d. h. a. kolff, om prakash-circumambulations in south asian history_ essays in honour of dirk h.a....

8/10/2019 D. H. a. Kolff, Om Prakash-Circumambulations in South Asian History_ Essays in Honour of Dirk H.a. Kolff (Brill's In

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CIRCUMAMBULATIONS IN SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY


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BRILLSINDOLOGICAL

LIBRARYEDITED BY

JOHANNES BRONKHORST

IN CO-OPERATION WITH

RICHARD GOMBRICH OSKAR VON HINBER

KATSUMI MIMAKI ARVIND SHARMA

VOLUME 19


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CIRCUMAMBULATIONSIN SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY

Essays in Honour of Dirk H.A. Kolff

EDITED BY

JOS GOMMANS & OM PRAKASH

BRILLLEIDEN BOSTON

2003


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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Circumambulations in South Asian history : essays in honour of Dirk H.A. Kolff /edited by Jos Commans & Om Prakash.

p. cm. (Brills indological library ; 19)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 90-04-13155-81. South AsiaHistory. I. Kolff, D.H.A., 1938- II. Gommans, Jos J. L.

III. Prakash, Om. IV. Series.

DS335.C55 2003

954dc212003051885

ISSN 0925-2916ISBN 90 04 13155 8

Copyright 2003 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written

permission from the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personaluse is granted by Brill provided that

the appropriate fees are paid directly to The CopyrightClearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910

Danvers, MA 01923, USA.

Fees are subject to change.

printed in the netherlands


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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...................................................................... vii

List of Contributors .................................................................. ix

Introduction ................................................................................ 1

Jos Gommans and Om Prakash

The Tides of the Indian Ocean, Islamization and the

Dialectic of Coast and Inland .............................................. 29

Jan Heesterman

Shah Jahan wore Glasses: Remarks on the Impact of the

Dutch East India Company on Northern India andSome Suggestions for Further Research .............................. 47

Hans van Santen

To be a Servant of His Catholic Majesty: Indian Troops

of the Estado da ndia in the Eighteenth Century .............. 69Ren Barendse

The Trials of Captain Hackert and Engineer

Andries Leslorant at the Malabar Council of War ............ 105

Mark de Lannoy

Bedara Revisited: A Reappraisal of the Dutch Expedition

of 1759 to Bengal .................................................................. 117

Hugo sJacob

Between Fact and Fictions: Khoja Gregory alias

Gurgin Khan, the Evil Genius of Mir Qasim ................ 133

Bhaswati Bhattacharya

Two Captains of the Jawnpur Sultanate ................................ 159

Simon Digby


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Slavery and Naukar among the Bangash Nawabs ofFarrukhabad ............................................................................ 179

Jos Gommans

The Legitimation of Kingship in India: Bundelkhand .......... 217

Godard Schokker

The Short Career of Walter Dickens in India ...................... 233

Dick Kooiman

Writing and Reading Tods Rajasthan: Interpreting theText and its Historiography .................................................. 251

Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph

The Idea of Modernity: European Progress for the Rest of

the World? .............................................................................. 283

Victor van Bijlert

Modern Media of Communication and Indigenous

Knowledge in India and Europe: Towards an

Anthropological Perspective .................................................. 307

Jan Brouwer

From Chariot to Atom Bomb: Armament and Military

Organisation in South Asian History .................................. 325Dietmar Rothermund

Bibliography of D.H.A. Kolff .................................................. 353

Index .......................................................................................... 359

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This Festschriftserves to mark Dirk Kolffs retirement as Professor ofModern Indian History at Leiden University. The contributors are

some of his friends and colleagues, from within and beyond his own

country (the Netherlands) and discipline (history). The result is a

polyphonic tribute to a many-sided and wide-ranging scholar.

This volume could not have been produced without the friendlyhelp of Annemarie Kolffwho provided us with some essential bio-

graphical information; the generous cooperation of Marc de Haan

who made and donated the photograph; the understanding assist-

ance of Lia ten Brink and Carolien van Zoest for helping us by

copying and scanning some unprocessed manuscripts. We are also

very grateful to Ian Wendt who saved this volume from the most

dubious manifestations of Duglish. Finally we are most obliged toE.J. Brill Publishers for agreeing to publish the volume and doing

an excellent job of it.

A volume including essays written by such a wide range of authors

drawing from such a wide variety of linguistic sources makes stan-

dardised transliteration not only problematic but also undesirable. In

general, we have avoided the use of diacritics for personal and geo-

graphical nameswith the exception of Schokkers paper that retainsthe spirit of its Braj sourcesand instead have employed their most

common and modern spelling. In the essays that use or refer to

indigenous Indian or Indo-Persian sources, transliteration has been

employed for institutional and technical terms. In these cases, as with

personal and geographical terms, spelling has been standardised.


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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

R B is fellow of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences

(KNAW).

B B is associated to Kolkata University and

publishes on the early-modern social-economic history of South Asia.

V B is professor at the Management Centre for

Human Values at the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata.

J B is professor of cultural anthropology at the North-

Eastern Hill University in Shillong.

S D is presently based at Jersey but has been a fellow of

Wolfson College, Oxford, and a member of the Oriental Faculty atthe University of Oxford.

J G is associate professor at the Kern Institute of Leiden

University.

J H is emeritus professor of Indian Civilisations at the

Kern Institute of Leiden University.

H J was associate professor at the History Department of

the University of Groningen.

D K is associate professor at the History Department of

the Free University of Amsterdam.

M L is research assistant at the National Archives in

The Hague.

O P is professor of economic history at the Delhi School

of Economics, University of Delhi.

D R is emeritus professor of modern South Asianhistory at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg.


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L R is professor of political science and the social sci-

ences at the University of Chicago. Together with his wife, S

H R, he publishes extensively on a wide range of issues

involving modern South Asian society.

H S is a diplomat in the Dutch foreign service. At

present he is Head of the Security and Defence Policy Division in

The Hague.

G S was associate professor at the Kern Institute of

Leiden University.

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INTRODUCTION

Jos Gommans and Om Prakash

Als iemand die de geschiedenis en cultuur van India doceert aan een universiteit inons land, schaam ik me eigenlijk het toe te geven, want ik ben medeverantwoordelijkvoor de stagnatie van ons India-beeld. Toch kunnen alle universiteiten van Europa

tezamen hier weinig aan veranderen. Om ten lange leste een idee van India teverkrijgen dat recht doet aan die samenleving, hebben we kunstenaars nodig. Alswe af willen van de vele clichs, waarvan ik er enkele noemde, zullen we heel watlagen van vooroordelen van ons af moeten pellen en India de kans geven ons teverrassen en zich te laten zien in een nieuwe vorm.1

D.H.A. Kolff

On the first of March 2003, Dirk H.A. Kolffbecame emeritus pro-

fessor of Leiden University. From the very beginning, Kolffs careerhas been closely connected to that academic institution. After taking

his MA in History there in 1967, he became lecturer at the Kern

Institute in 1971. In 1983 he finished his PhD thesis and in 1991

became Leiden professor of the Modern History of South Asia.

This volume is a collective tribute to Kolffs scholarship by some

of his friends and colleagues. As usual with tributes, everyone brings

valuable oblations from his own exotic homeland, the result beingas rich as it is variegated. Perhaps the latter should be tolerated in

a volume dedicated to a scholar who discards one-dimensional views

and prefers the pluriform conveyed by multiplicity of voices. Reading

all these different papers certainly evokes Kolffs own metaphor of

the circumambulation which offers no certainty or finality but merely

1 Speech of D.H.A. Kolffat the opening of the exhibition of Rameshwar Singhin March 2001 at art-gallery Jan Steen in Amsterdam (Schilderijen van RameshwarSingh: Kennismaking met een Indiaas kunstenaar, Beeldaspecten, 13, 4/5 (2001),p. 13). As someone who teaches the history and culture of India at one of ourcountrys universities, I really feel ashamed to admit it, since I am partly respon-sible for the stagnation of our image of India. Still, all of Europes universitiestogether can hardly change this. Ultimately, to get an idea of India that does jus-tice to that society we need artists. If we want to get rid of the many clichs, I

mentioned a few of them, we shall have to peel our layers of prejudice and giveIndia the chance to surprise us and to show itself in a new form. (translation JG)


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reflections on the ongoing mystery. Om Prakash, himself a mone-

tary historian, will attempt to convert these different tributes into

one currency and carefully estimate its overall value. Before that,

however, Jos Gommans will discuss Kolffs own scholarly circum-

ambulations at the periphery of history, or to use Kolffs own phrase,

at the confluence of anthropology, history and indology. Although

he has not been a particularly prolific writer, it is all the more

remarkable that Kolffs work stands at the root of what has become

a most flourishing South Asian branch of ethnohistory, including thatmost uncanny of offshoots: the new military history of South Asia. Andthere is definitively more to come, as his most recent work antici-pates his explorations into yet another fringe of the historical disci-

pline: South Asian psychohistory.By highlighting his published scholarly work in this volume, it is

not intended to underplay his considerable contributions as a teacher.

