Reconsidering
Local History:
Some
Facts, Some Observations
JAWHAR
SIRCAR
A Plea for Local History
The bureaucratization of history in the twentieth century has led to its
transformation into a more professional academic discipline, but a growing
distinction thus developed between professionals and amateurs. The former,
sacerdotal in outlook and superior in attitude, regarded the latter with
disdain. They, in turn, felt resentment towards professionals who increasingly
dominated a field of study the amateurs had once ruled. In the end, the
bureaucratization of learning inevitably meant the exclusion of those who did
not possess proper academic credentials.1
this was the candid opening sentence of a
well-known American historian, but the tenor in which he continued was equally
incisive and applies to academics per se, without pinpointing on History alone.
‘The bureaucratization of learning’, he said, ‘led in turn to growing
estrangement between the broad educated public and the world of scholarship’,
and scholars who tried to ‘bridge the widening gap between abstract thought and
everyday existence’ were dismissed as journalists, popularizers, or hacks.
Though quite unexpected from a formal historian, this was part of Theodore S. Hamerow’s
address at the annual conference of the American Historical Association of
1988, held at Cincinnati. What the immediate provocation was for Hamerow to
deliberately heat up the atmosphere in the post-Christmas chill is not known,
but let us first hear him out. According to him, ‘historical research had been
conducted for over two thousand years, not by professional scholars but by
self-taught amateurs who had spent most of their lives in politics, warfare,
theology, bureaucracy,
journalism, or literature longer than in any other field of learning’.
He was categorical that history had depended on non-historians ‘longer than any
other field of learning’ and what attracted these non-historians,
… to the study of the past was a spontaneous curiosity, an instinctive
interest in how the world had become what, it was, how society had changed and
grown with the passage of time … Theirs was no cloistered scholarship fusty
with archival dust, smelling of the lamp and leather binding. It was lively and
vibrant, rousing and compelling. It had the breath of life.2
I chose to begin with this long
sermon by a senior historian as he articulates quite effectively the angst of
amateur historians like, say, late Tarapada Santra of Hoara, or Gopi Kanta
Konar who is an established authority on the local history and customs of
Bardhaman. They have been kept far away from the ‘high table’ of formal history
in spite of decades of tireless work and prolific production. I empathize with
the frustration of those who are derisively branded as ‘local historians’ and
lumped into the dubious category of ‘non-historians’. Most of such scholars who
rose forth from the soil may well be school or college teachers, or may even
possess outstanding qualifications in their own (and perhaps,
equally-streamlined) academic disciplines. They may simply lack a formal
methodological training in the science of history. Of course, there are several
semi-lettered hacks among them, but even they did spend a large number of years
collecting what they consider to be evidence and facts, many of which could
well be just tall claims or parochial myths. Several have actually published
their ‘local histories’ even though they knew fully well that their labours
would hardly be accepted within the portals of an increasingly rigid
discipline.
This article pleads for some
tolerance towards the ‘findings’ of local historians. Despite obvious
inadequacies in the treatment of their subjects and their unprofessional,
non-academic language, several of these chroniclers deserve better treatment
and encouragement. Formal scholastic history is written by historians mainly
for other historians to read and this deters the rest of humanity from seeking
to know it beyond what one had to cram in school or college. The attempt here
is neither to demean the historian’s hard-earned professional skills
Reconsidering Local History 837
nor to exaggerate the amateur’s contribution, but to ponder for a while
on what the discipline of history has done to profit from the energetic output
generated by those at the margins. After all, most people can relate
immediately to their town or local area in a more involved manner than they can
with macro history. Since non-professional local historians will work anyway for
catering to the need to know one’s own area and really do not care much for
what recognition they earn from the elite, it is better that they be nudged
gently into using more professional empirical tools lest their often-coloured
versions replace more ‘authentic’ histories.
Having said so, one wonders whether Professor
Hamerow had cause for such an alarm, because his own American Historical
Association (AHA) was among the earliest to establish a semi-autonomous ‘Conference
of State and Local Historical Societies’. This occurred in 1904, within 20
years of the existence of the fledgling mother body. By 1939 the AHA accepted a
proposal moved by Christopher C. Crittenden, the Director of the North Carolina
Department of Archives and History, to create a full-fledged local history
organization. Its objective was ‘to better coordinate the activities of
historical societies and stimulate the writing and teaching of state and local
history in North America’.3 This was agreed to and in December 1940 the American Association for
State and Local History (AASLH) was born. Its purpose was ‘the promotion of
effort and activity in the fields of state, provincial, and local history’. The
AASLH made it possible for several generations of amateurs to become proficient
local historians. It still provides methodological support and training through
the dissemination of ‘Technical Leaflets’ and its popular quarterly magazine History News publishes quite regularly
articles submitted by non-historians, bringing them closer to professionals.4
More than 650 local history groups have already
benefited and Indians, with a reasonably-established history of some 5500
years, could imbibe a few ideas from those who have just three centuries to
call their own history. But, obviously, this was not enough to hold back the
enthusiasts or, why else would Hamerow plead so strongly? Besides, his concern
was not only for amateur local historians, but for all non-professional seekers
of history.
Defining ‘Local History’
What exactly constitutes ‘local history’ as
distinguished from mainstream history. Let us start with the views of a
top-rated professional like Carol Kammen, also from the USA. She described
local history as, ‘a study of past events, or of people or groups, in a given
geographic area – a study based on a wide variety of documentary evidence and
placed in a comparative context that should be both regional and national’.
While one may not agree that these studies have necessarily to be accomplished
by a trained historian, we agree with her insistence that that the researcher
must ‘use methods appropriate to the topic under consideration while following
the general rules of historical inquiry: open-mindedness, honesty,
accountability, and accuracy’.5 Such a definition of course legitimizes all sorts
of research projects, because local history is, as all history is meant to be –
the study of the human condition in and through time, except that the field of
enquiry is restricted to a relatively small area.
Kammen further elaborated that, ‘Local
history is, despite its limited geographical focus, a broad field of inquiry:
it is the political, social, and economic history of a community and its
religious and intellectual history, too. It is a place to look for individual
reactions to historical events and the arena in which to practice demographic
investigation’.6 In other words, while subaltern historians have
posited the underdog as the little cog in a more gigantic apparatus and
concentrated on how he viewed his world, local history broadens this type of a
study to how a localized group viewed kings, wars and peace in terms of what
impact they left on local societies. It also studies the impact of technology
and major events on man in his habitat, whether it be a village, a locality, a
community or even a larger body. But, unlike some schools of history, like the
Marxist one, that may have a definite mission, local history is not generally
supposed to have a left or a rightist view. Besides, there is no secret hero whose
struggle needs to be ferreted out of depths of society and posited on the broad
canvas; it is supposed to be ideologically neutral.
Let us now turn to how the
British Association defined local history. It was said to be ‘the study of
history in a geographically local context and it often concentrates on the
local community. It incorporates
Reconsidering Local History 839
cultural and social aspects of history and is often
documented by local historical societies or groups and many works of local
history are compiled by amateur historians working independently or archivists
employed by various organizations’.7 Local history in the United Kingdom was assisted
by several local records kept faithfully by churches and registries in the
villages or by municipalities and even by families. It is best to admit right
away that very little of such records exist in India, other than the minimal
that had to maintained by colonial rulers or enforced by their laws, rules or
orders. We hardly have basic grassroots records except for dry records of
properties as these were rarely maintained by local bodies, nor preserved
properly. Or else, one could really write a data-based local history by relying
primarily on the records of Santipur or Gobordanga municipalities in West
Bengal that are more than one and a half centuries old. As one who has worked
in, and also had the dubious distinction of ‘administering’, the West Bengal
State Archives in Kolkata and the National Archives of India in Delhi for a few
years, I fear that most of the mandatory records of the post-Independence era
are either missing or are never preserved in any worthwhile manner. This is
tragic, when one compares this callous attitude with the absolute sincerity
with which all prescribed government documents were regularly sent by all
departments to the State and National Archives in colonial India. In the India
of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, most government records were destroyed to make
space for new departments in an ever-expanding bureaucracy.
