History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 12002000 by Sumit Guha;

Author:Sumit Guha;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295746234
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2019-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

EARLY COLONIAL HISTORY IN BENGAL

English-language of histories of Indian regions, as well as the larger one by Elphinstone were initially intended for the English in India, incoming English officials, and the scholarly world of Europe. The triumph of the Anglicist program meant that a growing but always small number of Indians began to read these histories too. I have already alluded to the very different traditions of reconstructing past events in each part of India. The new colonial histories thus encountered distinct historical traditions, each structured by enduring features of the sociopolitical setting of its home terrain. The Bengal delta was a politically and religiously diverse region, with a corresponding variety of literary traditions. Mughal rule came later and sat lighter upon it. The Calcutta area became the bridgehead of British power in India, and a new urban center and corresponding hybrid cultural tradition sprang up there. The scribal intelligentsia of Calcutta were early adopters of a new historical style emerging from the interaction.

Madras and Calcutta were both initially small East India Company trading towns that grew into metropolitan centers of an emerging British empire around the Bay of Bengal. British Bombay, though older than Calcutta, had powerful Indian rivals in the area and only emerged as a significant territorial power after 1818. Calcutta was the biggest and wealthiest of the three cities in the early nineteenth century. It was also the seat of the governor-general, who came to control regional administrations across British Asia. New clerical and commercial classes closely intertwined with Western commerce and empire thrived there, and the largest and most complex bureaucratic and literary apparatus emerged in this city. Christian missionaries had long sought to influence elite and popular thought along the seaboard of the Bay of Bengal. The rise of evangelical interest in Britain (with which the politically networked East India Company director Charles Grant was affiliated) gradually gave the pro-missionary faction great power in the Bengal Presidency. The small but energetic Baptist establishment at Serampore (near Calcutta) pioneered printing in Indian characters and printed a range of texts. They were thus ready when Western-style schools and a new curriculum began to require large numbers of cheap Indian-language histories.

We have already considered the two earliest Bengali-language histories, produced in 1801 and 1808 by teachers at the College of Fort William. Their authors, especially Ramram Basu, alluded to kulaji genealogical traditions, as did the earliest British authors, like John Marshman. But they were increasingly challenged by the gradual unearthing of copper-plate and lithic inscriptions, as well as other records that contradicted traditional caste legends. Efforts by Nagendranath Basu to incorporate new archaeological findings by announcing their “discovery” in supposedly ancient manuscripts only discredited the legends further. R. C. Majumdar published a series of articles on this debate in the Bengali journal Bhāatavarṣa during the 1930s and later reedited and printed them in 1973. He recalled that the debate grew heated but then largely died down thereafter. It was replaced by an archaeologically sustainable narrative of ancient Indian history to which Majumdar himself made large contributions.

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