Historical Methods Course: Response paper 2: On Introduction, Chapter 1 and 2 of

Prachi Deshpandes Creative Pasts

Prachi Deshpandes Creative Pasts seeks to explore the construction of particular forms
of historical memory of the Marathas of western India stretching from the seventeenth to
the twentieth century. The cognate term historical memory is used in the book to indicate
the mutually co-constitutive character of particular memories and histories and also the
common forms of remembering that come to ground both popular and academic practices of
relating to the past. The formulation is thus a first step in a historiographic exercise quite
literally a social history of historiography that seeks to contextualize such elementary
aspects of past-making and thus move beyond judgments about the relative merits of either
(pre-modern) memory or (modern) history (or the popular or the academic) as units of
analysis in studies of historical cultures. Such a formulation is of course possible at least
partly on count of Deshpandes serious engagement with what she identifies and argues to be
pre-colonial practices of history-writing in the region, exemplified by the Marathi language
prose narratives termed bakhars, that have otherwise fared quite poorly by the standards of
modern positivist historical writing and in the estimation of later historians.
Bakhars, as elaborated in the first chapter of Creative Pasts were a widely prevalent
tradition from the late 17
th
century onwards, and continued to flourish over the 18
th
and 19
th

centuries in the Maharashtra region and overlapped in particular ways with the emergence
and consolidation of a relatively centralised Maratha state in India during and after the rule of
Shivaji Bhosale. In discussing the formal characteristics of such narratives, Deshpande argues
that while there are differing opinions in later years about whether the bakhar form originated
in practices of intelligence gathering of a Perso-Arabic variety (akhbar) or in Puranic forms
of literary story-telling (akhyayika) of a Sanskrit lineage, such differences only serve to
highlight the presupposition that literary and historical narratives are mutually exclusive
forms of textualities. She points out how the bakhar form was a product of the two
bureaucratic exercises, one of information gathering from frontier regions and the other of
court proceedings requiring legal precedents. Especially in the latter context, the bakhar had
to draw on a common reservoir of knowledge including akhyayikas of a puranic description,
(serving to renew them in turn) especially since legal argumentation was conducted in public
assemblies. It is this continuous invocation of the past through public legal proceedings and
on an ever widening scale as the Maratha state expanded since the 17
th
century, that created
conditions for the emergence of larger historical narratives fusing conventions of both literary
and factual natures.
Since the turn of the eighteenth century, these narratives became more complex and longer
and showed distinct signs of history-writing conventions as they graduated from being
newsletters. In the process even within purely biographical descriptions, there emerged
certain explanatory devices focusing on particular problems that sought to explain through an
ordered selection for example, the singularity of the event of the rise of Maratha power
through Shivajis conquests and its oppositionality to the Mughal empire even as it continued
to highlight that awe-inspiring power of this empire to punctuate the tale of Shivajis rise. If
this explanation assumed a literary form, often emphasizing divine agency in the crafting of
Maratha power, this was in Deshpandes argument, quite crucially constitutive of the goals
and methods of this historical explanation that did not shy away from actually contextualizing
divine power in the here and now of mortal subjects and their various actions. But along with
literary conventions, the bakhars considered also foregrounded the authority of their writers
as knowledgeable men who have consulted of all available sources. Though such sources did
not appear in the narrative composition as important elements, there can, in Deshpandes
observation, be located in especially the later bakhars, the attempt to sift through a range of
earlier sources and opinions on the concerned subject. In the process, distinct opinions
developed in these about the characters of particular Maratha rulers and the consequences of
their actions that in turn filled up their chronological intent with particular representations of
Maratha power that often yielded quite a differentiated picture of the Maratha formation and
served to focus on the internal conflicts of particular chieftains in relation to their specific
geographical positions and personal inclinations.
A particular clarification that Deshpande offers in this context in the second chapter is that
such differentiating elements do not allow for the abstraction of anything as distinctive as a
Maratha social formation; rather the Maratha of such texts were invariably a military,
administrative and bureaucratic entity approaching the idea of a centralized state from various
sites of power and authority and often focusing on an ideal warrior-leader as a nodal point of
power, a figure drawn liberally from oral forms like powada and lavani. The latter forms
though popular and plebeian in circulation, exchanged influences with the elite courtly
structures of consumption and values, serving as ideological techniques to hold together a
dispersed polity. Their chief character was of course to describe a gendered-matrix of
Maratha life characteristically represented in terms like Marathmola that eventually served as
distinctive cultural markers of Maratha identity in the 19
th
century. They became more prose-
like simultaneously with the consolidation of the bakhars over the eighteenth century as a
form of historical narrative. Yet even as the latter borrowed the cultural idioms of the former,
the contours of a Maratha social, in Deshpandes opinion, remain quite elusive in the bakhars
and majority of historical narratives of the period. The multitude of sites from which the
Maratha seemed to speak himself in the bakhar thus were quite distinct from the eventual
mapping of common histories onto enumerated communities in the following centuries.
-Ritam Sengupta
PhD (2013-14)