Professor D.N. Jha – Two Tributes

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A Tribute to D.N. Jha, a Historian Who Will Be Remembered for Treasuring Plurality

Ranabir Chakravarti

The passing away of Professor Dwijendra Narayan Jha on February 4, 2021, at the age of 81, caught many of us, including this writer, unawares.

True, this former Professor of History of Delhi University and one of the stalwarts in the study of early Indian history was not getting any younger these days and had been ailing for the last few years. Yet, there was absolutely no hint that his end was around when he came for his last public appearance for his online lecture, organised by the Kolkata-based academic body, Society for Understanding Culture and History in India (SUCHI) on January 10, 2021.

He was feeble and preferred his presentation be read out; but he stayed, though in a wheel-chair, throughout the programme and interacted with his customary liveliness with the audience after his paper was read out. He looked tired, but he also looked forward to seeing his new publication, Against the Grain, out soon.

That wish of his eluded him, but what he has left behind in the analytical understanding of early Indian history are wonderful intellectual gifts for future generations of scholars.

Even his swan song carries the typical markers of the intellectual profile of D.N. Jha. He was ‘Dwijen’ to his contemporaries like professors Harbans Mukhia, B.D. Chattopadhyaya and the late Sabyasachi Bhattacharyya, ‘Jha saab‘ to younger colleagues, and ‘Dwijen da’ for many who stood in between the two above groups.

Dwijen da, in spite of his failing health, made the presentation at SUCHI, as he had promised to do so. More importantly, he came with a 20-page written paper, fully annotated with references to a wide variety of primary sources and relevant secondary readings! This commitment to professionalism is the hallmark of his academic pursuits.

An affable, soft-spoken person, Dwijen da however never minced words. His Marxist leanings grew during his days as an undergraduate student in Presidency College, Calcutta, and this, he nurtured throughout his life. It paved the way for his life-long engagements with the socio-economic history of early India in terms of material cultures.

His first book, Revenue System in the Post-Maurya and Gupta Times (1967), tried to demonstrate the increasing burden of revenue demands on subjects during roughly the seven centuries of his studies. This, he combined with the demonstration of the growing power of the monarchical state in early India. The book pointed towards the impoverishment of the peasantry. His critical analyses of the Gupta period laid bare that the cultural efflorescence, which marked this age, hardly matched with the ostracisation of the chandalas and the extraction of forced labour (vishti/begar).

Dwijen da, along with several other scholars, cogently questioned the celebration of the Gupta period as the Golden Age in Indian history, popularised by the nationalist historiography. There was, and still is, vicious denouncement of this statement, but its author remained unfazed and dished out further empirical validation in support of his conclusions.

D.N. Jha will be best remembered for his contributions to the study of what is called the feudal social formation in India (c. AD 300-1300). Taking the cue from D.D. Kosambi’s formulations and inspired by Marc Bloch’s view that feudal social formations took place in non-European contexts, Jha followed the footsteps of R.S. Sharma, his mentor.

He argued for a social formation marked by decentralised polity, preponderance of feudal lords (samantas), de-urbanisation, impoverishment of the peasantry and mounting influence of Brahmanical varna–jati norms at the cost of the lower social order, especially what is now called the a-varna group.

From the 1960s till the late 1990s, this was the most important historiographical debate among the specialists on early India, as Hermann Kulke and B.P. Sahu (History of Precolonial India: Issues and Debates, 2019) demonstrate.

A few things need to be noted here.

First, by arguing for a feudal formation in India, the thoroughbred Marxist historians – D.N. Jha included – moved away from Marx’s formulation of the Asiatic Mode of Production that perceived the pre-colonial Indian society as unchanging and immutable.

The proponents of Indian feudalism established the capacity of the Indian society to change and change outside dynastic shifts. This was the most significant impact of their studies and led to the coinage of a new period, the early medieval in Indian history. Ranging from roughly AD 400 to 1300, this period now figures as a phase of transitions from the ancient to the medieval.

The third point of note is their profuse use of inscriptional data, mainly gleaned from copper plates recording grants of revenue-free landed properties in favour of brahmanas and other religious grantees. These documents are descriptive sources, no less significant than the prescriptive Brahmanical sources in the Sruti-Smriti tradition. Raging debates ensued for and against feudal formations in India of the pre-1300 days.

A striking point is that major critiques to R.S. Sharma, D.N. Jha, B.N.S. Yadava and K.M. Shrimali came from several Marxist historians themselves, notably Harbans Mukhia. Using the same genre of inscriptional data, scholars like B.D. Chattopadhyaya, Noboru Karashima, Hermann Kulke and B.N. Mukherjee presented images to the contrary and portrayed the consolidation of the monarchical state-society, vibrant trade, new forms of urban growth and most importantly, the significance of socio-political formations at local levels. The search for centralisation and decentralisation of the state machinery was not given centrality in the counter-arguments to the proponents to Indian feudalism.

