Srikar Raghavan, 1st Year M.

A
183602009

Writing the Past

Total Word Count - 5200

Mapping Saketh Rajan’s Making History

Saketh Rajan’s Making History holds the distinction of being quite possibly the only
academic work in the country that is read at a university in a state that shot its author
dead.1 That said, Saketh Rajan is not a very oft-heard name in academia. There are
rumours of an underground left-wing fraternity in Bangalore that still whispers his
name, and sings about him, but there is not much mention in mainstream academia
and media. In this essay, I hope to try and figure out where to place him on the
spectrum of contemporary Marxist thought, and in the sphere of the Subaltern Studies
school in India. These concerns will mostly be historiographical, rather than a
pulpit-style exchange of ideologies. However, there is much ideology that spills over
onto the act of history-writing, and that much can never be separated. Rajan’s history
is different from other such works in the country. There is a sense of romanticism
present throughout the book. At one point he writes, ‘After all, is it not with blood and
tears, the sacrifice of what is most precious - life - that history enriches posterity?’2
There is a glorification of armed insurrections and revolutions, and all of the guerrilla
warfare events in the book are described in painstaking detail. Perhaps this is thanks
to Rajan’s own revolutionary interests in his time, and owes something to his
obsession with the study of armed struggles. Ideologically, it leans heavily towards
Marxist purism, and shares some concerns that the Subalternists espoused. However,
there are several perils involved in writing such a history, and I hope that some of
these are illuminated in the course of this essay. Here, we shall only be looking at
Volume Two of his three-volume history, as the first volume is inaccessible online,
and the third one was never finished. The second volume is dedicated to a history of
19th century Karnataka, and it is only this timeline that we will be referenced in this
essay.

1
https://sites.google.com/site/sakethrajan/
2
Rajan, S. 2004. Pg-158
 I

It is interesting to see how Rajan approaches the idea of class consciousness in 19th
century Karnataka. We must begin with a workable definition of what the word
‘class’ entails. In the words of E.P Thompson, ‘class happens when some men, as a
result of common experiences (inherited or shared) feel and articulate the identity of
their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are
different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.’ 3 It is when one zooms into this
question of articulation that there begins to emerge a small fissure between Rajan and
Thompson, with the former seeming to be more purist of a Marxist.

For instance, addressing the figure of Sangolli Rayanna, Rajan writes, ‘Thus, while
Rayanna fought with the articulate political demand of restoring the Kittur
principality to the adopted son of Chennamma, which remains the influence of
feudalism on his consciousness; he was by doing so only in fact at the same time
expressing an unarticulated anti-feudal and anti-colonial aspiration, attacking the
cruel-rack rent of revenue farmers, and centered on the question of land for the
pauperised and burdened peasantry.’ 4 There is, on Rajan’s part here, an assumption
of what Rayanna and his compeers must have been thinking, which Thompson argues
against, thus. He writes,

‘“It”, the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined
almost mathematically - so many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of
production. Once this is assumed it becomes possible to deduce the
class-consciousness which “it” ought to have (but seldom does have) if “it” was
properly aware of its own position and real interests. There is a cultural superstructure,
through which this recognition dawns in inefficient ways. These cultural “lags” and
distortions are a nuisance, so that it is easy to pass from this to some theory of
substitution: the party, sect, or theorist, who disclose class-consciousness, not as it is,
but as it ought to be.’5

Can this rebuttal be transposed onto Rajan, then? It seems to me, while keeping in
mind the strong flavour of anti-colonialism in Rajan’s writings, that when Rajan reads
anti-colonial sentiments and ‘aspirations’ in the minds of the rebels and peasants, he is
trying a little hard to make a case for his stance. Thompson writes - ‘Class
consciousness, however, is a bad thing, invented by displaced individuals, since
everything which disturbs the harmonious co-existence of groups performing different
social roles (and which thereby retards economic growth) is to be deplored as an
unjustified disturbance-system. The problem is to determine how best “it” can be
conditioned to accept its social role, and how its grievances may best be handled and
channeled.”6 Thompson believes that history-writing would do well to look
intimately at the lives of the common masses, and really try to get into their shoes;
notions of class consciousness are not really conducive to the historiography that he
has envisioned. On the other hand, Rajan’s history of Karnataka reads much like how
a Marxist manifesto would have looked like, had Rajan been alive in 19th century
Karnataka and critically articulated the feudal aspirations himself, and suggested the

