist scrutiny. Using coins, inscriptions, and chronicles, they determined the dates and identities of numerous kings and dynasties within an apparently scrupulous empiricist framework. From the 1930s, with the widespread rise of nationalist sentiment, South Asian scholars began to write about their own past. The particular configurations of colonial and early nationalist historiography of South Asia have proved immensely consequential for subsequent generations of historians. Not only did this historiography value certain types of evidence, particularly Indic language epigraphy, Persian chronicles, and archaeology (while at the same time devaluing others like literature and religious texts), it set some of the enduring thematic and topical parameters which have shaped the course of the field. The initial focus was on the careers and personalities of rulers or the genius of races as the key causative forces in history, but eventually dynastic history became the dominant mode of writing about the past.

Anxieties of Attachment: The Dynamics of Courtship in Medieval India

The copious literature on love in early India has most recently been interpreted as a variant of the universal experience of human sexuality. Studies have rooted the uniqueness of Indian ideas either in theological conceptions of the immanent and transcendent, or in the particularity of the parent-child relation in India. Whatever the insights of such scholarship, two major problems relevant to this essay are its positioning of a ‘civilizational’ backdrop as its subject of analysis—either ‘India’ or ‘Hinduism’—and, particularly with the former approach, the subsequent application of what has been called the ‘repressive hypothesis’ to the Indian material, which poses the ‘transcendent’ principles of Indian civilization in a restraining role over those deemed life-affirming or immanent. This essay will offer an alternative to these interpretations by placing conceptions of romantic love in medieval India within their social and discursive contexts, and connect up the discourses on self-discipline in medieval India with those of love in a more historically specific and illuminating way.

Gardens in Early Indian Court Life

He indeed is king whose abode has spacious pleasure gardens with long pools made brilliant by beautiful lotus blossoms covered with humming bees.... Wealth, friends well-versed in the arts, the sound of melodious lutes, and beautiful women with young and charming bodies— all these will be without fruit for the king seeking the pleasure of all, if there are no pleasure gardens. Śārngadharapaddhati

The Death of a Friend: Companionship, Loyalty and Affiliation in Chola South India

This article argues that the languages of loyalty and affiliation that marked public and formal relations of service and hierarchy in medieval India, though traditionally understood as thinly veiled pretexts for class exploitation or self-aggrandizement, may instead be interpreted, when combined with other sorts of sources, as elements within a larger ethical landscape where men of rank shared varieties of companionship and intimacy with one another. The article will enter this realm of intimacy through an exploration of the emotions of grief and loss in two strangely parallel Chola-period friendships: one epigraphically documented to the tenth century, and the other recounted in an important contemporary hagiographical tradition. The article argues not only for the importance of male friendship and intimacy in the political and religious life of elites in medieval south India but also suggests that fragmented memories of particular lived experiences between individuals may have been embedded in or triggered by more idealized representations. I hope to suggest that there were not only structures of affect at work in the constitution of male intimacy but also models and paradigms.

Friendship in Indian History: Introduction:

The articles in this issue grew out of a series of conferences that sought to initiate a discussion among historians about the possibilities and strategies for writing the history of friendship in South Asia.3 The study of the history of human emotions, emotional affiliations and the structures of sociability though which they were articulated in South Asia—whether conceived of as the history of concepts, the history of manners and ethics, the history of affect or the history of ‘private’ or ‘everyday’ life—has been strikingly neglected in Indian historiography. Friendship, in particular, has over the last several decades gained a rich historiography in the fields of US, European and Middle Eastern history.4 Yet, Indian historians and anthropologists have, until recently, been reticent to engage with the theme of friendship despite, as these articles argue, copious evidence suggesting its importance.5 Why historians have been indifferent to the topic of friendship is complex. At a superficial level, it might be argued that such concerns have been considered

The idea of the medieval in the writing of South Asian history: contexts, methods and politics

The concept of the ‘medieval’ in South Asia has been a long and contested one. From its origins among colonial administrators to its present-day habitation in educational institutions, the study of...

Book Review: Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter

Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter, University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2009, pp. xv, 366; 180 b&w figs,