This is not the place to delve further into this extremely significant debate and intellectual exercise, nor can we place even a bird’s eye view of Dwijen da’s many publications. An outstanding aspect of the debate was that the points of the other side were accommodated by both proponents and critiques of the Indian feudalism question.

When D.N. Jha edited a volume in honour of R.S. Sharma (1996), a contribution from Chattopadhyaya – known for critiquing Sharma – figured in this volume. This writer too has been the beneficiary of this open-mindedness. I did not subscribe to the portrayal of the decay of trade and urban centres during the early medieval times. Yet I, at that time a young and raw practitioner of the craft, was asked to contribute a piece.

The same happened when D.N. Jha edited a massive volume in memory of R.S. Sharma (2014) and this same writer’s essay was once again included in the anthology, in spite of the fact that my piece would take up positions against both Sharma and Jha. This spirit of accommodating a critique to a dominant perspective sums the intellectual openness of D.N. Jha.

If one’s empirical wherewithal and analytical tools were sound enough, Jha would not mind if someone countered him strongly. This does not at all mean that any quarter was given by Jha during heated debates. But he and many other historians of his time (Marxists and non-Marxists alike) had cultivated this broadness of mind. This is now, very sadly, eroding at an alarming pace.

As I have already said, D.N. Jha was ready to enter into controversial issues and topics in the light of historical evidence. His faith in empirical accuracy was as firm as a rock. And he would treat his sources in a diachronic manner and not with a synchronic treatment, like many cultural historians practise nowadays.

In other words, he would not put a hymn of the Rigveda next to a passage from the Arthasastra, or would not combine a Roman coin with a 12th century coin. He invariably looked at the spatial and temporal contexts of his sources. That lifted the study of early India from the hackneyed narratives of repetitive socio-economic and cultural histories to the portrayals of lived experiences in the interplay of the agents of changes and continuities.

This prompted him to delve deep into the examinations of beef eating in the dietary practices in India in remote pasts, firmly on the basis of his primary sources. Abuses and threats to his life were hurled at him, but he did not flinch from uttering what the evidentiary and the analytical positions emerged from his in-depth studies. He would counter his critiques with his empirical baggage and his sharp interpretations, but would never engage in diatribe against his critiques. Historical enquiries, to Dwijen da, were a life-long intellectual exercise to understand and explain the past. He did not study the past merely to glorify the past of India and to vilify the ‘other’(s).

This illustrates why he stoutly resisted the communal interpretations of Indian history, now made often in the garb of nationalist historiography of India. Till his very last breath, D.N. Jha read the history of the subcontinent to highlight, celebrate and uphold its plurality and was at the forefront against a homogenisation of the past which rides on majoritarian agenda.

He is no more and will be sadly missed, but will inspire many minds towards professional history-writing (distinct from faiths and myths) in years to come.

(Ranabir Chakravarti retired as professor of Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, JNU. He has authored several books.)

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India Under Modi Is Living Through a Dark Age: Professor D.N. Jha

Teesta Setalvad interviews Professor Jha

(This interview was first published in December 2015. We are reprinting it as tribute to Professor Jha.)

Teesta Setalvad: What are the real reasons behind the antagonism between your historical research and findings on the Lifestyle of early India and its Dietary Traditions and supremacist forces like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its parliamentary wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)? What sort of threats have you had to face?

Professor D.N. Jha: They (the RSS/VHP/BJP) have attacked me. They have threatened me and filed a (false) case against me in 2001. The root of the issue is that the fact that the RSS-VHP combine want to declare India a vegetarian country. Someone had even recently suggested that “Cow should be declared the national animal”.

Their main aim is to project the country as a vegetarian country when this does not reflect the truth, the historical reality. We have large sections of Indians who are non-vegetarian: Kerala, Karnataka, Bihar, Bengal, North East, this entire region is where large sections, the majority of the population are non-vegetarian by cultural habit. This includes both Brahmins and non-Brahmins. It is therefore utterly incorrect to say, or to project that Indians, or large sections of Indians are vegetarians. That is the first point. The second part is the ‘Cow’ is part of this imposed food culture. This leads to another of the dictums that they want to promote, “Cow is our Mother and therefore should not be killed, or consumed.”

TS: There was an attack on you in year 2001 after which a Hyderabad Court issued a two year injunction against the publication of your book. Thereafter you had it published from London.[1] What were the reasons for the antagonism against this book?

