Dwijendra Narayan Jha, former Professor of History at the University of Delhi, passed away in February 2021. Best known for his monograph on the early history of beef eating in India, he was a widely read historian who wrote extensively on aspects of economic history and contributed to the Indian feudalism debate. His was also a prominent voice against communalism in contemporary India. Pushing the Boundaries of South Asian History is a collection of essays in his honour, which three of his colleagues at the University, Jaya S Tyagi, Saiyid Zaheer Husain Jafri and Amar Farooqui, have put together. Jha would have certainly appreciated this collection if it had been presented to him during his lifetime, although he would have been a little upset about the strange absence of non-Indians—with the exception of Michael Witzel—from the list of contributors.
There are nineteen essays in this collection, divided across four thematic sections with four essays in the last section and five each in the rest, in addition to reminiscences by Irfan Habib and Vishwa Mohan Jha. The opening section—with two pieces on law and three on dietary practices—examines a fairly long period that extends from the third century BCE to the twelfth century CE. The section is entitled ‘Reading Against the Grain’, but only two of the five essays, Jaya S Tyagi’s and Kumkum Roy’s, attempt a reading that is actually against the grain. Tyagi makes a comparison of the dhamma in Aśoka’s edicts and dharma in the Manusmṛti, two widely different sources that are often thought to have little in common. She suggests the possibility that some of Aśoka’s decrees might have influenced the Manusmṛti in matters such as animal killing and women’s agency. Roy’s piece urges us to rethink ‘the conventional understanding’ that the Arthaśāstra is a text obsessed with a highly regulated order. For all its centralizing tendencies, the Arthaśāstra keeps some aspect of everyday life sparingly controlled.
Roy’s discussion of a specific case, viz., dietary practices, examines the state’s regulation of the sale of food and drink, and the lack of proscription—except in some instances involving liquor—in matters related to food consumption. The bearings that the varṇāśrama system, gender and the state’s network of espionage have on dietary preferences come up for nuanced discussion. Roy concludes:
For a text that is almost obsessed with centralization, what is also remarkable is the virtual absence of any attempt to regulate the dietary practices of ordinary people. Even when there are incidental references to the norms typical of men belonging to different āśramas or stages of life, these are not backed up by provisions for either rewarding compliance or punishing violations; these are simply noted. Nor is there any attempt to suggest that consumption patterns needed to be governed in accordance with differences in either varṇa or gender identities (p. 85).
On a different note, Aloka Parasher Sen’s paper looks at how a Dharmaśāstra text produced ‘in the borderlands’ shied away from rigid prescriptions, especially in relation to women. Examining the prāyaścitta rites in the Dēvalasmṛti, Parasher Sen underscores the easy ways of expiation that the text prescribes for women who are sexually violated and/or forcefully converted to Islam. At a time when the realpolitik and the visions of the past that it promotes have tended to be increasingly authoritarian and centralized, professional historians have chosen to lay stress on the diversities and fluidities that characterize India’s past. Roy and Parasher Sen take this trend forward, as does Suchandra Ghosh’s piece that makes a comparison of sculptures of drinking in Gandhara and Mathura.
The second section which centres on the region speaks to the first in interesting ways. Kesavan Veluthat’s paper looks at the provincialized character of India’s interpretive traditions through an examination of the Bhāṣākauṭalīyaṃ, a twelfth-century Kerala commentary of the Arthaśāstra. Veluthat shows that what is true of the text in Roy’s discussion is also true for interpretations of the text. Ranabir Chakravarti’s study on a mid-twelfth century grant made to a mosque in Vaṅga is a remarkable contrast to the theme that Parasher Sen explores in her paper. Chakravarti highlights the religious plurality of riverine and maritime Bengal, associating it with trade and the diaspora that it brought in its train. This paper is best read with NR Farooqi’s piece in the third section, which brings to the Indian historian’s attention some important Turkish farmans that reveal Ottoman interest in, and funding of, a number of mosques in Calicut in the sixteenth century. Chakravarti doesn’t speak of religious syncretism, though, a hackneyed theme that Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi takes up in his examination of urban centres in the Mughal times. Rezavi’s thrust is on the urban centre as a place of cosmopolitanism (p. 249) and mutual interactions between different religious communities (p. 263). Another paper in this section exploring the same theme is more an elegy than a piece of historiography, with a fifteenth-century Kashmiri ruler’s reign represented as ‘a shining example’ of ‘peaceful coexistence’ (p. 158).