Many who have attended his classes have been inspired by the way

he leads his students from one surprise to the other, slowly but surely

breaking down preconceived notions about a static and backwardIndian civilisation.2 Besides, it should not be ignored that Kolffwas

an enthusiastic university manager; this being a somewhat rare phe-

nomenon among his Leiden colleagues.3 Moreover, beyond the purely

academic, were his repeated attempts to stimulate the social and

spiritual cohesion of the university community. Although his idea of

a university meditation centre failed to materialise, thanks to his con-

certed efforts, the Leiden Faculty Club was realised in 1999.4 All inall, though, we feel Kolffwas most successful as a writing scholar.

Hence, the following will turn to his internationally recognised con-

tributions to various fields of South Asian studies.

2 Kolffs fondness for teaching, particularly to the general public, is most clearlydemonstrated in his involvement in the development of a very successful course

in world history at the Dutch Open University of Heerlen. See the report byM. Broesterhuizen in Katern Hoger Onderwijs ( Juni 1985), pp. 58.3 From 1992 until 1997, he served as the director of the Centre for Asian, African

and Amerindian Studies (CNWS) (see D.H.A. Kolff, Aziatische, Afrikaanseen Amerindische talen en culturen (het niet-westen), in H.J. de Jonge andW. Otterspeer (eds), Altijd een vonk of twee. De universiteit Leiden van 1975 tot 2000(Leiden, 2000), pp. 5965. Kolffhimself said about this period: . . . a large partof it was a waste of time. Nothing remains [er ligt niks], it vaporizes (Dirk vanDelft, De vrijgestelde onderzoeker, Hypothese, July 2000, p. 11).

4 The plan for the meditation centre reminds one of one of the ancestors of the

Kolff family, Ds Gualtherus Kolff (16441705), who was a Protestant minister inVuren en Dalem, Noordeloos and Maassluis (N. Manneke, Kolff in zeven eeuwen

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1. Exploring the periphery of history: from ethnohistory to psychohistory

Kolffand HuizingaAbout a hundred years ago the Dutch sanskritist Johan Huizinga

decided to leave the field of Indian studies. As foreshadowed already

in his dissertation on Indian drama, he now became frustrated with

the civilisation of India as a whole. In both he sorely missed a sense

of cause and effect, the destiny of history and the conflicts of peo-

ple of flesh and blood. According to Huizinga the visual image of

India remained necessarily vague in line and but faintly coloured,especially in those parts where a real historical narrative, a sense

of living will always be extremely essential for our understanding.

He was probably not only missing proper historical sources, but also

adequate schemes and forms to reveal to the historian the con-

nections of past events. As in its drama, Indian history presented

itself as a succession of poetical tableaux vivantsas merely a presen-

tation in sequence of lyrical impressions. At this time, Huizinga him-self was looking for a solid middle ground between, on the one hand,

his earlier impressionistic mood, i.e. his tendency to find visual images

that could create order in otherwise unrelated sequences of events,

and, on the other hand, his more recent interest in a more posi-

tivistic approach, in other words, to let the sources speak for them-

selves. The combination of these two contradictory emotions implied

that Huizinga not only distrusted all-embracing and all-explainingparadigms but also that he had a certain aversion against speciali-

sation. Perhaps this inner dualism was the source of Huizingas later

success as one of the most imaginative and innovating historians of

the European Middle Ages.5

(Rotterdam, 2001, pp. 189). But as Kolff observed himself, more than this reli-gious background, the familys common riverine connections are striking (D.H.A.Kolff, De familie en onze rivieren,De Colve, 7 (2002).

5 For Kolffs writings on Huizinga, see Huizingas proefschrift en de stemmin-gen van Tachtig, in:Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden104 (1989), pp. 38092; Huizingas Dissertation and the Stemmingen of theLiterary Movement of the Eighties, in W. Otterspeer (ed.), Leiden Oriental Connec-tions 18501940(Leiden, 1989), pp. 141152; Huizinga en de Vedisch-BrahmaanseReligie: Zijn college als privaat-docent te Amsterdam in 190304, in Hanneke vanden Muyzenberg en Thomas de Bruijn (eds), Waarom Sanskrit? Honderdvijfentwintig jaar

Sanskrit in Nederland (Kern Institute Miscellanea, 4) (Leiden, 1991), pp. 6473;Huizinga and the Vedic-Brahmanic Religion. His first series of lectures at the

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This fascinating picture of Huizinga, struggling to bring his inner,

personal mood in tune with indology, derives form Dirk Kolffs

insightful biographical studies of Huizingas journey into the field of

history. I feel that the early trials and tribulations of Huizinga the

indologist-turned-historian, must have appealed to the imagination

of the historian-turned-indologist Dirk Kolff. Although coming from

opposite directions, both were to meet each other on one and the

same path that linked history to indology, and Europe to India. Of

course, they never physically met as they lived almost a century apart

from each other. In this century, Kolffwas happy to observe, the

field of Indian studies had significantly developed: many new factshad come to light and old and unappealing paradigms had been

found inadequate. Huizinga, had he lived in Kolffs time, would

probably have found more than enough to inform and enrich his

historical imagination and thus would most probably have stuck to

Indian civilisation.6

Nonetheless, one cannot avoid being struck by the common strug-

gle of both Huizinga and Kolff to come to terms with the multi-formity of Indias civilisation. Even a century after Huizinga, Kolff

was still very much aware that the assumed unity and continuity

of Indian civilisation proves as difficult to fathom as its obvious multi-

plicity. The sanskritic great tradition is not only far from univocal

in itself, but also seems scarcely concerned about its inconsistencies

or about the recurrent discrepancies between text and reality, pre-

cept and practice.7 Here we almost hear the last sighs of Huizingathe indologist. Although clearly recognising Huizingas struggle with

Indian history, Kolff, however, decided to stay on. Was it the right

decision and was it worthwhile?

Before delving into this question, by having a closer look at Kolffs

contribution to the field of South Asian studies, I would first like to

briefly elaborate on this dualism that he seems to share with Huizinga,

and perhaps with innumerable other South Asianists, when trying to

University of Amsterdam in 190304, in A.W. van der Hoek, D.H.A. KolffandM.S. Oort (eds.), Ritual, State and History in South Asia: Essays in Honour of J.C. Heesterman(Leiden, 1992), pp. 578586.

6 D.H.A. Kolff, Indische geschiedenis een overwonnen contradictie?, in Groniek,92 (1985), pp. 289.

7 Taken from Kolffs introduction to J.C. Heestermans Festschrift (Kolff et al.,Ritual, State and History in South Asia, p. ix).

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come to grips with the so-called unity-in-diversity dilemma of Indian

civilisation. For Kolff it is not so much the contradiction between

impressionism and positivism. This clearly remains Huizingas dilemma.

But like Huizinga, Kolffdoes not seem to like the universal, the gen-

eral and the timeless, but instead has a better taste for the particu-

lar, the local and the timely. Here he clearly sympathises with

postmodernist thinking as he distrusts the modern mind ever aim-

ing at certainty and finality. This sense of scepticism may be labelled

postmodern, but for Kolff it is probably more closely related to

sixteenth-centurythat is pre-Cartesianintellectuals like Erasmus

and Montaigne, those humanists who still fully respected the com-plexity and diversity of human existence.8 Anyway for Kolff, this cri-

tique on modernity cannot tell the whole story, as he warily realises

that Indian studies cannot do without universal concepts. For Indian

history, for example, he emphatically makes the point that univer-

sal concepts should bring it within the compass of where it belongs:

world history. As he further explains, though of universal validity,

the relative importance of such concepts in the configuration ofIndian society and civilisation may be different from its importance

elsewhere, just as the linkages between the elements of the structure

may be different in India. Hence Kolffaims at the combination of

universal and particularthat is specifically Indiancategories and

to weld them into an image that does justice to the flux as well as

the facts of history.9

Looking at Huizinga and Kolff, one may wonder to what extentthis particular problem, to make the chaotic diversity of the Indian

experience into some kind of digestible unity, is a consequence of

the subject of their inquiries itself. For sure, Kolffwas familiar with

the idea of the so-called inner conflict, the paradoxical dualism of

Indian tradition as worked out by his supervisor Jan Heesterman.10

Kolff, although a bit wary of its essentialist undercurrent, clearly

8 This view derives from Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda ofModernity (New York, 1990). He once mentioned in one of his classes that the bookhad had a great deal of influence on his thinking.