3
Thompson, E.P. 1966, pg-9
4
Rajan, S. 2004, pg-159
5
Thompson, E.P. 1966, pg-10
6
Ibid.
right way forward. And by this, I wish to draw attention to the fact that Rajan
subscribes to Marxist teleological modes of thinking, and this spills over into his
chosen mode of historiography as well. Consider this statement of his.

‘It is only when we keep this in mind, grasp the objective direction of history and the
nature of the ruling classes at each historic turning point that we can, although
apparently self-contradictory, say, with convincing certainty, that the palegaras who
fought for the restoration of their fiefdoms with British support against Tipu were
trying to pull history backwards; while at the same time, palegaras who took up arms
against British colonialism, albeit, for the repossession of their petty fiefdoms, were
pushing history forward. ‘7

To this, Thompson’s reply would probably be something on the following lines of

thought. ‘If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a
multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men
over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships,
their ideas, and their institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own
history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.’ 8 In the Thompsonian way of
writing history, there is more space for the ordinary folk, and not just the rebels,
reactionaries, history-pushers, and political visionaries. Rajan writes, ‘To see the overt
and miss the covert, as historians writing of the period have generally succumbed to;
is to miss out the masses while seeing only the escapes of feudal kings and queens of
our past; is to miss out the cause - the class cause - motivating the broad masses to act
and make history. ‘9 I think the fissure deepens in light of this statement, because it
reveals Rajan’s comparatively narrower view of what constitutes the ‘masses’, as
opposed to the Thompsonian view. In the course of the book, Rajan’s lens only hovers
over the prominent actors in the political plane - Tipu, The Wodeyars, Rani
Chennamma, Sangolli Rayanna, Dhondia Waugh, Kalyanaswamy, Buda Basavappa,
and so on. Of course, this may very well be attributed to Rajan’s professed aims in his
preface; his project is driven by a motivation to buck the historiographical trends of
the day. He wishes to ardently focus on these matters, which he feels have been
ignored. He writes, ‘there has been a general tendency of historians to underwrite or
even maintain petrifying silence about the role of violence in the historic process,
particularly when the period of history inches closer and closer to the very social
precipice we stand today.’10 And yet, when he concludes by saying - ‘The military
deed will also plunge into the heart of historiography. History will have to concede to
the claim of those who have, after all, made it ’11- there is the implicit assumption that
history is being made by a certain group of people, while the others hampered its
progress in some way. In this context, it becomes clear why exactly Thompson is
considered a gadfly in academic circles; a oft-quoted paragraph in his preface to The
Making merits a full quotation here.

7
Rajan, S. 2004, pg-134
8
Ibid, pg-11
9
Ibid.pg-159
10
Ibid, pg-1
‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete”
hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna
Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions
may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been
backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their
insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these
times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in
terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain,
condemned in their own lives, as casualties.’12

It is safe to say that Rajan does not wish to rescue the poor native who joined the
British administrative machine out of dire straits, or the pragmatic and self-interested
Palegara that made common cause with the British, or the “obsolete” princeling who
did not know how to respond to a force as novel and unprecedented as the British, or
even the deluded follower of a William Carey, say. Their acceptance of the colonial
overbears might have been cowardly, and their faith in the British scheme of things to
make life better might have been fantasies. Yet, they lived through these times, and
their aspirations are valid in their own right. The point being made is that when the
notion of a class-consciousness or a colonial-consciousness13 is brought strongly into
the discourse, there is the immediate teleological assumption that is always looking
towards the resolution of the contradictions that this assumption brings forth, mutatis
mutandis. It ignores, very conspicuously, the other side of the coin, and proceeds to
disregard any lessons that might be grasped from the lives and history of those that
‘did not make history.’ For instance, consider how Thompson regards the
phenomenon of Owenism, a utopian socialist philosophy that Marx and Engels held in
deep contempt.

