A Liberal Inquiry into the Past: Peary Chand Mittra's Study of History (original) (raw)

Kanpur Historiographers ISSN 2348-3814 Volume-6 Issue-2 December 2019

New Archaeological & Genological Society Kanpur India, 2019

Issue two volume six of Kanpur Historiographers is here for common readers, researchers and a vast audience interested in South Asian history. From the first volume it has opted for the less traversed road of writing the history of marginalized, excluded and subjugated. Historiographer instead of taking the linear deterministic course tried to unearth the people, events and processes excluded from the dominant course of Eurocentric historiography. In the 1980’s a group of renowned Indian historians initiated subaltern studies. The group became a voice of the weak that resisted the dominant powers in far of places. The western view of history is a universal progressive phenomenon excluded the narrative of subaltern, indigenous, peasant and common populous. Papers in all the previous volumes of Kanpur Historiographers, as well as the current issue, is an increment in the same process of recording the forgotten history of people and places. The historiographers contributing in this issue has addressed the themes of historical geography, cultural history, civilization studies and literary history. The topics addressed are as vast as the maritime history of the Indian Ocean to cultural history reflected in popular film culture. However, the main focus of the present issue remains in the history of Malabar region. The first article ‘Indian Ocean a Zone of Peace’, traces the importance of Indian Ocean bases in the creation of British and US hegemony. It presents a picture of great power rivalry in the presence of all major powers in Indian Ocean and the consequences for Indian Ocean littoral states. The littoral states despite their repeated insistence on creating a zone of peace and collective security in the Indian Ocean can’t change the present scenario as international law and the concept of freedom of seas work for their disadvantage. The paper ‘Madras native association: a pioneer of political association of South India’ deals with genesis, growth and decline of Madras native association. The association much before the formation of Indian National Congress resisted Christian Missionary activities working under the patronage of East India Company. When Madras became a Presidency the society organised on non-cast lines, articulates the demands like a decrease in taxation, better provision of education and formation of local government. The article ‘Indo-Tibetan friendship Scenario of Uttarakhand province’ traverse through the Indian civilizational history to create a scenario of friendship and foresee future of Tibet as a peace zone. The author believes that monastic traditions Tibet have roots in Indian soil. ‘Writing local history: a journey Pothukal Panchayath, Malapurram District’ is a well written piece of cultural and economic history. It traces the process of culturl synthesis taking place as a result of internal and external migration. It tells the story of a land where parochial indigenous tribes were involved in hunting, gathering and tilting the land. How the natural resource of forest attracted the capitalist, who for the sake of raw material altered the natural habitat. The article is vast in scope as it presents the multiple phases of resistance between indigenous tribes and national bourgeois like Birla’s: land rights struggle between locals and migrant and state reformed to provide communal ownership of land. The paper ‘Music in Malabar: culture and aesthetics’ traces the cultural influence of migration and trade activities in port region of Malabar. The imprints of Muslim folklores, music and poetic traditions are deeply evident in popular film music of 1960’s and 1970’s. Musicians like K. Raghvan and M.S. Baburaj seems to be inspired by tunes of Ghazal, considered to be Muslim heritage. ‘The saga of service: A case of early leaders of SIS in Malabar’ is about the services of Servants of India Society created by Gokhle. The society was created as an aftermath of Malabar rebellion 1921-22. To redress the untold miseries of people of Malabar belonging to both Hindu and Muslim communities, the leaders like A. V. Thakkar Bappa who devoted his life for the services and uplift of the Harijan community. ‘Contribution of Admiral Kunjali marakkar to Calicut Navy’ is the clear example of resistance struggle of forgotten heroes. The European history narrates the story of Portuguese hegemony on seas and oceans but it remains but it remains silent on history of resistance. Even Indian history tells the story of King Zamorin fighting with the help of his naval admiral Kunjali, a born Muslim, belonging to the Mappila community of seaman was chief admiral of King Zamorin. Kunjali was successful in establishing a naval base between Kochin and Calicut, hindering the trade as well as military ambitions of European naval powers. Kunjali was a military strategist who initiated Guerilla warfare against heavy slow-moving Portuguese ships with fast moving small boats. With the help of rowing boats, he reached to Europe through Cape of Good Hope. The article is an ode to Kunjali dynasty who dominated trade through Cape of Good Hope and China. ‘Literay Historiography under the eastern and western eyes: a comparative study of Oriental and Occidental Historiography models’ draws a parallel between traditions of literary history in the west and non-west. The author traces the indigenous modes of literature, especially Prakartis where folklores, myth and oral history combine to narrate the story of a hero and many heroes. The writer also contrasts the linear manner of western history with a cyclical notion of history as a repetition. He also believes that western and Indian attitudes towards language and literature are not only exclusive but contradictory. When west treats language as a body or corpus having an origin, process and demise; the Indian concept of language is as ever-present energy. West treats readers as advisors and commentators, while in India reader is an audience. The author is if the view that western literary history is exclusionary because it creats a binary between independent marga (dominant) and indigenous marginalized. Western literary historiography is the strategy to colonize. The last article entitled ‘The idea of Pakistan at 1940’ is an effort to analyze the Indian politics in colonial India. The present collection of Historiographers is not only the “history from below” the hierarchical division of power, but also an alternative conception of future as well, articulated in suggestion of peace, collective security, communal bonding, Environmental preservation and service of marginalized. The untiring efforts of Prof. Dr. Purushottam Singh, the Chief Editor has made Kanpur Historiographers a successful story.

