Thomas R. Trautmann - The Clash of Chronologies: Ancient India in the Modern World

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The Clash of Chronologies

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON INDIAN PASTS General Editor: Saurabh Dube
Other Books in the Series:
T HOMAS R. T RAUTMANN
Aryans and British India (Paperback edition)
A.R. V ENKATACHALAPATHY
In those days there was no coffee: Writings in cultural history
D AVID N. L ORENZEN
Who invented Hinduism? Essays on religion in history
T HOMAS R. T RAUTMANN
Languages and nations:
The Dravidian proof in colonial Madras
H ARLAN O. P EARSON
Islamic reform and revival in nineteenth-century India: Thee Tarqah-i Muhammadyah

Saurabh Dube
After Conversion:
Cultural histories of Modern India (Forthcoming)

D AVID N. L ORENZEN
The scourge of the mission:
Marco della Tomba in Hindustan (Forthcoming)

YODA PRESS
79, Gulmohar Enclave New Delhi 110 049 www.yodapress.co.in

Thomas R. Trautmann 2009 Second impression 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right YODA PRESS (maker)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of YODA PRESS, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to YODA PRESS at the address above.

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
ISBN 978-81-906186-5-6

Typeset in Galliard and Frutiger
By Tulika Print Communication Services, New Delhi Printed at Saurabh Printers Pvt Ltd
Published by Arpita Das for YODA PRESS, New Delhi

For my friends
David, Madhav, Romila, Dilip, Chalapathy, Bob, Nick, Nick, Carla and Velcheru

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Series Editors Note xi Preface xiii Introduction: The Clash of Chronologies xv

Time and history
1. The revolution in ethnological time 3 2. Indian time, European time 25
Kinship and marriage
3. India and the study of kinship terminologies 55 4. Patterns of marriage67
Languages and nations

5. Hullabaloo about Telugu 93
6. Dr. Johnson and the pandits: imagining the
perfect dictionary in colonial Madras 112
7. Constructing the racial theory of Indian civilization 137

Orientalists and Orientalism

8. Finding Indias place 155
9. The missionary and the Orientalist 189
10. Bashams big book, fifty years after 208

viii Contents

List of Illustrations

Chapter 4
Patterns of Marriage
Figure 1. Box diagram of a Dravidian kinship terminology

(Nanjilanattu Vellalar) (Trautmann 1981: 40) 71
Figure 2. Diagram of a Dravidian kinship terminology inscribed on a cylinder (Trautmann 1981: 41) 72
Figure 3. Structural implications of three rules of cross-cousin marriage (Trautmann 1981: 202) 74
Figure 4. The marriage of the elder sisters daughter with the mothers younger brother, and the marriage of patrilateral cross cousins (Trautmann 1981: 207) 75
Figure 5. Ritual marriages between two Nayar tarawads (Trautmann 1981: 212) 76
Figure 6. Tamil and Hindi terms for mothers brother, fathers sisters husband, and spouses father
(Trautmann 1981: 24) 80

Chapter 8
Finding Indias Place
Figure 1. India in Ptolemy (Ptolemaeus 1545) 160 Figure 2. India in the New Table (Ptolemaeus 1545) 162 Figure 3. An Arab version of Ptolemys India

(Ptolemaeus 1928) 165
Figure 4. India in the map of Sir Jonas Moore (1681) 166
Figure 5. India in the map of dAnville (1758) 167
Figure 6. Britannia receiving the Shaster from the

x List of Illustrations

Indians (Rennell 1785) 169
Figure 7. Rennells map of India (1785) 170
Figure 8. Statue of Sir William Jones, St. Pauls
Cathedral, London (John Bacon 1799) 176
Figure 9. Detail of the statue of Jones 177
Figure 10. Map of the Indo-European language family179
Figure 11. Schleichers family tree of the Indo
European languages 180

Table 1. The synchronism of Biblical and Hindu
chronology, according to Sir William Jones 178

Chapter 10
Bashams Big Book
Figure 1. A.L. Basham (1939) 214

Chapter 11
Elephants and the Mauryas
Figure 1. Distribution of Elephas maximus 240 Figure 2. The eight elephant forests 241

Chapter 12
Reign & Generation
Table 1. Mean length of generation and reign (to the

nearest year) of medieval Indian kings according to A.L. Basham (1964: 86) 257

Table 2. Mean and standard deviation of generations and reigns of medieval Indian kings258
Table 3. Mean and standard deviation for one to ten successive generations and reigns of medieval
Indian kings 262
Table 4. Upper and lower extremes of frequency tables for one to ten successive generations and reigns of medieval Indian kings 264
Table 5. Gupta kings from Gupta to Kumra Gupta 268
Table 6. Kua kings from Kanika to Vsudeva 269
Table 7. Genealogy of the Kuas as proposed
by A.L. Basham (1964: 135) 270
Appendix table. Length of generation and reign for kings of medieval India 273

Series Editors Note

It is a pleasure to include in New Perspectives on Indian Pastsfor the third time nowyet another path-breaking work of the tireless historian, anthropologist, and scholar at large, Thomas Trautmann. This time, however, the series dispenses with my foreword to the volume. On the one hand, the departures and accomplishments of the scholarship of Trautmann, already widely known, have been discussed earlier in the series through the means of editorial forewords. On the other hand, the terms and textures of The Clash of Chronologiess a work that brings together a range of Trautmanns writings on distinct yet overlaying themes, all framed by a timely Introduction conjoining these concernspresciently, perfectly mesh with the plan and purpose of the series. Such a remarkable fit calls for abandoning further description, in order to await instead dialogue and debate on the part of scholars, students, and readers at large.

SAURABH DUBE Mexico City, 2009

Preface

Looking through pieces I had written at different dates and on different topics, it came to me recently that I had unknowingly been writing a book on time and the clash of chronologies. The book had emerged gradually and I only recognized later that the problem of time constituted a kind of hidden thread connecting these pieces. This theme, though admittedly it is sometimes below the surface and by no means obvious, is there, and it must have been guiding my work all along, by some inhering tendency. This is the book I did not know I was writing.

Most of the essays making up the book have been previously published, except for Finding Indias place (Chapter 8) and Bashams big book (Chapter 10), which had been given as public lectures. Some ideas of the first went into Chapter 1 of another book, Languages and nations: the Dravidian proof in colonial Madrass (2006), and a truncated version of the second appeared in a foreword to the fiftieth anniversary reprint of A.L. Bashams The wonder that was India , brought out by Picador (2004). But this is the first occasion in which these pieces appear in print as wholes.

The book includes one of my earliest published articles, Length of generation and reign (Chapter 12), published in 1969, while the most recent, The missionary and the Orientalist (Chapter 9) appeared in 2008. Most of the articles belong to the latter half of that rather long span. Nevertheless one could say that I dashed off this book in four decades.

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