Peabody, Tod's Rajasthan (1996)

Tod's Rajast'han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India
Author(s): Norbert Peabody

Source: Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Feb., 1996), pp. 185-220
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Modern Asian Studies 30, I (1996), pp.
I85-220.
Printed in Great Britain
Tod'sRajast'han and theBoundariesof

India
ImperialRule in Nineteenth-Century
NORBERT
PEABODY
Universityof Cambridge
This essay concerns the labile boundary between the familiar and the
exotic in an early nineteenth-century Orientalist text, entitled Annals
andAntiquitiesof Rajast'han,by James Tod. Written by the first British
political agent to the western Rajput states, Tod's Rajast'han,particularly the several chapters he devoted to the so-called 'feudal system'
of Rajasthan, remained implicated in colonial policy toward western
India for over a century. By situating Tod's Rajast'hanin the specific
circumstances in which it was written and then tracing the fate of
that text against a historical background, this essay aims to restore
an open-ended, historical sensibility to studies on Orientalism that
most critics of Orientalist writing have ironically forfeited in their
laudable efforts to restore history to the indigenous peoples who have
been the objects of Orientalist discourse.
Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism(1978), much
academic scrutiny has been directed at uncovering the various ways
in which Orientalist writers have posited an asymmetrically ranked,
ontological difference between the essential natures of European and
non-European civilizations.' Perhaps the most ambitious recent
Acknowledgments
The material presented in this essay is based upon research supported by the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization under a grant awarded in I992. Any opinions, findings,
and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the
author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NATO. This essay has benefited
enormously from critical readings of earlier drafts by C. A. Bayly, Michael Herzfeld,
and S. J. Tambiah. Some of the ideas contained herein were also developed in the
course of discussions with Subho Basu, Susan Bayly, R. S. Chandavarkar,Jayasinhji
Jhala, Gordon Johnson, and Anil Sethi. I wish to thank these people for their help
and criticism. At the same time I must also absolve them from responsibility for any
of the shortcomings in my argument. The kind understanding and warm hospitality
of Greta and Peter Hare at Haylers Farmhouse, where this essay was finally finished,
is greatly appreciated. Finally, I must acknowledge the steadfast support and encouragement of M. Brijraj Singh of Kotah.
For an important, but now often neglected, precursor to Said's work, see Asad
(1973).
oo26-749X/96/$7.50+o.
Io
I996 Cambridge University
Press
I85
I86
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example has been Ronald Inden's Imagining India (i990) in which he

