Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300
Why it's here
The machine notes: Mill had never been to India and could not speak any Indian language. He claimed this helped the book's moral objective. Wikipedia: The History of British India
Sometime in the last couple of years, I realised how spectacularly ignorant I was of Indian history. Apart from fragments I remembered from my social studies textbook in school, I knew nothing. I was an ignorant dumbass whose understanding of India was coloured by the wrong, and often outright idiotic, takes you find in the popular press. So I wanted to correct it. I started reading Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi, a brilliant, brilliant book I can't recommend enough, and I also bought Romila Thapar's Early India, which is full of fun anecdotes. The one that stood out this week is this passage, where she dunks on James Mill, Jeremy Bentham's great ally and one of the leading utilitarians of his day. I needed this book to understand the sheer influence of European ways of studying history, and of European visions of India, on our own Indian perceptions of who we are as a people, and how some of these texts and people went on to poison visions of India. Funnily enough, and I didn't know this, Mill and Max Müller, the famous Indologist, never set foot in India. They were experts on India without ever visiting it, which at the bare minimum strikes me as spectacularly odd. B.
Early India, PenguinRomila Thapar
The other strand in the European interpretation of the Indian past was a critique of Indian culture. It drew from the Utilitarian, legalistic philosophy current in Britain, and was largely the contribution of those writing on India but based in Britain. This interpretation is best represented in the views of James Mill and Thomas Macaulay and was partially endorsed, but for quite other reasons, by the Evangelicals among the Christian missionaries. Mill, writing his History of British India in the early nineteenth century, was the first to periodize Indian history. His division of the Indian past into the Hindu civilization, Muslim civilization and the British period has been so deeply embedded in the consciousness of those studying India that it prevails to this day. It is at the root of the ideologies of current religious nationalisms and therefore still plays a role in the politics of south Asia. It has resulted in a distorting of Indian history and has frequently thwarted the search for causes of historical change other than those linked to a superficial assessment of religion.