Karnataka - Others   

`Marginal areas should step forward'

Staff Correspondent

SOUVENIR RELEASED: David Washbrook (second from left) of Oxford University, U.K., releasing `Journal of Karnataka Studies' brought out by Kannada University in Hampi on Tuesday.

HAMPI: "Conventionally, modern history in India begins with the coming of the British and there can be no doubt that peculiarities of colonialism in the south fostered these developments," David Washbrook, Director, Centre for South Asian Studies, Oxford University, United Kingdom, said here on Tuesday.

Dr. Washbrook was delivering a special lecture on "Towards a history of the present: southern perspective on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" organised by the department of Distance Education Centre, Kannada University.

He released the first edition of the third volume of "Journal of Karnataka Studies" brought out by the university.

Dr. Washbrook said that colonialism in South India might not have shattered cultural confidence. It did not destroy the pursuit of economic gain and material reward - which could be translated into social prestige or the demand that privilege be shared with a community. "These historical qualities survived colonial thralldom and created the conditions for the south and the west to assert themselves more strongly in the post-colonial era.

Then to find a place in the world, India had to become truly post-colonial, to overcome the paralysis which colonialism had attempted to impose upon it; to escape the sense of an unbridgeable gulf between east and west; the orientalist conception of its own uniqueness and changelessness.

The stage was set for erstwhile marginal regions - which had evaded the heaviest impact of colonialism - to step forward and release the social and economic energies, which had been pent up but never died within them and which now could carry India forward into the 21st century," he said.

Dr. Washbrook said there were clear signs of endogenous sources of economic growth emerging from the 12th Century, which set up a long secular trend that might have lasted till the 17th Century. The south's textile and spice trades gained significance in the early modern era and also helped sustain a rich domestic economy in many places.

It was a society where the interchange of cultural and technological ideas among different groups, even where the groups were otherwise keen to sustain their own separate identities, was widespread and marked.B.A. Vivek Rai, Vice-Chancellor, presided over the function.

Mallepuram Venkatesh, Director Prasaranga, proposed a vote of thanks.

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