David Hardiman

The coming of the Devi : adivasi assertion in western India

In 1922 the Adivasis of Western India were commanded by a goddess - or Devi - to change their established way of life. Their collective efforts to obey this goddess quickly brought them into conflict with the locally dominant class of landlords and liquor dealers. What began as a religious movement was thus transformed into a struggle for Adivasi assertion. In this book, David Hardiman argues that the study of such struggles can throw much light on the important themes of the religiosity of peasant consciousness, the transmission of political messages amongst the peasantry, the transition to capitalism in rural India, the continuing struggle by the peasantry against both feudal and bourgeois hegemony, and the nature of the Indian nationalist movement at village level.

Feeding the Baniya : peasants and usurers in Western India

This book provides important insights into a relationship which has been crucial to life in rural India--that between peasants and usurers. It explores the relationship in a rounded way, examining how states extended support to usurers, as well as how Baniyas exerted a power that was both economic and ideological.

Indian medical indigeneity: from nationalist assertion to the global market

The Indian system of healing known as Ayurveda is today popularly projected as a holistic form of healing that works on the mind, body and spirit. It is also said to be extremely ancient, with a knowledge rooted in successful practice that has continued largely unchanged for millennia. The article seeks to understand how a ‘traditional’ form of healing that is associated with Indian civilisation came to occupy such an epistemic space. The related practice of Unani Tibb (a practice that was associated with Islam in India) is compared. It is argued that the claims of Ayurveda and Unani Tibb are typical of many ‘invented traditions’ that sought to forge cultures that helped to bind disparate peoples within supposedly uniform nationalities. In the process, many cultural phenomena that did not fit into the created categories were either marginalised or excluded. The essay examines how claims to great antiquity were forged, the idea of a decline from a glorious past, with a corresponding need for present-day revival, attempts to create uniform ‘systems’ out of a range of eclectic practices, the politics of medical education for indigenous practitioners, and conflicting claims as to what ‘Indian indigenous medicine’ entailed.

Purifying the nation: The Arya Samaj in Gujarat 1895–1930

This article examines the impact of the Arya Samaj in Gujarat from 1895 to 1930. Although the founder of this body, Dayanand Saraswati, was from Gujarat, it initially proved less popular there than in the Punjab. The first important Arya Samajists in Gujarat were Punjabis, brought there by Sayajirao Gaekwad of Baroda to carry out educational work amongst untouchables. The Arya Samaj only became a mass organisation in Gujarat after a wave of conversions to Christianity in central Gujarat by untouchables, with Arya Samajists starting orphanages to ‘save’ orphans from the clutches of the Christian missionaries. The movement then made considerable headway in Gujarat. The main followers were from the urban middle classes, higher farming castes, and the gentry of the Koli caste. Each had their own reasons for embracing the organisation, ranging from a desire for higher social status, to religious reform, to building caste unity, and as a means, in the case of the Koli gentry, to ‘reconvert’ Kolis who had adopted Islam in medieval times. The movement lost its momentum after Gandhi arrived on the political scene, and many erstwhile Arya Samajists embraced the Gandhian movement. When the Gandhian movement itself flagged after 1922, there was an upsurge in communal antagonism in Gujarat in which Arya Samajists played a provocative role. A riot in Godhra in 1928 is examined.

Healing Bodies, Saving Souls

Missionary medicine flourished during the period of high European imperialism, from the late-1800s to the 1960s. Although the figure of mission doctor – exemplified by David Livingstone and Albert Schweitzer – exercised a powerful influence on the Western imagination during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, few historians have examined the history of this important aspect of the missionary movement. This collection of articles on Asia and Africa uses the extensive archives that exist on medical missions to both enrich and challenge existing histories of the clinic in colonial territories – whether of the dispensary, the hospital, the maternity home or leprosy asylum. Some of the major themes addressed within include the attitude of different Christian denominations towards medical mission work, their differing theories and practices, how the missionaries were drawn into contentious local politics, and their attitude towards supernatural cures. Leprosy, often a feature of such work, is explored, as well as the ways in which local people perceived disease, healing and the missionaries themselves. Also discussed is the important contribution of women towards mission medical work. Healing Bodies, Saving Souls will be of interest not only to students and historians but also the wider reader as it aims to define the place of missionary within the overall history of medicine.

The politics of water in colonial India.

I With rainfall in India confined to a few months in each year, and often uncertain, agriculture has, historically, relied heavily on irrigation. The power of many ruling groups in the sub-continent has depended on their ability to promote and maintain irrigation works of a variety of sorts. The authority of the Cholas, for example, rested on their success in building impressive irrigation systems in the delta regions of South India. Dams were constructed on the major rivers from around the second century CE onwards, channelling water to extensive paddy-growing tracts. Later, in northern India, the Tughlaks and Mughals constructed canals with similar intentions, but these works were neither very extensive nor as important for agriculture as the earlier South Indian works. There appears to have been an increase in canal building in the Ganga-Jamuna Doab region and in the Indus valley in the eighteenth century that was associated with the emergence of local rulers. These systems often relied on controlled inundation, involving the flooding of land, which spread silt over the fields and saturated the soil with water, allowing for the production of rich crops. This was a feature of the South Indian irrigation systems, such as that from the grand Anicut, and it was a system also used extensively in Bahawalpur State in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century and in the north Indian plains, using water flowing off the Himalayas.

