Burton Stein. A History of India

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Impression from an Indus valley seal (Courtesy of the

Trustees of the British Museum) 45

2 Ruins of Mohenjo - Daro (Courtesy of George Michell) 46

3 Ashvamedha - yaga (horse sacriﬁ ce ceremony) (By permission

of the British Library) 54

4 Rama, Sita and Lakshmana menaced by a demon host

(Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 56

5 Ashokan pillar edict (By permission of the British Library) 69

6 Gandhara stone carving showing Greek inﬂ uence

(Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 72

7 Vishnu and his ten avatars (By permission of the

British Library) 81

8 Arjuna, and Krishna as his charioteer (Courtesy of the

Trustees of the British Museum) 82

9 Gold coin of Samudragupta (Courtesy of the Trustees of

the British Museum) 91

10 The Minakshi - Sundareshvara temple at Madurai

(Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) 127

11 The great citadel of Devagiri (By permission of the

British Library) 136

12 The Alai Darwaza, Delhi (By permission of the

British Library) 141

13 The burning of the Rajput women during the siege of

Chitor (Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum) 144

14 Virupaksha temple, Vijayanagara (By permission of

the British Library) 145

15 Tomb of Shaikh Salim Chishti, Fatehpur Sikri (By

permission of the British Library) 165

16 Dara Shukoh attending a debate (By permission of the

British Library) 174

17 The emperor Aurangzeb in old age (By permission of

the British Library) 183

18 The haveli of the Divetia family in Ahmedabad (Courtesy

of Vivek Nanda) 198

Illustrations

19 A European smoking a hookah and watching a nautch in

his house (By permission of the British Library) 203

20 Sir Thomas Munro (By permission of the British Library) 210

21 The ﬁ ery trial of Sita (Courtesy of the Trustees of the

British Museum) 218

22 The Viceroy ’ s elephants (By permission of the British Library) 240

23 Victims of a nineteenth - century famine (By permission of

the British Library) 250

24 Raja Ram Mohun Roy (By permission of the British Library) 255

25 Santhal scroll painting (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British

Museum) 270

26 ‘ Terribly Sympathetic ’ (Courtesy of the Victoria and

Albert Museum) 279

27 Embroiderers (By permission of the British Library) 303

28 Gandhi at the second Round Table Conference (By

permission of the British Library) 316

29 European ladies at the wedding of a maharaja ’ s daughter,

1932 (Harald Lechenperg) 318

30 Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (By permission of the

British Library) 322

31 Nehru and Jinnah in the garden of Jinnah ’ s house (By

permission of the British Library) 339

32 Three voters outside a polling booth in Tamil Nadu

(Courtesy of K. Gajendran and Frontline) 385

33 ‘ City for Sale ’ by Gulam Shaikh (Courtesy of the painter

and the Victoria and Albert Museum) 389

34 Mrs Indira Gandhi addressing an election rally

35 The destruction of the Babri Masjid, Ayodhya, on 6

December 1992. 412

36 Women protesting against the Narmada Dam scheme

MAPS

Map 1 India today. 3

Map 2 Physical features. 4

Map 3 Annual rainfall. 5

Map 4 Harappan culture. 43

Map 5 The Nanda and Mauryan empires. 71

Map 6 The Gupta empire and Central Asian invasions, c .250 bce

to 550 ce . 95

Map 7 The regional states of medieval India. 111

Map 8 The Delhi sultanate and early Mughal empire. 135

Map 9 The late Mughals and Maratha expansion. 173

Map 10 British expansion to 1857. 221

Map 11 The railways of India, c .1900. 237

Map 12 Partition and the integration of Indian states, 1947 – 1949. 355

SERIES EDITOR ’ S PREFACE

There is nothing new in the attempt to understand history as a whole. To

know how humanity began and how it has come to its present condition is

one of the oldest and most universal of human needs, expressed in the reli-

gious and philosophical systems of every civilization. But only in the last few

decades has it begun to appear both necessary and possible to meet that need

by means of a rational and systematic appraisal of current knowledge. Until

the middle of the nineteenth century History itself was generally treated as a

subordinate branch of other ﬁ elds of learning, of literature, rhetoric, law,

philosophy or religion.

