Sanjay Subrahmanyam

SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH, Vol.17, No.2, Autumn 1997 AGREEING TO DISAGREE: BURTON STEIN ON VIJAYANAGARA Sanjay Subrahmanyam Among the numerous works that Burton Stein published in his very productive, ’post-retirement’, period in London, was a short monograph entitled quite simply Vijayanagara, for The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. 1.2 (Cambridge University Press, 1989), under the general editorship of Gordon Johnson, C. A. Bayly and J. F. Richards. The monograph, which I presume was commissioned in the early to mid 1980s, had a broadly favourable reception, for example in the Times Literary Supplement (where it was reviewed by K. N. Chaudhuri), although a few somewhat critical reviews, notably one rather severe one by R. Champakalakshmi in the Delhi journal Studies in History, also appeared. In this brief essay, I shall attempt to place the work of Stein on Vijayanagara in a double context: first, the evolution of his own views on the subject, which as we shall see by no means followed a linear pattern; and second, the rather more complex question of the changing historiographical constellation within which these views should be placed. I am tempted, however, to begin with a somewhat anecdotal reflection. I first met Burton Stein, as I recall it, in London in early 1985, when I was doing research at the India Office Library for my doctoral thesis at the Delhi School of Economics. Funded by a rather meagre Indian Council of Social Science Research grant, and staying at a somewhat curious Polish 6migr6-owned hotel off Baron’s Court, Stein’s was one of the few telephone numbers I had in London, besides that of K. N. Chaudhuri. I had just been in the Netherlands, working at the Hague archives, and Frank Perlin - at that time still teaching in Rotterdam, and resident in Leiden - had briefed me in his own way about Stein. The facts I knew included that Stein did not own a suit, and that he had had to borrow a tie for Perlin’s formal thesis defence at the Erasmus University. The image I had was thus a rather odd one, between the studied casualness this anecdote suggested, warnings concerning Stein’s intellectual ’hypnotism’ that I had received from my elders and betters at Delhi, and my own impressions from reading Peasant state and society in South India, a book which had been greeted with a huge hullabaloo as Downloaded from sar.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 17, 2016 128 soon as it came out in 1980, being acclaimed by some (mostly outside India), and reviled by others (mostly in India). The book itself I found very hard going, written in a convoluted and hermetic style that was extremely difficult for an economist like myself to penetrate; but the ’segmentary state’ model was finally there, as fully fleshed out as it would ever be after the bare bones of the historiographical essays that had preceded it. In any case, it took me a very long time to reconcile myself to the fact that the same person who had written this book (in somewhat rebarbative ’social science’ language), was the very humorous, denim-jacketed, character who showed up on appointment at the India Office Library, looking like a sort of ageing Clark Gable playing the White Hunter in Mocambo (a fairly awful film I had just seen two days before on TV, in the seedy lounge of my Polish hotel). Now, as is well-known, Peasant state and society is mostly about the Chola dynasty, even though there is a long, last chapter on later times. In contrast, the Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, which appeared just as I was beginning my research, included several chapters by Stein on precisely this later Vijayanagara period, that coincided with the focus of my own dissertation (which was on South India between 1550 and 1650). Besides, since my main interest was trade, there was also the paper that Stein had written, titled ’Coromandel Trade in Medieval India’, in a volume edited by John Parker of the James Ford Bell Library, entitled Merchants and scholars (1965). I managed to obtain a xerox copy of this paper in Delhi with great difficulty, and read with interest its theory concerning how the so-called ’merchant guilds’ in South India had been smashed by the expansion of the Vijayanagara polity into south-eastern India. Let us recall where matters stood in Vijayanagara studies in the mid-1950s, when Stein began his own thesis work on the Tirumala-Tirupati temple at the University of Chicago, even if this means partly rehearsing ground touched on by him in the introduction to Vijayanagara. The classic work was that of the British administrator Robert Sewell, and its title, A forgotten empire (1900), tells its own tale. Sewell had begun by doing research on epigraphy and numismatics, to establish clear ’lists’ of south Indian dynasties; in some sense, this was a continuation of Colin Mackenzie’s unfinished project to the same end, although Mackenzie had had a rather different set of materials in mind. Sewell’s enterprise was completely altered though, by the chance re-discovery by the Portuguese Arabist David Lopes of some detailed accounts by Portuguese of Vijayanagara (or ’Bisnaga’, as they prefer to call it), in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Lopes published the texts, anonymously authored, but attributed by him to Domingos Downloaded from sar.