Dattatreya Balawant Parasnis was a monumental figure in Indian historiography, distinguished by his singular passion for rescuing and preserving primary historical records. His vast collection—ranging from the private correspondence of British officials during the Second Sikh War to invaluable Mughal and Deccani paintings—established him as a guardian of India’s visual and written heritage.
NOT CONTENT WITH books in European languages, Parasnis also bought in England the entire mass of private letters (all autograph) written to Sir Frederick Currie, the British Resident at Lahore, during the eventful year of the Second Sikh War, by Dalhousie, Henry Lawrence, Nicholson and other makers of Indian history, with the drafts of a few replies by Currie. We can here read Dalhousie’s defence of his policy in not nipping the Multan outbreak in the bud but taking the risk of the revolt spreading to the whole Sikh population. There are also three other volumes of manuscript letters written by Lords Ellenborough, Hardinge and others.
Parasnis also secured a fine steel engraving of Lord Clive (in full-blown obesity) by paying something like £20 to his descendant. The Mughal paintings that Parasnis rescued out of the Satara Raj collection (sent from Delhi in the 18th century) and also bought elsewhere, are genuinely old and of unsurpassed value. Nobody in India can hope to write a complete study of Indo-Muhammadan pictorial art unless he examines the three greatest collections of it in India, namely, the Khuda Bakhash (Patna) the Rampur Nawab’s and Parasnis’s.
As late as January 1925, Parasnis bought a portfolio of the portraits of Indian celebrities of the 17th century (mostly of the Deccani Muslim States, with some of the Mughal Court, including a very fine profile of the great Sawai Jai Singh)— which had been collected by a Dutchman in India in Aurangzib’s reign. A silly dealer had spoiled many of these by retouching and adding a modern varnish.
D. B. Parasnis had been created a Rao Bahadur in 1913; but he remained the same simple soul, the same passionate lover of books and historical talk, the same jolly host and warm friend as before. The present writer remembers with a mournful interest a comedy in which we took part in his house in January, 1925.
The Indian Historical Record Commission was sitting at Poona and it had been settled that its members would visit Satara on the 3rd day. As the session terminated very early in the afternoon of the second day, some eight of us decided to avoid the rush and have a quiet talk with Parasnis by motoring to Satara that very evening, instead of accompanying the other members next day.
A local gentleman undertook to inform Parasnis of our coming by telegram, and he forgot to do it. The result was the delivery of a bus-load of guests at half past eight on a cold January night at Parasnis’s door, to the intense surprise of the host, confusion of his household and shame of the guests. But Oh! the cordiality and charm of Parasnis’s unflagging conversation which beguiled our time—and confusion—our dinner was served at midnight, the host and his household fasting till then. He laughed it away as a good joke!
Parasnis clung to his unpublished records and the credit of first publishing them with all the tenacity and unreasonableness of a lover or a miser. Hence, workers in the same field have often charged him with selfishness and secretive habits.
Witness how he withheld the author’s manuscript of the Chitnis Bakhar from Rao Bahadur K. N. Sane who was editing that work. Even Parasnis’s explanation, in a letter which he wrote to me only eleven days before his death, supports this view. He wrote from Satara on 20th March, 1926.
“As regards Rao Bahadur Sane's remarks against me, I may point out that they are, to say the least, the outcome of his own misunderstanding. When he asked me for the loan of the manuscript I had clearly and definitely given him to understand that I was myself going to publish a critical and complete edition of the Chitnisi Bakhars. When he first wrote to me, the manuscript was not with me but it was with my friend Mr. P.V. Mawjee. When he enquired after some months, it was returned to me and I do not understand what fault my friend or myself committed when we told him the simple truth. The manuscript had been secured by us after great efforts and expenditure, and it was naturally not possible for us to lend it out before we had made full use of it. No impartial and sensible man will interpret this as unwillingness on my part to help any research student. The complete edition of the Chitnisi Bakhars is in the course of preparation and will be out as soon as possible.”
In his passionate devotion to his country’s history, there could be no place for any other love in Parasnis’s heart. Our countrymen, especially the young who brood over our past, are politics-mad. But Parasnis from his earliest youth shunned politics, of the familiar type, as futile; he even kept himself aloof from the Poona school of historical students whose mutual wranglings have almost sterilized their intellects and some of whom have degraded past history into an instrument of present-day political agitation.
Parasnis knew the price of his conduct. Professional “patriots” whispered that he was a Government Sycophant,—a spy. But he held on to the straight single course of his life, regardless of Envy's hiss and Folly’s bray, and succeeded in enriching Maratha history as no other single individual has done.
His magazines not only published his own collections of records, but gave other workers an opportunity for preserving their discoveries and obtaining publicity. Sane and Rajwade, besides many younger men (notably “Yaswant” or Mr. Gupte) have contributed to his Bharatvarsha and Itihas-Sangraha.
When the day comes for rewriting Grant Duff’s standard History of the Mahrattas (now antiquated by exactly a century) in the roll of those who have made such a revision possible not the least brilliant will be the name of Dattatreya Balawant Parasnis.
Series concluded
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