When historians began to establish its independence as a ﬁ eld of scholar-

ship in its own right, with its own subject matter and its own rules and

methods, they made it in practice not the attempt to achieve a comprehen-

sive account of the human past, but the history of western Europe and of

the societies created by European expansion and colonization. In laying the

scholarly foundations of their discipline they also reinforced the Enlighten-

ment ’ s belief in the advance of ‘ civilization ’ (and, more recently, of ‘ western

civilization ’ ), and made it, with relatively minor regional variation, the basis

of the teaching of history almost everywhere for most of the twentieth

century. Research and teaching of the histories of other parts of the world

developed mainly in the context of area studies like those of ancient Greece

and Rome, dominated by philology, and conducted through the exposition

of the canonical texts of their respective languages. World history as such

remained the province of thinkers and writers principally interested in con-

structing theoretical or metaphysical systems. Only towards the very end of

the century did the community of academic historians begin to recognize

world history as a proper and even urgent ﬁ eld for the application of their

knowledge and skills.

The inadequacy of the traditional parameters of the discipline is now widely

– though not universally – acknowledged, and the sense is growing that a

world facing a common future of headlong and potentially catastrophic trans-

formation needs its common history. Its emergence has been delayed, however,

by simple ignorance on the one hand – for the history of enormous stretches

of space and time was known not at all, or so patchily and superﬁ cially as not

to be worth revisiting – and on the other by the lack of a widely acceptable

Series Editor’s Preface

xii

basis upon which to organize and discuss what is nevertheless the enormous

and enormously diverse knowledge that we have.

The ﬁ rst of those obstacles is now being rapidly overcome. There is almost

no part of the world or period of its history that is not the subject of vigorous

and sophisticated investigation by archaeologists and historians. The expan-

sion of the horizons of academic history since the 1980s has been dramatic.

The quality and quantity of historical research and writing has risen exponen-

tially in each decade, and the advances have been most spectacular in the

areas previously most neglected. Nor have the academics failed to share the

results of their labours. Reliable and accessible accounts are now readily avail-

able of regions, periods and topics that even twenty years ago were obscure

to everyone but a handful of specialists. In particular, collaborative publica-

tion, in the form of volumes or sets of volumes in which teams of authors set

forth, in more or less detail, their expert and up to date conclusions in the

ﬁ eld of their research has been a natural and necessary response to the growth

of knowledge. Only in that way can non - specialists, at any level, be kept even

approximately in touch with the constantly accelerating accumulation of infor-

mation about the past.

Yet the amelioration of one problem exacerbates the other. It is truer than

it has ever been that knowledge is growing and perspectives multiplying more

quickly than they can be assimilated and recorded in synthetic form. We can

now describe a great many more trees in a great deal more detail than we

could before, but it does not always follow that we have a better view of the

wood. Collaboration has many strengths, but clarity, still less originality, of

vision is rarely among them. History acquires shape, structure, relevance –

becomes, in the fashionable catch - phrase, something for thinking with – by

advancing and debating new propositions about what past societies were like,

how they worked and why they changed over long periods of time, how they

resembled and why they differed from contemporaneous societies in other

parts of the world. Such insights, like the sympathetic understanding without

which the past is dead, are almost always born of individual creativity and

imagination.

There is a wealth of ways in which world history can be written. The oldest

and simplest view, that it is best understood as the history of contacts between

peoples previously isolated from one another, from which (as some think) all

change arises, is now seen to be capable of application since the earliest times.

An inﬂ uential alternative focuses upon the tendency of economic exchange to

create self - sufﬁ cient but ever expanding ‘ worlds ’ which sustain successive

systems of power and culture. Another seeks to understand the differences

between societies and cultures, and therefore the particular character of each,

by comparing the ways in which their values, social relationships and struc-

tures of power have developed. The rapidly emerging ﬁ eld of ecological

history returns to a very ancient tradition of seeing interaction with the physi-

cal environment, and with other animals, at the centre of the human predica-

ment, while insisting that its understanding demands an approach which is

culturally, chronologically and geographically comprehensive. More recently

still ‘ Big History ’ , two contributors to this series among its leaders, has begun

Series Editor’s Preface

xiii

to show how human history can be integrated with that not only of the natural,

but of the cosmic environment, and better understood in consequence.

