Book Reviews

D.N. Jha, Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History (Delhi:
Manohar), 2018, VII + 243 pp., `995 (Hb).

Professor D.N. Jha needs no introduction to students of Indian history scholarship,

or indeed social science academia in general. His works on aspects of ancient Indian
state and economy, religion and culture, and on historiography, are well known.
What is distinctive about his scholarship is the ability to interrogate contemporary
concerns and assumptions that telescope into the past. While teleology has been
fashionably critiqued by new age historians in the West, Jha is one of those who do
not waste paper and time on verbiage. He gets to the crux of the problem, examining
sources, interpreting meanings and contexts, and presenting a coherent argument
on themes that are of relevance for understanding both the past and the present.
The collection of ten essays and five appendices in this volume approaches
the issue of identity in its several articulations, which are neatly tied together
by the self-explanatory title of the book. They all run against the grain, in terms of
the themes and interpretations that are proffered. What is not of concern in these
essays, not for lack of recognition, though, is gender and caste as identity markers,
the interpretations of which in modern times also reflect attitudes of intolerance
and historical immutability.
Four articles focus on historiography, and raise issues related to biases and
methodology. One focuses on colonial and post-colonial interpretations of the
ancient past that were greatly influenced by the prejudices of colonial administrator-
scholars. Beginning with William Jones, who went on to find the Asiatic Society,
to Charles Grant, James Mill, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Max Muller and V.A.
Smith, the logic of the colonial scholars’ interpretations of earlier glory and
current decline and degeneration which, then, could provide a justification of
British rule in India. Common stereotypes raised in these works related to the lack
of historical consciousness, the changelessness of Indian society, and religious
and cultural fault-lines between Muslims and Hindus (p. 119). Jha does not spare
Indian scholars in his critique, particularly, as most during this period uncritically

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DOI: 10.1177/2348448918795800
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accepted some of these generalisations. For instance, referring to R.C. Majumdar

(the prolific historian who was also nationalistic in political orientation), Jha points
out that repeatedly reiterated the view that Indians did not have a historical sense
in the past, despite himself using numerous texts and inscriptions which belied
that statement (pp. 120–21).
The essays of D.D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma, harbingers of the post-
independence scholarship, highlight the significance of detailed analysis of sources
of ancient Indian history. Kosambi’s training as a mathematician certainly affected
his methodology, as, for instance, in his reliance on the statistical method to classify
and analyse coins (p. 137). However, in his quest to contextualise the data in terms
of when and who struck them, he turned to texts, eschewing translations and others’
interpretations. He became so proficient in Sanskrit and Prakrit, we are told, that
he was able to edit and publish a number of Sanskrit manuscripts. The most well-
known of these were the Śatakatraya, authored by the fifth-century grammarian
and poet Bhartṛhari, for which Kosambi examined about 377 manuscripts (although
admitted the total number of extant ones numbered nearly 3,000!). A.N.D. Haksar
who has come out with the most recent translation of this collection informs us
that Kosambi identified a total of about 852 independent verses, which he then
grouped together on the basis of their appearance in all of the manuscripts (200
verses), in more than one of the manuscripts (152 verses) and those found only
in a single manuscript (500 verses).1
The Marxist literary historian and critic G.V. Plekhanov, in his classic Art and
Social Life, talks of art, particularly literature, as reflecting social relations, and the
possibility for dominant and subversive ideas being represented in artistic expres-
sion.2 He argues that the prioritisation of form over content by artists reflects their
collusion with the class ideology of the elites. Further, he argues for an analysis
of content to unravel the material basis of art. Kosambi, one of the finest Marxist
scholars, was sensitive to the relevance of such art criticism in the context of ancient
Indian literature. As Jha points out, Kosambi saw the brāhmaṇas as complicit
in class domination through their monopoly over Sanskrit language and literary
forms, thus asserting and propagating the political and cultural hegemony of the
exploiting strata. Anticipating Sheldon Pollock’s interpretation of the expansive
universe of Sanskrit, Kosambi drew attention to Buddhist and Jaina compositions
in the language, indicating their complicity in the politics of language that was
played out in ancient India (Jha, pp. 140–42). That Bhartṛhari turned a mocking
eye on contemporary society may also have been a source of attraction for Kosambi
in undertaking the editing of this text.3 The verses represented for Kosambi ‘the

1
  See, for example, the verse beginning: ‘May the clan go straight to hell’, Bhartṛhari, Three Hundred
Verses: Musings on Life, Love and Renunciation, tr. A.N.D. Haksar, Delhi, 2017, ‘Introduction’.
2
  G.V. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life, Bombay, 1953 (1912).
3
  Bhartṛhari, op. cit., p. 33.