Gandhi's global legacy

Gandhi has been understood in many ways since his death in 1948, and although his reputation has fluctuated, regard for him and his ideas has in general increased over time. He is revered by many as a spiritual leader and saintly figure. He is seen by others as a great pacifist. He is admired for his method of militant nonviolent resistance – satyagraha – and many have sought to apply it in struggles for civil and democratic rights. He has been held up as a champion of national liberation who has provided a potent means for resisting colonial rule. Others have appreciated his critique of the industrial mode of production and his call for a self-sustaining economy and egalitarian society. In this chapter, we shall see how Gandhi has proved an inspirational force for many, but also a controversial figure whose legacy has often been disputed. Gandhi has been revered by many as a saintly figure who worked for peace and harmony in the world. This image is often found in depictions of him in the West. His statue in London, in Tavistock Square, thus shows him in a cross-legged meditative pose with eyes downcast. The impression is reinforced by flowers and incense sticks, which are often placed by his admirers at the foot of the statue. He is depicted in a similar way in a mural in St Mary’s Church in Oxford. In India, by contrast, he is normally depicted in statues as striding forth, staff in hand, about to battle the British in one of his satyagrahas. Many, particularly in the West, regard Gandhi as a kind of patron saint of pacifism. His reputation in this respect is, however, open to question. It has been pointed out that he in fact supported the British military in the Boer War and in World War I, and believed that it was better to defend national honour through the use of armed force than to act in a cowardly manner. This was hardly an endorsement of the pacifist position.

Knowledge of the Bhils and Their Systems of Healing

In this essay, I shall examine how the Bhils of the border region between the present states of Rajasthan and Gujarat understood and treated ill health and disease in the late nineteenth century.

At Sussex with Anthony Low, 1970–1971

The period between the late 1960s and the mid 1980s was one of radical change within the field of South Asian history. Before then, as Ranajit Guha was to state memorably in the first sentence of the first volume of Subaltern Studies: ‘The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism—colonial elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism’. By the mid 1980s, the eminent literary theorist, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, was able to announce that the subject had been transformed in ways that scholars throughout the world in a range of disciplinary fields should acknowledge. Such a move does not happen often in Historical Studies; one can think, perhaps, of the British Marxist historians of the post-Second World War period in such a light. What was unprecedented in the case of modern South Asian history was that it was a history with a non-European focus, written predominantly by people whose forebears had been colonised by Europeans. And yet, it was not a purely ‘Third World’ enterprise. It had been launched in the metropolitan countries by either Indians studying or teaching outside their own country, or by ‘Europeans’ who were working with them. A significant figure in the latter category was the man who is the focus of this collection—Anthony Low. I have taken the late 1960s as the start of the period of transformation largely because it was in 1968 that a volume was published, edited by Low and titled Soundings in Modern South Asian History. In his ‘Introduction’, he explored the way that Indian nationalism was rooted in the social history of particular regions of India. He explicated this mainly through a study of the United Provinces (UP), which he depicted as being at the cusp of the nationalist movement after the initial surge from Bengal faded in 1910. There was an important essay in the volume by Peter Reeves on the political role of the landlords of UP. There were chapters also on the social and political history of some other main regions of India—by Ravinder Kumar on Maharashtra, John Broomfield on Bengal, and

Miracle Cures for a Suffering Nation: Sai Baba of Shirdi

Sai Baba of Shirdi, who died in 1918, was raised as a Muslim but is today revered as a Hindu saint. One of his most important perceived qualities was his ability to provide miraculous cures for his devotees, and this has continued after his death. I argue here that the emphasis in the Hindu tradition on saintly figures healing the sick is a relatively modern phenomenon. Earlier, though such figures were renowned for their miracles, healing played a very minor part in this. Their miracles were generally designed to worst religious rivals and to enable them to speak truth to power. In the modern era, however, such saintly figures can gain a reputation through healing in a way that is presented as beyond the comprehension of modern medical science. Such people are seen to provide living evidence of the superiority of Indian civilization and its religious beliefs. This move became entangled with nationalist sentiments, so that getting the better of the “English” doctor became a means to reveal the limited scope of Western science and culture. Although this appears to suggest that many Indians have rejected the biopolitics associated with Western modernity (as defined by Foucault), I argue that certain elements of such biopolitics are central to this process, and illustrate this through a study of Sai Baba, a village holy man taken up by the Indian middle classes and made into a pan-Indian figure, with a now global presence.