Each volume of the Blackwell History of the World offers a substantial

account of a portion of the history of the world large enough to permit, and

indeed demand, the reappraisal of customary boundaries of regions, periods

and topics, and in doing so reﬂ ects the idiosyncrasies of its sources and its

subjects, as well as the vision and judgement of its author. The series as a

whole seeks not to embody any single approach, but to support them all, as

it will use them all, by providing a modern, comprehensive and accessible

account of the entire human past. Its plan combines the indispensable narra-

tives of very long - term regional development with global surveys of develop-

ments across the world at particular times, of interaction between regions and

what they have experienced in common, or visited upon one another. In

combination these volumes will provide a framework in which the history of

every part of the world can be viewed, and a basis upon which most aspects

of human activity can be compared across both time and space. A frame offers

perspective. Comparison implies respect for difference. That is the beginning

of what the past has to offer the future.

R. I. Moore

SERIES EDITOR ’ S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Editor is grateful to all of the contributors to the Blackwell History of the

Wo r l d for advice and assistance on the design and contents of the series as a

whole as well as on individual volumes. Both Editor and Contributors wish

to place on record their immense debt, individually and collectively, to John

Davey, formerly of Blackwell Publishers. The series would not have been initi-

ated without his vision and enthusiasm, and could not have been realised

without his energy, skill and diplomacy.

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INTRODUCTION TO BURTON

STEIN ’ S A HISTORY OF INDIA

David Arnold

Burton Stein ’ s A History of India is one of the most ambitious histories of the

subcontinent ever undertaken, certainly by an individual scholar and in a

single - volume work. First published in 1998, it proﬁ ted from the decades of

intensive scholarly research that had been carried out by Western and South

Asian scholars since the 1950s and to which Stein himself was an active and

inﬂ uential contributor. Although in the History Stein seldom refers explicitly

to speciﬁ c historians, their views are at least implicit in his critical treatment

of Indian feudalism, the nature of the Vijayanagara ‘ empire ’ , the decline of

the Mughals and the personality and leadership of M. K. Gandhi. It is evident,

too, even if not foregrounded, in the wealth of historiography and historical

debate, which Stein himself found ‘ marvellously stimulating ’ , that consistently

underpins and animates his discussion. But the History of India also strongly

reﬂ ects its author ’ s wide - ranging personal engagement with the history of

South Asia, especially with the history of south India from the medieval period

to the early colonial era.

Although Stein died in 1996, before his History could be ﬁ nalized for pub-

lication, he had by that date, and exceptionally among historians of the

modern age (for whom specialization in the history of a century or two has

become the norm), published books that ranged from ‘ peasant state and

society ’ in medieval south India and of Vijayanagara society, poised on the

cusp of the early modern age, through to his intellectual biography of Thomas

Munro, one of the founders of British rule in India, who helped usher in ‘ a

new dispensation for India ’ in the early nineteenth century. Stein was, there-

fore, exceptionally well placed to take the long view of Indian history, to reﬂ ect

on its underlying continuities even more than its supposed disjunctures, and

to see in that complex and variegated history a strong sense of evolving proc-

esses rather than the static forms and abrupt transformations favoured by

earlier generations of historians, imperial and Indian alike. Added to this, and

giving a rare coherence to the work as a whole, Stein brought to his History

a broad thematic unity based on an essentially Marxist understanding of his-

torical materialism and the underlying processes of community and class

formation. ‘ I assume ’ , Stein states a third of the way through the Introduction

(which itself serves both as a succinct resum é of the History and as a statement

of Stein ’ s mature historical credo), ‘ that all social relations and institutions

Editor’s Introduction

are shaped, though not completely determined, by the extant systems of pro-

duction and the places of particular groups within productive systems. ’ The

result is an energetic, original and intellectually challenging reappraisal of

Indian history: it is, as Stein describes it, an ‘ accounting ’ , and not a mere

succession of events, dynastic adventures and oversized personalities (though

Stein never neglects the need to present history as an ongoing narrative). With

its ‘ uniformly lucid exposition ’ and ‘ breathtaking ’ temporal and thematic

range, the History of India is, as one of the reviewers best qualiﬁ ed to make

the judgement remarked, probably Stein ’ s ‘ most enduring ’ book.

