One rarely feels the stir of emotion in opening a scholarly volume that I did unpacking this boxed set. I felt a genuine mix of gratitude, admiration, and excitement at the publication of this new edition of James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, arguably one of the most important works of nineteenth-century Indian historiography. For those accustomed to the seemingly unceasing churning of the academic publishing industry, this weighty and attractively produced boxed set—consisting of Tod’s original two volumes, along with a new Companion Volume containing hitherto unpublished notes and annotations as well as analyses and reflections by the editor, Norbert Peabody, and others, plus a slipcase containing annexures (maps and genealogies)—seems a bit of a treasure chest, particularly for anyone interested in the history of South Asia. And, once opened, it certainly lives up to that expectation.

Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod (1782–1835) looms large in the history and memory of Rajasthan. Tod first came to India in 1799 as a 17-year-old cadet working for the English East India Company (EIC) army in Bengal. He visited Rajasthan for the first time in 1805 and lived in the Rajasthan and Malwa regions for the next sixteen and a half years. During his career in India, the EIC’s territories and influence grew rapidly. In 1818, the EIC won the Third Anglo-Maratha War and came to rule over the kings of Rajasthan, the Rajputs, who had been subordinate to the Marathas. Once the EIC took charge of the region, Tod served for four years (1818–1822) as the first political agent to the newly formed princely states under the British, known then as the Western States. These states initially included Mewar, Sirohi, Kota, and Bundi but soon grew to include Jaisalmer and Marwar as well. Tod returned to England in 1823 and wrote his monumental Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, whose two volumes were published in 1829 and 1832, respectively.

Tod’s text consists of chronological accounts of Rajasthan’s seven largest Rajput states—Mewar (Udaipur), Marwar (Jodhpur), Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Amber (Jaipur), Boondi, and Kota—as well as a lively ‘Personal Narrative’, which is a travelogue and memoir, an introductory essay on historical method, notes on the history and geography of Rajasthan, comparisons between European and Rajput political orders, and an ethnographic-style description of Rajasthani religion and culture. Through the publication of the Annals, Tod hoped to make a case for the inclusion of the Rajputs as a distinct people deserving a place among the emergent family of ‘nations’. To Tod, this claim could be justified through evidence that the Rajputs possessed not only a long and glorious history of valour and cultural achievement but also a strong historical sense as evidenced by histories preserved among their bards and chroniclers. In his view, the Rajputs fell from their condition of greatness around the twelfth century even as they continued to ‘valiantly’ resist the encroachment of their domains by Muslim-led armies and polities. In the Companion Volume, Peabody pushes against simplistic readings of Tod’s prescriptions on how to restore the Rajputs to their lost glory. He sought not to replicate European- or British-style economic and political arrangements among the Rajputs, according to Peabody, but instead advocated a policy of l’aissez faire on the part of the colonial state in relation to the Rajputs. In recommending that the EIC leave the Rajputs free, Tod seemed to suggest the possibility of multilinear routes towards ‘civilisation’ (Peabody, Companion Volume, henceforth Comp. Vol., p. 50).

As the Annals were published after Tod’s retirement, at the end of an increasingly contentious career in the EIC, he also used the text to critique company rule. He advocated the abrogation of the very subsidiary alliance treaties used for acquiring territory that he had helped implement and appealed to King George IV, in his dedication to the Annals, for the ‘restoration of [the Rajput states’] former Independence’ (Comp. Vol., p. 18). Tod’s calls for the preservation of Rajput and Maratha sovereignty were accompanied by his endorsement of EIC rule over the ‘plains of Hindust’han’ (ibid), without any apparent explanation for what justified this distinction.

Peabody points out that the Annals did not yield any of the immediate results Tod hoped to see in his lifetime. In England and in British India, interest in the book lasted a few years, after which its prohibitive cost made it hard to find. Tod’s efforts to win a peerage in England also came to nought. It was after the Revolt of 1857, as the first stirrings of nationalism emerged, that Bengali authors revisited Tod. Indians translated Annals into Bengali and then Marathi, Urdu, and eventually Hindi. The text’s appreciation of aspects of Indian society, its advocacy of independence for the Rajput states, and its romantic representations of Rajput resistance against erstwhile forces cast as ‘foreigners’ all helped win new and adoring audiences for the work. This foundational role for Tod in the minds of early Indian nationalists led to the normalisation of Tod’s biases as well. These included negative portrayals of Muslim rulers and armies as ‘bigoted Mahomedans’, the valorisation and excessive focus on elite, landowning Hindu lordly castes, especially Rajputs, and the association of Rajputs with a hyper-masculine aura of valour. Peabody argues with reference to the representation of Muslims that this was a convergence of Tod’s mental baggage from Europe with the biases of local informants.

