Introduction

Cambridge University Press 0521816270 - Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India - Daud Ali Excerpt More information Introduction In 1888,R. H. Farmer,the Government of India’s political agent to the princely state of Pudukkottai in south India,declared that the palace of the newly installed king Martanda Tondaiman was to be extensively reformed. This task was assigned to the British-appointed diw¯an to the Pudukkotai court,A. Seshaia Sastri. 1 The diw¯an’s most important task was to monitor palace expenditures and guard against the misappropri- ation of ‘public funds’ for domestic use by the young prince. Interest- ingly,Tondaiman’s body,deemed obese,was a point of special concern and in 1890 he was removed from the palace to receive ‘physical educa- tion’ near the British military cantonment outside Trichinopoly. Along with this reform of the king’s body and sumptuary,various members of the palace retinue,mostly brahmins but also a number of dancing girls who contributed to palace ‘vice’,were summarily dismissed for fiscal considerations. In the Inam Settlement of 1888 the remaining palace attendants’ rights to enjoy the revenue of lands given by the king was substituted by a system of fixed wages,with the old in¯am holdings appor- tioned and deeded to the palace staff as private¯ property subject to taxation. Some twenty-three years later,Ganganatha Jha of Muir Central College in Allahabad edited an abridged version of the fifteenth-century manual for princes,the Purus.apar¯ıks. ¯a,for use in schools to replace the ‘animal 2 fables’ (of the Hitopades.a and Pancatantra ˜ ) which were currently in use. The Purus.apar¯ıks. ¯a,like the texts before it,was to provide young boys at school with an introduction to morals,but without the air of ‘unreality’ that pervaded the fables. According to one of the several study guides to the text published in subsequent years,the stories of the Purus.apar¯ıks. ¯a, or ‘The Test of Man’,were to ‘serve as a good social and moral guide 1 Joanne Punzo Waghorne, The Raja’s Magic Clothes: Re-Visioning Kingship and Divinity in England’s India (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,1994),pp. 55–81. 2 See the preface of Ganganatha Jha,ed., Purus.apar¯ıks. ¯a (Allahabad: Belvedere Steam Press, 1911). 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521816270 - Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India - Daud Ali Excerpt More information 2 Courtly Culture in Early Medieval India for the training of the young and go a great way in forming their moral character and making them live a life worth living’.3 These two events,I would like to suggest,represent the contradictory relationship that modernity in India,as elsewhere,has shared with some of its own political antecedents – a relationship which has acted as a peren- nial irritant in the understanding of pre-colonial India. On the one hand, there has been widespread condemnation. Accounts of the corpulent and decadent bodies of the ancien régime characterise the European critique of dynastic absolutism and feudalism as much as the British,and later nationalist,diatribe against the oriental prince. Liberal writers and states- men of the nineteenth century looked forward to the transformation of the aggressive ‘passions’ of human life – lust,avarice and the desire for domi- nation – into enlightened ‘self-interest’ to be pursued through the rational accumulation of wealth. Men would peacefully accrue wealth rather than appropriate war-trophies and women. In Europe,this vision entailed a systematic attack and destruction of the old order,the ideology and practices of the feudal and absolutist classes. In India,it entailed the subjuga- tion of the social order in the name of liberating it from itself. The British political agent’s concern over the king’s ‘home life’ in Pudukkottai – his body and manners – was a concern over what might be termed ‘the habits of despotism’. The king’s body,corrupted by the old order,was to be reshaped to reflect new-found principles of government based on fiscal thrift and public welfare. He was to lose the excess of the past and discipline his appetites. In India,such transformations,part of what one scholar has aptly called the ‘colonisation of the political order’,4 relied heavily on particular representations of past Hindu and Muslim kingdoms. Indeed,the various theories of traditional Indian government served the ends of the emerging colonial state in its dismantlement and reconstitution of the political.5 Throughout the nineteenth century,the bourgeois concepts of ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ were repeatedly counter- posed to the pomp and despotism of Indian potentates and the choking hold of the caste system. The ‘state’ in ancient India was a particularly debased form of monarchy,one steeped in sensuality and imagination. But because of its isolation from ‘society’,rigidly enthralled by the reli- gious sanction of caste,it was at the same time powerless and irrelevant. 