‘So far from being backward-looking in its outlook, Owenism was the first of the
great social doctrines to grip the imagination of the masses in this period, which
commenced with an acceptance of the enlarged productive powers of steam and the
mill…The ‘Socialists’ hoped to found voluntary, self-supporting, self-controlled
industrial cities, in which the wealth created was to be equitably shared by all those
whose labour produced it. Those who see, in the failure of these experiments, only a
proof of their folly may perhaps be too confident that “history” has shown them to be
a dead end.’14

12
Thompson, E.P, 1966, pg-13
13
One might argue that the idea that Thompson is seeking to make is situated in the British
feudal-capitalist transition, while Rajan’s plane of thought has more to do with the native-colonizer
binary, and that it makes little sense to compare them. However, Rajan sees the colonial power as
conniving with the already existing feudal powers, and a good chunk of his book deals with showing
how there was little separating the feudal lords from the British, and how even the Wodeyars were
merely puppets in their hands. In this sense, the British intervention in Indian affairs, is, according to
Rajan, disrupting the natural transition from feudalism to capitalism that would have taken place in the
subcontinent had the British never set sail, and thus, any colonial-symphatiser would essentially be
backward-looking, in his eyes.
14
Ibid. pg-804,805
To further scrutinize the teleological idea in Rajan’s framework, it is interesting to
look at his views on Rani Chennamma. After the death of her husband in 1824,
without a male heir, Chennamma pleaded for ‘the British to accept the adoption of an
heir and allow a continuation of the fiefdom.’ 15 ‘Thus Chennamma’s struggle
against colonialism was for allowing Kittur to continue to be a loyal vassal of the
British. Its denial led to an armed resolution and made it one of Karnataka’s better
known colonial struggles. ‘16 Thus, Chennamma was, before the tipping point, really
looking to play by the British’s rules. Can one say that she was pushing history back
at this moment, or was she just an anxious widow, in the throes of political turbulence,
trying to make the best of the moment?

Rajan writes, with an emphatic flourish - ‘At this crucial moment, Chennamma could
have surrendered. She could have bowed to the British and lowered the drawbridge
for them. Yet she chose to fight. And that was what made a world of difference. She
hemmed in her troops and lost the battle all right. But she went down in history as a
courageous woman, a Rani who challenged colonialism. She struck a contrast to
British puppets such as the Wodeyars.’17

Now, this warrants some questions - Had Chennamma won the battle, and forced the
British to grant her the fiefdom, would she have still merited a nod from Rajan? In
that case, would she not still be an accomplice in their act? Given that Chennamma
did perish and the British immediately grabbed Kittur for themselves, didn’t she
contribute to the growth of the British apparatus, and thus actually push history
backward? Would not the course have been different had she pursued a more
pragmatic strategy, lived to fight another day, to deliver a more crushing blow,
perhaps? It is impossible to answer these questions, and this is why Rajan’s
teleological Marxist biases become extremely problematic.

However, it is worth noting Rajan’s justfication for his subscriptions, revealing his
unflinching allegiances to Marx18 which are nearly summed up in this extract -

‘It might appear overtly Marxist to draw out the class roots of such anti-colonial
leadership and negate on this sole basis the progressive prospect such struggles
delineated. But this is exactly what differentiates Marxism from revisionism.
Revisionist historiography can be mechanical and superficial. Its ultimate essence is
that it tends to legitimize colonial domination. Marxist historiography takes the class
characteristics into consideration, places it in the historical context and considers the
dialectical processes at work.’19