9 D.H.A. Kolff,Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy. The Ethnohistory of the military labour mar-ket in Hindustan, 14501850 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 193.

10 See J.C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship,

and Society (Chicago, 1985); The Broken World of Sacrifice. An Essay in Ancient IndianRitual (Chicago, 1993).

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elaborates on this idea in his dissertation, albeit in the specific his-

torical context of the early Mughal period. In a very enlightening

venture into the field of Indian law, one finds Kolffstruggling with

yet another, but closely related Indian incompatibility: that of uni-

versal dharma against the practical reality of customary local law-ways. Although there is a mediating middle ground consisting of

positive royal (and colonial) decrees, the British sadly fail to recog-

nise this organic whole of the Indian law system.11

Apart from being faced with dualities that are more or less part

of Indian civilisation, Kolffexperienced another dual conflict in his

brief but ongoing involvement with Indo-British colonial history. Nowit was the Battle of the Two Philosophies, that between Romantic

paternalism on the one hand and Benthamite utilitarianism on the

other.12 This dualism was suggested by Erik Stokes to divide the two

main strands in nineteenth-century colonial thinking. Although very

much inspired by Stokes work, Kolff again insists in providing a

more complicated picture that brings together or goes beyond this

beautifully printed menu. Again it shows that Kolff feels ratherunhappy with too easy models and dichotomies that caricaturise

instead of clarify the complexities of the human experience. In this

context, as well as on many other occasions, Kolffis not seeking the

comfort of the comradely consensus but prefers to be a dissenting

voice; its echoes resound in the fields of ethnohistory, colonial his-

tory and psychohistory.

From history and anthropology to ethnohistory

Let me start with Kolffs dissertation, finished in 1983 and, in a

slightly revised form, published by Cambridge University Press in

1990.13 It grew out of his earlier work on two themes: the history

11 D.H.A. Kolff, The Indian and the British Law Machines: Some Remarks onLaw and Society in British India, in W.J. Mommsen and J.A. de Moor (eds.),European Expansion and Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in 19th- and20th-Century Africa and Asia (Oxford and New York, 1992), pp. 20135 (in particu-lar pp. 2067).

12 Most explicitly in Kolff, The Indian and British Law Machines, p. 221, andagain in his inaugural lecture (A British Indian Circumambulation, Itinerario, 16,2(1992), p. 89. This refers to E.T Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford,

1959).13 Respectively An Armed Peasantry and its Allies: Rajput Tradition and State

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of Bundelkhand in the late-nineteenth century and editorial work on

the Dutch chronicle of Mughal history written by the Dutch East

India Company servant Francisco Pelsaert in 1626. At first sight

these are two completely different research issues. What is the con-

nection between the two?

First of all, in both cases Kolffwas strongly attracted by the social

dimensions of his topic.14 Of course, during the 1960s this was noth-

ing very peculiar considering the rising tide of both social sciences

at the university and socialism in the society at large. In South Asian

studies also, there was a strong tendency to write social-economic

history based on the enormous amount of as yet neglected localsettlement records. In this line, Kolff too started in 1968 to collect

material from the district archives of Bundelkhand. Reading the

results of what must have been a painstaking investigation, one won-

ders whether Kolffbecame really that much inspired by the possi-

bilities offered by the archives. Here we already see an attempt to

break away from the almost exclusive emphasis on quantitative agrar-

ian economics as presented by the bulk of the official correspon-dence. Here he was struck by the fact that there was hardly any

information of a sociological nature. How to bring life into such dry,

unimaginative, statistical material? Nonetheless, he finally succeeded

in tracing some socially significant, long-term developments behind

these statistics. Looking at the social background of upcoming and

declining landholders in the Mau ta sl of Jhansi district, he con-

cluded that the bases on which their power was founded changedsignificantly during the nineteenth century. The very principle of old

Rajput politics, the maintenance of extensive networks of men, now

had lost its value. In other words, the all-important change intro-

duced by British rule was not to confer the right of property, but

to supplant the diffusion that was bound up with a medieval, dynamic

political culture of adaptation and negotiation by the inflexible, legal

Formation in Hindustan, 14501850; and Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy. In 2002 theDelhi branch of Oxford University Press issued a paperback.

14 This already appears in his first two publications on the early history of theDutch Revolt in Leiden when he studies the socio-economic background of reli-gious strife in the city (D.H.A. Kolff, Libertatis Ergo: De beroerten binnen Leidenin de jaren 1566 en 1567, Leids Jaarboekje (1966), pp. 11848; with A.C. Duke,The Time of Troubles in the County of Holland, 15661567, Tijdschrift voor

Geschiedenis, 82 (1969), pp. 31637. Cf. J. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatnessand Fall 14771806 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 13754.

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idiom of zamndr right, the so-called village republics. At the sametime, the tradition of bhmiyvat, the struggle for land, was criminal-ized as dacoity. In the long term, it meant the effective de-Thakurisation

of the Mau area: Thakur clans became castes or gotras of castes,stressing the endogamous or exclusive principle rather than the exog-

amous or inclusive and political idiom of birder. Hence, Kolffcon-cludes, rural society was changed radically by being thus frozen into

the crystals of settlement rules. Transcending local restrictions was

something to be left to moneylenders in the nineteenth century and

urban politicians in the twentieth century.15

All this strongly anticipates Kolffs dissertation topic as he becameaware that there had been an earlier period in which these exten-

sive Rajput networks, in Bundelkhand and elsewhere in Hindustan,

had thoroughly influenced the process of state-formation.16 What

must have been an intellectual thrill was the sudden awareness that,

despite the break of colonial rule, there was in fact a long-term con-

tinuity in the military service tradition of Bundelkhand and south-

ern Bihar, connecting the Bhojpuri Ujjainiyas of Sher Shahs timeto the Baksariya sepoys of the British Raj. Hence, we see Kolffs

nineteenth-century social history of Bundelkhand logically ending up

in his sixteenth-century military history of his dissertation. Looking

at the roots of this military interest, one also understands why Kolffs

work was so influential in launching what hasperhaps a bit pre-

maturelybeen called the newmilitary history of South Asia; that

is the military history with a human, sociological face. Moreover,Kolffs focus of the Indian military was instrumental in breaking

down the caricature of an idyllic non-violent, pre-colonial Indian

society that still reigned at that time.17

15 D.H.A. Kolff, A Study of Land Transfers in the Mau Tahsil, District Jhansi,

in K.N. Chaudhuri and C.J. Dewey (eds.), Economy and Society. Essays in Indian Economicand Social History (Delhi, 1979), pp. 5385. See also his Economische ontwikkelingzonder sociale verandering; de katoen van Hindoestan, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis,87 (1974), pp. 54553.

16 This extensiveness of Indian commercial and military networks was alreadystressed by Kollf in his first published note on an Indian subject: his SanyasiTrader-Soldiers in Indian Economic and Social History Review, 8,2 (1971), pp. 2138.

17 For a more detailed discussion on this, see the introduction to Jos J.L. Gommansand D.H.A. Kolff (eds.), Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia 10001800 (Themes inIndian History) (Oxford, 2001), pp. 142. In the field of South Asias new military

history Kolffs contribution to J.A. de Moor and H.L. Wesseling (eds.), Imperialismand War. Essays on Colonial Wars in Asia and Africa (Leiden, 1989) was also important

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How to fit this in to his work on Pelsaert?18 As indicated already,

from the sociological point of view, Pelsaert has much to offer. His

reports on the political and commercial history of the Mughal Empire

are enriched by detailed descriptions of the real life of nobles, peas-

ants, and merchants, their social customs and their faiths.19 More

importantly, though, Pelsaert describes the lively political culture of

negotiating and adapting politicians, traders, and peasants, struggling

to survive in a highly dynamic Mughal society. As a consequence,

though widely different areas of enquiry, both the studies on Bundel-

khand and Pelsaert suggested questions about the traditions of Rajput

service to Muslim and colonial rulers and, more generally, about theimportance of military earnings in the survival strategies of the North-

Indian peasantry. But this required an entirely different theoretical

working kit than the existing, rather worn-out anthropological appa-

ratus still grounded in British census report classification.

