(Re)Presenting the 'Medieval'

About the Speaker

Meena Bhargava is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She has published several research articles in peer-reviewed national and international journals and collected works. She has authored and co-authored books and edited anthologies on Mughal History and Early Modern Environmental History.

Abstract

The issues that need urgent attention in the study of Indian history pertain to periodization, labeling of history and the characterization of the ‘Medieval’ period as Muslim period

associating it with the religion of the rulers or iconoclasm or temple destruction or imposition of jizya. The question that arises is that did the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal State symbolize ‘Islamic Conquest’ or were they proto-nationalist? The bias came from the ‘orientalist’ construction of Indian history. It is pertinent to emphasize on the objective, critical and rational understanding of history keeping it away from religious, sectarian and communal sentiments. If such biases meddle with history then several developments ushered in from the seventh-eighth century either get overlooked or lose their significance. This paper argues that what we call history of ‘Medieval’ India is as much a part of history in which the criterion of religion is quite unimportant. It is, instead, imperative to study stages of development in a society, system of production, social organization. If these issues are emphasized upon, the personal religion of the ruler become quite irrelevant. The paper reiterates that history is a process and represents patterns of continuity, change and transition. It defies stereotyped, rigid periodization in Indian history and questions the logic of the conventional scheme of Ancient-Medieval-Modern. To understand better the specifics of Indian history and shift from the narrow political and cultural dimensions of history, the paper hazards to redefine the term ‘Medieval’ and categorize it as ‘Early Modern’ to facilitate a different premise to understand colonial intervention and situate South Asia more widely in the global historical perspective.

Report

This is a response to the talk presented by Meena Bhargava of Indraprastha College of Women on Representing the Medieval. This talk dealt with the medieval period of Indian History, which is often labelled as the “Muslim period” as opposed to the early “Hindu period”. This talk aimed to dispel this notion of periodisation and show that the influences from the supposedly Hindu period always spill over to the supposedly Muslim period.

The talk addressed two important themes. Professor Bhargava first presented the accepted view of the Medieval period of Indian History, which is a highly colonial construct. She then presented the fault lines in this discourse and why this neat categorisation of the Ancient, Medieval and Modern is not ideal for Indian history. Finally, she addressed why religion cannot be the only modes of classification of History.

The generally accepted view of Indian History presents it in three neat divisions. The “Ancient Hindu”, the “Medieval Muslim” and finally the “Modern British”. This demarcation between the ancient and the medieval is made clear in most historical accounts. This is seen as a change of a religious power over the Indian subcontinent. Professor Bhargava argued that this was a narrative created by the British. This construct was made for two reasons; one to justify British rule in India and second to segregate the two dominant religious groups in India and prevent them from presenting a resistance to colonial rule.

If this narrative was a colonial construct, how were the religions actually perceived in the Medieval period? Professor Bhargava constructs this narrative by exploring the texts of both the ‘Muslim invaders’ and the ‘indegenious Hindu population’. She first presented why the British would have constructed this idea. The Persian texts from that period have a hegemonic, temporal viewpoint about the Islamic rule in Asia. But the contemporary texts from India doesn’t paint a binary. They don’t refer to the people who came in as Muslims but rather as Turks. The Sanskrit does not mention Mohammed of Ghazni as a tyrant like he is made out in contemporary narratives. The Mughals are also not referred to as Muslim in a lot of supposedly Hindu sources. This is similar in Islamic sources, where India is a geographical area to be conquered, not a land of a particular religious group. This geographical area is often referred to as Al-Hind.

Therefore this theological perspective is not the only way to access Indian History The alternatives of that are to explore it through the different historical processes. This talk, therefore poses the question “Why is the study of Indian History so secluded and why doesn’t it interact with other histories from the same period?”

By Pratiti, Undergraduate Class of 2020