KANPUR HISTORIOGRAPHERS VOLUME 6 ISSUE 2 ISSN 2348-3814 DEC 2019

NEW ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND GENOLOGICAL SOCIETY INDIA, 2019

A Promenade of Memories: Reading Resistance and Revival in the Historiography of Maulānā Ḥakīm Sayyid ‘Abdul Ḥayy al-Ḥasanī

The life and work of a historian steeped in Islām’s fourteen-century, intellectual tradition, Maulānā Ḥakīm Sayyid ‘Abdul Ḥayy al-Hasanī, serves as a model for rethinking the history of Muslims in India during the British Colonial period. Moreover, the life-story and writings of Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy promoted resistance to imperialist agendas, especially those focused on controlling the ways indigenous groups understood their own history and would carve out their futures through education pursuits. As a late nineteenth-century, Islāmic historiographer of the Nadwatul ‘Ulamā’ in British India, Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy explicitly calls upon all Muslims to learn about the intellectual heritage of Indian ‘ulamā’. In creatively engaging the practice of the Islāmic historiographical tradition, he implicitly invites all Muslims to resist Western epistemic pressures and reclaim past Muslim glory, offering a path to liberation through the preservation and revival of traditional, indigenous curricula. In providing a short biography of Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy and a cursory examination of three of his important works, I venture to ask three questions: What material conditions animate Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s historical writings? What message does he try to convey? Whom does he seek to reach? What techniques does he employ to achieve his goal? Why are these questions worth pursuing? For centuries, Western historians have portrayed the Muslim world in ways that have led the West to view Islām with an eye of fear and suspicion. This distrust has legitimized countless acts of violence and continues to prevent nations from building bridges of understanding and mutual respect. How then might a Muslim’s approach to history – a view from within – offer a different way? Thus this study explores three historical texts written by Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy in order to offer the reader a view into his social world and the material conditions to which he reacts, an introduction to the Islāmic historiographical tradition, and the significant historiographical intervention that he makes in light of dramatic changes brought to the India by Western colonialism and modernity. Chapter one summarizes Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s rich educational upbringing and his professional career as a physician, historian, and director of the Nadwatul ‘Ulamā’. I offer observations about the three key texts of this study. This chapter is significant because it depicts the communal structure of education in northern India that collapsed during Mualānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s lifetime. This biographical sketch grounds my argument that his historiography preserves a rich heritage while at the same time it creatively resists compromise to Western historiography and epistemologies and calls for the revival of Muslim identity in India and the broader Muslim world. Chapter two transitions into a broader discussion about the milieu in which Mualānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy operates. I reconstruct the social, political, and educational environment in late nineteenth-century British India. I give particular attention to how colonization causes both ruptures from the past and how it augments pre-colonial social processes. Moreover, in light of Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s life and work, I explore how British imposition in education – along with subsequent Indian abandonment – systematically caused traditional educational systems in India to wither. I then discuss how the founding of the Nadwatul ‘Ulamā’ and Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s leadership within the movement was a response to the intellectual challenges facing Muslims in India. Finally, I show how Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s historiography fits with the larger aims of the Nadwatul ‘Ulamā’. As a sayyid and a member of the ‘ulamā’, he communicates his message of resistance and revival in Arabic to the broader Muslim world and specifically Arabs. That Indians were never fully granted autonomy over educational institutions after the rise of the British Raj forced the hand of Indians who sought to preserve their intellectual heritage and reassert the prestige, if not the superiority, of traditional education. In chapter three, I explain how Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy creatively enacts this resistance from within the Islāmic historiographical tradition. What do I mean by Islāmic historiography? How is it an effective way to get the attention of the Muslim world – namely, the ‘ulamā’? Seeing that colonialism stimulated intellectual vigor and the emergence of new technologies, as is discussed in chapter two, how does Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy adopt such new techniques while still operating as a traditional ‘alim, a member of a millennium-long historiographical tradition? Where do we find Islāmic historiography? Which brand of scholarship produces works of Islāmic historiography? In light of these questions, I begin this chapter by parsing out the term word-by-word in order to arrive at an accurate conception. Then I highlight three literary genres that preserve Islāmic historiography. In short, what I mean by Islāmic historiography is historical writing, historically done by an ‘ālim, written according to the practice of a tradition that pursues certain goods. In other words, in addition to communicating his message of resistance and revival in Arabic, Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy utilizes the conventional genres of Islāmic historiography in order to make himself intelligible to the ‘ulamā’ across of the world and to present himself as an authorative member of the social class. In chapter four, I bring together the premilimanary observations in chapter one of Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s historical texts and conduct an indepth analaysis of one the books in which he particularly seeks to preserve the rapidly vanishing traditional curricula of the Indian Muslim world. His study offers to posterity tremendous insight into what was lost as well as a way to revive the tradition of learning characteristic of education in India prior to colonial rule and nationalist ideologies. Finally, I conclude by offering a set of inquiries into how Maulānā ‘Abdul Ḥayy’s model indicates ways Muslims might become empowered to “write” their histories as a way to resist hegemonic and epistemic pressures in contemporary global settings.

The Neglected Hindu Period of Pakistani History

ISPaD Partition Center Journal , 2015

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is the second largest Muslim country by population (next to Indonesia), but for the larger part of its history it has been inhabited by Hindus and Buddhists. When India was partitioned in 1947, into a residual India (with a Hindu majority) and Pakistan (with a Muslim majority), the fate of the minorities in the two countries took very different turns. India turned into a secular democracy, with a Muslim population that has increased in percentage. The population of Hindus in Pakistan, however, declined precipitously, and has now reached demographically insignificant proportions. With the physical disappearance of the Hindus in Pakistan, the memory of their residence as autochthons throughout the length and breadth of Pakistan has also begun to fade. This process has been consciously accentuated by the educational policies of the establishment, and even the work of otherwise responsible historians. Unlike the situation in neighbouring India, the voices of the minorities are not heard clearly, even in the rare cases when they are not actively suppressed. This paper is a study of the difficulties that bedevil the historiography of the Hindu period of Pakistani history.

A Liberal Inquiry into the Past: Peary Chand Mittra's Study of History (original) (raw)

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