15
Rajan, S. 2004. pg-150
16
Ibid. pg-150
17
Ibid. pg-152
18
It is interesting to note that Rajan exclusively quotes only from Marx and Engels, throughout the
book, with just the rare nod or two towards Mao and Lenin. No other Marxist/Socialist writer of any
contemporary school of thought is ever brought up. Now, considering the fact that Rajan wrote the
work while in hiding, and must have had scant resources to draw from, it must be said that it is
astonishing how well-researched and referenced it already is. Nevertheless, the partiality towards Marx
still remains a point to be addressed.
19
Ibid. pg-134
In what way does Rajan see revisionist historiography as legitimizing colonial
domination? It is the view that, in certain histories, it has been implied that the British
led to the break up of feudalism in India, and ushered in an age of glorious
industrialism and capitalism. There can be no doubt regarding the existence of such
histories. The general sentiment of holding the colonial past in reverence has found
multiple critics. Ranajit Guha, one of the few who have pioneered this criticism,
writes - ‘The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated
by elitism - colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism. Both originated as the
ideological product of British rule in India, but have survived the transfer of power
and been assimilated to neo-colonialist and neo-nationalist forms of discourse in
Britain and India respectively.’20 But there is a difference between Guha and Rajan,
in their approaches towards history writing, despite this common ground they share.
There is much about Guha that reminds one of Thompson’s writings. 21 We now
segue into the next section of this essay, which tries to situate Rajan’s history in the
sphere of subaltern studies, and in contemporary Indian scholarship.

II

Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, published originally in

1983, has long been regarded as a landmark publication in academic circles, and is
usually referred to as the work that brought the Subaltern Studies school to life. In this,
‘Guha is concerned with the mentality, values, ideas, and structure behind peasant
movements in colonial India between 1783 and 1900. Above all he wants to
understand them in their own terms.’ 22 To better understand how Guha and Rajan’s
trajectories diverge, and even come close to each other at some points, it is
illuminating to take into consideration the Nagar rebellion in Mysore State, in 1831,
and how Rajan approaches it. On the subject of peasants and class consciousness,
Guha writes -

‘To acknowledge the peasant as the maker of his own rebellion is to attribute a
consciousness to him. Hence the word ‘insurgency’ has been used in the title and the
text as the name of that consciousness which informs the activity of the rural
masses… This amounts, of course, to a rejection of the idea of such activity as purely
spontaneous - an idea that is elitist as well as erroneous. It is elitist because it makes
the mobilisation of the peasantry altogether contingent on the intervention of
charismatic leaders, advanced political organisations or upper classes.’23

The elitist idea mentioned here is not absent in Rajan’s narrative. But it is not in the
sense that Guha means. For Guha is talking about people who are far removed from
the peasant community, and to interventions of leaders extremely sensationalised, like
Gandhi, say. Rajan’s references to the Nagar rebellion revolve almost completely
around the leadership of two men by the names of Budi Basappa and Rangappa.
Consider the following snippets -

20
Guha, R. 1982, pg-1
21
Sumit Sarkar notices one aspect of this when he writes - ‘Ranajit Guha seems to have often used
‘subaltern’ somewhat in the way Thompson deployed the term ‘plebeian’ in his writings on 18th
century England.’ in Sarkar, 1997, pg-83
22
Guha, R. 1999, pg-3
23
Guha, R .1999, pg-4
‘In the case of the Nagar uprising, the peasantry located its antifeudal anticolonial
aspirations within a political framework. They recognised Budi Basappa Nayaka as
the heir of the Ikkeri kings and sought the restoration of Ikkeri rule over Nagar.’24

‘While Budi Basappa’s writ prevailed in Nagar as a whole, in Chickmagalur it was

the leadership of Rangappa Nayak, the palegara of Tarikere and that of his family
who formerly served under the Ikkeri dynasty that dominated.’25

‘New leaders emerged: Budi Basappa and Rangappa. Both were motivated by feudal
class interests. Yet, this time they took up the issues of the peasant masses and
articulated them in clear terms. They were compelled to speak of clear cut solutions to
the people’s problems. Thus, the peasant masses rallied behind them and fought for
their claims to power, since by this, and this alone, they felt their burdens could be
alleviated.’26

