In looking to narratives drawn from Indian history and legend, British writers found a space – historically distant and /or geographically outside the zone of British direct control – where Indian self- determination could be imagined with less concern for its impact on the contemporary colonial project. One of the most important such resources for writers of the Victorian period was James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of
Rajast’han (1829, 1832). Rajasthan (as I shall refer to it from now
on) is one among several important nineteenth- century works on the history of the Indian subcontinent, but is unusually influential both in its own right and as a source text for later writers, both British and Indian.1 This is partly owing to its subject matter: where Hinduism
generally identified ritual purity as its core value and organising prin- ciple, Rajputs valued honour; their social organisation and defining narratives were therefore closer to those of contemporary Britain, already familiar with Romantic- influenced ideas of a Western chivalric history. 2 The narrative richness of Rajasthan and its colourful vision
of India’s past also contributed to its impact on British readers and writers.
Tod, an army officer, was first posted to Rajputana in 1805, and set about amassing manuscripts and other sources for the geography, history and folklore of the area.3 At the outbreak of the third Anglo-
Maratha war in 1817, his knowledge and experience proved to be ‘of inappreciable value’ in the British campaigns.4 Following British victory
over the Maratha confederacy, the princely states of Rajputana signed treaties which bound them to a role of ‘subordinate co- operation with the British Government’, the payment of revenue, and subjection to British control over their foreign relations.5 Tod was appointed Agent
to the Governor- General in the area then known as the ‘Western Rajpoot’ states, and remained in post until 1822. During this period, he continued research for Rajasthan, a work that had a defining influence
Representations of India
on British perceptions, and representations, of the character and history of the people of these regions, and by extension of India more generally.
Rajasthan is a work of several strands, where accounts of the physi-
cal geography, history and genealogy of the Rajput states sit side by side with the author’s personal narratives of travel and encounters with the area. Its sources include genealogical legends of the Rajput princes, bardic tales of martial heroism, local legends, Brahman temple records and records kept by the Jain communities; it was also shaped by Tod’s reliance on the Jain cleric Gyanchandra.6 It is an encyclopaedic project
of accumulation and interpretation totalling over a thousand pages, which resists quick summary.7 A consideration of the full range of its
narratives, and their relationship to the original source material, is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, my analysis focuses on some representative examples of how Tod’s circulation and framing of epi- sodes in Rajput history were appropriated by later writers in order to develop a narrative of Indian self- determination.
Tod’s depiction of the Rajputs is complex and in some respects con- tradictory, in ways that echo the author’s multi- stranded relationship to India. The dedication (to King George IV) reflects his role as servant of the East India Company and by extension of the British state: he describes the ‘Rajpoot princes’ as ‘happily rescued, by the triumph of the British arms, from the yoke of lawless oppression’ – the Maratha confederacy – and now constituting ‘the most remote tributaries of your Majesty’s extensive empire’; but goes on to express the hope that ‘this ancient and interesting race’ might be restored to ‘their former independence, which it would suit our wisest policy to grant’.8 While
this appears to be an example of anti- colonialist advocacy for a Rajput nation, it also operates as an argument for British intervention, Norbert Peabody argues: Tod ‘delegitimated the contemporary Rajput polity as “degraded” or “fallen” ’, enabling the British role in India to be ‘recast in a (potentially) paternalistic guise whose goal was to revivify a lapsed local nationality’.9 In this respect, Tod’s role as coloniser inevitably
coloured his view of India.