Tod’s Annals remains a major text for historians of South Asia—first, as a primary source for scholars of Rajasthan and Central India and, second, as an object of critical analysis for its role as an important resource for early articulations of Indian nationalism. Scholars have long pointed to problems—biases and inaccuracies—in Tod’s representations that have proven difficult to rectify in the public discourse up to the present. These representations—for instance, portraying Rajputs as valiant heroes resisting a monolithic Islam—continue to be deployed towards harmful ends in contemporary South Asian politics.

Though historians over the generations have continued to rely on Tod’s Annals, it is little appreciated that editions since the late nineteenth century have been marred by significant editorial interventions by later colonial actors, particularly those made by William Crooke in 1920. Crooke’s edition became the one most reproduced by later publishers, as maps, genealogies, illustrations (plates), and other paratextual materials and enclosures were dropped and spellings standardised. More insidiously, Crooke inserted new subject headings into the body of the text, many of which were intended to shape a counter-reading of Tod’s original text (Comp. Vol., p. 20).

Peabody has thus done a great service to the field by publishing the text as it appeared in the first edition. As he argues, variations in the transliteration of Indian words and names within the text or departures from renderings conventional at the time allow us to better understand Tod’s intellectual milieu and scholarly endeavour. Even in his time, these nonstandard spellings helped drive home one of the key interventions that Tod’s Annals sought to make, which was an assertion of the common origin of European and Rajput civilisation, especially between Mewar and classical antiquity. Peabody also shows how retaining these original spellings helps us recognise Tod’s deep immersion in the linguistic and literary milieu of Rajasthan. Peabody suggests that these variations remind the reader of the many different hands that shaped this vast text and attune us to the polyphony of the text, making more evident its fecund instability and occasional self-contradiction. Though preserving its original oddities and inconsistencies, the new edition also introduces some features meant to improve the readability of the sprawling original edition. These include a two-column format and a more compact typeface. The editorial and design team have embellished the work in ways that were perhaps not possible when Tod first published the book. As a gesture to a feature of premodern Rajasthani manuscripts—red markings, such as in lines framing a page, punctuation marks, or opening invocations and closing colophons—the books designers have thoughtfully included red typeface (for elements like section headings and page numbers) and symbols (to mark placeholders for Tod’s original footnotes and Peabody’s annotations).

This set reproduces all the original plates and some additional ones that buyers of the 1829/32 first edition could purchase. Enclosed in the slipcase in the set are large-format foldouts of drawings and two maps Tod commissioned. A high-quality reproduction of Tod’s famous 1815 political map of Rajasthan, with its hand-coloured outlines, allows one to read each of the many, many place names Tod plotted. This map, Peabody reminds us, had served as an important strategic resource to the British in the Third Anglo-Maratha War. Other foldouts included in the slipcase are reproductions of Tod’s topographic cross-section of Central India, a rendering of the rock carvings known today as the ‘Hall of Heroes’ in Mandore, the erstwhile capital of the Rathor dynasty of Marwar, and a genealogy of kings from the Mahabharata to AD 720.

The Companion Volume, written by Peabody with contributions from Ramya Sreenivasan and Brian Cannon, includes a preface, introduction, and essay that orient the reader to Tod’s time, to Rajasthan, and in the fields of scholarship for which Annals is relevant. Most of the Companion Volume consists of chapter-by-chapter annotations to Tod’s text, which are a true labour of love and reflect considerable research. Peabody, with help from Sreenivasan and Cannon, makes corrections, helps identify manuscripts, texts, people, and places mentioned by Tod throughout the original publication, anticipating so many of the questions that a reader might have. If an early modern painting exists of a place, text, or person mentioned by Tod, Peabody has tracked it down and placed it, in colour, right where its subject comes up in his annotations. These visual additions help the reader imagine the sensory worlds of Tod in Rajasthan and at his desk in London. Some of the reproduced paintings are from the large collection of manuscripts Tod brought back from India and gave to the Royal Asiatic Society in London, of which he was a founding member.