It was in this context that the military labour market of Hindustan

emerged as a more useful research concept than older, static cate-

gories like caste or the Asiatic Mode of Production. In fact, the mil-itary labour market brought together the survival strategies of both

the peasantry and the empire, ideally uniting elites and subalterns.

As such, it changed the whole perception on medieval Indian states.

For example, the perception of the Mughal Empire changed from

a highly centralised, despotic kind of state imposing a unilateral law

and order on the peasant strata of society into a fluid polity held

together by a political economy that was constantly fed by flows ofhonours, gifts and intelligence.20 Mughal power was in its essence

a Personenverbandstaat in which caste, as a description of the social

(The End of an Ancien Rgime Colonial War in India, 17981818, pp. 2249).Kolffelaborated on the theme of Indian violence in his Geweld en geweldloosheid:

de twee gezichten van India, Reflector(February 1987), pp. 22631. For his strongdismissal of the idea that rational terror in South Asia is an imported, westernphenomenon, see his Terreurfantasie op het ISIM, Mare, 8 (18 October 2001)and 9 (1 November 2001).

18 D.H.A. Kolffand H.W. van Santen (eds),De geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert overMughal Indi, 1627: Kroniek en Remonstrantie (Werken uitgegeven door de Linschoten-Vereeniging,LXXXI) (The Hague, 1979).

19 It also gives us a most lively insight into the Christian community or nationin seventeenth-century Surat. For this, see D.H.A. Kolff, La Nation Chrtienne Surate au dbut du XVIIme Sicle, in J.L. Mige (ed.), La femme dans les socits

coloniales (Aix-en-Provence, 1984), pp. 716.20Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, p. 19.

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reality of Mughal India in its entirety, obscured rather than illumi-

nated political and social dynamics.21 In fact, Kolfffound that caste

and other social identities were not yet those rigid and ascriptive

social phenomena as analysed for the late-nineteenth and twentieth

centuries but they were still open, conscriptive categories and, as

such, most fitting corollaries of the extensive and ever-shifting alliances

that dominated the military labour market.

But Kolffwould not be Kolff if he had not attempted to com-

bine the universal concept of a labour market into something specifically

Indian. Hence, in stead of caste, tribe or nation, Kolffturned to the

idea of naukar, a term that originated from a Central Asian contextbut was widely current in medieval Hindustan to describe the nego-

tiable service of a free retainer to his master-cum-employer.22 Accordingto Kolff, naukar was the driving force of groups and networks ofgroups participating in the military labour market. Apart from study-

ing the usual Persian chronicles and European travelogues, Kolff

turned towards the colonial material he knew so well from his ear-

lier enquiries: the enormous amount of information gathered in dis-trict gazetteers and numerous volumes on tribes and castes. Moreover,

in his eagerness to find proper Indian notions and to come as close

as possible to the village level, he enthusiastically looked at the Indian

folk traditions collected and studied by indologists like Grierson and

Vaudeville. Without too much hyperbole, one may say that for

medieval North-Indian history, this combination of sources was not

only unprecedented but also proved extremely fruitful. As a result,we rediscover concepts like the military labour market and naukarin the guise of the viraha, i.e. the separation of a woman and herhusband, a theme so evocatively expressed in Indias numerous folk

songs, ballads and legends.23 In this fascinating exercise, soon to be

coined ethnohistory, Kolff not only managed to connect the uni-

versal (military labour market) with the specifically Indian (naukar)

but also to bring real village life into these concepts. Perhaps, onemay even say that, with the introduction of ethnohistory, Kolffsuc-

ceeds where Huizinga had failed.24

21Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, p. 30. Probably, the use of a German concept derivesfrom Kolffs classes with the Leiden Germanist Bas Schot.

22Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, pp. x, 20, 25, 76, 7982, 1813, 193.23Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, pp. 7485.24 At about the same time, Nicholas Dirks opened up southern India for ethno-

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Kolffs dissertation cannot be understood in isolation from the

academic context in which it came to fruition. Here, I feel, it should

be acknowledged that Kolff worked under the strong influence of

his supervisor Jan Heesterman. As we have indicated already, Kolffs

attempt to combine the universal with the particular was partly

inspired by Heestermans observation of Indias inner conflict.25 It

implied the inner paradox of Indian civilisation which cannot and

will not realise in this world a transcendent ideal that exactly renounces

that world. Like his Leiden colleague at that time, Andr Wink,

Kolffsucceeded in translating this idea into the practice of medieval

Indian history. This is as true for Winks concept of fitna, as forKolffs military labour market.26 In both we find the rather abstract

concept of the inner conflict at work in the daily practice of medieval

Indian politics. To use his own phrase, Kolffdemonstrated that the

complementary alternation between the roles of householder and

wanderer, suggested by Heesterman for a pre-axial age India, remains

of uninterrupted importance throughout ancient and medieval North

Indian history.27 Again, this achievement was the result of Kolffsethnohistorical combination of historical, indological and anthropo-

logical sources.

Overall, I feel, Kolffs dissertation was a great success thanks to

its highly original and innovative approach. To quote a reviewer,

the book had provided revisionists from a number of fields with a

convenient starting point for the renewal of their enquiries.28 It

should be stressed, though, that the bulk of the book is not aboutmethod at all. Most of the book provides a great deal of historical

detail, in particular about the pre- and early-Mughal working of the

military labour market. Most of the criticism was directed at his

uncritical extrapolation of what was considered the spatially and tem-

porarily restricted case of sixteenth-century southern Hindustan. Andr

Wink, for example, would have wished Kolffto have ventured into

a more elaborated and precise discussion on the developments in

history (N.B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown. Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge,1987). Perhaps one can say that it was the anthropologist among the historiansBernard Cohn who paved the way for both Kolffand Dirks.

25Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, p. 193.26 For Wink, see his Land and Sovereignty in India. Agrarian Society and Politics under

the Eighteenth-century Maratha Svarjya (Cambridge, 1986).27Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, p. 199.28 R.S. Cooper inModern Asian Studies, 26,1 (1992), p. 208.

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Rajasthan.29 Be as it may, Wink, studying the eighteenth-century

Marathas, can only but agree with Kolffs overall conclusions con-

nected with the political behaviour in the medieval Indian military

labour market.30 Although acclaiming his innovative approach, Seema

Alavi disputes Kolffs claim that the military labour market was

declining under British rule. She denies such a break when she insists,

with other revisionists like C.A. Bayly, that the Companys partici-

pation intensified the dynamism of the market and made it even

more volatile. At the same time, though, she also denies Kolffs argu-

ment for the long-term continuity of the role of the armed peasant.

In this instance, Alavi sees a sharp caesura between the armed peas-ant of the sixteenth century and the professional peasant soldier, or

sepoy, of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Alavi pre-

cisely this break explains why ethnic and social identities changed

the way Kolff had indicated but had not quite demonstrated.31

Nonetheless, the work by Alavi and other historians show how Kolffs

notion of open and negotiable social categories has opened up an

entirely new agenda for research.32

Apart from a few critical comments by these historians, who both

have been working on the much-debated eighteenth century, the dis-

sertation has been very well received by historians working on the

earlier Mughal period. One of its chapters has been incorporated in

a recent collection of influential contributions to the field of Mughal

studies.33 As the revisionist editors claim, it was to show that the

ability to command the services of free-floating military groups wasa key element in the pre-Mughal era of precociously market-driven

polities based on horizontal ties, both of marriage and negotiation.34

29 The Journal of Asian Studies, 52,3 (1993), p. 759.30 The close agreement between Kolffand Wink in this regard is also demon-

strated in P. Price, Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1996),

pp. 189.31 Studies in History, 9,1 (n.s.) (1993), pp. 1536.32 S. Alavi, The Sepoys and the Company. Tradition and Transition in Northern India

17701830 (Delhi, 1995). Two examples of his influence in other studies focusingon the construction of identities are W.R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks in British India(Berkeley, 1996) and even more recently P. Constable, The Marginalization of a

DalitMartial Race in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Western India,The Journal of Asian Studies, 60,2 (2001), pp. 43978.