Most histories of India have been written from the perspective of the north

– from the Indo - Gangetic plain that has so often been regarded as the geo-

graphical core and cultural heartland of the subcontinent, and, at least until

the European incursions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the region

into which northern invaders poured and from which were subsequently dis-

seminated many of the seemingly foundational attributes of Indian or Indo -

Muslim civilization. The south of India appeared, by contrast, a backwater or

the slow, perhaps sullen, recipient of northern innovation. Close familiarity

with the south, and the long - term structure of its society and history, enabled

Stein, whose enthusiasm helped stimulate a revival of south Indian historical

studies in the United States and Britain, to adopt a substantially different

perspective from that of most previous histories of the subcontinent. In his

History there is less sense of abrupt changes and sweeping transformations, of

a high classical era followed by retreat into a European - style ‘ Dark Ages ’ .

Many of the developments he traces, notably the Hindu devotional (or bhakti )

movement from the sixth century onwards, are clearly identiﬁ ed as having

arisen out of southern soil, just as the Chola and Vijayanagara polities provide

for him as telling an account of the realities and limitations of Indian state -

formation as the more celebrated northern empires of the Mauryans, Guptas

and Mughals. Within the south, it is particularly to the Tamil country (Tamil-

nadu) that Stein turns for inspiration and evidence. Tamil texts and epigra-

phy, along with Tamil social and cultural movements, provide him with the

means by which to qualify or to enlarge upon the kinds of all - India generaliza-

tions that any competent survey of this kind requires.

If at times Stein ’ s ‘ peninsular ’ perspective leads him to neglect aspects of

northern history that students and scholars might reasonably expect to ﬁ nd

here – the relative lack of discussion of the rise of Sikhism from the early

sixteenth century and the Sikh - run state of Ranjit Singh in early nineteenth -

century Punjab being a case in point – then the greater focus on the south

helps him to redress a familiar northern bias – as, for example, in questioning

a periodization of Indian history that reﬂ ects developments north rather than

south of the Narmada River and the Vindhya Hills. And though he was not

the ﬁ rst historian of South Asia to use the concept of an ‘ Early Modern India ’ ,

beginning around 1600, to elide an overdrawn dichotomy between the medi-

eval and the modern he uses it with particular effectiveness and supplies it,

in Chapter 4 of this work, with a persuasive rationale.

In his History of India , as in his scholarship more generally, Stein paid close

attention to the nature and availability of contemporary sources – oral, textual

Editor’s Introduction

xvi

and visual – and the problems they raise for historical enquiry. At the same

time, while particularly critical of what he seemed to see as the banalities of

certain strands of nationalist historiography (he seldom even stoops to chal-

lenge its imperial precursors), he shows an unﬂ agging appetite for a history

that is consistently analytical and well grounded in Marxist concepts of class

and economic change. Although the bulk of Stein ’ s scholarly output related

to a period centuries before British rule and its post - Independence successors,

as his Introduction makes clear (especially through the remarks with which it

opens and ends), many of his concerns were shaped by the post - 1945 world.

Although Stein often wrote about religion, he was deeply sceptical of approaches

to the study of South Asia that stressed India ’ s supposedly ‘ other - worldly ’

nature. His was a ‘ modernist ’ , ‘ developmental ’ approach, in which the material

substance of social and economic change mattered considerably more than the

supposed role of ‘ values ’ .

Having begun his career, broadly speaking, as an

economic historian (one of his ﬁ rst published works was a bibliographic essay

on Indian economic history published with Morris David Morris in 1961), the

importance he attaches in this book to questions of poverty and exploitation,

population growth and environmental change, gender inequalities and the rise

of the petty bourgeoisie, echo many of his abiding concerns with the material

underpinnings of the history of South Asia. Liberty, pleasure and poetics

seldom surface as frontline topics for discussion: the Kama Sutra is not listed

among the recommended reading nor do the Indian novel and Bollywood

cinema claim a role. The artistic imagination, the religious insights and sub-

tleties, the philosophical agility and inventiveness for which South Asian civi-

lization is so often acclaimed are here muted or near - absent themes. Not much

interest is shown either in questions of Orientalism (in the sense popularized

by Edward Said) or in ‘ colonial knowledge ’ : the discursive turn in South Asian

scholarship did not much impress Stein.

