Sources of Indian Traditions

Modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

Rachel Fell McDermott, Leonard Gordon, Ainslie Embree, Frances Pritchett, Dennis Dalton

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231510929
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Indian & South Asian History

For more than fifty years, students and teachers have made the two-volume resource Sources of Indian Traditions their top pick for an accessible yet thorough introduction to Indian and South Asian civilizations. Volume 2 contains an essential selection of primary readings on the social, intellectual, and religious history of India from the decline of Mughal rule in the eighteenth century to today. It details the advent of the East India Company, British colonization, the struggle for liberation, the partition of 1947, and the creation of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and contemporary India.

This third edition now begins earlier than the first and second, featuring a new chapter on eighteenth-century intellectual and religious trends that set the stage for India's modern development. The editors have added material on Gandhi and his reception both nationally and abroad and include different perspectives on and approaches to Partition and its aftermath. They expand their portrait of post-1947 India and Pakistan and add perspectives on Bangladesh. The collection continues to be divided thematically, with a section devoted to the drafting of the Indian constitution, the rise of nationalism, the influence of Western thought, the conflict in Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, minority religions, secularism, and the role of the Indian political left. A phenomenal text, Sources of Indian Traditions is more indispensable than ever for courses in philosophy, religion, literature, and intellectual and cultural history.

Chapter 1

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

FERMENT AND CHANGE

In a wide-ranging survey, the Indian historian K. K. Datta noted in 1977 that in much historical writing the eighteenth century emerges as “an inglorious period in the history of India,” depicting the country as subjected to “dreadful political turmoil, social disorder and confusion and a grievous economic decline.”¹ The sources for this judgment, however, were largely members of the old elites who had suffered from the changes that were taking place, foreign observers unfamiliar with the country, or members of the British ruling class in the nineteenth century who wanted to contrast the dire conditions of India under the old rulers with what they believed were the improvements that had taken place under their rule. This view also reflected the accepted interpretation of Muslim rule in India—accepted not only by the British rulers but also by Hindu nationalists, who pictured the golden age of India as destroyed by Muslim invaders.

Recent historical writings by South Asian and Western scholars have noted that the dark picture of the eighteenth century tended to focus on politics in North India and Bengal, ignoring the remarkable social and economic changes taking place in other parts of the country. Thus a careful study of the economic history of the century by Tapan Raychaudhuri can conclude that “imperial decay was in fact compensated for to some extent by the prosperity of the new provincial kingdoms and the emergence of new centers of trade and industry.”²

The selections in this chapter suggest that some prominent features of Indian society, as surveyed in volume 1, survived and adjusted to the massive political, economic, and intellectual changes that took place after 1700. The sources that we have drawn upon to illustrate these aspects of Indian life are largely literary, which results in little attention to the rich artistic life of the times, such as the many important schools of painting that flourished in the eighteenth century, and the abundant variety of “folk” traditions.

A problem of nomenclature arises in identifying the two great civilizations that interacted in India in the eighteenth century, because writers both foreign and Indian have tended to label them as “Hindu” and “Islamic.” We have endeavored to stress that each of these designations covers a very wide (and also overlapping) spectrum of beliefs and behavior; and they are used here more or less as in the Indian Constitution, Articles 25 to 30, to designate self-identified groups claiming certain characteristics not shared with others.

The wide variety of life in eighteenth-century India cannot be arranged in any very satisfactory pattern, but at least five general historical trends, all closely related to each other, can be identified as characterizing the century, all of which remain part of the legacy of the nations of South Asia in the twenty-first century. Of the five, the reorganization of political power was the most obvious: it is marked by the decline of the Mughal Empire and its replacement by strong regional kingdoms, often under former Mughal governors. The second was the emergence of local groups that had formerly been subservient to the power of the imperial center or to the provincial governor; during the period of Mughal disorganization, when changes in the balance of power were experienced and manipulated after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, many local groups were successful for the first time in gaining some autonomy. A third aspect of political change entailed the growing resistance of peasant and tribal groups to external authorities. A fourth trend was the devotional and intellectual creativity within both Hindu and Islamic religious communities, which is of special interest and importance since it links the past with later developments. The fifth was the intrusion of European political, economic, and cultural power into the subcontinent in the last decades of the eighteenth century in greater strength than in any previous period, and in ways that helped to shape modern India.

