Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | NXg | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

History

Divided into six sections, the tome starts with the genesis of the Wodeyar dynasty in 1399, runs through the “golden periods” under the likes of Ranadhira Kanthirava Narasaraja Wodeyar and encompasses the years of decline. It revisits all the ups and downs of the dynasty with meticulous details and concludes with the birth of modern day Mysore in the 1950s. The growth of Mysore as the cultural capital of southern India, with royal patronage in the areas of classical music, dance, folk tradition, painting and literature, gets special attention in one section.

Vikram spares no details of the rule of the Wodeyars — from wars, palace intrigues, romances, stories of valour and deceit to the minutest particulars of administrative machinery — in sketching the dynasty’s rule. The book bears enough evidence that the author has pored over every reference material available on this period. The book is replete with long quotations from several sources, especially colonial ones. Indeed, the generosity of the author in packing in details can sometimes prove a little too exhausting.

The more interesting aspect of the book, authored by a management graduate and the employee of a multinational bank, is the methodology he adopts, especially in handling controversial subjects. Both in his introduction to the work and in the course of the narration, the author agonises over a historian’s difficulty in dealing with contradictory historical sources.

He resolves this dilemma by choosing the journalistic path of presenting “both sides of the story” whenever faced with a touchy situation rather than risk any academic judgement. The balancing act is most evident in the way he handles the “Muslim interregnum” (the rule of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan).

This method, no doubt, ensures that the book is not in the eye of yet another storm that every possible position on Indian history gets thrown into. But the penchant for playing it safe seems to deny the author a chance for any insightful analysis. To cite one example, while recording the demand for reservation for backward class by Praja Mitra Mandali in the 1920s (a pre-cursor to the present-day OBC reservation policy) the author fails to talk of the social churnings that made this line of thinking even possible for the first-ever time in Indian history. The author’s keenness on chronicling details rather than harnessing them for a rigorous academic engagement with forces that shape history is what proves disappointing.

When Vikram does pause to offer a perspective, he often comes up with observations that are totally inane: “The problem with India and Indians is that we revel in and glorify our past to the extent that we would prefer to live in the past rather than the present… This is a suicidal version of history. Of course India has a glorious past and resorting to Marxist interpretation by belittling successes and symbols of past is not an encouraging practice…” (p.138).

The author denounces all “positions” on history, be it right wing, left wing or colonial. Rather surprisingly, he summons a quote in the controversial book Eminent Historians by Arun Shourie to make the sweeping judgement that Marxist historians have robbed us of all sense of pride in our past.

As opposed to this, he describes his own effort as a “humane study of history” that hopes to instil in the reader a “sense of pride” about the past and “a feeling of responsibility and ownership” to the present and future.

But this self-righteous objective of historical study and the methodology employed are surely not beyond question. After all, the best balancing acts do not make the most interesting studies of history!

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail