At last it is possible to read Bernard Cohn without having to hunt for his articles in obscure journals scattered in various libraries. Here are twenty-three of his essays, written over the period from 1955 to 1983, thus including all but his most recent writings. What a boon for Indian students, who do not have access to the sophisticated bibliographical aids to be found in American libraries and in the British Library System. It is also interesting to see the development of a scholar of such varied interests—ranging across the standard fieldwork of a young anthropologist in a U.P. village, a detailed account of Benares region in the period of transition to British rule in the early 19th century, an important study of regions in India, analyses of British strategies, whether in the form of raising pyramids of authority or of constructing frameworks of caste and status to pigeonhole Indians, and musings on the mutual relevance of anthropology and history. Cohn laughs at historians with their all-consuming ambition to write a ‘big book’.
While that has its own challenges and rewards, this collection makes it obvious that a widely-read and persistently curious scholar can shed light on many more dark corners than a historian focussing a powerful torch on one area of darkness alone. This book will be particularly valuable for younger scholars : the articles based on research will help them appreciate tools with which their under-graduate and graduate courses do not familiarize them, the bibliographical essays will help those who have learned only cursorily or misleadingly about ‘schools’ of history, as though they were so many dolphins. The essays are also thoroughly delightful reading for the non-specialist, for Cohn’s refreshing, somewhat ‘un-American’ sense of humour, a mixture of amusing, amused and irreverent, a mixture endearing for being non-personal and particularly welcome in a country where scholars are too busy being serious to be able to laugh.
That historians could learn from anthropologists was realized by western scholars from the 1940s. In India the influence of anthropologists has been uneven—M.N. Srinivas’s impact is perceptible, that of N.K. Bose not nearly enough. Anthropological studies like the splendid book on Benares by Diana Eck do not figure in reading-lists for history students. What may be called the ‘E.P. Thompson Revolution’ in Indian historical writing over the last ten years (after his triumphal tour of India in 1976 and his essay on Anthropology and History in the Indian Historical Review in 1977) led to the zealous treasure-hunt for ‘popular culture’. There is quantities of this around us in India, but climate and force of habit has led to much of the ‘research’ on popular culture being carried out not in the ‘field’ but in airconditioned libraries and with English-language material. If for an earlier generation of scholars working on India the pitfall was that ‘most historical research is done because there is a known body of source material available’ (Cohn, p. 6) and this material was allowed to speak through the medium of the scholar, today the danger is that the same material is being turned inside out, taken apart and stuffed into a trendy ‘subalternist’ cover. Cohn as early as 1980 had something to say which bears repetition. ‘The work of the historian proceeds outside the archives as well…. The past exists not only in records of the past, but survives in buildings, objects and landscape of the present day … The anthropological historian therefore should have the working experience of both the field and the archive. There are no shortcuts’ (p. 49). Cohn’s fieldwork on a village in U.P. led him to ask questions about caste categories, and thus to his classic article on census categories which is reprinted here. Caste categories were oversimplified, all-Indianized and made to fit all sections of people; this was shaped by and in turn shaped Indian intellectual attitudes. The question for us is how we would have done things differently, and whether the censuses of 1971 and 1981 are an improvement on the earlier ones in every way. The article on the census, together with the essay ‘Study of Indian Society’ should be given to students of modern Indian history for them to understand how the rulers perceived the ruled, at the same time as they read histories written by the British and their successors. The essay ‘Society and Social Change’ is a relatively slight essay on American writing on India, which, together with the essay ‘African Models and Indian Histories’ (and supplemented with the essay by Keith Thomas in Past and Present in 1963 and E.P. Thompson’s in Indian Historical Review in 1977) helps us see how theories and models constructed for one country are transferred to another. Since all the models being used in India are also transferred ones, it is useful to read these essays.
The work on Benares for which perhaps Cohn has been best known over the last twenty years, constitutes a book within a book. He was one of the earliest scholars to work on a region rather than an admi¬nistrative unit, something familiar to geographers but not to historians. The essay on Regions brings back memories of the forgotten discipline of historical geography, now surviving only in brittle pages of the Madras Geographical Journal in some obscure library. The study of the ‘longue duree’ is important in Indian history, cut up as it is by conventional periodization which itself is a relic of the colonial past. The important point made by Cohn is that regions are not static, and can be modified in varying degrees by changes in media and transportation.
Linked with the concept of space as well as with that of political authority is that of the domination of space—something that geographers are today devoting attention to. ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’ is the spatial dimension to the author’s essay on ‘Language of Command and the Command of Language’ in the Subaltern Studies.
The message that comes through from this collection is that we should not let our sources do our writing for us, even when the prose is as smooth as that of 19th century writers, and the paper so tough that it has withstood the handling by countless research students. Fortunately or otherwise, the telephone and the shredder between them make such excellent archives impossible for the past forty years. What will the historians of the next century write about?
The cover of the book is beautiful, as a Daniell print will always be. But this habit of reproducing Daniell prints for all books on Indian history is becoming too much of a good thing. As that wonderful artist Deanna Petherbridge says: ‘The prints of the Daniells … are only marginally about real buildings…. They are more about mood, metaphor and evocation.’ And the mood of a serene and people free Benares Ghat is not that of this vivid book. Perhaps one of the postcards pinned on Professor Cohn’s office-door in the University of Chicago would have been more appropriate. Also, was an index difficult to put together? This might have been as useful as the Introduction by a fellow scholar seems to be unnecessary.
Narayani Gupta teaches Modern Indian History at Jamia Milia Islamia College, New Delhi.