THE UBIQUITOUS ELEMENT in the method of the exemplars of Indian history is their emphasis on and fidelity for primary sources – coins, inscriptions, manuscripts, letters, edicts, literary works, and archaeological sources. None of them wrote derivative or secondary or tertiary history. We notice this quality in their books as well as their papers submitted to various academic journals. They went to extraordinary lengths to procure these sources often at great personal cost and even suffered health hazards in the process.
Here are a few real-life examples that illustrate how they worked.
The first is V.K. Rajwade, one of the greatest historians of Maharashtra. He was a prolific collector, compiler and scholar of old letters and other official documents related to the period of Shivaji and the Maratha Empire.
This extraordinary man issued a public letter in newspapers requesting the people of Maharashtra to send him any old documents, letters, Bakhairs etc., that they had in their possession. If they couldn’t send it, all they had to do was to send him a 15-paisa inland letter card, and he would personally travel to their location. Let’s read the rest of the story in his own words:
The work of unearthing historical papers, mildewed with dampness and which are lying in remote attics, lumbers and nooks and corners, is fraught with considerable danger. Ordinarily there is no escaping a cleansing bath, and sending the clothes to a washerman after completing the task of hunting out, dusting and selecting from old records and manuscripts in private houses. More than half of the time is occupied in fighting with ants, moths and insects which are moving in and out of the holes in the covering cloth, which looks like a sieve and which may be likened to Indra who is called “thousand-holed.” It is not an old record if in it are not found the pieces of old rags or old saris, tatters of crumbling khadi, decayed binding laces, rotten skin covers and worm-eaten boards of wood. In the process of undergoing the penance involved in the act of research of old records, the nose is filled with repulsive odour, the eyelashes are deposited with dust, the head is fully covered with cobwebs as to be practically entangled in a net, and such a painful scratching sensation is experienced in all the pores of the body for five or ten days, one remains in a constant dread of suffering from the evil effects resulting from such work.
The result of these superhuman labours was the production of his masterly work titled Sources of Maratha History, which runs into twenty-two volumes!
What is notable here is that Rajwade was a Kattar, orthodox Maharashtrian Brahmana of the 19th century. No matter where he was, he never missed performing his daily Anushtanam – Sandhyavandanam, Japam and so on.
He has recorded with some anger that he was unable to find a proper riverbank to perform these daily rituals in remote villages where he had gone to procure historical records; or how in some villages there was not a single Brahmana home, and that he was forced to live on fruits and raw vegetables, and had to drink pond water.
The next example is that of another towering Maharashtrian historian, Govind Sakharam Sardesai, the close friend of Jadunath Sarkar. We owe a lasting debt to gratitude to both Rajwade and Sardesai for giving us almost the entire corpus of primary sources for the study of the history of Maharashtra – including valuable sources related to the Mughal empire, the later Rajputs, Scindia, Holkar, Gaekwad, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan, Nizam of Hyderabad, and the East India Company.
To just give a brief idea of the kind of output Sardesai produced, his Selections from Peshwa Daftar runs into 47 volumes containing 8650 documents running into about 8000 printed pages; likewise, his Poona Residency Correspondence runs into 14 volumes spread over 7,193 pages and includes 4,159 original letters. These documents were written in the following languages: Modi, [old] Marathi, Gujarati, English and Farsi. Sardesai took tuitions in Farsi from his friend Jadunath Sarkar just to read these letters.
In fact, reading Sardesai’s introductions to these volumes is an education in itself. However, he was not content with just this. He also published a series of genealogies (Vamshavali) related to more than 300 notable families of Maharashtra. To describe this in common parlance, you take any Maharashtrian surname, and you will find its family tree in this work – for example, Atre, Apte, Angre, Ingale, Upadhya, Kane, Katre, Karve, Kashi, Chavan, Gode, Lele, Mehandale, Gune, Gupte, Nagarkar, Dhume, Pant, Patankar, Phadke, Phadnis, Fadnavis, Poddar, Sardesai, Samant, Shirke, Vaidya, Vavle, Vyas…
In fact, G.S. Sardesai has candidly declared the attitude that Indian historians must possess towards this sacred vocation called history.
Indians alone can study and accurately interpret the records and materials of India’s past. Many earlier histories written by a number of eminent western scholars have become obsolete if not entirely misleading.
Sardesai led a highly energetic, productive and useful life of 94 years of which he dedicated more than 70 to doing such pioneering work of history.
The third example is that of Rao Bahadur S. Krishnaswami Iyengar, one of the pathbreaking historians of the Vijayanagara Empire. Here, I’ll mention just a few anecdotes that give us insights into his passion, brilliance, industry and method of historical research.
Krishnaswami Iyengar actually studied to become a Mathematician, but became attracted to history when he was 28 years old. He was also instrumental in founding the Mythic Society, Bangalore and became its first secretary and editor of its journal.
His Sources of Vijayanagara History is truly a monumental feat, which has stood the test of time. In one shot, that volume steered the field in a new direction, stripping it of the biases of colonial historians like Robert Sewell, Heras, and others. Iyengar supplied the much-needed corrections to the reading of Vijayanagara inscriptions and supplemented it with copious literary and other primary sources.
Professor Tait, the renowned Principal of Central College, Bangalore, tells us of an incident that made Krishnaswami Iyengar embrace history as his life’s mission.
Sometime in 1896-7, the Archaeology Department discovered an inscription in Chitradurga and found that “no one in Southern India could decipher” it. So they sent it to an Indology scholar in Vienna who concluded that it belonged to the age of Ashoka.
When Krishnaswami Iyengar heard this, he was deeply dismayed and decided to pursue history as his life’s goal. This is how Tait describes his decision:
At that time a young scholar taking up such studies had little prospect of material reward. He had no aids to study in the shape of a library, or in the stimulus of fellow-workers. Only courage, sustained by a genuine love of learning, could have enabled him to remain faithful to his decision for twenty years, during which his ordinary work left him little leisure.
To be continued
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