In the United Kingdom we find
that local societies or communities came forth to preserve their local history
or the history of a site in their area, or to prevent its planned destruction
or its ruinous condition. The pride with which local citizens view their
heritage, or remember a local contribution to the nation’s history or culture
does not exist in an ahistorical country like ours. Even the respect with which
the British affix a ‘heritage plaque’8 on a historic building or at a site is hardly
visible in India unless it is an event sponsored by the ‘authorities’ or there
is some political mileage to be gained from such token gestures. On the other
hand, most owners of heritage properties in India can hardly afford their
upkeep and openly invite or permit commercial development that begins by
tearing them down.
The local community usually remains a mute or indifferent spectator in
this irreversible act of erasing history.
The British tradition for
recording and remembering local history is fairly old and scholars trace the
first attempts in documenting local history to medieval chroniclers like Bede
and John Leland.9 Their narratives contain references to local
antiquities, even though these were not their central concern. The Tudor National
Gazetteers like Camden also contained short local chronicles,10 but it
was really in the eighteenth century that we see the first proper ‘local
histories’ appearing in works of the county historians like Nichols and Morant.11 These
writers toiled on subjects like how the grand manors of England were passed
along from family to family12 that may be unfashionable now, but modern
historians can still extract important clues or leads from such county
narratives. By the nineteenth century, parish histories appeared in large
numbers and were treated as professional local histories.13 These
were charming accounts that focused on the county houses in England, which made
fascinating reading and added spice to normally dreary narratives. In the UK,
local and family history records are usually made available to anyone
interested, even if he or she has no training in history. This is what makes it
so popular and it is not like most other erudite works of historians written in
a language that only historians understand. The very nature and purpose of
recording local history is to reach out to the people and instil respect for
one’s own ‘local region’, whatever be its definition.
Even from my limited interaction,
I always found that local archivists and the volunteers who run societies were
eager to provide advice, encouragement and quite reliable information. It is
widely acknowledged that the Victoria County History (VCH) series and the
parish records of the local church in the United Kingdom are still among the most
reliable basic books from which one could begin the study of the history of a
locality. Many such local historians in Britain are confident non-specialists
who have undertaken certain acceptable methodological approaches and have
verified what they procure or present. One of the reasons why formal historians
in India are wary about the proliferation of works on local history is that
many of these appear to be just chronicles of claims, often untrue, or relate
to legends
Reconsidering Local History 841
or traditions that have not been scrutinized carefully, with reference
to already-established dates and historical characters.
As anthropologists are aware, the
caste system in India has survived largely due to its unwritten rules that
permitted variations and flexibilities to certain groups and also sanctified
them after they had risen well above their ascribed ranks with political or
economic power. History is thus replete with examples of how it condoned and
even legitimized certain determined acts of upward mobility. Such groups that
had sprung up from ‘lower orders’ in society were elevated and legitimized as ‘royalty’
by grateful Brahmin retainers, who were ever ready to fabricate respectable
genealogies for the wealthy and the powerful. There are several volumes of work
done on this process of ‘kshatriyaization or the conferring of warrior-king
status to those who managed to seize power, irrespective of their origins and
oblivious to the methods adopted to reach there.14 It is
interesting to see, for instance, how the Malla rajas of Bishnupur were first
delinked from their original tribal brethren, the Bagdis, and then conferred
Kshatriya status through an obviously invented story.15
There are many such examples and
the same story is copied to a large extent in tracing the history of the
Maharajas of Bardhaman.16 In tackling such hagiographic tales, some
knowledge of anthropology proves extremely helpful. We can thus trace the
continuing emotional links that bind the Bishnupur raja’s family with the Bagdi
caste in the region through various socio-religious rites, rituals and beliefs
even today – centuries after the royal family cleverly segregated itself from
its original stock.17 When reviewing the best phase of local history in
Britain that was produced by amateurs, one notices how this trend influenced
bands of enthusiastic young British men who landed in India in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. They came here as administrators, army officers,
engineers, doctors and the like, but took upon themselves the task of delving
deep into local history, legend, geography, people, customs, botany, landscape
and even religion and music. 18 This burst of enthusiasm, that continued unabated
for more than a century, produced the first set of district gazetteers,
statistical accounts, narratives, ethnographic analyses, letters to friends and
family and other valuable records. Numerous articles
were presented before erudite groups like the Royal Asiatic Society of
Bengal. Whether dated or not, they still form the starting point of many a
scholar and happen to be the only reliable records of that period. Batches of
young Indian graduates would soon emerge from the three modern universities and
the colleges set up by the British in the Presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay
and Madras. They also embarked on writing their version of India’s history, and
often challenged the imperial narrative and the colonial approach. The British
tradition of inquisitiveness about their environs and its history and the habit
of record-keeping thus produced the first crop of largely under-utilized books
on local history and culture in India.
Even in the United Kingdom, we
note that the serious stage of local history took a rather long time to be
arrive. It did so as late as in 1955, when we finally get one of the defining
works, when William George Hoskins firmly established local history as a formal
academic discipline. His classic work, The
Making of the English Landscape,19 had a great impact on both historians and the
reading public. Unlike text books, it was illustrated with 82 monochrome
plates, mostly photographs he had taken himself, and contained several maps and
plans, which helped take his reader along with him. This seminal book attempted
the history of some one thousand years of the English countryside since the
Anglo-Saxon period in ad 450. Hoskins remains true to the title ‘landscape’ for
he hardly dwells on cities. His book became a mandatory text in local and
environmental history courses and has been admired immensely by generations of
historians and readers.20 But, at the same time, it was also criticized by
some for ‘his grandly emotive, populist, and openly anti-modernist narrative’.21 E.G.R.
Taylor was critical and felt that Hoskins had taken a one-sided view of the
industrial revolution ‘with mounting horror’.22
But let us now move to France,
where Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre led a new school of historians from the
third decade of the twentieth century. The Annales school was named after its
famous journal, the Annales d’Histoire
Economique et Sociale, which appeared since 1929 and was considered quite
radical as it stressed on the history of all levels of society, and not merely
on major political events. It focused on what it called ‘the collective nature
of mentalities’ that shaped the decisions and studied events which emanated
from such mental frameworks. ‘The goal of the Annales was to undo the work
Reconsidering Local History 843
of the Sorbonnistes (and) to turn French historians away from the
narrowly political and diplomatic, toward the new vistas in social and economic
history’.23 It was very powerful among French historians and in several other
countries as well and opposed the powerful Marxist school of history. Where we
are concerned, its main importance lay in its emphasis on society, community
and the small man rather than on kings, kingdoms and politics. It helped to
focus on the ‘local’ as distinguished from the ‘universal’.
The generation after Febvre and
Bloch was dominated by Fernand Braudel whose first book, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen
Ã
l’Epoque de Philippe II (1949)
broke completely new paths.24 It treated the Mediterranean
not as a single region, but in its different layers and demonstrated how its
environment and vulnerability nurtured the mentality of its varied people and
communities. Braudel narrated how these men fought against nature and against
each other, but his uniqueness lay in his stories of the lives and woes of the
common men. They had names and identities that were not smothered by armies and
rulers or by empires and revolutions. Braudel was widely acclaimed for
sculpting serious history from local and regional materials and this is why his
work is considered such a landmark for students of local history.