DNJ: In this book, I had specifically argued, that Indians consumed beef long before the arrival of Islam in India. This was specifically crucial to present, and argue because a common notion perpetuated by the propagandists of the Sangh Parivar is that it is only Muslims who consume beef. Long before the coming of Islam on the sub-continent, beef was widely consumed. In the Vedic period it was particularly widely consumed. This is what I have argued with evidence, in my book.

The sacrifices were so many and frequent during the Vedic period which involved the sacrifices of many animals including the cow. Yagnavalka, the sage in fact expressed his preferences for the meat if it was tender (Taittiriya Brahman categorically tells us: `Verily the cow is food’ (Atho annam via gauh) and Yajnavalkya’s insistence on eating the tender (amsala) flesh of the cow is well known.)[2]. This is what made the forces who wish to declare India a vegetarian country tried to suppress. There was a many pronged attack on me: physical threats, attacks and a case. Their (intimidating ) tactics did not work, however.

TS: Are you fearful of yourself and security with the brute majority of these forces, the RSS and this government?

DNJ: The fear and insecurity is always there. They have in the past targeted other persons like MF Husain also.

TS: Last year, you questioned Arun Shourie’s rendering (interpretation) of Allauddin Khilji’s attack on the Nalanda Vihar. What is the politics behind this attempt?

DNJ: One thing is clear, that in the Medieval period, both Temples and Buddhist Vihars were sacked, and attacked, and damaged. I simply and firmly controverted that the attack on Nalanda Vihar was not conducted by Allauddin Khilji because there is no historical evidence that he went there, on that route, at all. Maybe if he had reached there, he would have attacked the university. He certainly attacked Bihar Sharief and ransacked the Monastery there and also the shrines near Bhagalpur. There was no question or attempt to deny that in certain areas some rulers, who were Muslim, did in fact ransack some places of worship. But the point (in my rebuttal) was that Nalanda Vihar, regarded as an ancient university that housed learning and scholarship in the early Indian period – a symbol of knowledge – that particular University was not attacked/sacked by Khilji.

TS: What were the motives behind such raids, attacks, and sackings of religious places of worship during the Medieval period?

DNJ: In the medieval period, within India and outside there have been attacks and raids on religious institutions, Church(es) sometimes, Mosque(s) sometimes. And there should be no question of concealing this. But it is important to understand that the motive behind this destruction was not always religious. There were political reasons and other motives too. This complexity needs to be understood. The raid and sacking of the Somnath Temple was motivated by the wealth amassed there. But this was not always the case behind other incidents and raids. Often the motive was to get at/destroy the idol of the kul devata [3] in the shrine who the local Rajah/King worships and who/which provides legitimacy to the rule of that king. There are several such examples in South India, where temple idols were the motive and were sought after and destroyed.

The other thing is, that it was not only rulers who happened to be Muslim, who had used this strategy (in medieval times). Even Hindus used it, Hindu rulers in Kashmir for example. Kalhana’s Rajataringini provides evidence of this, where the Hindu kings caused immense damage to the Buddhist Viharas. There are also many instances where the loot from the Buddhist Viharas (by Hindu rulers) was used to build temples. This kind of evidence turns their (the Sangh Parivar) ill-conceived argument in Ayodhya regarding the Babri Masjid, on its head. (Their propaganda is that only Muslims destroyed temples because they wish to cast the Muslim as the enemy). It is critical to study and learn history from a rational and independent perspective.

TS: Professor Jha, today we are witnessing a discourse today, from the Prime Minister downwards, from persons in official positions, that is officially promoting an irrational and non-scientific approach to the learning of history. I refer specifically to utterances like there was ‘plastic surgery in ancient times’, the ‘evidence of stem cell research in the Mahabharata’, aircraft technology in early India are being made by persons in responsible, official positions.[4] (Official) books in the schools of Gujarat and Haryana (by Dinanath Batra) are actually officially promoting an un-scientific and irrational temper among the young. How grave is the danger of this to future generations of young Indians in the 21st century?

DNJ: The danger is very grave. I believe India under Modi rule is living in a dark age. It is shocking that the Prime Minister of a modern country should be making statements of the kind he has done: statements that legitimise superstition and irrationality: that there was plastic surgery, stem cell research and aircraft technology in early India.

Being a Prime Minister he simply must not make such statements. By doing so he is facilitating an age of supersitition, irrationality and ignorance. Source(s) and evidence in the understanding of history will now have little place and faith will replace reason, source and evidence. this is a battle between faith (vishwas) and logic (reason, tarq ) that we are witnessing.