33 A Warlords Fresh Attempt at Empire, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrah-manyam (eds.), The Mughal State 15261750 (Themes in Indian History) (Delhi, 1998),

pp. 75114.34 Alam and Subrahmanyam, The Mughal State, p. 21.

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Among Mughal historians, especially Douglas Streusands work exten-

sively draws on Kolffs conclusions about the important role of the

armed peasantry in the North-Indian military labour market.35 Some-

what remarkably, considering the fact that it undermines the idea

of a highly-centralised Mughal state, the book has also been posi-

tively reviewed by the doyen of Mughal studies, Irfan Habib. Although

he criticises Kolff for using only printed sourcesamong these he

forages widely and insightfullythe material from other, docu-

mentary evidence is likely to support, rather than throw doubt on

Kolffs main thesis. Rather less surprisingly, the Aligarh historian,

and thus very much against current revisionist opinion, is particu-larly happy with the discontinuity that, according to Kolff, followed

on the rural demilitarisation under British rule and turned zamndrsfrom armed magnates into landlords.36 Considering the turbulence

of the historical debate in the 1980s, the books acclaim on the part

of both Aligarh and revisionist scholars is indeed a most remarkable

feat of scholarship.

Comparative colonial studies

During the first decade after his research trip to Jhansi (196870)

and his appointment as a lecturer at the Kern Institute of Leiden

University (1971), Kolff was working on his dissertation which he

defended in 1983. Meanwhile, in 1979, he published his article on

Bundelkhand land transfers and edited, with one of his students Hansvan Santen, Pelsaerts writings for the Linschoten Vereniging. In that

same year, he wrote an article in which, for the first time, he made

a few preliminary comments comparing the colonial administration

of British India with that of the Dutch East Indies. This he did

mainly through the eyes of the Dutch colonial administrator Van

Hogendorp who on his 1875 mission to India was to report on

British methods to calculate, register and collect the land revenue.

35 Douglas E. Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire (Delhi, 1989), pp.413; 456; 73, 81, 144. My own recent surveyMughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers andHigh Roads to Empire 15001700 (London, 2002) extensively builds on Kolffs con-cept of the military labour market.

36 In Irfan Habib (ed.),Medieval India 1: Researches in the History of India 12001750

(Delhi, 1992), pp. 21011. Remarkably, in the same volume M. Athar Ali, anotherAligarh scholar, fiercely reviews Streusands work (pp. 2167).

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In this article, Kolff, while working with the equally dry facts and

figures of the Bundelkhand district archives, must have sympathised

with Van Hogendorps aim to use endless and complicated statistics

to come as close as possible to the social and economic reality on

the ground. In his conclusion Kolffanticipates his later theme, pub-

lished in several comparative articles, that European categories like

conservative and liberal did not count as much in the East as at

home. On the contrary, both in India and Indonesia, the character

of the colonial administration was strongly determined by the local,

social-economic circumstances.37

Kolffs first strides into comparative colonial history were soon tobe further stimulated by the so-called Cambridge-Delhi-Leiden-

Yogyakarta conferences, taking place during the mid-1980s, which

specifically aimed at a comparison between the Indian and Indonesian

experience with colonialism.38 In this stimulating academic context,

Kolff, at one of these instances together with the Indonesianists Cees

Fasseur, threw doubt over the widely held opinion, informed by

Furnivall and Emerson, that the British colonial officials were firstof all magistrates and relatively distant referees in a boxing match

while the Dutch civil servants were welfare officers, planners and

social engineers. According to Kolff, this picture of British indirect

rule versus Dutch direct rule was far too simplistic. He stressed that

similarities and differences between the British and the Dutch were

rooted in the Asian societies they ruled. For him dwelling on the

different national characteristics of the two soon comes down to sen-timental twaddle.

For Kolff there are at least two important structural differences

between Indian and Indonesian societies that have caused the two

37 D.H.A. Kolff, De kontroleur G.K. van Hogendorp (18441879): Een ent-

housiast statisticus, in F. van Anrooij, D.H.A. Kolff, J.T.M. van Laanen, and G.J.Telkamp (eds.),Between People and Statistics. Essays on Modern Indonesian History presentedto P. Creutzberg (The Hague, 1979), pp. 175206.

38 D.H.A. Kolff, Administrative Tradition and the Dilemma of Colonial Rule:an Example of the Early 1830s, in C.A. Bayly and D.H.A. Kolff(eds.), Two ColonialEmpires: Comparative Essays on the History of India and Indonesia in the Nineteenth Century(Dordrecht, 1986), pp. 95109; C. Fasseur and D.H.A. Kolff, Some Remarks onthe Development of Colonial Bureaucracies in India and Indonesia, in Itinerario,10,1 (1986), pp. 3155. Two years later he wrote with V.J.H. Houben a similarlycomparative essay, about the pre-colonial period: Between Empire Building and

State Formation. Official Elites in Java and Mughal India, Itinerario, 12,1 (1988),pp. 165194.

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continuous interference with the Javanese society.42 For Kolff, though,

even the most modern of Dutch administrators, the likes of Douwes

Dekker alias Multatuli, remained more aloof from local society than

those most paternalistic of British collectors in the tradition of Bird

and Thomason. Hence he makes the illuminating observation that,

as a consequence and despite Multatuli, Dutch colonial literature

lacks the personal intimacy as expressed by authors like Sleeman,

Kipling and Forster.43

No doubt, since Furnivalls time, these observations were big steps

forward. But it also raised new questions about the traditional per-

ception of colonial rule in India, straddling between Stokes twophilosophies of Romantic paternalism and Benthamite utilitarianism

or, alternatively, between Deweys Gospel of Uplift and Cult of

Friendship.44 For Kolff, it appears that at the root of all this was the

psychological dilemma of colonial rule: whether to refer to European

values and comradeship as an inspiration for rule or to open ones

mind to what the institutions and dynamics of Asian societies seemed

to call for.45 This implied, for example, that modern statistical sur-veys could be as attractive to the utilitarian as to the romantic mind,

the first in order to achieve certainty and finality, the latter in order

to acquire an instrument from below to do justice to the histori-

cally defined indigenous institutions.46 But he wondered to what extent

these different colonial mentalities were homemade or derived from

circumstances in India. In his articles he clearly tends to the latter

position but it may be too early to formulate definite conclusions asthese questions will probably be more thoroughly discussed in his

forthcoming work.

From history and psychology to psychohistory?

In 1991 Kolff succeeded Jan Heesterman to the Leiden chair of

South Asian history. One year later, he became the director of the

42 Fasseur and Kolff, Some Remarks, p. 40.43 D.H.A. Kolff, Waarom was er geen Multatuli in Brits-Indi?, in Theo Dhaen

en Gerard Termorshuizen (eds),De geest van Multatuli: Proteststemmen in vroegere Europesekolonin (Semaian 17) (Leiden, 1998), pp. 23344.

44 Kolff, Waarom was er geen Multatuli, pp. 2403. This refers to C. Dewey,Anglo-Indian Attitudes. The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London, 1993).

45 Kolff, Administrative Tradition, p. 108.46 Kolff, Administrative Tradition, p. 107.

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Centre of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies (CNWS). This

meant that, until he left that job in 1997, he was almost fully occu-

pied by administrative responsibilities. In his few publications of the

1990s he primarily elaborates on his earlier work. It was only after

1997 that Kolff found time to do research again, both in London

and in India.47 Now having more leisure as an emeritus, his second

book is to be expected rather sooner than later. Looking at his beau-

tifully-written inaugural lecture of 1991, one may detect a few hints

about the course he is to embark on.48

Kolffs current work is mainly of a biographical nature as he

extensively uses the personal diary and letters, the official corre-spondence, and the public essays of Frederick Shore, a colonial civil

servant during the first part of the nineteenth century. In this mate-

rial, we are once again confronted by the contradiction that although

Shore is aware that Europeans and Indians are living under one and

the same heaven, a universe which could be described in one lan-

guage, he also knows that to understand India demands a palette

all its own. Kolffagrees with Shore that this palette is not primar-ily about those endless nineteenth-century reifications of India, in

censuses, in gazetteers, language descriptions, archaeological surveys,

ethnographical works, all of which left no caste or sect unnoticed

but which did not yield an insight into Indian consciousness or man,to use the Indian word preferred by Shore. Taking up the example

of Tulsidas circumambulation of Lake Manasarovar, Kolffinvites us

to accompany him in a circumambulation of Shores psyche andpersonality. This in order to construct, like Shore himself, a British-

Indian discourse that is not confined within a colonial horizon, but

that is open to Indian notions and to Indians themselves. In order

to succeed, the historian should not only look into the periphery of

the colonial system and study such dissenting outsiders like Shore,

but also into the periphery of his own discipline. In this regard, Kolff

expects a great deal from psychologists, non-western psychiatrists and

47 For this he took up a sabbatical leave of 6 months that was spent at theNetherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) at Wassenaar. For a brief, per-sonal report of this period, see Van Delft, De vrijgestelde onderzoeker, p. 11.