Nor was he content to marvel at those great men and women whose lives

and works adorn so many histories of India. Munro, who perhaps signiﬁ cantly

appears almost exactly midway in Stein ’ s text, poised between the old world

and the new, is more an exemplar of continuity and change than testimony

to the commanding role of the individual in history. Stein ’ s sceptical, even

iconoclastic, stance towards ‘ heroic ’ history is evident in his searching, at times

scornful, observations on Gandhi. While admitting Gandhi ’ s historical impor-

tance in leading and moulding India ’ s anti - colonial struggle, Stein is highly

critical of his personal attitudes and his baleful effect in preserving many of

India ’ s grossest inequalities. This is not a book written to ﬂ atter nationalist

sensibilities any more than it is intended to salve imperial consciences.

Burton Stein was born in Chicago on 1 August 1926. He grew up in that

tough pragmatic city and, after service in the Second World War, returned

there to write a PhD, completed in 1957, on the economic functions of the

Tirupati temple in medieval south India: from the outset his approach to

‘ religion ’ was through the materiality of economic history. He taught at the

University of Minnesota before transferring in 1966 to the University of

Hawaii where he taught for seventeen years. In 1983 he moved to London

Editor’s Introduction

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with his wife Dorothy and was a professorial research associate at the School

of Oriental and African Studies in London until his death on 26 April 1996.

Living only a few streets away from the then India Ofﬁ ce Library in Black-

friars, Stein was able to pursue his research on Munro and to engage with the

many scholars who visited London and the India Ofﬁ ce Library from around

the world (the present writer being one of the many who joined him for a

lunchtime chat about the current state of Indian history in a neighbouring

pub), and a substantial portion of his scholarly output was produced during

these ‘ retirement ’ years, away from the constraints of a conventional academic

environment.

Stein ’ s frank and theoretical interest in working backwards from the present,

as if, like an archaeologist, the historian toiled to skim off successive layers of

time ’ s accretions in order to reach down to a more ancient past, and yet with

all the practically acquired knowledge of what happened thereafter, was in

part a reﬂ ection of his own professional trajectory as a historian of South Asia.

As he noted in his biography of Munro in 1989,

when he began work on his

doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago in the 1950s he had in mind a

study of the current rural development programme in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and

south India. But he almost immediately found himself ‘ plunged into the past

of South India ’ . What began as mere ‘ background ’ to a study of contemporary

modernization became, in the absence of a halfway adequate historiography,

a personal quest and an in - depth exploration into the complexities of south

India ’ s pre - modern agrarian society. Perhaps as Christopher Bayly has

remarked, like many American academics in the 1950s and 1960s, Stein ’ s

approach to India was ‘ overtly anti - colonial in spirit ’ – at least in the sense of

questioning imperial categories and historical assumptions. Much of his schol-

arly work was motivated by a desire ‘ to get behind colonial categories of

society to discover what were the real unities, the real political and social

structures which might have fostered or impeded development ’ .

Certainly, Stein ’ s approach to the history of India – in this book and in his

earlier works – was in many respects a radical one. As David Washbrook

pointed out in paying tribute to Stein ’ s scholarship, he sought to escape from,

and to challenge, the ‘ virtually axiomatic ’ idea that colonialism ‘ fundamentally

broke the pattern of the Indian past ’ . This is not to suggest that Stein con-

sidered colonialism an insigniﬁ cant intervention or one that failed to change

the contours of Indian history, but rather that his distinctive research trajec-

tory, one which had carried him through a thousand years of south Indian

history, from the tenth - century Cholas to Munro, the imperial proconsul,

‘ gave him a sense that it was an intervention into something that was already

going on, possessed its own dynamics and energies and wasn ’ t going to be

stopped by a handful of white men in funny hats ’ . And in this ability to stand

outside colonialism and to see it within far larger and inﬁ nitely more complex

patterns of change, Washbrook suggests, Stein ’ s sense of the south Indian

longue dur é e was critical. It enabled him to see that the historical past of the

south (and by extension India as a whole) ‘ owed at least as much to its own

local inheritances as to whatever was imposed upon it by Britain and the West.

Stein ’ s genius was ‘ distinctively “ modernist ” in inspiration ’ – unlike that of