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Administrator-scholars and the Writing of History in Early British India: A review article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2013

JAMES LEES
JAMES LEES*
Affiliation:
Institute of Historical Research, University of London, UK Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The histories of Asian peoples penned by British East India Company officials during the early years of colonial rule—rightly—have long been considered to be doubtful source material within the historiography of South Asia. Their credibility was suspect well before the middle of the twentieth century, when Bernard Cohn's work began to present the British colonial state as one that relentlessly sought to categorize Indian society, and to use the distorted information thus gained to impose its government.

However, the histories of these administrator-scholars still retain value—not as accurate studies of their subjects, perhaps, but as barometers of the times in which they were written and also in the unexpected ways in which some continue to resonate in the present. To illustrate that point, this paper will review three recent monographs which deal with the writings and historical legacies of some of the Company's most prominent early nineteenth-century administrator-scholars. These are: Jason Freitag's Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan; Jack Harrington's Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India; and Rama Mantena's work centred around the antiquarian pursuits of Colin Mackenzie, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780–1880.1

Type
Review Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , May 2014 , pp. 826 - 843
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Freitag, J., Serving Empire, Serving Nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan (Leiden: Brill NV, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harrington, J.H.L., Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mantena, R.S., The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780–1880 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, for example, Cohn, B.S., Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

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11 Tod, J., Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, two volumes (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1829Google Scholar and 1832).

12 Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation, p. 9.

13 Ibid., p. 9.

14 Ibid., p. 21.

15 Ibid., p. 46.

16 Ibid., p. 53.

17 Ibid., p. 21.

18 Ibid., p. 22.

19 Ibid., p. 129.

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21 Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation, p. 9.

22 Ibid., p. 8.

23 Chatterjee, P., The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 249Google Scholar, cit. Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation, p. 185. See also Peabody, N., ‘Tod's Rajast’han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (February 1996), p. 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation, p. 186.

25 Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. ix.

26 Ibid., p. 2.

27 Ibid., p. 9.

28 Ibid., p. 68.

29 Ibid., p. 11.

30 Ibid., p. 193.

31 Ibid., p. 12.

32 Ibid., p. 131.

33 Ibid., p. 12.

34 Kaye, J.W., The Life and Correspondence of Major-General Sir John Malcolm, G.C.B, Late Envoy to Persia and Governor of Bombay; from Unpublished Letters and Journals, two volumes (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1856)Google Scholar.

35 Mantena, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India, p. 4.

36 Ibid., p. 55.

37 Ibid., p. 28.

38 Ibid., p. 62.

39 Ibid., p. 95.

40 Ibid., p. 29.

41 Ibid., p. 29.

42 Ibid., p. 176.

43 Ibid., p. 151.

44 Ibid., p. 11. See Burton, A., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Mantena, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India, p. 181.

46 Ibid., p. 60.

47 McLaren, British India and British Scotland, pp. 8–9.

48 See Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation, p. 49; and Peabody, ‘Tod's Rajast’han’, p. 208.

49 Peers, D.M., ‘Between Mars and Mammon: The East India Company and Efforts to Reform its Army, 1796–1832’, Historical Journal, vol. 33, no. 2 (1990), p. 386CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Peers, D.M., Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth Century India, 1819–1835 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), p. 11Google Scholar.

51 Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. 18.

52 Ibid., p. 37.

53 Ibid., p. 20.

54 Ibid., p. 115.

55 Ibid., p. 111.

56 Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation, p. 42 and p. 76.

57 Harrington takes issue with McLaren's assessment of Malcolm as a legislator in the Scottish Enlightenment mould, arguing that she has linked Malcolm ‘only to the great authors of the middle period of the Scottish Enlightenment’ and has not accounted for the later impact of the Revolution on his political thought. See Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. 133.

58 Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation, p. 50.

59 Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, pp. 126–127.

60 Letter quoted in Kaye, Malcolm, vol. II, p. 329, cit. Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. 107.

61 Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. 107.

62 Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation pp. 131–132.

63 Ibid., p. 136.

64 Ibid., p. 132.

65 Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. 11.

66 Ibid., p. 195.

67 Mantena, Origins of Modern Historiography in India, p. 144.

68 Ibid., p. 144.

69 Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation, p. 199.

70 Ibid., p. 198.

71 Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. 195.

72 Freitag reminds us that scholar-administrators exhibited a tendency to reject Brahminical sources, fearing that that the priestly office of the Brahmins made them ‘agents of “Oriental despotism” and therefore a threat to British control’: see Freitag, Serving Empire, Serving Nation, p. 14. Also, see Harrington, Sir John Malcolm, p. 114: Malcolm ‘made use of local folklore about the origins and lives of major historical figures wherever possible’.