Now, in light of these quotes, there could be an elitist reading made of Rajan’s work.
But it can also be argued that these men were very closely linked with the peasant
community, and that it is tough to draw a line between who is an ‘elite’ and who isn’t.
The character of Buda Basappa, for instance, is rumoured to not be of royal blood at
all, but rather an imposter who was a native of the village of Chinikkate near Honalli,
where his mother and elder brother lived.’27 Thus, further zooming to the actual
historicity of someone’s lineage, it becomes hard to determine how elitist a history of
it would be. Let us be fair. In all probability, it is highly unlikely that a peasant leader
might emerge like a Indian Spartacus, and launch a true revolution from the bottom. A
necessity for some sort of sanction of power is necessary, and this is what the feudal
seat served the purpose of. What is important to keep in mind is their appeal to the
masses, and how well they represented them. Now, in this vein, it is worth noting that
Rajan is not saying that these peasant movements were ‘pre-political’, or rather, at
least in the case of the Nagar insurrection, he isn’t saying so. He writes -

‘When, in August 1830, a rally was called in Hosanthe village, in Shimoga district,
the massive demonstration passed a charter unanimously, saying - ‘The peasant
organisation must be built everywhere. The struggle must be advanced till the
demands are accomplished. Government officials must be prevented from entering
villages. Revenue payment to the government should be stopped. The government
must recognise that the tiller is the owner of the land. Land must be returned to those
tenants who had forfeited it.’28 Following this, a letter was drafted for the king and
forwarded.29

24
Rajan,S. 2004. pg-166
25
Ibid. pg-168
26
Ibid. pg-169
27
Ibid. pg-167
28
Ibid. pg-173
29
However, it must be noted that Rajan draws on a host of local histories and vernacular texts. How
historically grounded in fact and documentation these are is another matter. The veracity of these
sources remains to be verified.
More evidences of the peasant’s clearly directed actions are supplied by Rajan.

‘BS Ramabhatta provides certain instances from Chikmagalur and Wastare of the
antifeudal orientation of the movement. He writes: “The rebels brought out the grain
from the houses of the rich and distributed them to the poor peasants. They harvested
the crop from their fields and carried them to the houses of the tenants.” Thus, it was
quite evident that the feudal forces which collaborated with colonialism were being
mauled and this decadent class was on the look out for protection by the colonial state.
There can be no doubt that this heat of anti-feudalism was kept up throughout the
period the guerilla war lasted, remaining the chief plank for its sustenance and the
procurement of support from the peasantry.’30

Rajan acknowledges that the peasants knew reasonably well what they were doing.
The very fact that there were demonstrations, clearly articulated political demands
that were passed around, and directed attacks on the feudal classes means a general
awareness on the part of the peasants to some degree. Since their leaders seemed to
have a reasonable understanding of their problems, it would not be wholly fair to call
them ‘elitist interventions.’ Like Ranajit Guha writes, ‘there was no way for the
peasant to launch into such a project in a fit of absent-mindedness. For this
relationship was so fortified by the power of those who had the most to benefit from it
and their determination, backed by the resources of the ruling culture, to punish the
least infringement, that he risked all by trying to subvert or destroy it by rebellion.’31
Nowhere does Rajan stray from this view, to the best of my reading of his book. Thus,
we may place Rajan towards the side of the Subaltern Studies group, and leaning
away from the Hobsbawmian orthodox view, in this regard.

III

Sumit Sarkar was one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Collective in
the latter half of the twentieth century, but after a decade of its existence decided to
distance himself from it, for reasons that become relevant in the context of this essay,
and in the political climate of today. In an essay titled The Decline of the Subaltern,
Sarkar writes - ‘In South Asian historiography, the inflated reputation of late
Subaltern Studies has encouraged a virtual folding back of all history into the single
problematic of Western colonial cultural domination… A simple binary of
Westernized surrender/ indegenist resistance will necessarily have major difficulties
in finding space for sensitive studies of movements for women’s rights, or of
lower-case protest: for quite often such initiatives did try to utilize aspects of colonial
administration and ideas as resources.’32 It is impossible to deny the fact that Rajan’s
historical work overlooks initiatives that took place with the help of the colonial class.