has built on Said's arguments and proposed that European subjugation of India was facilitated (if not actually achieved) by Europeantrained writers who successfully defined Indian society in terms of
various 'essences' that kept India eternally ancient and passive. Inden
labels this process 'essentialism', which he defines as 'the idea that
humans and human institutions ... are governed by determinate
natures that inhere in them in the same way that they inhere in the
entities of the natural world' (Inden I990:2). As European-trained
scholars have worked these unchanging essences into their analyses
of India, they have stripped from the Indian people their agency.
Moreover, and this is really the crux of Inden's thesis, the persistence
of these imagined essences has justified European interventions in
India in order to act for, and on, these peoples. The most notable of
India's essences is caste, for it is apparently unique to India, but
Inden also identifies three other 'pillars' of Indological discourse,
including Hinduism, village India, and sacred kingship (although
each of these latter three, plus numerous other derivative 'essences'
that Inden uncovers, such as Tod's 'Rajput feudalism', are each reducible in one way or another to caste).
As Inden makes abundantly clear at several points throughout his
book, the Orientalist enterprise of fabricating essences has important
implications for understanding the West as well as India. In the
introduction to Imagining India, he makes the following manifesto and
challenge:
Euro-American Selves and Indian Others have not simply interacted as
entities that remain fundamentally the same. They have dialectically constituted one another ... India has played a part in the making of nineteenthand twentieth-century Europe (and America) much greater than the 'we' of
scholarship, journalism, and officialdom would normally wish to allow ...
India was (and to some extent still is) the object of thoughts and acts with
which this we has constituted itself. European discourses appear to separate
their Self from the Indian Other-the essence of Western thought is practical
reason, that of India dreamy imagination, or the essence of Western society
is the free (but selfish) individual, that of India an imprisoning (but all
providing) caste system. But is this really so? (Inden I990:3)
Thus for Inden, the process of essentializing the Oriental Other
entailed a largely invisible, parallel process of essentializing the European Self.2 An important consequence of Inden's understanding of
2
Whether 'essentializing' is an uniquely European predilection is, of course,
another question.
TOD'S
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187
the dual effects of Orientalism has been the need to redraw the boundaries of'colonialism' to include analyses of what previously had been
treated as distinctly European phenomena. The 'originary' European
notion of Self, based on such attributes as rationality and individual
autonomy, did not penetrate India and transform it. Rather, that
'originary' European identity was itself the product of the encounter
between East and West. In a sense, Inden has re-ordered Kipling's
famous ditty 'Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain
shall meet' so that it now reads 'East makes West and West makes
East and, without the Other, the Self is not complete.3
Inden must be commended for concentrating our attention on the
dialectical construction of Self and Other, and he has focused a valuable floodlight onto the clandestine, crypto-structuralist workings of
the South Asian avatar of Orientalism.4 His efforts have thus
broadened the boundaries of studies on Orientalism, in particular,
aild colonial studies, in general, by bringing a greater range of social
and intellectual phenomena under analytic scrutiny. While maintaining that Inden's study is useful starting point for any analysis of
colonial representations of India, I shall argue in this essay that he
has only taken a half-step in pushing back the boundaries of the
practice.
Through a closer examination of one of the Orientalist texts analyzed by Inden, Tod's Rajast'han,whose two volumes were first published in I829 and I832,5 I hope to make two interrelated points that
would lend both greater scope and subtlety to his basic thesis. The
first point takes the form of a simple observation, and it is this:
Inden's univariate analysis that correlates the difference between Self
and Other with the difference between European and Indian does
3
In an important respect, Inden proposes a more measured reworking of Nandy's

(1983) provocative thesis that in thelong-termthe most profound impact of the Indian
colonial experience was felt, ironically, in Great Britain with the distorted development of hyper-masculine, hyper-rational English identities rather than in South Asia.
That Inden understands the Orientalist delineation of essences in terms of strict
dichotomies, or binary oppositions, is most baldly put forth in his earlier article
'Orientalist Constructions of India' which was something of a dry-run for Imagining
India. In this article (Inden I986:402), he states 'Indological discourse ...
holds (or
simply assumes) that the essence of Indian civilization is just the opposite of the
West's.'
5 Tod's Rajast'hanhas been reprinted in numerous editions and formats. In order
to enhance recognition of my citations, in addition to the rather rare first edition, I
shall include references to two editions on which most contemporary reprints are
based, the 1914 'Popular Edition' and the I920 'Crooke Edition'. It should be noted,
however, that the I920 'Crooke Edition', on which Inden has relied, is the edition
in which the editor's reshaping of the original text is the most extensive.
i88
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not cover the full range of social representations that are expressed
in even a single Orientalist text, such as Tod's Rajast'han.Tod's characterizations do not coincide with Inden's neat two-column entries
of binary oppositions in at least two ways. First, on the Indian side of
the colonial divide, Tod carefully articulates a number of distinctions
between different indigenous social and political types. Although
Tod's text is ostensibly about 'feudal' Rajputs, he also devotes significant space to 'predatory' Marathas and 'despotic' Mughals. Inden's
analysis provides us with little with which to understand the need
for and significance of these further distinctions. Secondly, in Tod's
writings those who are classified one way in one context often are
reclassified differently in another. For example, although the Rajputs
are quintessentially 'feudal' in Tod's scheme, we also find him
labeling the RajputJhala Zalim Singh as a 'despot' (a term, according
to Inden, that Tod reserved for the Mughals). Inden dismisses these
multiple and shifting classifications as inconsistencies and relapses,
apparently further evidence of the feeble-mindedness of already misguided Orientalists who cannot even keep their own story straight.6
But are we to understand this 'schizophrenia' as resulting from the
weakness of intellect of Orientalist writers or is this evidence that
these writers were also supplementing Inden's logic with another with
which they were attempting to cope with contradictory sets of pressures emanating from several different sources?
What I shall propose in this essay is that, in addition to Inden's
strict dichotomizing logic, Indological discourse was shot through by
another mode of social categorization that was not premised on the
attribution of discrete, oppositional essences, that ontologically separated East from West. Rather this discourse was based on the idea
that there was a fundamental unity, or single essence, underlying all
humankind. In Tod's case, this unifying essence was expressed
through the idiom of Romantic nationalism and the idea that the
highest degree of human fulfillment is achieved through the complete
manifestation of one's transcendent national identity. Tod therefore
saw nationalism as the universal vehicle for self-realization, and he
attributed distinctive national identities to various Indian peoples.
This does not mean, however, that he assigned these nations an equality of status vis-a-vis the British. While Tod accepted national identity
as a transcendent reality, he argued that the nation only rarely
6
Inden thereby projects many of the same qualities of'irrationality'

