The Origins of Modern Historiography in India: Antiquarianism and Philology, 1780–1880 by Rama Sundari Mantena (review)

The past generation has seen numerous efforts to apply Edward Said’s arguments about orientalism to the history of South Asia. Said himself focused almost exclusively on European perceptions about the Middle East, but it has been tempting to apply his theoretical framework to the Indian subcontinent. Was not India also the target of Eurocentric condescension, depicting natives as backward, inferior, or historically immobile, smothered by a dysfunctional culture and centuries of tyranny? The problem with this transposition of the Saidian argument is that in India it was the orientalists who preached respect for classical Indian (especially Hindu and Sanskrit) civilization, and their opponents who treated indigenous culture with contempt. However, the transposition has been secured by a string of postcolonial scholars, starting with Bernard S. Cohn, who have argued that the work of British officials in appropriating classical Indian culture (especially Brahman and Sanskrit) facilitated subtle strategies of conquest and control. “The command of language,” as Cohn succinctly put it, underwrote a “language of command” (Colonialism and Its Form of Knowledge: The British in India [Princeton University Press, 1996], 16–56). Under the gaze of the British rulers, the Hindu Pandits and Muslim Munshis were transformed from independent intellectuals into subordinate employees, becoming instruments for extending British dominance into the arenas of law, culture, and revenue collection.

In this book, Rama Sundari Mantena offers a partial critique of this interpretation, which is fast becoming the historiographical orthodoxy. Mantena does not dispute the importance of an imperial power structure that put British officials in a position of authority and made native assistants dependent on their support and patronage. Nevertheless, she contends, genuine intellectual collaboration was possible in spite of these asymmetric power relations. The result of such collaboration was not merely an ideology of colonial dominance, but a new approach to the study of Indian history that balanced the preservation of indigenous scholarly traditions with a more modern, empirically grounded mode of historiographic analysis.

Mantena makes her case by shifting her focus on several fronts. She turns away from Calcutta, where the relationship among Pandits, Munshis, and British officials has been well studied, and which has provided most of the evidence for the orientalist interpretation. In Calcutta, where William Jones’s philology emerged as the major tool of historical analysis, Indian cultures and castes were arrayed by British officials along a hierarchy of quality, which privileged Sanskrit over the modern Indian vernaculars and denigrated modern Indians as unworthy of their civilizational past. Through the production of grammars and dictionaries, these philologists sought to trump what they perceived as the ahistoricity of the natives, forging instruments for bringing Indian languages under British control. Meanwhile, in institutions such as Fort William College and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Indian scholars were marginalized or excluded. Shunted into less prestigious, indigenous venues, it was not until the protonationalism of the Victorian age that they finally discovered a voice of their own.

By contrast, Mantena focuses her research on the much less familiar landscape of historical scholarship and collaboration that developed in the southern Presidency of Madras. Here the relationship between European sponsors and indigenous scholars was a good deal more fluid and open-ended. As against the philological orientalists of Bengal, she reconstructs the world of the Madras historical antiquarians, who developed a much more capacious conception both of what constituted valid historical evidence and of Indian historical development. The College of Fort George was a good deal more open to indigenous participation than its Bengali counterpart, and it was supplemented by the Madras Literary Society in which natives played a central role. However, the central focus of Mantena’s analysis is the remarkable archive that was created by the British surveyor and collector Colin Mackenzie between the 1790s and his death in 1821. Because Mackenzie was not conversant in Indian languages, he was much more reliant on his native...