Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India is a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation, submitted in 2008 at Leiden University. The dissertation's title, “Xenophobia and Consciousness in Seventeenth-Century India: Six Cases from the Deccan,” represents a much fairer indication of the book's contents than does its published title. Although the representation in precolonial India of a feared “other” (European as well as Indian), and the underlying enmities that derive from the ascription of “otherness,” are prominent themes in this study, looming just as large in the work as a whole is Gijs Kruijtzer's delving into the questions of agency, self-consciousness, and, ultimately, the notion of identity in precolonial India (hence the original title: Xenophobia and Consciousness). Here, Kruijtzer seeks to combat what he describes as a pervasive trend among scholars during the last thirty years to see “early modern identities … as less than modern identities: less intense, less well demarcated, of a lesser scale, mere event rather than system or mere ideology without practice” (p. 256).
Within the larger context of Kruijtzer's work, xenophobia in seventeenth-century India becomes a lens through which he exposes this consciousness of identity that is, in his view, no different from that which underlies the modern sense of self. Throughout, Kruijtzer carefully attends to the theoretical as well as the ideological polemics (in particular, those that have arisen within poststructural scholarship and communalist political ideology) that necessarily surround this assertion.
At the heart of Kruijtzer's work is a stunning mass of empirical data that the author presents in the form of six case studies, each drawn from the geographic region of the Deccan (i.e., “the area encompassed by the sultanates that originated in the early sixteenth century from the break-up of the sultanate ruled by the Bahmani dynasty,” p. 3) and bound chronologically by the seventeenth century, the end of the precolonial period. The case studies are grouped into two parts: part I consists of studies of the Dutch-Portuguese enmity vis-à-vis each of these group's efforts to establish trading posts and win farman(s) from the Indian ruling powers (chapter 1); the mixed loyalties of Indian Muslims to locales outside India, and the multivalent symbolism used to give these loyalties expression within India's regnant Muslim communities (chapter 2); and the right- and left-hand caste disputes that Kruijtzer argues paralleled the rise of Chennapatnam as a center for British trading (chapter 3).
In part II, Kruijtzer moves beyond these somewhat isolated expressions of seventeenth-century Indic xenophobia to engage issues that he strongly suggests continue to reverberate in modern Indian nationalistic discourse. These chapters consist of discussions of the figure of Shivaji and the rise of Deccani patriotism (chapter 4); the military conflicts and general unrest that dominated the Deccan in the late seventeenth century, which variously involved Marathas, Rajputs, the English, and the Mughals (chapter 5); and the spectacular rise and fall of the two Brahmin brothers, Akkanna and Madanna, who served as chief administrators under the Muslim rulers of Golconda (chapter 6). Along the way, Kruijtzer is not averse to making strong assertions, such as his claim that the “othering” that went on between European nations in India (in particular, the between the Portuguese and the Dutch) was far stronger than that between the Europeans and the inhabitants of India (pp. 19, 65–68), or that the roots of modern communalism rest heavily (if not entirely) in the interplay between Shivaji and the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb during the decade 1677–87 (p. 8, 266 ff.).
Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India contains a wealth of material; the individual chapters stand on their own as much as they inform Kruijtzer's larger quest to establish a position that counters the received wisdom of poststructuralist scholarship regarding notions of identity in precolonial India. At times, however, Kruijtzer's theoretical positions appear murky—for example, the somewhat paradoxical position he takes in suggesting that group identities exist as both fluid and fixed (p. 2; cf. pp. 185–87). Additionally, it must be noted that Kruijtzer's work references a mass of empirical data; readers who do not have a significant understanding of seventeenth-century Indian history—whether the details of the European incursion into India (including the interplay of the European powers outside India), or the ongoing conflicts of the Muslim ruling families, or the positioning of India's population into castes and clans (and these just touch the surface)—will find Kruijtzer's text to be challenging.
The volume is marred slightly by a few linguistic oddities and typographic errors (e.g., pp. 87, 105, 106, 112, 114, 118). These are but minor issues, however. On the whole, this is an extraordinarily erudite and bold work; those with a deep interest in the precolonial and early colonial periods, as well as those who have engaged in the scholarly discourse that has emanated from the study of this period, will benefit greatly from Kruijtzer's laudable scholarship.