Peabody delights us with details about Tod that help situate the precise ways in which global and historical forces converged on the life and writings of the author as a microhistorical figure. We learn that Tod’s parents were descendants of lordly Scots who had emigrated to America but that, as royalists, they returned to England from New York when the American Revolution broke out.Footnote ¹ Peabody paints a vivid portrait of Tod: of his yearning for the lost aristocratic lifestyle and rank of his ancestors, of his ‘maverick streak’ that led him to defy his superiors in the EIC’s chain of command and take independent decisions on the ground without consulting his superiors (vol. i, pp. 27–28), of his possible affliction, ‘hypergraphia’, or the compulsion to write obsessively (vol. i, p. 26n1), leading to letters as long as 350 pages written to senior company officials including Mountstuart Elphinstone, John Malcolm, Charles Metcalfe, and David Ochterlony. Such behaviour, we learn, led to the ‘the vast majority’ of company administrators disliking him and to his de facto banishment from India when he left.

The Companion Volume highlights the role of Tod’s Indian informants and assistants in shaping the text, noting how the text never quite synthesised these voices into a single harmonious and systematised whole. Yati Gyanchand, the artist Ghasi, and the Charans Benidas and Omra are among Tod’s Rajasthani assistants whose hands shaped the text and its authorship. These different perspectives, however, remained ‘sedimented’ in the Annals and were activated by different readers towards their unique ends. For Peabody, this feature of the text demonstrates the untenability of the scholarly perspective held by Bernard Cohn, Nicholas Dirks, and others that holds, according to Peabody, that ‘the forms of knowledge through which colonial rule was established were fully European in origin and development’ (Comp. Vol. p. 6, 6n2). This contention, however, would have benefited from greater explanation, since, to my knowledge, most of these scholars in question do not make this claim. Cohn’s 1987 essay on the objectification of Indian tradition argues for the active participation of Indians in shaping colonial understandings and frameworks.Footnote ² Similarly, Nicholas Dirks’s Castes of Mind highlights the crucial role of Brahmin informants, such as Kavelli Venkat Boria, in shaping Colin Mackenzie’s archive and his understanding of India’s past and of the elevation of Brahmanical texts, mediated by Brahmin scholars, in colonial understandings of the caste order.Footnote ³ That said, what all of these scholars do agree on is that the participation of local informants and their shaping of their own representation fed into an asymmetrical system that ultimately sought to assert the superiority of the West. But this too is not inconsistent with Peabody’s contention of local informants shaping Tod’s understandings of India. For, as Edward Said notes in his Orientalism, the ‘local agent’ with specialist knowledge ‘may treat subjects of local interest in a manner calculated to damage, or even to jeopardise, Imperial interests’.Footnote ⁴ But, in Said’s framework, knowledge from the far reaches of empire was processed in the metropolitan centre (a ‘machine’, in Lord Cromer’s vision) to suit the ends of empire. Empirical information such as that gathered by Tod and shaped by Rajasthani actors then could be selectively read and interpreted to fit and reinforce master narratives about India or simply ignored if found unsuitable. All this is to say that while Peabody is right to point us towards the Indian voices in and influences on Annals, this is in fact not inconsistent with the arguments of Cohn, Dirks, Said, and others.

Due to their size, weight, and cross-referencing, reading these volumes is an embodied experience. To make the most of the set, one needs to keep both a Tod volume and the Companion Volume open at the same time, so that Tod’s text and footnotes may be glossed by Peabody’s annotations in the Companion Volume. The reader’s mind proceeds along criss-crossing tracks—looking out from Tod’s perspective and looking back at Tod from a moving set of vantage points evoked by the annotations. Peabody’s commentary provides a fascinating journey, following Tod in his narrative meandering while also simultaneously grasping how his choices were shaped—limited and expanded—by the circumstances within which he found himself. The meticulous work that Sreenivasan and Cannon have put into their entries in the annotations deserves note. Together, Peabody, Sreenivasan, and Cannon become trusted guides as the reader traverses vast distances in time and space with Tod. In sum, this set will be of immense interest and use to students and scholars of Rajasthani and Central Indian history and art history, to those working on the history of the historical discipline, scholars of comparative colonialisms, and historians of the British Empire. Outside of academia, connoisseurs of Rajasthani and Central Indian history will savour this set.