The historian is relooking at India and the sub-continent from the lens of ideas, bodies, emotions…

A historian of pre-Mughal South Asia, Daud Ali taught history for many years at SOAS, University of London, before relocating to University of Pennsylvania in 2009. His research spans a fascinating range of areas, from courtly and monastic discipline and mercantile practices to conventions in erotic poetry and courtship, to slavery and, most recently, gardens and landscapes in the medieval Deccan. His ongoing projects include works on the history of friendship in early and medieval South Asia, a translation of a Buddhist text on erotics, as well as the King Bhoja cycles of western India. This interview attempts to grasp some of the ideas he deals with. Excerpts:

Your oeuvre is very wide and difficult to classify temporally or spatially. Can you briefly tell us how your interests evolved during the course of your career as a historian?

I started by thinking of working on state formation in the Chola period and read Burton Stein and many other works. But, somehow, I stumbled onto the work of Norbert Elias and I had, of course, read Foucault who was very fashionable at the time. I made a connection between these two scholars and became interested in how one could think about the formation of what we may call “subjects”. Foucault focuses on the formation of modern subjects and looks at disciplinary practices at large. But Elias takes a more longue durée-cum-sociological approach about the development of manners, habits, mental dispositions and attitudes, linking them with behaviour. He was trying to map them onto particular sociologies.

What occurred to me, which I have been elaborating in my work ever since, is that the material from medieval India has not been looked at from this particular point of view. Everybody has been obsessed with mapping state structures and talking about either dynastic history or social history of a more empirical type, ignoring the whole question of mental dispositions, of bodies, of emotions, of these less tangible things which are incredibly important for the understanding of state structures, social relationships and the sinews of social life. There were people coming at it from the perspective of religious studies. But in terms of history, there was an indifference to these problems; they had not been explored. So most of my career has been working on what I would consider the completely virgin territory of what you could call the history of practice or mentalité.

The states of medieval India are erroneously understood as abstract administrative structures, when actually it makes sense to see them as small coteries of elite individuals that came together using a more actionist notion of what the state is. So if one rethinks the state as an extended household of the king with functionaries, some of the courtly literature and the epigraphic practices and all of the sorts of things I was interested in, begin to make a lot more sense.

One of your current projects is the study of friendship in early and medieval South Asia. Please tell us more about it. How does a historian go about writing the history of something that is as intangible as friendship?

It is interesting that friendship as a field of study exists in many historiographical traditions but for some peculiar reason, not in India. It is not simply about friendship. An underlying concern here is sociability. One of the problems with Indian writing on this subject is that kinship has been the predominant organising social locus for a lot of anthropology and it has been assumed by a lot of historians as well. For example, jajmani relationships existed in the village but jajmani is based on caste and caste is based on kinship. All of this precludes what was seen as opposite of that, which were free-associative relationships.

The reason I think it is important is that, as a scholar in one of our friendship conferences put it, it is the way things are done in India. These links are very strong in contemporary India and they have been strong in Indian societies throughout history. Various forms of affiliations that cannot simply be reduced to kinship, that crossed the lines of kinship, hierarchy and community, became important for getting things done and for all sorts of social processes.

Some parts of friendship are intangible, if one thinks about the affective side of friendship. But other parts are extremely easy to study because we have been looking at the evidence through completely different eyes. Much of the literature on niti, akhlaq in Persian, can be understood as literature designed to, what we would call today, ‘make friends and influence people’. What I mean is that they can be compared to [modern] self-help literature.

Much of this literature is rooted in modern psychology, which is something like a bourgeoisie replacement of earlier cultures of self-regard located in the ethical traditions of akhlaq and niti. They taught you through various forms of complex interlocution, how to make your way in the world and how to deal with people, both friends and enemies. The Hitopadesha, for example, is largely a kind of advice literature.

Global history as a subject and mode of enquiry has been gaining popularity in academia. Many universities are setting up centres and chairs. Is global history going to replace other types of historical enquiry, such as microhistory?

I don’t think the opposition is between global history and microhistory. The real driver of global history in the U.S. is, sadly, the opening up of Asian markets to American educational institutions. That sounds cynical but I am afraid it is the truth. And a lot of global history is simply re-washed neoliberal claptrap about the rise of capitalism, put in a more acceptable language.

My fear is that global history will replace serious work in the regions of the world which rely on languages, although that is seen as terribly provincial. For example, in U.S. universities, if you study Chinese or Indian history and work in the language of your sources, that is seen as very provincial. What they would prefer that people who engage with non-European and non-American history do is to work at a level of greater abstraction and deal with the history of global trade, of global entrepreneurs or of global cosmopolitan relationships. All these paradigms largely de-emphasise the more in-depth engagements with local sources and local histories. Many scholars who are writing this don’t have any engagement with anything but European language sources. So this is the new kind of globalism that I am not very keen on.

Historian Upinder Singh said in a recent interview that the history of ideas is neglected in India. The history of which ideas would you like to see explored by historians working on India?

The history of ideas is neglected in Indian history but not in Indian studies. For example, we have a tremendous amount of material relevant to what one might call the history of ideas that have been compiled by Indologists and scholars of religion. The history of ideas can be a very illuminating and a very problematic endeavour from my perspective. The fruitful approach to exploring the history of ideas in the Indian context would be the ‘keywords’ approach of Raymond Williams, where we could begin with ideas that have a significant amount of historical accretion and unpack them to show their diverse historical origins from the present backwards.

Particularly with the ancient past, what would be very useful is to try to work from the classical languages to the vernaculars. If you read medieval inscriptions, the word dakshinyam in Sanskrit is translated as civility, niti as polity, artha as statecraft. So, many of the assumptions about what we know about these words need to be seriously rethought by a greater contextualisation of words within their own structural universe, but also, a greater understanding of the problems of translation between premodern and modern categories.

You have worked on Connected Histories. And Upinder Singh has said that historians in India ought to be less ‘India-centric’, expand their geographical horizons and look at intellectual and cultural exchanges with other regions like China and Southeast Asia. Is this what the Connected Histories project is trying to accomplish?

The Connected Histories project is slightly different. I would, of course, support Dr. Singh’s comments. It is always good for Indian historians to look outward as it were. There are some established lineages about the way Indian historians have conceived of India’s relationships with the rest of the world. This has been so since the outset of Indian historiography. We tend to think of Indian influence as all about the dissemination of Hindu-Buddhist cultures or Indic cultures abroad. But actually, Indian Islamic cultures were also very important export items in pre-modern Asia.

The point we are trying to make is that in Southeast Asian Islam, and within Islamic studies, there is always a very high premium on indirect connections to the Hijaz, if you actually look at the details of the origins of Islamic societies, many of them trace their origins back to India. So India was also a place of the dissemination of Islamic knowledge to various regions, even though the agents who were involved in those interactions were often people who themselves claimed to have some relationship to the Hijaz or to other parts of the Islamic world. Conceived like that, India plays a much larger role in interactions than previously had been considered.

There are now several interesting paradigms, one of which is connected histories, which move beyond the idea of comparative histories to thinking about the long durée and short durée connections using network theory and other theories to think about the ongoing circulation of people, goods and ideas between regions. Not only between India as a civilisation and Southeast Asia but even between sub-regions within India. We are at an important juncture in Indian history where there is a ubiquitous feeling, particularly in the pre-modern side, that this is an important research direction.

The writer is a researcher in history and performing arts, and works with Natyavedi Kerala.