30
Ibid. Pg-186
31
Guha,R, 1999. pg-9
32
Sarkar, S, 1997. pg-106
But, at least in the context of Rajan’s work, it is safe to say that colony and the
Enlightenment cannot be employed as synonyms, although it is true that Rajan does
not feel the need for many women actors in his historical drama.33

It is possible that one might construe these concerns as being purely academic, but
there are political ramifications that Sarkar shrewdly notices as well, which I will get
to later in this section. Talking about movements such as the Narmada Bachao
Andolan, feminist organisations, trade union activities, Sarkar writes - ‘Any
meaningful understanding of or identification with such developments is undercut by
two kinds of emphasis quite central to late Subaltern Studies. Culturalism rejects the
importance of class and class struggle, while notions of civil, democratic, feminist,
and liberal individual rights - many of them indubitably derived from certain
Enlightenment traditions - get deligitimized by a repudiation of the Enlightenment as
a bloc.’34

Now, even if we were to place Rajan in this late Subalternist roster, it would be unfair
to say that his ideological biases would lead someone to misidentify with such social
developments as Sarkar speaks about, simply because Rajan’s own life provides
sufficient counter examples. ‘He played a leading role in thwarting the joint venture
of imperialist and comprodor ruling classes of Karnataka in setting up the "Japan
Industrial Township" at Sattanur near Bangalore and the expansion of mining
activities in the Western Ghats by the Kudremukh Iron Ore Company Limited
(KIOCL). On the attempts by the Government to evict tribal people in Kudremukh
National Park area, Prem35 said the State was keen on allowing multinationals and
international drug houses to exploit the bio-diversity of the region and to promote
parasitic tourism.’36 Ecological concerns rank high in Rajan’s book37, and when
Sarkar talks about feminist and civil rights in the context of the Enlightenment, there
is a precise reason why Sarkar does so. ‘The spread of assumptions and values
associated with late Subaltern Studies can have certain disabling consequences for
sections of individuals still subjectively radical. This is so particularly because India -
unlike many parts of the West, perhaps, is still a country where major political battles
are engaged in by large numbers of people: where, in other words, depoliticization has
not yet given a certain limited relevance to theories of sporadic initiative by
individuals or small groups glorying in their imposed marginality.’38 Following a line
of thought that is remarkably prescient, Sarkar proceeds to make a case for how a
sharply anti-colonial historiography could help foster a radical machine, namely the
Hindutva brigade. He writes, ‘The political inclinations of the Subaltern scholars and
the bulk of their readership are certainly very different, but some of their work
nowadays seems to be unwittingly feeding into softer versions of not entirely
dissimilar moods. Words like ‘secular’, ‘rational’, or ‘progressive’ have become terms

33
Interestingly, Sumit Sarkar also points out this very problem in Thompson’s work as well - namely
that ‘women were no more than marginal in his narrative of the formation of the English working
class.’
34
Ibid.
35
Rajan’s assumed alias
36
https://sites.google.com/site/sakethrajan/
37
His paper, ‘Commercialisation of forest and its impact on the Soliga tribes in Biligiri Rangana
Hills’, published in the Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society in 1984, is a widely referenced
paper in further studies about the same.
38
Sarkar, S. 1997. pg-107
of ridicule, and if ‘resistance’ (of whatever undifferentiative kind) can be valorized,
movements seeking transformation get suspected of teleology.’39

Now, granting Sarkar his concerns and reservations with the later subalternists, it
must be said, in a pragmatic and realistic tone, that it is highly unlikely that Rajan’s
work can be adopted by a right-winger40 to ridicule secularism. Perhaps, Sarkar’s
concerns lie with certain other writers, that have missed being called out by name in
his essay.