Among the others who led the
second generation of the Annales school were Duby and Goubert, while those like
Chaunu and Le Goff continued writing till almost recent times. The attention of
students of local history is however riveted to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie who
would be considered the leader of third generation of this school. Ladurie’s Peasants of Languedoc25 and Montaillou26 brought
out the life of the medieval French peasants and village folk in vivid colours,
at the closest range possible. Montaillou
made full and adroit use of local church records of the dreaded period of the
Catholic Church’s Inquisition. It reconstructed the lives and religious beliefs
of the villagers of Montaillou, a small hamlet in the Pyrenees with only around
250 inhabitants, at the beginning of the fourteenth century. It was first
translated into English in 1978 by Barbara Bray, and was subtitled as ‘The
Promised Land of Error’ and ‘Cathars and Catholics in a French Village,
1294-1324’. It is considered a masterpiece in the realm of local history and
its perfect craftsmanship of historical anthropology advertised the
contribution of the Annales
school to the whole world. It made its author Ladurie pre-eminent in the
fraternity of those who strove to bring out the real history of the people from
the much neglected layers at the bottom of the pyramid.
But the influence of the Annales
school waned rapidly in the 1970s because it was unable to keep pace with newer
technologies of history, like quantitative data, that was presented as the
instrument that could really unlock all of social history. The Annales
historians ignored the developments in quantitative studies which were taken up
seriously in the UK and the USA and shaped economic, political and demographic
research. Scholars moved in multiple directions, covering the social, economic,
and cultural history of different eras and different parts of the globe without
much coordination or any grand overview. The vast and unwieldy publishing and
research network of the Annales school proved counterproductive as a branded
school that hardly assimilated new ideas from others. By 1980, post-modern
sensibilities undercut the swagger of overarching meta-narratives.
Even after traversing so many lands through several
decades, we are still not perfectly clear on what exactly is meant by local
history. In a number of countries, the term ‘local’ sometimes meant a small
village like Montaillou or a wider region like the rural landscape of England
of Hoskins. It could even cover a cross-border, multi-nationality zone like
Braudel’s Mediterranean. Sometimes, it is meant to be ‘the view from below’,
like the history that the Subaltern school pursued later. It could be even look
seriously at versions of local lore or legends. In a comprehensive sense, it is
the study of many facets that pertain to a specific local area: covering its
history, ethnography, geography, natural history.
Problems in Writing Local History
in India
Two major problems confronting research in local history in India are
(a) the unmanageable magnitude of the task, and (b) the woeful absence of
worthwhile records to base history upon. Where the first is concerned, let as
look at comparisons that would clarify the submission regarding the
unwieldiness of our local units. The most
Reconsidering Local History 845
popular unit of local history in India is usually the ‘district’. In
most parts of India, it is purely a British creation that defined the area
covered a group of police stations, which in turn, ruled over a large number of
villages. While the contours of the village shifted, the police station areas
(the thanas) have remained reasonably
constant for a couple a centuries or more. However, police stations lack data
other than crime and related records, which has discouraged historians from
venturing further with the thana as
their focus. The districts began as administrative units created by the British
for their revenue purposes and they covered hundreds of villages and some urban
agglomerations, which were grouped under several police stations. Because
record keeping was better at the district headquarters and most were
accessible, the districts became the base for a large number of works on local
history.
But, once we view a district like Medinipur in West
Bengal, which has mercifully been split now, we come across an area of 14,081
sq. km, which is larger in area than Qatar, Gambia or Jamaica, that have only
about 11,500 sq. km each. Even smaller districts of this state like South
Dinajpur would figure above at least a dozen members of the United Nations, in
terms of area. The point is that if Malta or Maldives or Singapore or
Seychelles, that occupy lesser fragments of the world’s land mass, can have
their own national histories, it appears so strange to describe the history of
Bhagalpur or Bankura as tiny, local histories. But then, this is only one way
of looking at issues and all we did was to bring in ‘size’ as a deterrent,
though we are also conscious that the historian is not a cadastral surveyor who
has to cover every part of it.
But then, landmass or size are
poorer indicators of social concerns or human existence than, perhaps, the real
number of people who inhabit an area. But India can overwhelm anyone who goes
by statistics of population. For example, the 10 million people of just one
district, North 24-Parganas, of the state of West Bengal, will be more than
several nations of the world in number. Even a smaller district like Wardha in
Maharashtra, with its one and a half million, has a bigger population than at
least a few sovereign countries. Denmark and Norway have less about 6 million
each, yet they all have proud and
continuous national histories. So how do we go about the issue of what
exactly is ‘local’, what is ‘provincial’, or what can be called truly ‘national’
?
Let us examine one district, such
as Bardhaman, a little closely. It is a district in West Bengal that I am
familiar with, as I began my field work in village studies, anthropology and
history in 1976 and did manage to continue with some meaningful research for
the next twenty-five years, with unavoidable gaps. Its eight million people
make it equal to important world-class players, i.e, countries like Israel and
Switzerland, that have so many local regions with their own separate histories.
The history of Bardhaman district is usually beneath the level at which a
professional historian, as distinguished from a local historian, would choose
to work: unless he was working on a larger theme like coal mining or the
Communist movement. Yet, more than 200 books have already been written on
Bardhaman, covering different aspects of the local history. The list contains
local histories of villages, zamindaris, temples, fairs, festivals, coal mines,
settlements, towns and subdivisions, but a lot of it would find difficulty in
passing strict tests of historical evidence, validation of claims and strict
empiricism.
The point with special relevance
to history in India is: how do we then arrive at some comfort in academics or
in society for calling or accepting a history as ‘local’ under our conditions?
I would submit that, however tempting be the urge to flaunt the large
uncontrolled populations of the subcontinent’s administrative units, many of
these districts really do not qualify for research as local histories. With
such huge districts in India, it is clear that many of them are too unwieldy to
qualify as ‘local’ units for historical purposes, and they do not seem to
display the signature traits that characterize the term ‘local’.
How do sociologists and anthropologists view
feelings of bonding and pride that cement human relationships among face-to
-face communities within localities as well as within wider networks? Such ‘bonding’
or ‘district identity’ grow over long periods of time, unless the rough
boundaries of these districts coincide, or are somehow coterminous, with their
historical bonds. In such cases, the district happens to cover a people who
have some common social and historical heritage to share. We do not expect to
come across what Ferdinand Tonnies described as the gemeinschaft,27 the emotionally close
Reconsidering Local History 847
community of locals where everyone knows everyone
and is relatively homogenous and compact. These are found only in some
relatively small isolated hamlets in the hills or in other remote zones. Even
in anthropology, this close-knit gemeinschaft
moves on in time become more wide, urban, faceless, mobile, heterogeneous and
of impersonal communities, the gesellschaft.
It may not be appropriate to insist on proximity as a necessary ‘binder’ for
any group to qualify for the term ‘local’. Similarly, famous binaries like
Emile Durkheim’s ‘organic versus mechanical’ solidarities or Talcott Parson’s
dichotomy between ‘particularism’ and ‘universalism’28 that we
borrow from classical anthropology are useful for enhancing our consciousness,
but cannot take us far. We need only to see how anthropology has approached a
similar problem of what constitutes a ‘local community’. Thus, we may view the
term ‘local’ as some sort of a reasonably compact area with certain
distinguishing features of social behaviour or some historical linkages,
however faint. It would be ideal if it is beyond just an administrative
convenience and has some sort of a bonding of its own through some bits of
shared memory.
Constituting the Local: The District, the Region and the Village
In such cases, districts become more appropriate for our study, even if
many of them are, as we have seen, too big or too populous or even too diverse
to fit in comfortably within this anthropological definition of
bonding/impersonal. It is my submission that districts still constitute the
most favoured unit for local historians to study because there are at least a
few records to go by or because some enthusiasts find it a theatre of local
glory. Though many of these district-produced district histories have reached
respectable antiquity, very few have received anything more than recognition within
the district or the state at the most. Among the ones that have made a mark are
works like Sudhir Mitra’s history of the district of Hugli, Hughlee Jelar Itihas.29 One does not recall too many works that obtained any worthwhile national or international acclaim, and the fact that
language need not be the stumbling block is best proved from the numerous
translations of the French historians.