48 D.H.A. Kolff, Een Brits-Indische omwandeling (Oratie Rijksuniversiteit Leiden,1991), subsequently published in De Gids, 156 (1993), pp. 63545. My references

are to the English translation published as A British Indian Circumambulationin Itinerario, 16,2 (1992), pp. 85100.

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novelists as they can help the historian to understand some of the

pathological ingredients that accompany the inevitable alienating rela-

tionship between the colonised and the colonisers.49

How can we expect Shore, as a British outsider, to lead us out

of the colonial predicament and to restore, as it were, Indian agency?

Of course, this is something that is not yet fully articulated but his

lecture does suggest that Shore, by always standing in front of a

mirror, not only came face to face with himselfthereby giving us

a better understanding of the colonisers societybut also recognised

the multitude of images India reflected in his direction. While going

native like a Rustam or a Sufipr, he listened to the best of his abil-ity to the Indians he met and did justice to their man or manas, theirself, their consciousness. Kolffacknowledges, though, that even this

cannot offer more than a circumambulation and a variety of reflections

on the mystery.50

Looking at the methodological message of his lecture, one gets the

impression that, after successfully venturing into ethnohistory, so con-

necting history with anthropology, Kolffnow strives to take up anothernew field, that of psycho-history connecting history with psychology.

As said already, this brings him very close to postmodernism.51 As

a fellow historian, one should perhaps be a bit concerned that this

approach will rather mystify than clarify the issues at stake. Kolff

may sympathise with Shore but should be careful not to identify

with him. This admittedly rather positivistic critique may sound out-

dated but is still relevant as Kolffadmits that Shore himself attemptedto understand the Indian conscience. If the latter exists at all, onewould like to know what is true understanding and what is con-

struction. This nearly comes down to the old question of how we

can have universal knowledge of something that is specifically Indian?

49

Kolff mentions the French work of Mannoni, Fanon and Memmi and theIndian work of Sudhir Kakar and Ashis Nandi. In this context he also speaks favor-ably of Jan Bremans work on Dutch colonial excesses (British Indian Circum-ambulation, p. 92).

50 Kolff, British Indian Circumambulation, p. 97. In another context, Shoresproblematic involvement with pre-colonial Indian society seems to reappear in Kolffsrecent comments on the Dutch novelist Jacob Haafner (Jacob Haafners Journey ina Palanquin: A Passionate Farewell from a ColonialAncien Rgime, in D.W. Loenne(hrsg), Tohfa-e-Dil. Festschrift Helmut Nespital, Bd 2: Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek, 2001),pp. 72747, more in particular p. 746.

51 Kolff himself mentions Lacan and Levinas in this context (British IndianCircumambulation, p. 92).

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Whereas in his dissertation, Kolffcame up with the combination of

military labour market and naukar, one wonders whether, by fol-lowing in the footsteps of Tulsidas, he is not giving up, like Huizinga,

the first by being fully immersed in the latter. But surely Kolffwill

come up with another convenient, mediating middle ground. Does

this imply a South Asian variety of psychohistory? One cannot but

most eagerly await Kolffs forthcoming observations on this.52

2. Circumambulations in South Asian History

In the first part of this introductory essay, Jos Gommans has com-

mented in some detail on the considerable diversity and expanse of

the canvas around which the scholarly work of Dirk Kolffhas been

carried out over the last three decades and more. The essays writ-

ten by his friends and colleagues in his honour and included in this

collection cover an even wider range both in terms of the themes

handled as well as the time period spanned. It is, I believe, a greattribute to Kolffs scholarship that in spite of their wide range, each

of the contributions has something or the other to do with Kolffs

writing and research.

The unifying theme of the first block of six essaysthose by

Heesterman, Van Santen, Barendse, De Lannoy, sJacob and Bhatta-

charyais the various facetsranging from the military to the eco-

nomic to the diplomatic and to the religiousof the Europeanpresence in the Indian subcontinent in the pre-colonial and the early

colonial period. Jan Heestermans is by far the most wide ranging

of these articulating and making an innovative use of his well-known

thesis on the frontier and the interior in relation to the spread of

Islam in the Indian Ocean region. Heesterman argues that it was

in the context of increasing maritime activity that Islam expanded

along the coasts of the Ocean. The coastal culture, he points out,was characterized by openness and flexibility in contrast to the restric-

tive nature of the inland agrarian regimes. But the Indian or the

Southeast Asian seaports were not a particularly fertile ground for

52 A first flavoring of what is forthcoming we may consult his De bajonet erin!Een kleine oorlog in Brits-Indi, in A. Huusen, J. de Jong, G. Prince (eds.),

Cultuurcontacten: Ontmoetingen tussen culturen in historisch perspectief (Historische Studies IV)(Groningen, 2001), pp. 12336.

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the expansion of Islam which like other scriptural religions needed

durable centres for maintaining, developing, transmitting and prop-

agating its scriptural tenets. The absence of such centres on the coast

prevented the availability of stable patronage and generous endow-

ments which were necessary conditions for Islams flowering. The

inland agrarian zones in the subcontinent were also not conducive

to the promotion of the religion. Barred from the agrarian zones,

Islam had to create its own permanent space in the open frontier

where there was land suitable to be turned into arable. In tune with

the argument of Richard Eaton, Heesterman suggests that the agents

bringing this about were in the first place Sufi holy men and theirfollowers. So Sufism, he concludes, was practically predestined to

be the vehicle of the propagation of Islam, penetrating into the agrar-

ian interior and pushing forward the agricultural frontier.

In his contribution, Hans van Santen delves into the economic as

well as the political domain of the Dutch East India Companys

operations in northern India in the seventeenth century. He begins

by talking about the tight rope walking that the Company was obligedto do in its quest of achieving a finely tuned balance between its

objective of attaining a position of differential advantage over rival

Indian merchants moving in the direction of monopoly even if vio-

lence had to be used in the process, and the necessity of maintain-

ing the goodwill of the Mughal Indian authorities to be able to

engage successfully in its trading activities in the Empire. To Van

Santens justified emphasis on the Mughal states realization of thesuperior naval power of the Europeans as an important factor in

conditioning its own response structure, one might add that the size-

able accretion to imperial revenues in the form of customs duties

paid by the Europeans coupled with their import into the Empire

of enormous quantities of precious metals critically needed for run-

ning the Empires monetary system from Europe as well as other

parts of Asia were by no means insignificant considerations at work.In the context of the procurement of textiles, Van Santen correctly

emphasizes the important regional differences within the Empire. For

example, the buoyant market one encounters in Gujarat is conspic-

uous by its absence in Awadh in the interior. Another important

area that Van Santen comments upon is the relationship between

the Company and the Mughal elite not only in the political domain

but also in the economic. He points out, for example, that the invest-ment in the procurement of textiles in Awadh was channelled at

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Agra through a daughter of Shah Jahan who had herjgrin Awadh.There were also cases of the Company borrowing directly from the

imperial treasury. However, for fear that such interaction might even-

tually have undesirable consequences, the scale of such contacts was

deliberately kept limited. Finally, in an important case study of a

major Surat magnate, Virji Vohra, Van Santen demonstrates in some

detail the nature of the complex relationship between Indian merchants,

the Mughal state officials and the European trading companies.