THE REORGANIZATION OF POLITICAL POWER

In the eighteenth century, the governors of the Mughal provinces, or subās, became virtually independent rulers, but without formally rebelling against the Mughal emperor; thus they preserved for themselves a symbol of legitimacy. These major centers of political power, as well as many smaller ones, largely replicated the cultural and administrative styles of the old Mughal capitals of Delhi and Agra. A salient feature of the reorganization of political power was the diffusion of both economic and cultural control to these centers, releasing new energies that built up new political institutions and weakened old ones. Bengal and Hyderabad are two examples of this process.

In other areas, political power passed to groups with roots in the older traditional cultures of India who had also been important participants in the Mughal power structures and had adopted them for their own use. The most powerful of these were the Marathas, centered in what is now the state of Maharashtra, who controlled much of western and central India as far north as Delhi and territories as far south as Thanjavur (Tanjore). At the end of the eighteenth century they posed the main challenge to British expansion; although they were defeated as a military power in 1818, they became a powerful element in the formation of the Indian nationalist movement.

In the Punjab, the Sikhs, a group defined both by regional political identity and by religion, as noted in volume 1, in the eighteenth century under a number of chieftains ousted the Mughal authorities in numerous areas, establishing their own rule. During this period the Sikhs evolved the distinctive symbols of their religious identity, embodied in the special garb of the Khalsa, the order instituted, according to Sikh traditions, by Guru Govind Singh in 1699 to establish Sikh identity and to unite them into a political power. Under their very able leader Ranjīt Singh (1780–1839), they founded a kingdom that dominated the Punjab from 1799 to 1849.

In Rajasthan, the courts of descendants of the ancient chiefs of the region, as well as rulers of small Himalayan kingdoms governed by Rajputs, became centers of religion and remarkable schools of painting, music, and religious poetry. Although they never became a political force comparable to the Marathas or the Sikhs, they self-consciously preserved and patronized a vision of their own traditional culture.

In the south, where Mughal rule had been the weakest, regional chieftains, with historical roots as military chieftains and landlords, asserted their authority. At the great Hindu temples of the south, as well as at the courts of the rulers, sculpture, painting, and music flourished throughout the century, closely allied with the devotional and ritual practices of both the Shaivite and Vaishnavite religious traditions. Many southern rulers asserted their genealogical relations with the great empires of the past, and the cultural continuities with the pre-Islamic period are everywhere evident—in language, literature, religion, art, and architecture. By the end of the century the most powerful regional political power in the south was located in Mysore, whose Hindu rulers, the Wadiyar dynasty, traced their origins to the great Vijayanagar Empire. Their power was usurped by their Muslim general, Haidar Ali, in 1765.

Central to all regional kingdoms from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries was what has been called “military fiscalism,” that is, the extraction of tribute payments from local chiefs under threat of military action, in order to create income for the state. In the unstable environment of the period, especially under the spread of Maratha power from western and central India, but also through the steady expansion of the English East India Company in the east and south, cash was needed to pay for a new style of army, comprised chiefly of infantry groups who rose to prominence with the improved rate of firing and the longer range and accuracy of modern firearms. Such new military groups were supported by states with increased administrative depth and newly important roles for bankers and money-lending.

In addition to the political reorganization associated with indigenous powers, eighteenth-century India was subjected to intrusion from groups outside the subcontinent. Two of these, led by the Persian Nadir Shah in 1738–1739 and the Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1748–1752, caused terrible suffering in the Punjab and Delhi, and weakened the power of the Mughal emperor. Ultimately, however, it was the British who, through their East India Company and its participation in Indian political life, had far more lasting influence. Although the Portuguese had established their colony at Goa at the beginning of the sixteenth century—defeating local kings, engaging in repeated wars with the Marathas and the Deccan sultanate, and subsequently promulgating repressive religious policies of conversion—by the eighteenth century they had ceased to be major actors. The French and the Dutch had small trading centers on the coast but lost out to the British, who by the end of the eighteenth century had begun the transition from being traders to becoming successor...