The district is thus popular for
non- professional local history writers, but professional historians are still
not in a position to accept most of the local historical works produced at the
level of the district. As mentioned, they find the district too small for
serious history in comparison to the history of the nation or the state, or they
feel that it is too vague where data is concerned, except for using tidbits for
occasional embellishment. Moreover, the district is hardly uniform enough in
its leading characteristics to really appear as a candidate for the type of
history that we are straining to define as ‘local’. But as it appears to be a
winning proposition for most people who look at local history. The longevity of
the district as an administrative unit is the prime motivating reason. It means
that some data may be available for research and some local traits can be
distinguished, without falling into the pitfall of district-based stereotypes.
The ‘district’ appears to have been a stable feature during British rule in
India and many districts have outlived their departure, in spite of the
repeated fragmentation that several of them have gone in post-British India.
The names and headquarters of most districts have remained reasonably
unchanged, as have their surrounding ‘cores’, even when the mother district has
been split more than once.
Districts in Bengal were
comparatively stable during two centuries of British rule and they acquired
thereby certain district- specific characteristics, which bordered on
oft-repeated stereotypes. But, as stated, while the names and headquarters of
many a district may have remained the same for more than a century, their
boundaries have undergone considerable change. Monmohan Chakrabartti’s
painstaking and voluminous work of 1918 on the internal and external boundaries
of districts of Bengal30 relate in graphic detail how these boundaries were
constantly changed. When this valuable work was updated in 1999,31 at least
the part on West Bengal, many other modifications appeared clearly before the
historian, indicating the numerous twists and turns in this rather fickle
domain.
Let us take come back to
Bardhaman, or Burdwan as it was styled in English records, for understanding
some samples of the data. It was one of the first three primarily-rural
territories of India that were be ceded to the British in 1760, by Mir Kasim.
Between that year and 1916, the district’s jurisdictions, both external and
internal, were
Reconsidering Local History 849
tampered with as many as twenty-two times. In 1760,
Bardhaman constituted more of an amorphous ‘revenue-earning claim’ rather than
a very precise territorial formation. The government orders revealed changing
kaleidoscopic images, as large parts of the original district were dismembered
and joined to other districts. On the other hand, territories of entire police
stations and Mughal mahals were taken
away from other districts and merged with Bardhaman. We find that between 1939
and 1999, no less than twenty-four notifications were issued changing internal
demarcations within Bardhaman district. mainly at the level of police stations,
‘circles’, blocks and other administrative and revenue units. The process
slowed down between the two World Wars, but after Independence while several
districts of India underwent alterations, Bardhaman remained quite unchanged.
Other districts have similar tales to tell. Despite
such changes, we reiterate that the name and central mass of most districts
usually did not undergo momentous alterations. And, despite the changes, none
can deny the loyalty and identification that the districts managed to obtain
from their inhabitants, and more so, from their émigrés. So strong has been the
effect of these agglomerations that were created for bureaucratic convenience,
that many people actually conferred on the district a strange socio-historical
ethos or value. They became sentimental pillars of a person’s existence in
Bengal and in other states of the subcontinent.
The concentration of mainstream
history and of formal historians is, however, on the national and the federal
states, and there are quite a few on the latter, especially after linguistic
states were streamlined in 1956. There is also a loose area of history called ‘regional’
that cuts across a few adjoining districts, i.e. the level just below the
constitutive state, or could even mean areas that cut across some adjacent
states. Since it is usually not very precisely defined in legal or
administrative documents, it has both vagueness and popularity. There are, for
instance, several local histories on the ‘Bhojpuris’ whose speakers cover
mainly two major states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, but are present in large
numbers in adjoining states and are well-represented in the three metropolises
of Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi. We have also local histories written about
regions like Sambalpur in Odisha that has strong emotive and integrative links,
or even the Bundelkhand
area that overlaps parts of two states, Uttar
Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The ‘region’ has a greater felt bonding than the
later construction called the ‘district’ and is often quite popular for
historical research. It could very well be placed under the nomenclature ‘local’
even if this means that we are going around in circumstances over the different
levels of historical geography: we have no choice. We would be the happiest if
we could agree on a more precise terminology that would be universally
applicable and monosemous.
In this framework, the term
regional is applied to an area that, in the modern period of Indian history,
could signifies a group of districts either within a state or failing within
adjacent states. To give an example of our ‘region’, we may say that the
history of the Baro Bhuiyan’s struggle or the depredations of the Bargis, both
of which rolled over several ‘districts’ would constitute the stuff of regional
history, as would the revolt of the Chuars or the Santals. Such regional
histories that would fit in eminently within the term ‘local history’ have
attracted disciplined historians. We see, therefore, that much of our academic
history has generally shuttled between the national, the regional or the state,
and only occasionally to levels below, which appears to have left that strata
of local history open to others. But is there any iconic work by a professional
historian on a particular village of India comparable to Ladurie’s Montaillou?
The problem with the ‘village’ in
India has been its romanticization in literature and in politics, buttressed by
the performing arts and the cinema. It is viewed as an idyllic hamlet surrounded
by verdant green fields and bounteous orchards with graceful rivers flowing
past it. In Gandhian lore, villages were portrayed as ageless and pristine,
almost akin to holy. We shall not discuss the stark reality here, but simply
mention that there are several basic issues and problems that accost anyone who
is seriously interested in working even on some selected aspects of village
life. I confronted my own difficulties in the 1990s, when I started a
socio-historical survey as the Project Director of a research supported by the
Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). It took me to the interior
of several villages in five districts of West Bengal through every conceivable
mode of public transport. It was then that I realized what scholars like Richard
Eaton32 had bemoaned: villages in Bengal are not
historically-fixed places but
Reconsidering Local History 851
are loose, amorphous networks of households, hamlets, paras or
localities. These were often held together, quite vaguely at times, and the
habitations were largely unstable. They were prone to physical shifts after
many a natural disaster and this continued till recent times, when
overpopulation and rising land costs restricted their horizontal mobility.
Another problem relates to the
perceptible difficulty in agreeing on what constitutes a village with reference
to official records. A reliable starting point for grassroots research is the
Village Directory that is published after each Census operation and it contains
a lot of valuable socio-economic data. On closer examination, however, it is
found that this data does not relate to villages as we understand them in
common parlance, but to local level ‘revenue villages’ called mauzas. The mauza is a precisely demarcated area within the boundaries of which
we may or may not find any human village, or we may locate just a part of a
village or in some cases, even more than one village. Parts of the same
habitation could very well lie within another mauza or even over two or three adjoining mauzas. Basically, a mauza
is the collection of a large number of numbered ‘plots of land or water’, each
of which is precisely marked on a revenue map. The lowest unit of territory for
revenue purposes is this numbered ‘plot’, which in Bengal did not usually
exceed an acre and was often even less.
In Bengal Presidency the British
colonial rulers improved upon the existing Mughal system of land revenue and
usually ensured that every plot of land was surveyed and documented with
numbers. These numbered ‘plots’ fit tightly next to each other, somewhat like
different countries or states do on a map. A demarcated ‘plot’ may cover
patches of agricultural or non-agricultural, homestead lands, or even water
bodies, fragments of rivers, hillocks, forests, roads and pathways – in fact,
any type of land use. When all the contiguous areas of individual plots in a
surveyed tract are clubbed together, they constitute the next higher level of
revenue records, i.e. the mauza or
the revenue village. It is not coterminous with the village as we understand
it, i.e. a reasonably compact conglomeration of dwellings, in a rural setting.
