Jonathan Seefeldt | The University of Texas at Austin (original) (raw)

Papers by Jonathan Seefeldt

On the morning of December 28, 1979, members of the Indian History Congress settled in for the st... more On the morning of December 28, 1979, members of the Indian History Congress settled in for the start of the second day of their fortieth annual gathering. It was to be a day focused on 'medieval' India, a term and periodization whose coherency for the South Asian context was increasingly in question. The conference had over the past decade gradually drifted southwards from its usual north Indian circuit and this year found itself amidst the aging coastal colonial campus of Andhra's Waltair enclave. Harbans Mukhia was set to deliver the morning's opening presidential address. Mukhia had spent the past decade at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University leading a course on medieval India that toed the dominant post-1950s historiographic line which, in a manner Daud Ali would later characterize as a "checklist" approach, sought to verify the authentically feudal nature of post-Gupta South Asian society. 1 Mukhia's address that morning verbalized years of frustration-shared by an increasingly large number of Indian scholars in the late 1970s-at the perceived gross inadequacy of the feudal model for the South Asian context. Bringing his broadside to a climatic end, Mukhia urged a move away from the "straitjackets" of both feudalism and the Asiatic Mode of Production-Marx's vague disqualification of pre-modern Asia that likely fueled the initial desire amongst Indian historians of the 1950s to prove the applicability of the feudal model for medieval India 2 . For Mukhia, these were non-universal models born of European experience and bias. What was needed instead was a renewed search for "a typology more specific to pre-British India". 3 Much of the historiographic conversation in the decades since Mukhia's Waltair address can be seen as a search for "typologies" better suited to the historical evidence from South Asia. This debate has largely centered around the nature and evolution of the political state. The following is an analysis of this conversation in three parts. We will survey key moments in pre-and postfeudalist historiography of the South Asian state, take up the particular case of the Mughal state as a bellwether for past and present trends in the field, before a brief final consideration of future directions. The concept of the state as a unitary entity has been increasingly unraveled, decentered, and passed over in favor of analyses of the entanglement of culture and power. While this is a necessary corrective to a long legacy of ahistorical projections of the premodern Indian state, it has a led to overly fragmented and abstracted scholarly discourse on precolonial power formations. I argue for an approach that better synthesizes cultural, material, and institutional histories of the state.

Book Reviews by Jonathan Seefeldt

This sprawling two-volume set presents itself as a translation of a handful of seventeenthcentury... more This sprawling two-volume set presents itself as a translation of a handful of seventeenthcentury Mārwaṛī texts, yet translation forms little more than a tenth of the final product.

White, Richard. The Organic Machine. Critical Issue. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

On the morning of December 28, 1979, members of the Indian History Congress settled in for the st... more On the morning of December 28, 1979, members of the Indian History Congress settled in for the start of the second day of their fortieth annual gathering. It was to be a day focused on 'medieval' India, a term and periodization whose coherency for the South Asian context was increasingly in question. The conference had over the past decade gradually drifted southwards from its usual north Indian circuit and this year found itself amidst the aging coastal colonial campus of Andhra's Waltair enclave. Harbans Mukhia was set to deliver the morning's opening presidential address. Mukhia had spent the past decade at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University leading a course on medieval India that toed the dominant post-1950s historiographic line which, in a manner Daud Ali would later characterize as a "checklist" approach, sought to verify the authentically feudal nature of post-Gupta South Asian society. 1 Mukhia's address that morning verbalized years of frustration-shared by an increasingly large number of Indian scholars in the late 1970s-at the perceived gross inadequacy of the feudal model for the South Asian context. Bringing his broadside to a climatic end, Mukhia urged a move away from the "straitjackets" of both feudalism and the Asiatic Mode of Production-Marx's vague disqualification of pre-modern Asia that likely fueled the initial desire amongst Indian historians of the 1950s to prove the applicability of the feudal model for medieval India 2 . For Mukhia, these were non-universal models born of European experience and bias. What was needed instead was a renewed search for "a typology more specific to pre-British India". 3 Much of the historiographic conversation in the decades since Mukhia's Waltair address can be seen as a search for "typologies" better suited to the historical evidence from South Asia. This debate has largely centered around the nature and evolution of the political state. The following is an analysis of this conversation in three parts. We will survey key moments in pre-and postfeudalist historiography of the South Asian state, take up the particular case of the Mughal state as a bellwether for past and present trends in the field, before a brief final consideration of future directions. The concept of the state as a unitary entity has been increasingly unraveled, decentered, and passed over in favor of analyses of the entanglement of culture and power. While this is a necessary corrective to a long legacy of ahistorical projections of the premodern Indian state, it has a led to overly fragmented and abstracted scholarly discourse on precolonial power formations. I argue for an approach that better synthesizes cultural, material, and institutional histories of the state.

This sprawling two-volume set presents itself as a translation of a handful of seventeenthcentury... more This sprawling two-volume set presents itself as a translation of a handful of seventeenthcentury Mārwaṛī texts, yet translation forms little more than a tenth of the final product.

White, Richard. The Organic Machine. Critical Issue. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.