On the other hand, one of the primary achievements of Rajasthan was to direct the attention of Tod’s readers towards Rajput efforts at self- realisation, as a quest with which they might find themselves in sympathy. Writing of the ‘struggles of a brave people for independence during a series of ages, sacrificing whatever was dear to them for the maintenance of the religion of their forefathers, and sturdily defending to death . . . their rights and national liberty’, Tod implicitly sought readers’ agreement that this was ‘a picture which it is difficult to con-
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template without emotion’ (1. xvii). His work also encouraged British readers to identify in other ways with his Rajput subjects. Part of his self- imposed task was to ‘endeavour to prove the common origin of the martial tribes of Rajast’han and those of ancient Europe’; and to con- sider the evidence ‘in favour of the existence of a feudal system in India, similar to that which prevailed in the early ages on the European conti- nent’ (1.xviii). The inspiration for this endeavour was Henry Hallam’s
View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, but Tod rejected
Hallam’s contention that feudalism was specific to England.10 Instead,
he developed a narrative that positioned Rajput society as parallel with an earlier version of British society, thus inviting readers to consider his Indian subjects as people, if not equivalent to themselves, then at least sharing some characteristics in common. The trajectory of Tod’s career reflects the difficulty of accommodating this knowledge of and sympathy with the people of north India within a British colonial state which was growing in power and adopting an increasingly Anglicist approach, stressing reform or Westernisation as goals. In 1822 Tod’s responsibili- ties were curtailed by the colonial government, leading to his eventual resignation; as Freitag suggests, one factor in this may have been his ‘reputation for favouring’ Rajput rulers.11
This contradiction at the heart of Tod’s concept of the Rajput nation is visible throughout Rajasthan. The emphasis on the feudal structure of Rajput society, and Rajputs’ adherence to values of loyalty and martial strength, also has the indirect effect of constituting them as less evolved societies than those of Europe, thus making them easily containable within a larger narrative of Indian subordination and loyalty to a British colonial state.12 In this discourse, the heroic past of Rajput kingdoms
is framed within an overarching narrative of Indian degeneracy that legitimises contemporary British rule. Tod’s introduction to Rajasthan refers to the Rajputs’ ‘eight centuries of galling subjection to conquerors totally ignorant of the classical language of the Hindus’ (1. ix), and distinguishes between the dynasties that are the subject of his work and the present- day ruling families of Rajputana, who ‘owed their present establishments to the progress of the Moslem arms’ (1. xvi). By denying these elite groups the ‘legitimacy’ of long descent, and positioning them instead as a by- product of the Muslim conquest, Tod’s narrative avoids representing the British as interlopers on a Rajput sovereignty.
Even while Rajasthan creates equivalences between the history of Europe and that of India, Tod’s manoeuvre of relegating Rajput national glories to the past is thus a constant dynamic. The comparison with Greece offers a clear sense of Tod’s thinking on this issue: referring to the rise of Akber, whom he refers to as ‘the first successful conqueror
Representations of India
of Rajpoot independence’ (1. 324),13 he describes the lasting and cata-
strophic effect of his victory on the Rajput people:
unhappily for Rajast’han, a prince was then rearing, who forged fetters for the Hindu race which enthralled them for ages; and though the corroding hand of time left but their fragments, yet even now, though emancipated, they bear the indelible marks of the manacle; not like the galley slave’s physical and exterior, but deep mental scars, never to be effaced. Can a nation which has run its long career of glory be regenerated? Can the soul of the Greek or the Rajpoot be reanimated with the spark divine which defended the kangras [battlements] of Cheetore or the pass of Thermopylae? Let history answer the question. (1. 319–20)
These narrative strategies demonstrate that, despite his sympathetic engagement with his subject, Tod is not describing a culture in which he participates or with which he recognises common identity. His account is compiled from the vantage point of a British colonial administra- tor, for whom the trajectory of Rajput decay is an enabling part of an implicit justification of British domination in India. If the ‘idea of epic’, as Herbert Tucker puts it, is to ‘tell a sponsoring culture its own story’, then Tod’s narrative, though it successfully articulates a distinct identity and a set of heroic values for the Rajput peoples, is never just about India: the ‘sponsoring culture’ is that of the expansionist East India Company’s colonial state.14
To focus solely on these instrumental uses of Tod’s work as colonial historiography is to overlook the impact of its literary quality. It is not simply or even at all a work of history – the introduction asserts that it is rather ‘a copious collection of materials for the future historian’. It is dense and inaccessible, with the author being ‘less concerned at the idea of giving too much, than at the apprehension of suppressing what might possibly be useful’ (1. xix). Readers faced with this mass of aggregate, complex material fell back on narrative, and focused on individual tropes and stories that in their turn made their way into British writing influenced by Tod. The dramatic and engaging stories Tod collected, and his technique of recounting them on an epic scale, have a momen- tum of their own, so that the briefly delineated lives and desires of indi- viduals derive their significance from their role in the larger narratives of the Rajput peoples. Successive, repetitive accounts of individual heroism and self- sacrifice for causes greater than the self – the community, the nation, family honour – are picked up and used by later writers, both evidencing their impact on these individual readers and setting in motion the process by which the tropes of Tod’s vision were popularised and circulated to become part of a wider representation of India.
Imagining India