In search of Christopher Bayly (original) (raw)
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Reorienting Global History: Lecture in Memoriam Sir Christopher A Bayly
2015 marks the end of an era for historians of Britain and its empire. Terence Ranger, Martin Gilbert, D.A. Low, and Mark Kishlansky have all passed on. Each in their own way made fundamental contributions to their respective fields of research whilst simultaneously inspiring younger generations of academics through their insights and examples. However, no man of letters made a deeper impact on my own intellectual and professional formation than Sir Christopher Bayly. Like many students of history I first encountered him through his writings.
Reading (the) late Chris Bayly: a personal tribute
South Asian History and Culture, 2015
Everything seemed normal about the weekend of 18-19 April 2015 in Chicago until it ended with a very cruel blow to many around the world. Without any warning or early signs that could have prepared anybody for what was to come, it took away my friend Chris Bayly-Professor Sir Christopher Alan Bayly (1945-2015)who was then visiting us at the University of Chicago. This tribute is in part a statement of my admiration for Bayly's evolving academic personality; it is also an attempt to understand the shifting terrains of academic historiography that brought us together. Beginning from very different academic and social positions, following pathways that intersected as often as they diverged, we had come to a point, late in our careers, where I felt privileged enough to think of Bayly, an infinitely more accomplished person than I, as a 'friend.' Not a close friend by any means, but we bore each other much good will and warm feelings of friendship. I had a role to play in Bayly becoming a visitor to the University of Chicago. Age-wise, Bayly was my senior by only a few years, but the gap between our careers was substantial. He was already a published scholar when I had just begun to dabble in historical research in Calcutta in the early 1970s. Bayly finished his Oxford DPhil in 1970. I finished my ANU PhD in 1983. His academic life spanned some 45 years. From his first book, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880-1920, 1 to the book he was working on till that fateful weekend last April, a history of the world in the twentieth century, it was a long and rich journey that included some significant, and sometimes collaborative, forays into South East Asian and other histories as well. Moved along by the sheer force of his erudition and research, and that of his intelligence that could connect events across very large gaps of geography, I also, like many others in my position, learned to evolve as a reader of Bayly. As someone who received his training in history from leftist historians in India in the early 1970s, I should explain what it meant to learn to read Chris Bayly in those early years of modern South Asian history. E. H. Carr once said that every generation writes its own history. If he had seen Indian historians at work in Calcutta, Delhi, or Aligarh in those years, he would have probably said: 'True, every generation of professional historians write their own history, but they do so through their students.' Modern South Asian history as a field was very young, hardly 8 or 10 years old, when Bayly finished his dissertation in 1970. And though this emerging field was structured around the shared themes of imperialism and nationalism in the subcontinent, it was also very divided internally. Our Indian professors, particularly those trained in Oxford and Cambridge, were proud of their 'blighty' connections but rejected the British Empire with the passion they had imbibed in their nationalist youth of the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Bayly's mentors, on the other hand, had seen the empire decline and disappear; they got interested in finding out why and how it once mattered and worked. When my academic cohorts came of age in the world of historical scholarship in India in the early 1970s, they became, naturally, the inheritors of their teachers' nationalist passions that by the 1970s were yoked to some global developments in the realm of thought and ideology: the Latin American dependency theory, for instance, that helped to provide a perspective that CONTACT Dipesh Chakrabarty
Thinking back on C.A. Bayly’s Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars.docx
C.A. Bayly’s Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars is a milestone in the field of modern Indian historiography, whose importance is difficult to overestimate. It has changed – or should have changed – the received vision on some nodal points concerning the history of India in the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet the monograph has a set of problems, most (but not all) of which related to the extreme complexity of a book that, according to one of its reviewers, is «two or three books interwoven». As a consequence, in the first part of this article, a long and detailed, but selective, summary of Bayly’s main argument is broached out, in the attempt to disentangle one of the «two or three books» which make up Bayly’s monograph from the others. Accordingly, the résumé itself is an (implicit) evaluation of the work under review. However, a more explicit discussion of the crucial contributions given by Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars is broached out in the second part of this article. According to Bayly himself, the most important part of his monograph is its interpretation of the rise of the Indian middle class as the end result of a long-term historical process, which began well before the British conquest. This process had its main features in the separate coalescing of two social formations, the merchants and the Muslim gentry. Each of them was kept together by a common ethos and a sense of identity which crossed caste identities and, sometimes, even religious identities. According to this reviewer, however, Bayly’s treatment of the 18th century and his analysis of the crisis which overtook India in the 1830s-1850s are at least as important. Bayly shows that the 18th century, far from being a period of economic decline and military anarchy, was characterised by the emergence of a set of dynamic states, which played a key role in the maintenance of a flourishing economy. As far as the 1830s-1850s are concerned, Bayly shows that, in those decades, North India, far from being vigorously driven by her British masters on the way to modernisation and prosperity, was forcedly pushed into the biggest economic crisis experienced in some centuries. Finally, this article concludes with the examination of some drawbacks present in Bayly’s monograph: the missing analysis of the role of British violence; the missing analysis of famines; the limitations of Bayly’s thesis on the historical roots of communalism. Regarding the first point, this reviewers argues that the « the slow drift to the East India Company of [Indian] soldiers, merchants and administrators», which left the Indian rulers «with nothing more than a husk of royal grandeur», was far from being a voluntary process. Quite simply the spectacular rise of British military power in the second half of 18th century left merchants, service gentry and even peasant confraternities with no other option left but taking side with the British. Regarding famines – to which several references are scattered in Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars – the fact that they are not analysed obscures a very important datum, whose discussion would have been highly relevant for the comprehension of those British-Indian relations on which Bayly focuses much of his attention. Indian and British rulers reacted in opposite ways to famines: the former implementing proactive support policies aimed at helping the population, which minimised the famines’ adverse effects; the latter leaving it all to the working of the free market, with cataclysmic results for the victims of famines. In doing so, the British rulers condemned to death for hunger or famine-related diseases in the famine-affected areas even the members of those influential Indian social groups collaborating with the colonial order. What happened during famines showed that the choice to collaborate with the British (which, as above argued, had not been voluntary) did not even guarantee the (physical) survival of those who made it. Regarding the limitations of Bayly’s analysis on the historical roots of communalism, the reviewer compares the conclusions reached by Bayly in the work under review to whose reached by him in a later article on the «prehistory» of communalism. In Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars the implicit but inescapable conclusion is that the communalism of the colonial period was the logical and unavoidable result of the different religious affiliation, ethos and social composition of the two sectors that made up the rising Indian middle class: the (mainly Hindu) merchants and the (mainly Muslim) service gentry. In the later article, the conclusion is much more nuanced and highlights the fact that «conflicts between Hindu and Sikh peasantry and Muslim gentry, or between Muslim peasantry and Hindu gentry did not inevitably lead to polarization on communal lines.»
‘I am not going to call myself a global historian’ An Interview with C.A. Bayly
Itinerario, 2007
You haue already given a short account of your entry into the field of South Asian studies in your work Origins of Nationality in South Asia. There you mentioned your first overland travels to North India as an experience that triggered your interest in Indian history. To what degree have such 'field experiences' influenced your writings? Very much so, I think, and from the very beginning. On my first trip to India I went to Gwalior with a friend who had spent a year teaching in the Sindhia School there. We travelled around the city and environs, met people with memories of the past and began to get a sense of what Gwalior and its fort might have been like in eighteenth-century India. From then on 1 remained interested in late-Mughal India and the very early British period, though it was nearly twenty years later that 1 published Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, a book about India in this period. In fact, I had originally intended to write a thesis on the eighteenth-century. At that time, Dr Ashin Das Gupta was teaching in Oxford and he confirmed my interest in the period. He taught a specified course on Warren Hastings and India and I remember him saying, 'I am not interested in Warren Hastings. I am interested in India in the eighteenth century'. This was shortly after I came back from the trip to Gwalior. The reason I didn't study eighteenth-century