The essay by Ren Barendse is concerned mainly with the role

of the indigenous soldiers in maintaining order in eighteenth-century

Portuguese Goa and adjoining territories. He begins by using thenotion of the military fiscal state and argues that it applied to

the Portuguese state in India as much as it did to the English and

the Dutch in India and elsewhere in Asia. The 1762 annexation of

provinces adjacent to Goa which had effectively tripled the size of

the Estado da ndia territories necessitated a substantial accretionto the military forces available to it. Barendse discusses in some detail

the distinguishing characteristic features such as amenability to dis-cipline etc. of the different companies of the Estado forces. He arguesthat the new sepoy force in Portuguese service from the 1770s onwards

represented a transition from the ancien rgime to the military fiscalstate in Portuguese India. He thus disagrees with the hypothesis of

continuity in this respect between the pre-colonial and the colonial

periods. There are according to him two basic differences between

the situation in the seventeenth century and that in the eighteenth.One new feature was that the frontier raids were now financed

through permanently assigning the incomes of villages in Bicholim

to the invading army, a practice that did not exist in the seven-

teenth century. The second difference was the taking of hostages

which was also a new phenomenon.

The contribution of Mark de Lannoy is also concerned with mil-

itary history in the eighteenth century though the corporate enter-prise discussed this time is the Dutch East India Company on the

Malabar Coast, the only region of the subcontinent in which the

Company enjoyed territorial rights. Following the loss of the fortress

at Colachel to the Travancore forces in 1740, a trial of the President

of the Dutch Council of War in Malabar, Captain Johannes Hackert

and of Andries Leslorant, the engineer who had been responsible

for the fortifications at the Colachel fort was conducted between1740 and 1742 by a Council of War established by Stein van

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Gollenesse, the Dutch Commander of Malabar. De Lannoys paper

contains interesting details regarding the process and clearly brings

out the weaknesses and the deficiencies characterizing the trial. In

May 1742, Leslorant was sent to Ceylon and in December of the

same year Hackert was sent to Batavia but the final outcome of the

trials is not recorded.

The following two papersby Hugo sJacob and Bhaswati Bhatta-

charyahave a great deal in common in so far as both are con-

cerned with the very early years of the English take-over of Bengal

and attempts by groups adversely affected in the process to try and

restore the status quo ante. sJacobs contribution deals with the littleknown attempt made by the Governor-General and Council of the

Dutch East India Company at Batavia in 1759 to dislodge the English

from their newly found position of authority and privilege in Bengal

following the victory at Plassey two years earlier. The adventure was

both ill-conceived and disastrously executed but it nevertheless mer-

its notice because, different from Malabar where the VOC enjoyed

territorial rights, this particular episode constituted the only orga-nized attempt by the Company to employ naval-cum-land forces inthe Indian subcontinent. sJacob deals with the matter in great detail.

He first establishes the critical role of Bengal in the overall Euro-

Asian and intra-Asian trading network of the Company through the

seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century. The role of

Bengal opium as an important generator of revenue both for the

Company as well as for its employees is also brought out clearly.While until the 1740s, the employees participated in the opium trade

on a clandestine basis, this was done legally following the establish-

ment of the Opium Society in Batavia in 1745. All this was gravely

endangered by the English take-over of Bengal in 1757. sJacob pro-

vides a blow by blow account of both the conception and the exe-

cution of the project and argues that given the nature and extent

of the information available to the authorities at Batavia, particu-larly in relation to the strength of the English in Bengal, the deci-

sion to send an expedition was not really as bizarre as is generally

believed to have been the case in the literature.

Following the so-called Plassey Revolution, the English East India

Company had replaced Siraj al-Daula as the Nawab of Bengal by

the puppet Mir Jafar. Not long after, however, the latter was also

replaced by his son-in-law Mir Qasim (176064). Bhaswati Bhatta-charyas contribution in this volume deals with an Armenian adven-

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turer Khoja Gregory alias Gurgin Khan who had started his career

as a merchant but who eventually ended up as the principal mili-

tary confidant of Mir Qasim and the commander-in-chief of his

army. This man has almost found a place in the folklore of Bengal

figuring prominently in one of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyays nov-

els Chandrasekhar. The novelist portrays the man essentially as anopportunist with an eye on the throne of Bengal. Be as it may,

Gurgin Khan at any rate played an important role in modernizing

Mir Qasims army in the latters quest to get rid of the English yoke.

In August 1763, however, Gurgin Khan was murdered while in the

entourage of Mir Qasim between Monghyr and Patna. Was MirQasim himself behind the murder? Bhattacharya speculates in detail

on this point.

The next block of three papersby Digby, Gommans and Schok-

kerbelong to a very different genre. They deal basically with issues

of kingship, legitimacy, rebellion, slavery, military recruitment and

so forth in parts of northern India, now broadly in the state of Uttar

Pradesh and which Kolffin his work on the ethnohistory of the mil-itary labour market had termed Hindustan. Simon Digbys essay

deals with the revolt against the Indo-Afghans which temporarily dis-

possessed the Lodis of their capital of Jawnpur shortly after the acces-

sion of Sultan Sikandar (1489 AD). In reconstructing the event, Digby

uses, among other sources, a Sufi biographical work and a collec-

tion of orally-derived anecdotes regarding the Indo-Afghans and their

campaigns. Digbys argument is that effective military manpowercould be raised from the armed peasantry of Awadh at the time of

the rebellion to establish an effective administration over the heart-

land of the Jawnpur Sultanate north of the Ganga and that this mil-

itary force could be deployed only by a leader who had also established

a defensive military base south of the Ganga.

The piece by Jos Gommans on the Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad

ties in rather neatly with Dirk Kolffs work on the military labourmarket. Indeed, the history of the Bangash Nawabs is an interest-

ing case study of Indian military slavery. Being introduced from a

Turko-Persian context, military slaves were instrumental in conquering

and establishing a new homeland for their Afghan masters. The first

Muslim raids into India in the twelfth century and the eventual con-

quest of parts of northern India at the end of the thirteenth cen-

tury was achieved by Turkish mamlksor bandagn in the service ofthe Ghaznavid and Ghurid dynasties in Afghanistan and Khorasan.

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Under the Mughals, slaves played only a minor part both in the

administration as well as in the army. According to Abul Fazl, Akbar

believed that mastership belonged to no one but God. He, there-

fore, borrowed the term chelafrom the Hindu bhaktiand the IndianizedSufi tradition, signifying the complete attachment of a faithful disci-

ple or pupil (chela or murd) to a venerable, holy leader (guru orpr). Here the relationship is not one of ownership but one ofunqualified and unconditional love. In due course, though, chelabecame the current Indian name for a mamlk-like or ulm-likeslave. This departure from a Turko-Persian Islamic expression reflected

not only the reduced importance of slaves under the Mughals butalso Akbars reorientation to an Indianized Indo-Islamic culture.

Gommans argues that Indias short-lived experience of the mamlksystem owed a great deal to the vibrancy of the extensive free labour

market in the subcontinent. The large availability of cheap military

labour and of ready cash to pay for it in a relationship of naukarmade slavery increasingly redundant. The opportunities offered by

the naukar relationship brought to the Bangash Nawabs enormousriches and honours which further strengthened their position both

in Farrukhabad and among the Mughal nobility.

The essay by G.H. Schokker is concerned with the legitimation

of kingship in Bundelkhand. Schokker provides a detailed analysis

of two genealogies written in Braj, a variant of Hindi, as source

material on the legitimacy of the Bundela kingship. Both the genealo-

gies claim the descent of the Bundelas from the Gaharavaras whoselast king Jayachandra was defeated and killed by Muhammad Ghuri

at Candravara in the Etawah district. Schokker questions the valid-

ity of this claim. He also suggests that the manner in which the

Bundela genealogies seek to legitimise kingship has a close parallel

in the tradition of the Rathor Rajputs at Jodhpur similarly claiming

descent from the Gaharavara king Jayachandra.

The following two contributionsthe ones by Kooiman and theRudolphstake one well into the heart of British India. The paper

of Dick Kooiman deals with the short military career of Walter

Dickens, one of the sons of the author Charles Dickens, in the sub-

continent in the immediate post-Mutiny years. The paper contributes

significantly to an analysis of the process of patronage in influential

quarters that was a necessary precondition to finding a position in

the service of the East India Company. Dickens arrived in Calcuttaon 30 August 1857 just as the Mutiny had gotten underway and

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was assigned to Her Majestys 42nd Highlanders. His regiment par-

ticipated in the battle of Kanpur (December 1857) and took part in

the relief of Lucknow (March 1858). Young Walter gained rapid

promotion as well as a medal for his part in the Lucknow opera-

tions. But both his career and life were rather short. He rapidly con-

tracted large debts, fell ill and died in India in February 1864.