A mauza is, however, a territory with defined boundaries that may or may not
contain such a human hamlet or a village. There are also ‘depopulated mauzas’ that do not have a single
village or even a part
of it within their boundaries, or even a single human household. These
areas may have contained human habitation once upon a time that may have been
wiped out by malaria or attacks or floods, or it may be that the entire ‘village’
moved out of that area as the river threatened it year after year or the land
became fallow.
Whatever be the reason, once
surveyed and demarcated, the mauza
remained the same under British administration and continued to be quite a
permanent unit in the post-Independence period. While the human village hardly
finds mention permanent official records in Bengal and adjacent states, the
revenue village exists and thrives therein as an immutable area. Moreover, in
this part of India the human village hardly ever has any reliable official or
historical record. So, when the term ‘village’ is used in government
publications it does not necessarily mean a village. How and where is the solid
data for one to anchor one’s field research? If we look up the ‘Village
Directories’ or any other such basic publication in order to trace a particular
village somewhere in Bengal the chances of finding it by name are very remote.
Providence may, occasionally, bless the researcher with the accident of having
a human village that shares the same name as the official mauza village. To locate a ‘real’ village, we are compelled to find
out the name of its parent mauza,
since land records, the census books and other regular government publications
mention and measure only the mauza.
Since our villagers or even their
counterparts in the towns of India do not have any great penchant for noting
historical events or details, or even keeping routine records like the Church
registers in the Christian world, we are left high and dry where raw materials
required for micro-history are concerned. The official process of identifying
and recording administrative units continues in the same manner as we move
upwards. A large number of mauzas thus
join together to constitute the area of a thana
or a police station. Each lower unit fits in perfectly with the rest, however
irregular be the shape, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In 1978, West Bengal
introduced direct elections to panchayats, first at the ‘gram level’ that
covered a small number of real inhabited villages, where voters lived. Some six
to ten such gram panchayats (GPs) constitute a Panchayat Samiti, which is the
next level of elected body that is usually coterminous with the police
Reconsidering Local History 853
station or thana. This is
where ‘revenue’ meets ‘reality’ as the same area is called PS or police station
for law and order, and is termed as Panchayat Samiti, also unfortunately
shortened to PS. Sometimes, villagers are more familiar with the name of ‘Blocks’
even though the Panchayat Samitis superseded and subsumed the name and area of
the Block. A lot of basic data is available at the level of the Panchayat
Samiti that has lasted four decades and in the erstwhile Block offices that
were set up in the 1960s. Just to complete the story, we may note that several
police stations or Panchayat Samiti areas are added to form a ‘subdivision’.
Usually, two to four subdivisions then add together a form districts
Identifying Local Sources
Reverting to the original issue of how to can glean reliable historical
data from a particular village or a group of villages, my contention is that in
is the absence of neutral records, we may try examining family records or even
genealogies that some families maintain or kept up to a point. These are quite
unreliable unless they can be corroborated with official records. Around 1995,
a family mentioned to me during field-work, that they could trace some twelve
generations of ancestors, though they could not name each one of them, and some
descendants started debating on some names in my presence. They stated
categorically that they had moved out of the Salar region of the Rarh when the
Bargis attacked their ‘zamindari’. On verification, it appears that this is
quite plausible as the number of generations gives us some 250 years of time
and in the 1740s the Marathas did attack that region of Murshidabad, which is
very much a part of Bengal’s Rarh. But most claims, especially to high caste,
royalty and pedigree are conjured even (or more so) if they have the stamp of
pandits who would, like many clerks and inspectors of today, would do anything
for a ‘fee’.
Local history in India has a
pronounced bias towards society and religion, unlike the ‘view from below’ that
concentrates on human pawns vis-Ã -vis
rulers and great events. Oral history is an area of research that has been
practiced successfully by Indian historians and it could shed a bit of its
current width and pinpoint to local areas
and how major events impacted on local society.
Historians have covered much broader themes using this tool, like the freedom
movement or the partition of India and some could always surely record memories
of the local persons in a village or in a group of villages, in some specific
context. We could record, for instance, the impressions of the surviving
participants and police officials who can still recall the incidents that took
place in 1959-60 during the Food Movement of West Bengal in the refugee
colonies of Dum Dum. We are sure to gain a perspective that is different from
either the official narrative or part of the Marxist lore. Or if we captured
the old memories of the chronic, endless violence in Gourandi village in
Asansol subdivision in the context of the coal mafia’s operations after
nationalization of the industry in the 1970s, one could write a powerful but
highly realistic local history that could either challenge or modify the
picture that films like the Gangs of
Wasseypur propagate.
For scholars with a penchant for
the folk, the field abounds with spontaneous expressions in the popular idiom,
like local doggerels, folk songs, crude skits and lampoons and bardic tales of
heroism. For instance, when I was on the trail of the Dharma cult in Jamalpur
village under Purbasthali thana of
Bardhaman district, I was told local stories of a communal riot there in 1964
which were then of little interest to me as my concern was to document certain
modes of worship and specific folk rituals. During later visits to the village,
I came across a forlorn folk singer sitting in one corner of the temple of
Dharmaraj, humming tunes and singing quietly about the events of that selfsame
riot. My friend later decided to tape this song and actually managed, several
years later, to have the singer and the song filmed into a documentary.33 I was
quite sceptical about accepting the evidence of this particular communal affray
because formal history has no mention of it. I had even checked up the I.B.
records34 of Bardhaman and came across a total blank. But
something appeared amiss as the living traditions of Dharmaraj worship at
Jamalpur village invariably had some frenzied dances by the ‘devotees’ with
dangerous machetes and firearms. Many an old man mentioned that these fearsome
displays had started from that ‘year of the riots, just before the Partition of
India’. They were ritually enacted every year at
Reconsidering Local History 855
Jamalpur till the 1990s after which the police clamped down on them as
open and flagrant violation of the laws of the land.
It was only much later that I
stumbled across some news items in leading Bengali and English newspapers of
Kolkata of that particular period which clearly mentioned this localized riot,
though in small print. Thus I had, by sheer chance, a perfect example of how ‘oral
memory’ remembered a slice of ‘local history’ and was captured in field notes,
print and on celluloid. It was embedded in the hearts of the people so strongly
that it defied official records to erase it. The memory of the people is thus
often a better guide than official documents or other written records that many
historians are so fond of. It is, of course, pertinent to mention that all folk
history and expressions are not reliable and their very spontaneity make them
susceptible to charges of distortion and colourful exaggerations. But is not
some amount of national or regional history also open to such charges? Folk
history and memory cannot, therefore, be singled out for reprimand on grounds
of over-dramatizing facts, but all the same, it is best to be cautious when
dealing with such popular sources.
Local Histories of Bengal
It is finally time to take a look at some of those local histories of
Bengal that appeared in India in English till 1950. W.W. Hunter deserves a very
special position as the first real local historian, though he preferred the
terms ‘annalist’ and ‘rural historian’. As a junior Assistant Magistrate in
Birbhum in the late 1860s, Hunter had displayed extraordinary mettle by
publishing the now forgotten book called The
Annals of Rural Bengal,35 several portions of which amounted to outright condemnation of the
early years of British rule in Bengal. We can still sense his anguish at the ‘eloquent
and elaborate narratives’ that have been written on ‘the British ascendancy in
the East’, while ‘the silent millions who bear our yoke have found no annalist’.36 His graphic portrayal of the
devastated landscape after the famine of 1770, which wiped out one third of
Bengal’s population, is touchingly personal and is replete with eyewitness
accounts that would otherwise have been lost forever. His notes on the daily
life and cares of the
Santal, as also their rebellion, leave behind lasting images, as do the
chronicles of ‘The Pandit and the Cook of Birbhum’.
