The Business of Empire:The Easi India Company and Imperial Britain, A Review

The Business of Empire:The East India Company and Imperial Britain,1756-1833 H V Bowen (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The East India Company, the first multi national trading organisation of the modern period has had a lively, if at times raucous presence in the history of eighteenth century Britain. Along with the coffee houses, the impeachment of Warren Hastings,the soul stirring speeches of Edmund Burke, the brilliant historiography of Edward Gibbon, and the byzantine bureaucracy of the Leadenhall street East India House,the East India Company imparted a distinct character to the long eighteenth century.

The historians of Great Britain have long neglected the interaction between the East India Company and the rest of the body politic. Marxist historiography that concentrated on the economics of trade neglected the political context in which the economic policies of the East India Company were generated and debated. Lucy Sutherland more than 50 years ago published a path breaking work, The East India Company in Eighteenth century Politics sought to explicate the prosopographical tissue of interests both financial and factional between the House of Commons and the Board of Control of the East India Company. This book was followed by P J Marshall's East Indian Fortunes dealt with the nabobs and the fortunes they made in India, mostly illegally. The East Indian fortunes were invested in the tea trade from China and the sugar trade from the Caribbeans thereby altering the very structures of both these distant economies. Within India the miserable fact was that the military arm of the East India Company was deployed against native rulers who were reduced to penury as a consequence. When the cultural elite of any society is impoverished that society remains deeply troubled, and this is exactly what happened in India.

William Darlymple and others like him can speak of the inter racial cohabitation between Indian women and Englishmen, but this is not based on equality but an assertion of the absolute power of a foreign power in India. Women are the first to be colonised and the inter racial cohabitation's during the eighteenth century documented in The White Mughals is based the military and political subjugation of India, Indians and their society. Darlymple may say that the very fact that 60% of the wills made in the eighteenth century made some provisions for children of interracial cohabitation is proof of the easy and friendly nature of British-Indian social relations. Nothing can be further from the truth than this.

Bowen, the author of the book under review has done a splendid job of investigating the economic impact of India on Britain. The take over of Bengal in 1764 following the grant of the Right of Diwani transformed the Company that was rapidly moving toward economic collapse into a financial powerhouse that quite literally sustained the English state. The book is a good piece of historical research and is a refreshing change from the post colonial excesses of the likes of Nicholas Dirks and Maya Jasanoff.

Vijayanagara Visions

Vijayanagara Visions: Religious Experience and Cultural Creativity in a South Indian Empire, William J Jackson, (Oxford University Press),2007.
Jackson sets out the themes of this new book in the following words:The essays in this book are forays into the creative imagination of the Vijayanagara era. An examination of the images that the people of this south Indian empire (1336-1565) recorded in their lyrics and verses, and their stone carvings and stories, gives us an insight into the ideas and fantasies that engaged them and inspired them. Thise two sentences frame the themes of the volume and each chapter is essentially devoted to an analysis of questions raised by the poet singers of the Vijayanagara empire such as Purandaadasa or the metaphysical polemics of the Madhva sait philosophers like Jaya Thirtha.
An important insight animates Jackson's work. He rightly views tradition not as an ossified collection of religious rituals and beliefs but a creative and dynamic fusion of personal charisma and religious expression. He argues that it was within this context of a redfined aethetics that the South Indian music can best be located. This redefinition of tradition is necessary as there is a tendency in India to regard religion in purely instrumental terms, as is the case in all the monotheistic religions.
Chapter II contains a lengthy discussion on Purundaradas who popularised the Madhva religious identity in the Deccan region, particularly in the territories under the nominal control of the rayas of Vijayanagara. Intellectual history of the late medieval period is still so underdeveloped that we are not able to discern the reasons for the close bonds between the Vijayanagara ruler, Krishnadevaraya and the Madhve saint, Vyasathirtha. Jackson rightly emphasises the complex political and social trends in the Deccan region which underpinned the dasa movement.q
Chapter III is a study of the changing religious contours of the Vijayanagara state. Jackson does not spend time discussing the sterile view of Vidyaranya ass the founder of Vijayanagara. Hermann Kule and I have both shown that this interpretation was probably fabricated in the seventeenth century after the Battle of Talikota, 1565. In fact for the longer period of its history,Vijayanagara empire was founded on Vaishnava religious precepts. Annamacharya,Vyasaraya, Purundaradasa and Kanakadasa were all associated prominently with this period. The new feature in the cultural realm during this period was the fusion of music with worship, and Carnatic music later associated with the Trinity--Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Swati Tirumal--can be traced back to the innovations in tradition introduced during this phase. Herein we have yet another example of radical innovation clothed in the rainments of tradition.
Vedanta Desika forms the subject of the IV th Chapter. This philosopher songster was the composer of several prabandhas, and Jackson discusses two texts in great detail, Hamsasandesa and Yadavabyudam.
This volume contins interesting sidelights on the cultural patterns of an important, though highly neglected aspect of medieval South Indian history. Jackson and David Dean Shulman are perhaps the foremost interpretters of late medieval South Indian literary and cultural production. This book is a must for anyone interested in Vijayanagara history, South Indian literature and music.

Three Recent Books on Vijayanagara History

Vijayanagara History has now become an important area of historical investigation in India. It is difficult to speculate on the reasons for the sudden spurt of interest on the last imperial power in peninsular India. Perhaps a mixture of nostalgia and pride in what most historians perceive as the "last hindu empire" accounts for interest historians have been taking on Vijayanagara, of late. I do not for one believe that the sartorial preferences of the rayas of Vijayanagara is any indication of a syncretic "Hindu-Islamic" culture that was evoloving in the region. The kabayi could well have been just a peaked cap and nothing more. The tendency on the part of historians to read contemporary trends in the medieval past is a kind of distortion and leads to an anachonistic understanding of the past.
A recent book which is a remarkable addition to the spate of works on Vijayanagara is Vijayanagara Visions by William Jackson. Jackson is a familiar name in Vijanagara studies due to his path breaking study on Tyagaraja, the early 19th century sait composer of Tanjavur, then under the rule of the Maharattas. Jackson displays a mastery over the historical literature of the period and his work is a must read for all those interested in the history of late medieval South India. His earlier work, Vijayanagara Voices published by Routledge, London is also an excellent work and need to be reprinted here in India as this book is not available here.
The third book I have in mind does nbot deal exclusively with Vijayanagara, but is a study of the relationship between the classical language, Sanskrit, and the regional languages. The advent of caste and strong regional identities in India has led to a fundamental error in the reconstruction of the medieval past that is substantially rectified by Sheldon Pollock's Language of the Gods in the World of Men, a book of breathtaking intellectual effort. The concept of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, a cultural space in which the language of kavya in Sanskrit became the vehicle for the transmission of concepts relating to society and polity. It is an empirical fact that all majoe South Indian states, the Chalukyas of Badami, the Rashtrakutas of Malkhed, the Pallavas of Kanchipuram and of course the Cholas of Tanjavur all deployed Sanskrit in their public and monumental epigraphy and the regional language was essentially the language of record keeping.
Sheldon Pollock has completely changed the understanding of the relationship between power and polity through this great and magnificent work. Some time in the not too distant future I will take up the specific details of Vijayanagara Empire as a part of this "Sanskrit cosmopolis"

These three biiks must be read by every one interested in Vijayanagara.