Comments on: Decline Scenario

By: elizabeth

elizabeth — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:20:06 +0000

and very belatedly, because I was distracted and missed this excellent discussion, I wanted to mention that Donald Quataert has an v good essay somewhere on the changing attitudes to the “decline” paradigm in Ottoman historiography (o, for access to an academic library…will dig up a reference eventually).

And of course, similarly, declinism is a crucial ingredient in Turkish republican/nationalist history-writing about the Ottoman past as well.

By: krishna

krishna — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:59:40 +0000

Thanks for the nice writeup. This story of descent is pretty ironic considering that the british were able to rule India precisely because the descent narrative was factually untrue. They could not have run India without the extant bureaucratic and administrative institutions that they inherited from Indian rulers.

Incidentally, the standard nationalistic narrative of british takeover emphasized the importance of trade, and that the loss of Indian freedom was a consequence of loss of control over sea lanes of communication (due to neglect of naval security and regional political and military instability), and hence trade from India. At least this was the narrative when I studied NCERT books as a school student (80’s and early 90’s). The books were otherwise pretty communist :), and I must say that there is much more merit to this than the standard tropes that you refer to. This is of course also partly Braudel’s thesis of colonization.

I also really felt sorry for Dara Shikoh and was pretty distressed by his fate when I heard the story in my childhood. :)

By: shiromoney

shiromoney — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:54:50 +0000

great post and discussion. not the trivialize things, but it made my day to see the Kinks album cover at the head of the post. as ever, way to go Sepoy.

And, to Qalandar, I often imagine an alternate universe with the 2 vols. of The Rothschilds and none of Ferguson’s later books. I feel better about liking them, that way.

By: Dr Anonymous

Dr Anonymous — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:06:11 +0000

great post. i struggled for a time with the question of the impact of colonial intrusion in South Asia for a while before giving up because I don’t speak Persian (yet) and have no way of knowing who to believe even if I found enough sources.

By: Qalandar

Qalandar — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:33:56 +0000

I’ve heard good things about the new NCERT books (i.e. compared to the ones they replaced) too, would be curious to get teachers’/educators’ take on them too…

Dara: Random Aside: his “Mingling of the Two Oceans” is available in English too…

By: history_lover

history_lover — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 05:38:05 +0000

Qalandar
I first learnt of Dara Shikoh vs Aurangzeb in Maulana Abul Hassan Ali Nadwi (Ali Mian)’s Saviours of Islamic History and took a early dislike to Dara shikoh on reading of his rather unorthodox ideas .
I began to appreciate Dara shikoh’s ideas when I grew older.

By: Red

Red — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 01:35:21 +0000

Dara Shikoh rocks my boat too. Incidentally I would recommend the new NCERT textbooks for history (available online here http://www.ncert.nic.in/textbooks/testing/Index.htm)

They junk the kings and dynasties method, focus on things like traveller’s accounts, social formations, poetry and culture and leave Kings and Courtly culture for the last chapter.

By: Qalandar

Qalandar — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:57:21 +0000

Good point Red — and note that in nationalist historiography (referring here to the Nehruvian kind, not the right-wing kind) you have Akbar as “good” and his nefarious ideological other, Aurangzeb*; combined with the other Indian monarch Sen champions in “The Argumentative Indian”, namely Asoka (whose chakra is of course the centerpiece of the Indian tricolor), one can easily see Akbar and Asoka as two pillars of the Nehruvian ideological project. To this day Indian school history textbooks will typically have a lot more material on Akbar than any other medieval monarch (I note that based on what I’ve seen with my cousins in Karachi, at least the post-Zia textbooks there accord a lot more space to Aurangzeb than to Akbar).

*[I'm myself very unsympathetic to Aurangzeb's ideology, and have had distress ever since childhood that Dara Shikoh didn't win :-)].

By: Red

Red — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:49:49 +0000

For what its worth, Sen does eulogize Akbar in his argumentative Indian and has the great line about while Europeans were burning Giordano Bruno at the state, Akbar was formulating his suhl-i-khul, which goes to confirm Q’s point about the central role the Mughal state plays in the nationalist geneology of the modern Indian state.

By: Qalandar

Qalandar — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:09:30 +0000

Thabet: Could you elaborate? Not sure I follow: why do the Spanish or Ottoman empires provide better comparisons from your perspective?

By: thabet

thabet — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:14:11 +0000

Why constantly compare the “American empire” with the Brits?

The Spanish or Ottoman empires provide better comparisons, imho.

By: Qalandar

Qalandar — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:50:55 +0000

Speaking of Ferguson, I really liked his book on the Rothschilds…

By: Global Voices Online » South Asia: Decline Scenario

Global Voices Online » South Asia: Decline Scenario — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:29:08 +0000

[...] Chapati Mystery on the idea of “decline scenario” in interpreting history - implying that South Asia was already in decline before colonization. Share This [...]

By: Qalandar

Qalandar — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:36:15 +0000

Rajat Kanta Ray’s book “The Felt Community” also bears mention in the context of this discussion: it is empire-centric too, but in large part with an ear for what happened to this ideology over the course of the 18th century (Ray seems to locate the “pre-history” of nationalism in the rhetoric and ideology of specifically the late-Mughal aristocracy)…

http://qalandari.blogspot.com/2007/03/book-review-felt-community-2002_25.html

By: Qalandar

Qalandar — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:30:55 +0000

Sorry, meant to say, in my first paragraph above, that “…I would agree that PRE-Mughal Muslim rule is placed under a pall”