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 17, 2016 129 Paes (c. 1518) and Fernao Nunes (c. 1535), in his book Chr6nica dos Reis de Bisnaga (’Chronicle of the Vijayanagara kings’) in 1897, as part of the publication programme for the fourth centenary of Vasco da Gama’s voyage; his edition also carries a long eighty-one page introduction, including references to Sewell’s Lists of inscriptions, and sketch of the dynasties of Southern India ( 1884). Sewell seized upon this Portuguese publication and used it extensively in his own work published three years later, as he also did the early seventeenth-century text authored by the Portuguese Jesuit Manuel Barradas, concerning the Vijayanagara ’Civil War’ of the 1610s. Since Sewell published complete translations of these texts, the names of Paes and ’Nuniz’ (as Nunes came to be spelt), entered Vijayanagara historiography in a definitive fashion; the less fortunate Barradas for his part was largely consigned to the dust-heap. The next two generations of work then extended the documentary basis of Vijayanagara studies considerably. S. Krishnaswami Ayyangar (for some of whose other writings Stein had a particular fondness), published excerpts from literary texts relating to Vijayanagara in Sources of Vijayanagar history (1919), following it up some years later with an extensive work on the Tirupati temple; then, two historians, B. A. Saletore and N. Venkataramanayya, began the process of reintegrating Sewell’s view with the inscriptional record, which had in the meantime been published in fits and starts, in the Archaeological Survey’s annual summaries, as well as in some cases with the entire texts. The Portuguese, Italian and Latin materials continued to be exploited by the Bombay-based Spanish Jesuit, H. Heras, and thus by the mid-1930s, a substantial body of work existed on Vijayanagara. Yet this work remained curiously shorn of a framework, often reflecting no more than dull quarrels between regions (thus, the Karnataka lobby versus the Andhra lobby, each vying for the pride of having ’founded’ Vijayanagara). Venkataramanayya’s Studies in the history of the third dynasty of Vijayanagara (1935), which I myself consider the best work of that generation (though Stein did not share my view), faithfully reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the approach in vogue. The book is repetitive, often organised almost like a district gazetteer (a trait that is even more pronounced in T. V. Mahalingam’s unreadable work of the next generation), and this is not a coincidence. Though Venkataramanayya was a very talented scholar and philologist, who edited a number of important Telugu texts from the Mackenzie collection, he typically insisted on seeing Vijayanagara as an empire in the mould of the British Raj in India. A major part of his enterprise was thus to classify taxes, lands and other aspects of the ’land-system’ in a way that would be recognisable to Downloaded from sar.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 17, 2016 130 a British revenue official. Atop this system sat the (as it turns out, somewhat bogus) category of a sort of Vijayanagara military fief-holder, the arnarandyaka, the description of whose activities seems to derive essentially from Nunes’s account of the 1530s. Indeed, as Stein himself noted in his chapter in the Cambridge economic history, while Venkataramanayya surely knew the materials at first hand as well as anyone, the real ’theoretical’ statement was that of K. A. Nilakantha Sastri, who in his general work, History of South India, described Vijayanagara as a confederation of military chieftains, perhaps unconsciously borrowing the early British description of the Marathas in the closing years of the eighteenth century. These monographs, and a few other works devoted to the Nayaka principalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (R. Satyanatha Aiyar on Madurai, V. Vriddhagirisan on Tanjavur, C. Hayavadana Rao on Mysore), defined the baseline from which any analysis might be attempted in the baseline from which any analysis might be attempted in the late 1950s. The last major publication in English at that time was the three-volume work (Further sources of Vijayanagar history) edited by Sastri and Venkataramanayya in 1946, and as its title indicates this was really a source-publication, even though one volume of the three tried to establish a clear chronology of political ’events’, which was then extensively used as background material by such historians as Tapan Raychaudhuri in his Jan Company in Coromandel, 1605-1690 (1962).

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