Kooimans account also uses Charles Dickens fairly close personal

connection with India in the form mainly of several of his sons

including Walter trying their luck out there to delineate his projec-

tion of the country in his writings. The fact that Walter was in the

thick of the Mutiny made Dickens take an unusual amount of inter-est in the reports regarding the uprising. News regarding English

women and children being massacred was evidently behind Dickens

outburst of October 1857 in which he declared that in case he had

held the office of the Commander-in-Chief in India, he would have

done his utmost to exterminate the Race upon which the Stain of

the late cruelties rested. Exaggerated notions of loyalty often evoke

strange reactions from otherwise sensible individuals!The contribution by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph on Colonel

James Tods classic Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan brings out insharp relief Tods seminal contribution in facilitating the under-

standing of aspects of Indian society in the great tradition of British

administrators-cum-scholars such as William Moreland, MalcolmDarling and many others. Tod arrived in Calcutta in 1799 at the

age of seventeen to begin service in the East India Companys Bengalarmy. For a long period of twenty four years, he served the Company

in central and western India in military, surveying, intelligence and

political capacities. In 1818 he became the Companys first political

agent at Mewar. It was during the following four years that he col-

lected the enormous amount of material for hisAnnals. In the processhe mastered Mewars language, culture and history. Most of the writ-

ing of theAnnalswas done in London between 1823 and 1831 whenhe held the position of the first Librarian of the recently foundedRoyal Asiatic Society. The first volume of the Annalswas publishedin 1829 while the second appeared in 1832. This is not only a work

of considerable scholarship about history and ethnography and leg-

end and myth but also as a text which can be explicated as intel-

lectual history. In the course of his Indian career, Tod was also

instrumental in having geographical material relating chiefly to theregion between the Indus (in the northwest) and Bundelkhand, the

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war-elephant replaced the chariot, say under the Mauryas, the nature

of social stratification also changed. Imperial officers rather than

noble warriors were the new ruling elite. With the establishment

of the Delhi Sultanate at the beginning of the thirteenth century,

the war elephant was replaced by the cavalry as the principal instru-

ment of warfare. The system of military feudalism based on the

assignment of revenue grants (iq') which were given to officers forsupporting cavalry troops did have a certain amount of centralizing

effect. This became the precursor of the Mughal manabdr system.In the domain of weaponry, field-artillery remained the mainstay of

Mughal power throughout. The principal distinguishing feature ofwarfare under the East India Company was the rise of a modern

infantry. It was only much later that a new type of armamentthe

tankwas introduced in the British Indian army. The officer corps

in this army continued to be exclusively British until World War II.

Rothermund also covers the post-Independence era and goes into

the imperatives of the social structure of the Indian and the Pakistan

armies in the second half of the twentieth century. The last sectionof the paper deals with the nuclear tests carried out by the two

countries in 1998 and the implications of this development for the

security of the region.

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THE TIDES OF THE INDIAN OCEAN, ISLAMIZATIONAND THE DIALECTIC OF COAST AND INLAND1

Jan Heesterman

1

We have come to seek Christians and spices. This proud decla-ration by the Portuguese emissario sent ashore by Vasco da Gamaon reaching Calicut has entered the standard lore of the Age ofDiscoveries. The striking point, however, is that the Portuguese onarrival promptly found interlocutors with whom they could com-municate in a Mediterranean lingua franca. That is, they met andconversed as Mediterraneans among each other. In contrast to

Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama never left the old and famil-iar worlda world that had its centre in the Middle East, which invarious ways linked the Mediterranean to that other, far larger,mediterranean of the Indian Ocean. The first entry of the Portugueseinto the Indian Ocean was no more than adding an alternative chan-nel of communication to the already existing overland route. Alongthis channel they introduced the violent competition and enmities of

the Mediterranean.It is not that the Indian Ocean was an area of peaceful pro-

ceedings, cruelly disturbed by ruthless Portuguese violence, not tospeak of the later coming Dutch and English. The Indian watershad their well-established fierce competition, conflict and piracy.However, there is a striking difference. While the Mediterraneansince the fall of the Roman Empireactually already beforeshows

a pattern of progressively splitting up, the Indian Ocean offers a pic-ture of increasing integration. The Mediterraneans evermore com-plicated pattern of shifting and criss-crossing dividing lines was notprimarily a matter of the clash of the Christian and Islamic worlds.

1 This essay is the revised and annotated text of a lecture delivered at a con-

ference on Eurasia and Africa during the last Thousand Years, convened by F.M.Clover, University of Wisconsin, 1112 October 1999.


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In fact, it must be counted to be typical of the European world,where eventually it gave rise to the configuration of mutually exclu-sive, modern national states. Similarly, it was through the intensifiedintervention of the West-European powers since the end of the eight-eenth century that this divisive pattern came to impose itself in theIndian Ocean worldas elsewhereand eventually broke up thesecular process of its integration.

On the face of it one might be inclined to see the clash betweenIslam and Hinduism or Buddhism as the source of the break-up, asit dramatically manifested itself in the Indian subcontinents parti-

tion which accompanied Independence in 1947. However, as in thecase of the Mediterranean, the clash with Islam was part of the divi-siveness, not its cause. Moreover, how should one explain the sud-den upsurge in India of irreparable communal conflict against thebackground of seven centuries of give-and-take symbiosis? It is unlikelythat such an irreparable conflict could have been suppressed for solong. In fact, far from causing disruption, the expansion of Islam

went hand in hand with the on-going integration of the Indian Oceanarea. But again without being its cause. The tides of integrationamply preceded Islam. One might say that, like Buddhism and scrip-tural Hinduism before, Islam rode the crest of the integrative waves.

2

Speaking of waves and tides here, is no mere, conveniently vaguemetaphor. The channel of communication was indeed the IndianOcean with its currents, its trade winds and its coasts. And it wasalong this channel that Islam expanded. The expansion of Islam,then, can give us interesting insights in the integration process of theIndian Ocean.

It is well-known that Islam was in the first place carried all overthe Indian Ocean by maritime traffic, stimulated by the economicpreponderance of the Middle East and the steadily increasing activ-ity along the sea-lanes, which in turn were linked via the Mediterraneanwith the growth of the European economy. From the other end ofthe Indian Ocean economic activity was further intensified since thelate tenth century by Chinese involvement leading to Chinese com-

mercial settlements in Southeast Asia and culminating in the greatmaritime expeditions under the Ming dynasty in the first half of the

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fifteenth century (14051431), after which official Chinese involve-ment came to an end. Chinese merchants remained active, thoughespecially in Southeast Asia.

It was in this context of increasing maritime activity that Islamprimarily could expand along the coasts.2 And for a long time Islamremained very much a coastal phenomenon. Armed conquest of theSouth Asian mainland had to wait till the break-through of CentralAsian mounted archers at the beginning of the thirteenth century.3

But their lightning actions had nothing to do with the strong pres-ence of Islam on the coasts, nor did they bring aboutforcibly or

otherwisesomething even distantly approaching mass conversion.

3

Now, it lies near at hand to suppose that once having a footholdon the coast Islam easily expanded into the interior. However, on

further consideration it may be doubted, whether the coastal areasoffered the conditions for Islam firmly to take root. And in as faras this may have been the case, can we safely assume that Islamautomatically penetrated into the interior?

In order to become firmly established and expand, Islam, likeother scriptural religions, needs durable centres for maintaining, devel-oping, transmitting and propagating its scriptural tenets; that is, it

needs stable patronage and generous endowments. Islam, after itsrise in the Arabian peninsula, found the resources for such supportin the Hellenised cities of the Middle East. It was there that itreceived its typically urban imprint. But exactly there is the rub.

We tend to think of seaports as permanent towns with a stablepopulation and properly looked after harbour facilities and defences.However, in general towns and cities were institutionally of a different

naturea point to which we shall have to come back. Seaports,

2 On the historical role of the coasts cf. J.C. Heesterman, Littoral et intrieur delInde, in: L. Bluss, H.L. Wesseling and G. Winius (eds.), History and Underdevelopment:Essays on Underdevelopment and European Expansion in Asia and Africa(Leiden, 1980), pp.8792; J.C. Heesterman, The Hindu Frontier, Itinerario 13 (1989

d. h. a. kolff, om prakash-circumambulations in south asian history_ essays in honour of dirk h.a....

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