Rama Sundari Mantena. The Origins of Modern Historiography in India

In this fine monograph, Rama Sundari Mantena illuminates the development of modern historiography in India by locating its origins in the formation of the early colonial archive. According to Mantena, examining the archive as a process enables us to discern its participation in multiple methodologies and practices, authored by multiple agents. While acknowledging the instrumentality of knowledge and historiography in colonial rule, Mantena shows that colonial knowledge production was dynamic and generative of exchanges between European and indigenous agents in what she terms the “little practices” of history. Her most important goal, however, is to demonstrate that it was the antiquarian practices of history, rather than narrative histories or philological investigations, that laid the foundation for a modern, positivist historiography in India. The focus of Mantena's study is the “Mackenzie Collection,” a massive archive of Indian texts and documents in multiple languages and scripts, more than 1,700 drawings and maps, and numerous artifacts collected by Colin Mackenzie and his assistants. The bulk of the collection dates from between the late 1790s, when Mackenzie conducted a survey of the English East India Company's South Indian territories, and 1816, when he was appointed the first Surveyor General of India. Neither a professional historian nor a philologist (he had no Indian languages), Mackenzie was an odd man out among early colonial investigators. He assembled his extraordinary archive mainly at his own cost, employing a large establishment of native assistants with linguistic and textual skills, whom he trained in antiquarian methods; and he rarely paused to synthesize the material he had assembled, or to publish his findings.

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