The Gazetteer series have carved
out its own position in so far as local history in India is concerned. Here
again, it was W.W. Hunter who led the way in the 1870s, with his multi-volume Statistical Accounts of Bengal that clubbed an average of three districts in
each volume. He plunged into his
analysis and narrations as soon as the results of the first systematic ‘Census
of The Lower Provinces of Bengal of 1872’ were made available to him. Until the
publication of the independent district volumes, popularly known as the Imperial Gazetteers, these Hunter Accounts were the district officer’s first
text, for over three decades. The
next name that appears here is L.S.S. O’Malley, who set the pace in the second
decade of the last century, with the ‘Imperial’ or (properly speaking) the Bengal District Gazetteers. They are
still quite reliable as comprehensive local histories (and more) and as most of
them have been reprinted, with some amount of updating, by the West Bengal
District Gazetteers they are available in print. Professional historians, such
as Barun De, Hitesranjan Sanyal, Saugata Mukherji and Pranabranjan Ray, as well
as specialized civil servants, like Amiya Kumar Bandopadhyay, Sankarananda Mukherji
and Kumud Ranjan Biswas, were involved in updating and rearranging materials
and re-publishing these valuable books and the work still lingers on for four
decades and more. Complementary to this effort, Asoke Mitra made his valuable
contribution to local and social history, working almost single-handedly among
the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, immediately after his outstanding Census
of Bengal in 1951. His Castes and Tribes
of West Bengal and his compendium on the fairs and festivals of West Bengal37,
especially the detailed Bengali volumes of the latter, provide a mine of dated,
local micro-histories.
As we move away from works of
home-trained ethnologists and civil servants to the earliest Indian
chroniclers, we note that some were not lagging behind. It appears that among
the first English publication of consequence is a charming book by Bholanath
Chunder called The Travels of a Hindu,38 which
appeared in print in 1869 just a year after Hunter’s Annals and contained interesting snatches of local history. But the
credit for the first dedicated local history may go to Chandranath Banerjee for
An Account of Howrah, Past and
Reconsidering Local History 857
Present that was published in 1872, even before Hunter’s Statistical Accounts was conceived. In
1896, A.G. Bower brought out The Family
History of Bansberia Raj, while a decade later, Purna Chandra Majumdar’s The Musnud of Murshidabad appeared. Continuing the tradition of
publicizing the glory of the small rajas of Bengal, Akshoy Kumar Maitra brought
out A Short History of the Natore Raj
in 1912, while Abhoypada Mallik’s History
of Bishnupur Raj appeared a decade later. In this coverage of local
histories, we have deliberately omitted the several histories of Calcutta town
and the reports of specific archaeological spots. As this is a review of books
published, we do not focus on the numerous articles on localities that appeared
in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of
Bengal, the Calcutta Review, Bengal Past and Present, the Sahitya Parishat Patrika and similar
journals.
After Independence, we have
several works of our focused area in English. Mention may be made of N.K. Sinha
and his Midnapore Salt Papers, Hijli and Tamluk, 1781-1807,39 which is
definitely local-centric as also David McCutchion’s Temples of Bankura District 40 published in 1967. Thereafter, the volume and
frequency of local histories increase dramatically, and hence we shall restrict
our view to numbers only, covering both English and Bengali works on local
history. But even a cursory discussion on local histories of Bengal that
appeared in English cannot be complete without recalling Ranjan Kumar Gupta’s The Economic Life of a Bengal District:
Birbhum, 1770-1857,41 which stands out as an example of how local
materials can be handled and crafted
into skilful history. It is a pity that local economic or social histories of
other districts have not been worked on a sequel to Gupta’s thesis, which made
full use of the District Collectorate documents. Incidentally, our district level
records have been deteriorating at such a rapid rate, that most old revenue and
correspondence papers may not be available, traceable or readable later. This
is due to a whole range of factors: from their inadequate and improper
maintenance to the use of insensitive contractors handling their fumigation and
lamination. Besides, as a low priority subject, the availability of government
funds is also low and most overworked bureaucrats are not in any position give
any directional priority to the archives and record rooms unless harassed
scholars descend upon them. Sinha’s and Gupta’s works are excellent specimens
of two levels of local economic history, while
Barun De’s ‘Death of a Maharani’,42 is a political view of a mofussil constituency,
garnished with social spice. All these books make it clear that local history
need not be only social history, but at the same time, I would submit that
social customs and behaviour are such complex and area-specific variables that
they appear in true colours only in localized renditions – losing larger
degrees of their spontaneity and quaint individuality to broader sweeps of
generalizations, as they move on to larger canvases.
In 1977, Satish Chandra was among
the early professional historians to point out that there is ‘a distinctive
genre is the district or local histories … and most of them were written
between 1895 and 1948.43 He mentions that ‘these district histories throw
ample light on socio economic conditions’ and also that a large amount of
unconventional materials have gone into their architecture. Most of the Bengali
local histories have not acquired the acceptability that formal historians have
granted, with footnotes on some limitations, to a select few. These may include
Girishchandra Basu’s Sekaler Darogar
Kahini (Dhaka, 1888); Trailokyonath Pal’s Medinipurer Itihas (3 vols., Calcutta, 1888 & 1896);
Tarakchandra Dasgupta’s Chattogram
Itibritta (Chittagong, 1897); Nikhilnath Roy’s Murshidabader Itihas (Calcutta, 1902); Jogendranath Gupta’s Bikrampurer Itihas (Dhaka, 1909);
Satishchandra Mitra’s Jashohar Khulnar
Itihas (2 vols., Calcutta, 1914
& 1923) and
among others Sudhirkumar Mitra’s Hughli
Jelar Itihas
(1948). Their degree of their acceptability among
professional historians varied considerably and some discount on factual
accuracy or for lack of methodological propriety were accepted. After all,
these older histories appeared to compare well with efforts made in the
adolescent stages of new disciplines. And, returning to Hamerow, history itself
was not yet so dogmatic or ruthless with intruders.
In 1953, Prabodh Chandra Sen
published his well-known Banglar Itihas Sadhana,44 that
mentioned local or district histories and in
1998, Sunil Behari Ghosh brought out his edited compendium entitled Bangla Bhasay Itihas Charcha.45 Local
history in Bengal will remember Tarapada
Santra for his Banglar Anchalik Itihas
Charcha: Ekti Samikhya, that came
out in 2000 listing as many local and regional histories that he could find out till 1997. Santra was one of the
few persons who could bridge the great divide that separates the field
historian from the desk-bound, the amateur from the professional,
Reconsidering Local History 859
the flexible from the formal, thanks mainly to his indefatigable and
detailed researches at the grassroots level. The wide variety of his knowledge,
experience insight and consequent database that he could recall to substantiate
his hypothesis impressed many a well-known historian. Many other field
historians or local specialists of popular culture have fallen victims to the
overwhelming, standardizing values of the city establishment and after some
time, their writings become indistinguishable from those of their urban
patrons. If this loss of spontaneity is not disappointing enough, they dress up
as clones of university dons and some become so urbane that their subsequent
field-work becomes (in effect) some occasional touring of the rural areas,
preying upon their less fortunate former companions, for materials that will be
refined by them for their next publication in the city. But this was not the
case with Tarapada Santra who remained essentially a field worker who hardly
changed till his unfortunate demise. Despite his extreme problems of health and
disease, he continued to publish genuine field histories and other monographs
at regular intervals.
