INDIA: A History - by John Keay

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John Keay’s ‘India: A History’ is an engrossing read for any lay-reader of history – it uses a wide range of sources and crafts the stories into rather lucid prose. While the book lacks sufficient primary material from the archives scattered across the country, the author seems at ease with collating and substantiating ideas using an assortment of secondary publications. One is even heartened to see the amount of space given to what is termed, for lack of a better word, “ancient” history – something that is not as popular as the period spanning the last 300-600 years, in academic circles of historical study. The book retains its ease with language through the five hundred-odd pages, thus providing its readers with an accessible narration of different historical incidents spanning more than a couple of thousand years.

In addition, it is commendable in terms of its use of pictures and diagrams which manage to simplify chronologies that would be otherwise rather addling – take the case of what Keay calls ‘Other Indias’ or the history of the mainstream nationalist movement, where a diagrammatic representation helps one understand the broad sense of time within which things took shape in just a few moments. The book combines evidence and narrative in a manner reminiscent of the likes of Percival Spear. The book follows his other overviews such as his book on the East India Company – a work which similarly brought together an excellent knowledge of secondary studies and some interesting primary work in order to show the mechanisms of control that evolved with British imperialism.

However, the classicism in the book’s narrative gives way to several gaps – one may even call them silences. Take for instance the notion of an overbearing sub-continental sense of nationality that comes into being with the chapter on Vedic Myths – although the influence of Romila Thapar’s writing ensures that the ‘Aryan’ is represented by Keay with all its flaws as a ‘misnomer’ (ref. Aryanisation) – the understanding of Aryan migration and the hybridity of cultural exchange gets subdued and ‘India’ comes into the fore as a presupposed geographical and political territory. While ‘dasa’ culture finds scant mention, the silence on these early roots of ‘gotra’ and caste bear heavily on the narrative. What is impressive, nonetheless, is that sources are treated as such and not as factual representations while a healthy amount of scepticism lines the use of dated sources.

The author tends to take the scepticism too far as well – describing a ‘nagging problem of Indian history’ to be “light on dates” and “rip-roaring hero narratives” as he departs from the works he owes much to – those of Kosambi and Thapar. While his momentary disregard for “contexts – geographical, social, environmental and economic” seems a bit fruitless, it is further exposed as such when he alternatively sets out to lend “historicity to the hero” but only manages to provide obvious conclusions from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata using basic tenets of source-criticism. He never manages to return to “dates”, settling regretfully for “an entire river basin and a timespan of centuries”.

John Keay

Beyond the ossified understanding of the term ‘India’, he even manages to replicate the biases of his sources on several counts dealing with the period following Ghaznavid influx. Here, he collapses the distinction he held for the Aryan intervention, between “invasion” and “migration” and settles comfortably for “invasion” – a bias long established in colonial historiography. The ‘Muslim’ period is as much a misnomer as is the “Aryan” and this contradiction is evident even beyond William Dalrymple glowing reviews of the book’s impartiality on its back cover. Keay goes on to comfortably summarise and tie up his knowledge of secondary sources in order to gradually start providing accounts of wars and violence in as authentic a manner as he possibly could – while strangely (or not?) the same tone is missing while discussing the Gupta rule and the Aryan intervention itself. The tone of authenticity is substantially suspect because of a lack of references – a cursory look at the list provided at the end of the book will be enough to give one an idea of the problems with Keay’s assumptions and conclusions.

What he seems to miss is an ability to acknowledge that certain things are not so easily explained given that they occurred several years ago and the sources we see today are merely ‘traces of the past’ and not a direct and authentic ‘window’ into the past. Things change subsequently when he deals with the British conquest of southern Asia, which he comfortably again compartmentalises into ‘India’. Taking from the works of C.A. Bayly, Bernard Cohn, Thomas Metcalf and others, he provides a succinct account of events but gives in to the constraints set up by his own ambition for the book – crucial critical perspectives on the political work of Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah go missing while the substantial political interventions of Ambedkar and Periyar are practically absent. Events like the Naval Mutiny and the role of Subhash Bose’s Indian National Army are glossed over. While one can understand this book to be priviledging a longer duration of time that spans the flawed periodisation of “ancient” and “medieval” as against the “modern” which gets a lot of attention by historians, one also must acknowledge the book’s limitations in perspective. The level of criticality to be expected from an author as experienced as John Keay is found wanting.

Having said that, the book makes some things very noticeable in the way that it is divided – the most important being the role of commodities. Salt, rice, metal and other such forms of commodities which allow for different narrations of history through their own trade circuits and registers of labour and cultural value find important mention in Keay’s work. It is now for newer historians to take up the task and add more knowledge to what is already known about the lives of artefacts, commodities and other substances.