TS: There is now an (official) obsession under the Sangh Parivar’s rendering of history, with pushing back the date of the Vedas (Rig Veda) and the Mahabharata and Ramayana by hundreds of years if not thousands, to enable a crass labeling of all that is Indian as ‘Hindu.’ How should this misuse of the state machinery by this ideological rendering that includes the re-writing of official texts based on this irrational history be countered?

DNJ: The RSS (and its Parivar) has been propagating that the Adivasis (indigenous peoples) are ‘Hindu’ and Muslims are the invaders and outsiders. Behind this is the motive to claim original inhabitant status for the Hindus. It is therefore an obsession for them to prove the antiquity of the Vedas, Ramayana and Mahabharata. The American based Global Hindu Foundation in fact states so on its website that the ‘Hindu’ civilization is one lakh 18,000 years old!! This is an obsession to prove original inhabitation status.

TS: How should the ordinary citizen counter these moves?

DNJ: There is an overall atmosphere of irrationality and intolerance that prevails today. Prtests of writers has been called “manufactured protests and manufactured rebellion.” Is the RBI Governor also part of this manufactured rebellion is a moot question! Protests are important. But only protests will not make a dent any more. It is critical that we do more; all academic groups of History, Science and Literature should come together and mobilize the people.

TS: There has also been a systematic assault on our institutions of learning as well; unqualified persons have been appointed to positions who have nothing to do with the disciplines of History or Science. I refer to the appointments to the Indian Council of Historical ResearchICHR), the National Book Trust (NBT), the Children’s Book Trust (CBT) and even the Science Congress. There is a calculated move to erode Institutions of Learning, from within. What will be the consequences of this erosion of institutions of research and learning?

DNJ: This is part of a calculated agenda. The Assault on Reason. Part of this agenda is to completely and utterly ruin and destroy Institutions like the ICHR, the NBT and other institutes founded with a vision and that ensured independent, rational thought and quality. This is part of a clear-cut agenda of theirs, towards un-Reason that they are pursuing. Their goal is what their Gurus have written or decreed, be it Guru Golwalkar or Savarkar. What they do not understand is whatever their Gurus have stated in their time, it was ridiculous rnough in the early 20th century, it is now even more outdated and narrow (these articulations). There is a serious threat to this country. This country, Indian society is already and will, in future, suffer great damage from this. People need to fight this firmly and re-invent methods of struggle.

TS: Last question, Professor Jha. What would be your message to the young person, with what approach should he or she approach the learning and study of History ?

DNJ: History must be read with a critical analsysis of Sources and Evidence. The approach must be critical and scientific. It cannot be, ‘whatever is written or stated in the Mahabharata is true.” If this latter (irrational) way is promoted and if that is the approach, then we will come up with the statements of the kind that the Prime Minister made on Karna and Stem cell research and Plastic Surgery in ancient times!

We must analyse critically all sources, cross-check /study different the Texts; have a Multi-Disciplinary Methodology all of which are critical to the learning of History: Archaeology, Economic and other disciplines also provide an insight. We must enrich our understanding of history through this approach.

Notes:

[1] Holy Cow: Beef in Indian Dietary Traditions.

[2] References in the book: Many gods such as Indra and Agni are described as having special preferences for different types of flesh – Indra had weakness for bull’s meat and Agni for the meat of both the bull and cow, It is recorded that the Maruts and the Asvins were also offered cows. In the Vedas there is a mention of around 250 animals out of which at least 50 were supposed to be fit for sacrifice and consumption. In the Mahabharata, there is a mention of a king named Rantideva who achieved great fame by distributing food grains and beef to Brahmins. Later day, Brahminical texts also provide the evidence for eating beef. Even Manusmriti did not prohibit the consumption of beef. As a medicine: In therapeutic section of Charak Samhita (pages 86-87) the flesh of cow is prescribed as a medicine for various diseases. It is also prescribed for making soup. It is emphatically advised as a cure for irregular fever, consumption, and emaciation. The fat of the cow is recommended for debility and rheumatism.

[3] Family/Community/ Deity (of a lineage)

[4] Indian prime minister claims genetic science existed in ancient times, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/28/indian-prime-minister-genetic-science-existed-ancient-times; PM Modi takes leaf from Batra book: Mahabharat genetics, Lord Ganesha; http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/pm-takes-leaf-from-batra-book-mahabharat-genetics-lord-ganesha-surgery/#sthash.V7LdaNIb.dpuf; Fears grow in India about Hindu ‘Modi-fication’ of education; The Prime Minister and Early Indian Science http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/the-prime-minister-and-early-indian-science-686506; Fears grow in India about Hindu ‘Modi-fication’ of education http://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-religion-education-idUSKCN0J50BZ…

(The interview is a joint production of Communalism Combat and Newsclick and Hilleletv. The interview took place at Delhi in early November 2015.)