The Persianization of Itihasa: Performance Narratives and Mughal Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century Bengal

Abstract

This paper explores the nature and understandings of history, or itihasa/Purana, in eighteenth-century India using two Mangalkabya narratives. These materials belong to a large genre of performance narratives, usually devoted to eulogizing various deities, that were produced in Bengal for several centuries. The paper illustrates how a "traditional" genre such as the Mangalkabya was effectively used to articulate contingent political and cultural preoccupations. The narratives studied here show that the historical experiences and contexts mirrored in them were derived from Mughal rule over Bengal and large parts of India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The paper seeks to historicize and contextualize the shifts noticeable in these narratives and to engage with the notion that premodern, precolonial India lacked a sense of history molded by contemporary material and cultural imperatives. T HE VIEW THAT SOUTH Asian society lacked a proper historical consciousness until its experience with colonial modernity may not yet have been laid to rest completely. This view, given much publicity by colonialist writers such as Robert Orme (1803) and James Mill (1968), has been reinforced in recent times by scholars of modern Indian history (e.g., R. Guha 1988; P. Chatterjee 1993; Nandy 1995). The latter hold the position that history-which is understood to be a rational-positivist discipline-made its entry into India on the heels of British colonial rule and that one of its early manifestations occurred in the form of an Indian nationalist historiography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (R. Guha 1988; P. Chatterjee 1993). To both groups of scholars, what prevailed in India prior to colonial rule was mythic or Puranic history, which could not actually qualify as history in terms of its modern definition as a discipline grounded in verifiable facts. The specific reasons that disbarred this literature from claiming the status of history were many and ranged from charges that it was formulaic and unrelated to contingent material and political contexts to claims that it lacked a sense of historical time (Mill 1968; R. Guha 1988; P. Chatterjee 1993). As an emergent scholarly literature on early modern, precolonial historiographies in India was established Kumkum Chatterjee

Exploring the past to discern the present: The role of historico‐geographical study in differentiating natural river channels from artificial canals

“…King Krishnachandra, in naming the canal formed by this head‐crushing process, referred to it as “Churni.” However, certain questions arise in this context. First, historical records indicate that the Bargi invasion occurred between 1741 ad and 1751 ad (Chatterjee, 2008; Samaddar, 1925), and Maharaja Krishnachandra shifted the capital to Shibnibas in 1742 ad (Sarkar et al 2020). Therefore, the events described do not align with the end of the 17th century but rather the middle of the 18th century.…”

Shankh-er Shongshar, Afterlife Everyday: Religious Experience of the Evening Conch and Goddesses in Bengali Hindu Homes

“…Mundane temporality-ingrained in senses of passage, decay, renewal, birth, and disaster, narrated in goddess stories of Lokkhi/Manasa, and embodied in artefacts such as the conch-supersedes historicity. But postcolonial theorizations of Chatterjee (1993), Hancock (2001), Sarkar (2001), and even their critique, K. Chatterjee (2008), who tries to extend history to the puranas, are locked only in sequential secular time. Chakrabarty (1993) hints at alternative temporal imaginations.…”

“…So I argue that in understandings of the Bengali domestic (religious) experience, we need to go beyond secular-historicist tropes of postcolonial literature (see Chakrabarty 1993). K. Chatterjee (2008) uses 18th century Mangalkavya narratives, including the Manasa-mangal, to argue that premodern cultures also had tangible imperatives in senses of history, or itihasa. So linear temporality here is being extended to the precolonial.…”