Conclusions

Rajan’s Making History occupies a curious place in the modern academic roster. It
vehemently aligns itself with Marxist teleological modes of thinking - something that
has been generally agreed upon as being a bad thing. This is so for various reasons.
But the basic idea that one cannot suggest a way towards betterment on the basis of a
single factor, which is always economics in Marx’s case. Rajan’s argument too, is
founded mostly on economic concerns. In his view, the British power in Indian
crippled the economy, connived with the already existing feudal system, and made
away with a fortune. This might be a valid point, but in the absence of other angles to
look at it from, it loses its sheen, it becomes questionable. An analogue of this binary
may be seen in how his approach to the people of history, the actors in his play,
compares with that pioneered by E.P Thompson. Thompson looks at a far larger pool
of individuals, makes innumerable observations about the real lives of the working
classes. Rajan’s look may be bottom-up, but it is only scraping the surface.

Sumit Sarkar, in an essay about E.P Thompson and his bequeathed legacy, writes -
‘Thompson’s wrestling with the problems posed by a society not yet fully transformed
by capitalism obviously have a very high degree of relevance for historians working
on eras of Indian history prior to the most recent. Class analysis, if applied to such
situations in a manner identical with what might be appropriate to a developed
capitalist society, would evidently produce the reifications Thompson had been
attacking throughout - as has happened, one might add, in quite a lot of Indian
historiography.’ 41 It is tough to say if Making History falls squarely in this very
genre of historiography that Thompson runs at parallels with. But it is safe to say that
the engagement with historical sources, and the sheer wealth of data present in
Thomson’s writings is conspicuously missing in Rajan’s book. In this sense, one may
term it as a little superficial.

There is one more question that one might ask of Rajan’s work. Was it nationalist in
substance? Did it see these struggles leading up to a mass nationalist movement that
would eventually kick the British out? Consider this comment of Rajan on a fellow
historian Suryanath Kamath.

‘Suryanath Kamath’s views are typically interesting. He is sore with the British for
their ingratitude. He writes: ‘In fact, the Kittur principality provided the British with

39
Sarkar, S. 1997 pg-108
40
Just as an interesting aside, Rajan’s capture and killing is said to have been facilitated by a Bajrang
Dal informant.
41
Ibid., pg-56
ample assistance in their fight against Dhondia Waugh in 1801 and later in 1818 in
their war against the Peshwas. Yet the British did not demonstrate gratitude for this.”
Such historiography can be dangerously evasive since it is disinclined to see Kittur’s
repeated role in aiding the British conquest of India as an act of feudal betrayal.
Instead it is cut up with the British for not showering continued support on their loyal
vassals. This view has a percentage of patriotism all right. But it is skin deep. It can
only be as patriotic as the collaborating feudal class can get.’42

Rajan’s nationalism, or patriotism, runs only class-deep. He sees the feudal classes as
being more powerful in their exercise of nationalist agendas. But there is the definite
emphasis on a collective movement to oust the colonial class, and this is indeed what
the teleological model is built on. Every small skirmish with the British only adds to a
more robust collective consciousness that will eventually prevail.

Thus, we see that Rajan’s work does have some inadequacies when one considers all
the above contrasts and comparisons. This is not to say that his work had no important
facets at all. Above all, it must be submitted that there are very significant aspects of
the brutalities of the colonial rule that have been uncovered and explored by Rajan.
His vehement distaste towards colonisation is quite justified, but in as much as history
writing demands fuller engagement and closer perspectives, it is myopic. It is
certainly a book of ‘history from below’, but perhaps not the most comprehensive one,
or the most ‘belowest.’

References

1. Rajan, Saketh. 2004. Making History, Vol-2. Vimukthi Prakasana, Bangalore.

2. Thompson, E.P, 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books,
New York.
3. Sarkar, Sumit. 1997. Writing Social History. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
4. Guha, Ranajit. 1999. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency. Delhi University
Press, Delhi.
5. Guha, Ranajit, 1982. Subaltern Studies - 1, Writings on South Asian History and
Society. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

42
Rajan, S. 2004. pg-150
\