The third section is concerned with cosmopolitan linkages. Two papers in the section discuss knowledge transmission in India and the Perso-Arabic world. Nupur Dasgupta looks at Indian medical knowledge in the Abbasid realm. She underscores the importance of the state in this process, but cautions against overstating the state’s role, for there has been a longer history of knowledge exchange through Buddhist contacts. Saiyid Zaheer Husain Jafri’s is an overview for a lengthier span of time, centering on South Asia and looking at a wider gamut of knowledge systems from theology and law to mathematics and accountancy.
Ghanshyam Lal Devra’s paper, which reads like an excerpt from a longer work in progress, traces the early history of the Shansbānis with the help of khyat and tawarikh documents from Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, complementing it with information drawn from other sources such as the Chachnama, the Tabakat-i-Nasiri and the travel accounts of Hiuen Tsang. It refrains from dated forms of determinism and theoretical kite-flying to piece together historical and ethno-historic information that helps arrive at a reasonable understanding of the origins, settlement, migration, power politics and transformation of groups such as the Jadams and the Bhatis. Devra argues that the Shansbānis were of Indo-Scythian origins, and their rise to prominence was closely connected to the political and religious transformation of the Ghūr region in Afghanistan. What is known to historians only impressionistically comes through with a relatively richer attention to detail. A few lines describing the Jaisalmer sources would have helped readers appreciate the discussion better, and the arguments would have been richer had Devra shed light on the economic life of the Shansbānis.
Essays in the last section review aspects of India’s colonial and postcolonial history. Santosh Kumar Rai’s study on the weaving cooperatives looks at the contradictions involved in the making of the cooperative movement in northern India. Rai’s attempt is to explain why the movement eventually failed. In his words:
Indian weavers were not totally oblivious of the idea of cooperative societies as panchayats or shrenis had existed in India since ancient times. Moreover, panchayats also used to control transactions and prices of goods till as late as the early nineteenth century. Yet these very weavers could not associate themselves with the new organizations formed by the government. The formation of new organizations and societies interfaced with the existing social relations. In a community where ustads, grihastas and sardars had always played an important role in decision making, and where panchayats were included within the public sphere of the community, attempts to elect or nominate new associations and cooperative societies’ leaders, had to witness failures and their acceptability factor was certainly going to be poor (pp. 426-47).
In placing the existing and the new in a relationship of contradiction, this assessment might in actual fact be overlooking how much of the existing was created or reconstituted in the course of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Deepak Kumar’s paper on knowledge transformation in ‘Victorian India’ underlines this aspect of ‘tradition’. ‘In a subtle way,’ writes Kumar, ‘the colonizers themselves promoted this obsession with tradition by heaping occasional praises on “the spirit of the East”, and “the Hindu technology of contemplation”, etc.’ (p. 526).
Salil Misra’s overview of the historiography of communalism, with its autobiographical shades, is arguably the finest piece in this volume. It elucidates the chequered development of ideas on communalism through three issues: ‘(a) the big divide in locating communalism in modern history vs. premodern history; (b) the key explanatory variables; and (c) the big qualitative leap in communal politics in 1940’ (pp. 459-60). Misra’s take is incisive and often biased in favour of JNU historians (such as Bipan Chandra). At the same time, it is disappointing to find much space set aside to discuss less compelling descriptions while Gyanendra Pandey is glossed over in a couple of footnotes and several other important writers such as Shabnam Tejani overlooked. Misra contests the idea that nationalism and communalism are identical. Communalism, he notes, draws upon a number of political expressions, nationalism being only one among them.
This book is, like most festschrifts and memorial volumes, wide-ranging in its themes, geographies, and periods. In terms of its concerns, it speaks to the historiographical epoch that Jha represented and exemplified in large measures. But with so much of the thrust being centred on overworked themes such as linkages, diversities, cosmopolitanism, the colonial rupture and religious syncretism, one wonders if Pushing the Boundaries of South Asian History is really appropriate as the title for a book that is a fine snapshot, as it were, of a preceding historiographical epoch.
Manu V Devadevan is Associate Professor, History, Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi.