In this concise and stimulating book, Rama Mantena traces the emergence of history writing in India to the antiquarian impulses of traders, soldiers, and officials of the East India Company. It brings to light the intriguing figure of the Scottish army officer and British India's first surveyor general Colin Mackenzie (1753–1821), an ardent Orientalist and collector, cartographer, and numismatist, known especially for his legendary collection of manuscripts, inscriptions, translations, coins, and paintings. Mackenzie, aided by a clutch of resourceful native assistants, played an instrumental role in shaping a distinctive archive of the British conquest and rule of southern India.
The withdrawal of Mughal authority from across the Indian peninsula and the intrusion of warring European trading groups had already undermined the solvency of regional powers and institutions and practices of long standing. The long Anglo-French conflict finally ended in the late eighteenth century, leaving the Company in charge of old Mughal provinces, with Hyderabad and Mysore as large and powerful neighboring states, along with smaller polities such as Bobbili and Vizianagaram. As the Company amassed power and patronage, it also sought to preserve facets of the old culture and vestiges of letters and arts. While surveyors assessed the terrain and natural resources, they began to make an inventory of historical curiosities. Indian assistants were instrumental to this voluminous collection of literary and historical manuscripts in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Marathi, along with sketches and drawings of archaeological remains and ruins of religious structures. Mantena contends that this peculiar athenaeum of texts and artifacts was in fact symptomatic of the asymmetrical exchange between the colonial purveyors and their native subjects. This is perhaps the key contribution of this book to the field of Indian historiography: the distillation of material from the colonial archives aided by new methods for the collection of oral testimonies and manuscripts for the purpose of creating standard, authoritative histories. While Mantena does not explicitly state so, she seems to suggest that such digests also had the effect of dismantling the authority of pre-British forms of patronage, authority, and knowledge.
Mantena's study urges a reconsideration of the modes of acquisition of knowledge in early colonial India and the individual aperçus of its leading interlocutors. What motivated Mackenzie's grand archival project beyond the utilities of geographical survey and statistical inquiry? Mackenzie and his army of native assistants, Mantena shows, were also collectors and antiquarians who attempted to collate and classify a vast and variegated body of material, which by its nature was a messy and interminable affair. Such a project also relied significantly on the expertise and enterprise of native assistants such as the Kavali brothers (Borayya, Lakshmayya, and Ramaswami), who in turn reached out to an indefinite number of Indian agents employed in the colonial administration throughout the Madras Presidency. To gather such details, they inevitably turned to the kaifiyats—traditional village records on land, genealogy, and local history. The sifting, digesting, and archiving of these local accounts set the table for the rise of certain privileged genres of literature for historical reconstruction. In this process, the collection also picked up empirical details and narratives history, points of convergence between what Mantena calls the “little practices of history” (pp. 4–5) and the early imperial archive.
This book revisits an important debate about the role of colonial interlocutors, who—to borrow a phrase from the anthropologist Talal Asad—were the incipient “history makers” of early colonial India. Rather than being the hapless recipients of a dominant colonial Orientalist discourse, Indian intermediaries appear in Mantena's study as unequal but key agents in the filtration of historical sources, even if their thumbprints are buried deep in the records. In this instance, Mantena rightfully stresses the role of language as a model for the historical survey initiated by Mackenzie and his men. Colonial philologists, she reminds us, also played an important role in the scholarly and administrative conceptions of historical and temporal classification. In this regard, the Mackenzie Collection helped lay the groundwork for the introduction of many language-oriented pursuits in southern India in the nineteenth century, most notably perhaps in the case of C. P. Brown, the prominent scholar of Telugu, whose grammars, dictionaries, and definitive editions of literary classics contributed to the discovery and scrutiny of Dravidian languages initiated by pioneers like the missionary and linguist Robert Caldwell. These scholars saw Indian vernacular languages as endowed with unique histories of development and progress, and such views played a significant role in shaping their modern and standard versions.
While The Origins of Modern Historiography in India complicates and refines our understanding of the long and conflicted process through which the scholarly apparatus for the study of the languages, literatures, and histories of southern India emerged under the aegis of British imperial expansion, it still leaves relatively unexplored the textures and life-worlds of local histories and genealogies—as it does the significance of paintings, coins, and other artifacts the surveys unearthed—nonetheless setting the stage for other scholars to follow.