3 A Complete Guide Key to Purush-Pareeksha, Part II Full Sanskrit Notes (n.d.,n.p.). See also V. B. Dawoo, A Guide to the Purush-Pareeksha Matric Sanskrit Course for 1915 and Onwards Containing Full Notes in Translation (Nagpoor: Desh Sewak Press,1914). 4 Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge University Press,1987),pp. 324–57. 5 See Bernard Cohn,‘African Models and Indian Histories’,in Bernard S. Cohn,ed., An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987),pp. 200–23. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521816270 - Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India - Daud Ali Excerpt More information Introduction 3 Yet the fate of the practices which sustained the ancien régimes of late pre-colonial India,both provincial and imperial,were hardly sealed,for they were subject to both wide scale relocation and ideological recu- peration. Even as the colonial state sought to reform and re-educate India’s ‘princes’,it also integrated them into its own imperial durbars and splendorous pageantry. These incorporations continued with the rise of nationalism (though India’s loyalist princes were consigned to all that was corrupt in the past!). History once again played an important role in ideological transformation,with nationalists defending the critique of Indian despotism and attempting to find the lineages of their own modernity in ancient village republics,benign welfare states and glorious Hindu kingdoms. These visions are perhaps best captured in the Indian state’s later adoption of the A´sokan lion-capital as its national emblem,a ‘symbol’ that was properly ideological,having no organic relationship with the practices of governance and language of state which it so nicely crowned, as symbol of secular unity. At one level,India is hardly unique in this mat- ter,for most modern states have deployed symbols of the past in similarly anachronistic ways. Yetthere is a vast,complex and problematic history here which remains largely unwritten. For perhaps more important than these ideological pos- tures was the gradual ‘relocation’ of numerous forms (manners,modes of dress,literary cultures,etc.) grounded in practices of polity,both imperial and provincial (and only partly embodied in the princely states the British chose to patronise),to the newly emerging realm of ‘civil society’ – that is,beyond the borders of the newly christened colonial and post-colonial state apparatus. This process entailed not so much a wholesale move- ment of practices as their increasing recontextualisation in a world where the political was ostensibly located elsewhere – within the Indo-Saracenic sandstone of the Indian parliament. This is in fact the process of modernity everywhere,where elements of pre-modern political life survive as apparently depoliticised aspects of ‘civil society’ and ‘national culture’,where manuals for princes like the Purus.apar¯ıks. ¯a become character-building exercises for the nation’s youth. Yet what of everyday forms of life beyond the designs of the state’s civil authority,forms of practice whose political connotations were now silent? If in some cases these constituted ‘social problems’ in need of eradication, in others they have formed the ostensible basis of ‘social ethics’ among various classes and communities in everyday life. The recent and rather misplaced claims for an indigenous Indian ‘modernity’ notwithstanding, the problem which faces historians in charting the history and evolution of these practices is complex,for while it may be argued that in Europe the evolution of the bourgeois world occurred in open (often antagonistic) © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521816270 - Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India - Daud Ali Excerpt More information 4 Courtly Culture in Early Medieval India dialogue (i.e. dialogic process) with the aristocratic cultures it displaced, and thus were in some sense ‘organic’,the colonial context prevents any simple application of such a model to India. Toput it crudely,while it may be argued that in Europe ‘civil society’ and ‘public life’ were complex (and often antagonistic) reworkings of the practices and concepts of civilité, courtoise and le monde,in India,political modernity everywhere has had a more fitful and divided existence. It is an implicit presumption of this book that in order to comprehend this history in more complex and convincing paradigms than either the ‘imposition’ of Western modernity onto India or the rediscovery of an ‘indigenous modernity’,it is first necessary to explore critically the evolution of these practices outside the paradigms which have been made for them by those who seek to escape or return to some putative past. This work hopes to make a modest contribution to such a larger project.

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