Santra’s list of local histories
of Bengal had a few major omissions, like those of W.W. Hunter and Ranjan
Gupta. His definition of ‘local’ included some ‘provincial’ and ‘archaeological’
works and he mentions genealogical treatises and books on local pilgrim spots,
as they are also part of the local heritage, though not reliable as history
books. Such issues notwithstanding, his exhaustive, year-wise and (often)
publisher-wise list of publications is an invaluable asset to our study of
local history, and further, provides the requisite figures for establishing and
observing the curve of growth in this realm. We thus see that, while no local
history is available in Bengal before 1850 (only two genealogies of Rajas
Pratapaditya and Krishnachandra are there), thirteen publications appear in the
next twenty-five years, excluding Hunter’s. Kalidas Maitra’s delightful account
of the towns and areas connected by the new steam engine on rails that appeared
in 1855,46 and the first local histories of Bogura (1861),
Murshidabad (1864), Bikrampur, Bakharganj, Dhaka (all 1869), as well as
Mymensingh-Sherpur, Haora, and Tamluk (all 1872) are valuable works of this
period. Districts jostle with smaller local areas in claiming the attention of
chroniclers, and our appellation ‘local’ covered both, right from the infancy
of this genre. In the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, the number of local histories went up from 13 to 23,
which appears quite encouraging.
The twentieth century opens with
a veritable quantum jump, with at least 70 such publications surfacing in the
first quarter of the century, representing a threefold increase. Interestingly,
there are quite a few of these that are on villages, small towns and
localities, on which historians now appear to be focusing. Among such locations
feature Natore, Cachar, Chandradwip, Kedar village of Debra in Medinipur,
Syedpur village of Khulna, Chakrashal and Goirala of Chittagong, Tarakeswar and
Uttarpara in Hugli, Sirajgunj in Pabna, Garbeta in Medinipur, and Kakdwip in 24
Parganas. Santra could trace some 56 publications in the next quarter and for
want of any alternate database, we have to accept the fall in the number.
Again, according to our authority, 111 local histories (including state-level
histories) were brought out in the next twenty-five years up to 1975. This
figure and list relate now only to the western part of the erstwhile undivided
Bengal, but we may halt this analysis based on Santra’s compilation, as we have
reached recent times and events may need to marinade a bit to qualify as
history. It is also time for us to appreciate that, in spite of the best of
efforts and sincerity, it is just not humanly possible for any single (or even
a few) compilers to keep track of the numerous local publications that flood
the market from the remotest corner of a state. The mandatory registration of
new publications and the compulsion to send copies to the National Library have
effectively collapsed as none other than reputed publishers comply. There is,
therefore, no alternative to the laborious and primitive method of keeping
track of the work in the districts through personal knowledge, which
incidentally, is hardly ever infallible. It is wiser to rely on the experts of
local history and culture of every district and update compilations based on
their database, but this again is far from perfect.
I have not been able to include a
lot of valuable governmental publications that cover different specific local
areas and are, in a way, also local histories. For instance, the Jelar Purakirti series published by the
Directorate of Archaeology of the West Bengal government since the 1970s and
continued till the nineties of the last century was an excellent series started
by Amiya Bandyopadhyay. It was continued by other worthy historians and
archaeologists and documented most
Reconsidering Local History 861
of the notable items of ancient art, archaeology and architecture in
each of the districts covered. We may include the seven or eight districts,
including Bardhaman, that have been covered by the Information and Cultural
Affairs department of the state through the 1990s, by what they called the Jela Sankhyas, most of the articles of
which relate to the history and culture of the districts and are, therefore,
within our study. Around the same time, the state’s Folk and Tribal Culture
Centre has also brought out several volumes of its Jela Lok Sanskriti Parichay Grantha
series, featuring different aspects of the folk life and the cultural heritage of the districts. Our lists
would have, thus, been even longer had we included all such publications. The
sheer popularity of treatises on local history and culture appears to have been
understood and appreciated by the government’s culture wings, but we need to
convince mainstream scholars to enter this domain and lend their expertise.
The issue, therefore, is not any
more whether local histories require to be written, or whether it is better to
concentrate at the level of localities rather than on any district as a whole.
It appears more of a choice whether the formal, more positivist and trained
historian would take up the task, or let it be continued to be written by scholars
from other disciplines or by general enthusiasts. If we assume that students of
history would enter the arena seriously, it is obvious that their mission would
not be to valorize local persons or and incidents. Professionals would take a
more dispassionate view of the entire proceedings so far and make selective
choices of niche areas of work and then start burrowing for hard evidence. It
is here that the district record rooms, the much neglected mahafez-khanas may come to life. The records of the District
Collectorate of Bardhaman consist of quaint ‘Old English Correspondence’
volumes dating back to the 1770s, which need to be fully digitized and examined
before harm befalls them. Bardhaman’s old Settlement Office’s land revenue
records contain gems like the Khas Mahal estates and allied registers and those
relating to chakran and other baze zamin are the stuff that pines for
the historian’s touch. So do the registers of land sales, Burdwan Raj papers,
the Chowkidari and Thanadari registers, the bound volumes of sanads (grants) written in Persian and
Bengali distributing rent-free lands. When I last saw them, whole series and
shelves full
of civil and criminal cases were available in the Judicial and Revenue
record rooms of the district headquarters, in varying stages of indifferent
maintenance.
The District Magistrates and
Police Superintendents also have or had other records that have hardly ever
been used, like the ‘Notes to Successors’. They may still have survived in some
districts and subdivisions, though it is also likely that many such ‘informal’
records have been lost forever, as such traditions just withered away. At the
sub-divisional level, not too many records are available as the important ones
were transferred to the district headquarters, but in the older thanas, the crime records may still be
found, along with the village crime
note-books, from 1916 to 1970 or more.
The materials on district level
historical events that are available in a state capital like Kolkata are
located not only in the State Archives, but also in the record rooms of the
High Court, the Police headquarters, the Intelligence Branch and in the Board
of Revenue. As Partha Chatterjee and Gautam Bhadra have proved, one can glean
enough of the history of a ‘local incident’ of relatively small areas of Dhaka
and Mymensingh districts of Bangladesh, sitting in Kolkata. Among the problems
in the State Archives the one that confronts a certain category of scholars is
that Home department records, pertaining to the political or communal situation
were largely ‘classified’ and required to be ‘screened’ before their copies
could be taken out.
What is less known is that we have equally
interesting records pertaining to ‘open’ departments, like those dealing with
Education, Health, Irrigation, Food, Industries, Public Works and others that
provide a wealth of materials for scholars to use in the different contexts of
history, including local histories. The travails of an ‘Assistant Engineer’ of
the Public Works Department (PWD) as he struggled to remove the resistance of
villagers to a new road that was being aligned over their fertile fields, the
woes of an overseer who rushed around different lock-gates of the Eden Canal
near Bardhaman trying to ward off local farmers who refused to let water flow
past their fields as their crops wilted in the dry season, the chronicle of the
District Inspector of Schools as he moved from village to village in
Nakashipara and the Sanitary Inspector’s report on the state of the temporary
Reconsidering Local History 863
toilets built at Mahesh village during the annual Rathayatra festival in
the 1890s can all be used imaginatively. The local songs on the Battle of
Plassey that Rajat Kanta Ray has touched upon in his Palashir Sarajantra o Bangali
Samaj47 is a case in point that local cultures often contain frozen evidence of history through rhymes, songs, skits
and lampoons.
Conclusion
To conclude, I really do not know whether I have
been able to construct a case for the formal historian to consider entering the
domain of local history, with his inherent skills and wider perspective to the
advantage of eager readers. Since the production of local histories is
increasing in leaps and bounds and is assuming an important position in the
hearts and minds of the average Bengali reader, this category of history is
worth a serious look. It has waited a long time for the formal historian to
make up his mind, and we may soon have a ‘class divide’ in history between the
Western-inspired academics, writing mainly for themselves and their seminars in
India and abroad, and those teaching the subject (or allied disciplines) in the
mufassil colleges, producing local histories that the formal historian refuses
to take seriously. While we lack a tradition of record maintenance to produce a
Montaillou in this state, yet
Hitesranjan Sanyal could harvest a rich crop of social history by studying the
caste character of the temple builders of medieval and early modern Bengal.48 The
pedestal inscriptions of the idols of a cluster of temples in a particular
district may perhaps yield original, unpredictable results, for they have
hardly ever been given any serious attention.