India for my PhD was that Ashin Das Gupta soon left the University and S. Gopal replaced him as Reader in Indian History at Oxford. Gopal was just beginning to work on his biography of Jawaharlal Nehru and he obviously wanted some background to Nehru's early life. So he suggested that I write a thesis on Nehru's home city, Allahabad. It was only later that I came to know why he made this suggestion. But I think he was probably right. At that time, there was developing interest, particularly in Cambridge, but also in India, in the nationalist movement. Going to one Indian city and hinterland, working on it quite intensively for 3-4 years was actually a good way of getting into the subject. At that time, they didn't really teach Indian History as such at Oxford. It was really Colonial History and Indian history was simply tacked on to it. So, for me, the path
2008
This dissertation would have been impossible without the wisdom and kindness of Marjorie Levinson and Adela Pinch. For reminding me that I should always do what feels right, even when it feels almost impossible; for providing two amazing models of intellectual and personal integrity; for making sure my enjoyment of the work was never diminished, I can never thank them enough. I am immensely grateful to Vivasvan Soni for his unrelenting and unmitigated candor about the pleasures and the anxieties of persisting with the work before the path is clear. Thomas Trautmann is the gentlest and the most generous of rigorous critics that I have ever met. Before I could ever write the dissertation, Simon Gikandi, Valerie Traub, Gregg Crane and Jan Burgess helped me to learn how each phase of my graduate career would lead to the next. At the University of Texas at Arlington, Rajani Sudan, Stacy Alaimo and Tim Morris reminded me what it meant to seek pleasure in texts and the company of people who study them.
2020
Candidate Declaration I, Leif Bjarne Hammer, hereby certify that this MLitt dissertation, which is 14 997 words in length, has been written by me, and that it is the record of work carried out by me, and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. Date 18.08.2020 Leif Bjarne Hammer Note to the Reader At the time of researching and writing this dissertation, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen the closure of the physical spaces of the St Andrews University Library, the Bodleian Libraries, and the Queen's College archives. This has restricted the possibility of pursuing certain lines of enquiry, and of consulting certain works that are not available digitally.
The Historian, 2013
There can be few men so prominent in the early modern period whose life is so sparsely-and so ambiguously-documented as Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury. After the failure of his greatest enterprise which sought to exclude the Catholic Duke of York, heir apparent to his brother Charles II, from the succession, itself an attempt to reassert statute over prerogative and positive law above natural law, Shaftesbury's papers were seized by the government but they already been ruthlessly and skilfully redacted. For long periods, above all (but not only) in the 1640s and 1650s it is impossible to place him geographically let alone politically and religiously. As for the Restoration, in one of the many fine essays in this volume, J.R. Milton shows how impossible it is to measure or evaluate the earl's relationship with Locke. What is more Shaftesbury may have written, or overseen the composition of, far more tracts than he is given credit for, or he might have written, or overseen the composition of, rather less. As a counsellor of state under Cromwell, as Privy Councillor, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Chancellor under Charles II, and as putative founder of the Whig party which dominated British politics for 200 years, he bestrode thirty years of English history, and despite the best efforts of three (but only three) biographies, published in 1871, 1933 and 1968, he remains an enigma. For these are all biographies that explain how he moved from A-B, B-C, C-D etc, but not how he got from A-Z. None of them look at the deep consistencies and obsessions in his life and career. So this new collection of ten essays that explore major aspects of his life and career thematically and in a semi-chronological sequence is warmly welcomed. Thus Alan Marshall explores Ashley Cooper's relationship with the Commonwealth and early Protectorate, Paul Seaward explores the debates on (religious) indulgence from 1661-3, Mark Goldie examines the campaign for annual elections 1675-7, Lionel Glassey the Exclusion Crisis, Philip Milton the Rye House Plot. Many of the authors, agonising over the broken and incomplete shards of evidence, reach some very bold conclusions with loads of resonance: 'if the Earl of Shaftesbury had indeed drawn the conclusion that religion was generally a vehicle for self-interest. .. rather than a path towards 'future things', then he may well have abandoned religious belief itself ' (John Spurr, p.151); 'he may have told Monmouth that the king was to be deposed, though in whose favour he did not say. .. According to Lord Howard [of Escrick, during his trial for treason] Shaftesbury thought Monmouth 'aimed at nothing more than advancing himself whilst they could not hope that ever their liberties should be well secured for the future, but under the government of a