India in Brief

By EDWARD THOMPSON Tuts book* is divided into three parts : Hindu and Buddhist India, Muslim India, British India. The first part makes far taller use than any previous history of the evidence provided by coins. Yet this evidence does not amount to much more than an accumulation of insignificant names :

" Azes sometimes struck coins, like Mattes, in his own name alone, but also sometimes with Azilises King of Kings as well as with the strategos Aspavarman, son of Indravarman. Azilises, likewise, issued coins both in his sole name and with Axes King of Kings on the reverse. Spalarises issued coins alone as king's brother, as king of kings, and as great king with Azes as king. Herzfeld is probably justified in asserting that Votiones . . . (p. 69).

There is a lot more of this—not very enlightening, but excusable, since the writer is trying to make bricks without straw (or rather, with nothing but straw). But it is not excus- able later, when proper names become the binding material of such an agglutination as I never came across before—scores

of pages not written, but clotted together—not history, not- literature, but historical pemmican, literary concrete. Here is a characteristic example, a glimpse of a brisk and busy.

existence :

" He collected all arrears of tribute, put to death Sankara, who. had defied the royal authority, assumed the government of Deogir, captured Gulbarga, annexed the dofib between the Krishna and the Ttmgabhadra, invaded and plundered Telingana and the Hoysala kingdom, and took the sea-ports of Dabhol and Chaul."

I mention another flaw apologetically ; the authors may have deliberately accepted what they thought one of two unavoidable evils. For writing a " History of India "

is like writing a " History of Europe." Until you reach the British period, there is no unifying principle ; the historian's eyes must rove everywhere, and after very small game, dynasties as trivial (vet temporarily not negligible, as occupying considerable geographical tracts) as any Balkan

elan or mediaeval Germanic or Frankish semi-royal nobility. That may be why we are given, instead of one main stream of narrative, as in the Oxford History, a division of " Hindu and Buddhist India " from " Muslim India." But the division presents the reader with a depressing task. With biblical overlapping, events come twice over (like the song the wise thrush sings). Nor are they sung from different standpoints. The words may be somewhat shuffled, but

the repetition is almost word for word. One event, Prithi- viraja's fall, is told thrice (pp. 136, 138, 209). Examples are too numerous to cite. The index, under such names as

Diu, Mahmud, Vijayanagar, will guide to a few.

India's history (most of all as told here) is the most gruesome that could be imagined. I doubt if in the "Muslim" section there are five pages in all that are free from impalations,

slayings alive, massacres. It is all true, and should not be shirked. Yet a narrative so monotonously ghastly wrecks the authors' findings. After an account of Akbar which (onviets him of every crime (and of little else) we are startlingly assured that he was a very fine fellow, and Vincent Smith's

appraiSal of him, " as one of the greatest sovereigns k.nown

1 o history . . . on the basis of his extraordinary natural gifts and his magnificent achievements," is emphatically

endorsed. Smith's account may be consulted. He was equally set against whitewashing Akbar ; but you can sympathize with his conclusion, whereas it looks here as if an enemy had pitched it in from the Life of Alfred the Great !

Moreover, the space which repetition takes up has crushed out all chance of telling something of what the people -of *The Cambridge History of India. By J. Allan, Sir Wolseley Haig, H. H. Dodwell. Edited by H. H. DOdwell. (Cambridge l'iliv.-3rsity Press. 12s. 6d.) India did when not busy butchering or torturing. They must have had other activities—interludes when folklore and stories at which men and women laughed sprang up, when religious teachers deeply moved them. But, after we have left Mr. Allan's section, the first, the Cambridge History sternly ignores all mankind's lighter occupations. There is not a word of the immense and permanent impression made by the Vaisluiavas in Bengal, by Chaitanya and his companions—of the Alvars and Saivite poets in South India— of Sanloiracharya and Itamanuja—of the weaver Iiabir. Imagine a " History of Italy " which never mentioned St. Francis of Assisi ! Or one of England, which ignored the Renaissance and the Reformation, the Lollards, Puritans, Methodists, and told only of things like the Wars of the Roses and our periodical raids into France.

• The book is a queer amalgam of scholarship and casualness. The proof-reading has been magnificent. The exceedingly rare slip is obviously a slip : as when Nau Nihal Singh (instead of Kharak Singh) is said to have succeeded Ranjit Singh, or bhadralog is printed as bad ralog, or we are told that Sivajfii chief minister was " dignified by the Persian title of Peshwa " (theoretically, and at first, the Pratinidhi was above the Peshwa). On the other hand, mistakes have come in freely, and quite unnecessarily, from the pedantry which has given, proper names quantitative marks. And why is swadeshi always carefully printed as swadeshi ? And in what way does the scrupulously marked e in kesart differ from the un- marked e of swadeshi ? Another annoying habit is that of quotations, often long ones, with no indication whence they come. What authority has a quotation, unless we know its source ?

Readers will be most interested in the third section, British India. It contains a good many examples of history " written with a sceptre " (the complaint Luther brought against Henry VIII's literary style). " Advanced Indian opinion," we are told, was " hostile " to Mr. Lionel Curtis, " perhaps owing to his South African associations, perhaps also because it was reluctant to defend itself in an arena where rhetoric and invective would be idle weapons." " President Wilson, with headlong ineptitude, proposed ' self-determination ' as the goal to be attained on the con- clusion of the war." " Wholesale execution is the appropriate punishment of wholesale mutiny " (the Elizabethan view in Ireland, or of the Romans dealing with runaway gladiators). Luckily, Professor Dodwell's knowledge, as always, is close and wide. He knows the history of Madras better than any other man. He gives a succinct and valuable account of the Portuguese in India, and of the Anglo-Dutch rivalries. He can give the heart of a matter in a sentence ; Raffles's occupation of Singapore " effectively broke the monopoly of control which till 1811 the Dutch had enjoyed " in the East Indies. He can employ a pleasantly elaborate irony. The inhabitants of one village which the Pindaris approached " preferred to burn themselves with their wives and children rather than fall into the hands of these savage enemies. Those who shrank from so extreme a measure had small cause to congratulate themselves on their wisdom." If he is uniquely kind to the policy which waged the Afghan Wars, he is also unusually fair to Lord Ellenborough, who was " capable of deep insight and puerile extravagance." The book becomes more alive under his hands, as is shown by the number of passages one marks with gratitude for their illuminating quality, or for emphatic disagreement. Of these I have selected only a few.