This is a wake-up call, however
mildly, to city-based historians to de-sacralize their methodology in order to
get closer to primary materials and original evidence that are still available
in the field. These may never be classified, scanned and bound for the
reasonably comfortable and leisurely pace of trained researchers who work in
air-conditioned archives, record rooms and libraries. The ‘text’ available
therein is always important, but scholars could refer occasional to the ‘context’
as well. This lies in visiting specific ‘local areas’ that have to
be reached by all modes of transport, including the
cycle vans on which one has to sit upright at the edges, dangling one’s legs on
the sides, for several miles without relief. During such a journey, one recalls
with horror how the main cargo of the cycle van was a wrapped up but smelly
corpse that was being taken for a proper cremation. It kept rolling all over
and had to be pushed back, every now and then. Such hazards are minor when
compared to researchers who need to perch quite dangerously on the roofs of
overcrowded buses, next to squawking chicken flapping their noisy wings in the
circular baskets, as numerous boxes and bags jostled for space. Even so,
trained historians need to venture to visit the interior. They can guide local
researchers to sift materials for their local history with some professional
empiricism, or else the urban- rural and the professional- amateur binaries
will continue to plague us. Formal historians could actually partner as joint
authors and local history clearly requires professionalism and quality and
cannot thrive only on enthusiasm and energy.
Notes
1. Theodore S. Hamerow, ‘The Bureaucratization of History’, in The
American Historical Review, vol.
94, 1989, pp. 654-60.
2. Ibid.
3. Christopher Crittenden and Memory F. Blackwelder, The North Carolina Historical
Review, vol. 38, 1961.
4. Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko and
Stacy Klinger, eds., Small Museum
Tool-Kit, Nashville, Tennessee: American Association of State & Local
History Publication, 2011.
5. Carol Kammen, On Doing Local
History, Maryland: Altamira Press, 1986, Introduction.
6. Ibid., p.
477
7. John
Beckett, The Local Historian: Local
History in its Comparative International
Context, Macclesfield: British Association for Local History, 1999, pp. 19-29.
8. Lord
Montague, The Blue Plaque Guide,
London: Pluto Press, 1988, Preface.
9. Antonia
Gransden, Historical Writing in England:
c.1307 to the Early Sixteenth
Century, London and New York: Routledge,
1996, p. 477.
10.
Willmore Barley, Chapters of the Agrarian History of England
and Wales: 1500-1750, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 138.
11. Ibid., p.
140.
Reconsidering Local History 865
12. The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 181, South Carolina: Nabu Press, 2010 (rpt.), p. 510.
13. Michael Lynch, The Oxford
Companion to Scottish History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p.
53.
14. John R. McLane, Land and Local
Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002, pp. 148-55.
15. Abhoypada
Mallik, History of Bishnupur Raj: An
Ancient Kingdom of West
Bengal, Bankura: Published by Author,
1921.
16.
See W.B. Oldham, ‘Some Historical
and ethnical Aspects of the Burdwan District’, Appendix, in J.C.K. Peterson, Bengal District Gazetteers: Burdwan,
Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1910, pp. 263-304.
17. Satadal
Das Gupta, Caste, Kinship and Community:
Social System of a Bengal
Caste, Hyderabad: Universities Press
(India) Ltd., 1986, pp. 198-200.
18. Donald Anthony Low, Soundings in
Modern South Asian History, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968, pp.
60-5.
19. William G. Hoskins, The Making of
the English Landscape, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955.
20.
Charles Phythian-Adams, ‘Hoskins’s
England: A Local Historian of Genius and the Realization of his Theme’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society,
vol. 66, 1992, pp. 143-59.
21. Matthew H. Johnson, ‘Making a Home: English Culture and English
Landscape’, in The Public Value of the
Humanities, ed. Jonathan Bate, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011, pp.
118-30.
22. E.G.R. Taylor, ‘The English Scene: Review’, The Geographical Journal, vol.121, no. 4, December 1955, pp.
511-13.
23. J.H. Hexter, ‘Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien’, On Historians, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1979, p. 61.
24. Olivia Harris, ‘Braudel: Historical Time and the Horror of Discontinuity’
History Workshop Journal, vol. 57,
2004, pp. 161-74.
25. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The
Peasants of Languedoc, tr. John Day, Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1977.
26. Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, London:
Penguin Books, 1980.
27. Ferdinand
Tönnies, Fundamental Concepts of
Sociology: Gemeinschaft und
Gesellschaft, tr. Charles P. Loomis, New
York: American Book Co., 1940.
28. Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips, Development,
Key Concepts in the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.
29. Sudhir
Kumar Mitra, Hughlee Jelar Itihas,
Kolkata: Mitrani Prakashan, 1975.
30.
Monmohan Chakravartti, A Summary of the Changes in the Jurisdiction
of Districts in Bengal, Calcutta:
Bengal Secretariat Press, 1918.
31. K.R. Biswas, West Bengal District
Gazetteers, Kolkata: Government of West Bengal, 1999.
32. Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of
Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760, Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1996.
33. I am grateful to Amol Ghosh who made a film, The Thirst of the Gods, on the cultic worship of Dharma Thakur in
Jamalpur and has thereby preserved the rituals as they were practised in 1998.
34.
Intelligence Branch records.
These are classified and kept in the DIB (District Intelligence Branch) offices
in the district headquarters, directly under the supervision of the
Superintendent of Police of the district and often contain very valuable
information on political and communal disturbances.
35. W.W. Hunter, Annals of Rural
Bengal, London: Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1868, rpt., 1996.
36. Charles
Phythian-Adams, Local History and
Folklore: A New Framework.
London: Bedford Square Press for the Standing Conference for Local
History, 1975.
37 . Both were printed in 1953 by
the West Bengal Government Press. His major work is the 5-volume Paschim Banger Puja Parban O Utsav,
published between the mid-1950s and late-1960s.
38. Bholanath Chunder, The Travels of
a Hindoo to Various Parts, London: N. Trubner & Co., 1869.
39. N.K. Sinha, ed., Midnapore Salt
Papers, Hijli and Tamluk, 1781-1807, Calcutta: West Bengal Regional Records
Survey Committee, 1954.
40. David McCutchion, Temples of
Bankura District , Kolkata: Writers Workshop, 1967.
41. Ranjan
Kumar Gupta, The Economic Life of a
Bengal District: Birbhum,
1770-1857, Burdwan: University of Burdwan,
1984.
42. Barun De, ‘Death of a Maharani’, The
Economic Weekly, 23 & 30 November 1963.
43.
Satish Chandra, ‘Writings on
Social History of Medieval India: Trends and Prospects’, Indian Historical Review, vol. 3, no. 2, January 1977, pp. 267-85.
44. Prabodh Chandra Sen, Banglar
Itihas Sadhana, Calcutta: S.C. Das, 1360 bs (1953).
45. Sunil
Behari Ghosh, ed., Bangla Bhasay Itihas
Charcha, Kolkata, 1407 bs.
46. Bashpiya Kal O Bharatbarshiya
Rail, appeared both in English (The Steam Engine and the Indian Railway)
and in Bengali. Santra mentions that the latter
version contained the self-explanatory sub-title ‘The History, etc., of Those
Places Along Which the Railway Tracks Passed, Along With Relevant Photographs
and Sketches’.
47. Rajat Kanta Ray, Palashir Sarajantra
o Bangali Samaj, Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 2014, rpt.
48. For
instance see his Social Mobility in
Bengal, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1981.