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physiognomy of a whole class’, ‘acute observation of human nature’ and ‘poetry

of frustration’, and the poet like many of his caste-class background had no other
recourse but sarcasm and wit to express his frustrations with the society of his
time.4 The essay is a fitting tribute to a scholar who demonstrated his mastery of
the historian’s craft.
R.S. Sharma, another doyen of ancient Indian history, and his contributions are
the focus of the ninth essay in the volume. It is worth reproducing Jha’s commentary
on the former’s central concerns:

In a sense, R.S. Sharma was the first professional historian to make an in-depth
analysis of sources stretching over a long period to trace the history of caste
and delineate the vicissitudes of the lower social orders. Sharma’s path-breaking
work Śūdras in Ancient India, a doctoral dissertation completed at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, in 1956… examined the position of the Śūdras
and untouchables up to the end of the Gupta period, captured the voices of
the oppressed masses in them and anticipated the later subaltern historio-
graphy, though, of course, without sharing the anti-Marxism of its enthusiastic
exponents. (p. 165)

Jha points out that some criticism of Sharma’s theories with regard to feudalism,
decline of urban centres, etc. led to some revisions in Sharma’s understanding of
transitions and transformations. However, the one thing that Sharma continually
emphasised was the constant change in society and the repudiation of communal
interpretations of ancient Indian history (pp. 177–79). Further, his emphasis on
sources as well as on theoretical foundations firmly laid the ground for serious
historical scholarship on ancient India, going beyond the banalities and glorifi-
cation of Indologists and antiquarians.
The first essay in the volume on the ‘Pre-history of Hindu Identity’ is concerned
with the communal interpretation of history, which projects the contemporary
political ideology of Hindutva onto the ancient history of the subcontinent. Locating
the roots of this in the ideas of the social reformers of the nineteenth century, Jha
criticises the essentialising and unchanging aspect of religion and culture that was
introduced by scholars, activists and political ideologues in the colonial period
(pp. 13–34). Given the voluminous literature on situating Hinduism in pre-modern
contexts over the past few decades, Jha’s focus exclusively on the writings pertaining
to the modern period may leave one with some disquiet. Although his main critique
is of the evocation of Hindu identity by othering the Muslim, there is a need to
further explore and engage with scholarly interpretations of whether a religious
and cultural identity as Hindu was completely a colonial invention.5

  Ibid., ‘Introduction’.
4

  Jha does address this tangentially, and without much elaboration rejects such views, in his essays
5

on Rethinking Hindu Identity, New York, NY, 2009.

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Jha, as a critic of all nonsense, shows his masterly command over sources,
contexts and language, whether it be in his discussion of beef eating in ancient
India (Chapter 2), the invention of Bharatmata (Chapter 3), brahmanical intoler-
ance (Chapter 4) or gods drinking liquor (Chapter 6). Alongside brahmanical
literature, the Jaina and Buddhist sources are used to highlight the perceptions of
the brāhmaṇas and brahmanical literature as supporters of hiṁsā and sanctioning
violence against other creeds (pp. 88–90). The fifth essay of the volume on the
disappearance of Buddhist monuments again foregrounds violence, as legitimised
in word and deed in the brahmanical tradition. Here, it would be pertinent to recall
the position of Kosambi who sought the decline of Buddhism in the uneconomic
development of the monastic establishment, rather than in external causes, and
hence, he concluded that the ‘major civilising function of Buddhism had ended
by seventh century AD’.6 Jha’s object of concerns are the Buddhist monuments –
symbols of faith and resource mobilisation: their disappearance for him is to
be firmly attributed to the intolerance of the adherents of the brahmanical faith
(pp. 95–107). Despite the slightly one-sided arguments, it is indeed a conundrum
for historians that a vibrant religious tradition along with its institutional apparatus,
having adherents across the subcontinent, and with a conspicuous monumental
presence revealing the broad based patronage it enjoyed, just seems to have
disappeared almost totally from the entire subcontinent by 1200.
The appendices are a testimony to the times we live in, and firmly place Jha, the
historian, in the contemporary milieu, which has seen a rise in communal, obscuran-
tist and irrational views of the past being peddled as history. The reviews of Jha’s
The Myth of the Holy Cow by Wendy Doniger and Susan Watkins are particularly
detailed and delightful (Appendices 1 and 2). Both quote from the texts cited by
Jha to reiterate that meat-eating was not unusual in ancient India (pp. 198–99,
205–07), nor was vegetarianism the equivalent of ahiṁsā (p. 199). Doniger’s
optimism that the attack on this book was a good sign that the pen is mightier
than the sword belongs to the period before the present turn in Indian polity and
public life when we are witnessing the brazen manner in which history is being
retold. Nevertheless, Jha’s collection of essays is a reasoned call to historians to go
to the sources and critically engage with form, content and context, without caring
about what quasi-official propagandists demand of them.

Mahalakshmi R.
New Delhi

6
  See https://www.marxists.org/archive/kosambi/exasperating-essays/x01/1956.htm

Studies in People’s History, 5, 2 (2018): 226–248