ists that he blames Orientalists for projecting onto 'Orientals'.
onto Oriental-
TOD'S
'RAJAST'HAN'
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189
became fully manifest at particular moments in history. Moreover,

Tod used popular contemporary understandings of historical progress
and regression, as espoused by Scottish Enlightenment figures as
David Hume and John Millar and, particularly, the English Whig
historian Henry Hallam, to rank nations differentially against a continuous gradient of advancement and perfection. Because this history
was conceived in terms of following a single track and tending toward
a single goal, it produced a relational or segmentary mode of social
classification in which categories overlapped and could only be distinguished dependent upon context.7 Thus in this discourse, social representations simultaneously displayed affinities and differences and,
when dissimilarity was emphasized, it tended to be expressed in the
language of degree rather than kind.
This observation, that the social construction of difference may be
expressed in terms degree, as well as kind, through the use of historical metaphors, is hardly new. Inden certainly refers to this modality
(e.g. 1990:I5), as does his mentor Said (I978). However, these two
modes of constructing difference have typically been conflated, or

rather reduced to the latter, in much writing about Orientalism. And
in one important respect, there is sound reason for doing so. Both
modalities entail attempts by Selves to displace the agency of Others
and thus rationalize various interventionist agendas. In the segmented, historical mode of ordering societies, Self is always assumed
to be ranged at the most advanced or developed end of the continuum,
and because of its privileged position is admirably situated to guide
Others along their journey toward betterment. However, there are
also at least two related differences between these modalities. First,
because the segmented mode is not tied to the assumption of opposed
essences in which East is ontologically different from West, it permits
a unified analytic framework for the social construction of difference
that is simultaneously applicable to Oriental and Occidental contexts.
This facility is obviously important where the boundary between Self
and Other is not solely mapped against the coordinates of East and
West. At least two additional axes of social difference simultaneously
preoccupied European writers in the early nineteenth century (as
they still do so today in somewhat different guise). The first, whose
analysis can only be proposed here, constructs difference horizontally
within the several European imperial formations of the time among
7 Formulation
of this point is immediately indebted to Herzfeld (1987:
I52ff.),
but
the basic premise of segmentation, as Herzfeld himself points out, has a long history
in anthropology extending at least back to Evans-Pritchard.
I9go
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various orders of society, be they conceived on the basis of religion,

gender, social class or, even, political party.8 Suffice it to say, Tod's
writings on Rajasthan spoke to several public debates within England
in the years immediately prior to the Reform Act of I832 including
such issues as extension of the franchise, free trade and monopolies,
and aristocratic privilege. The second axis, which will be the principal
focus of this essay, constructs the boundaries of difference vertically
between the European imperial powers, particularly among the British, Russians, and French.
The second main difference between the two modes of Othering is
that because the segmented mode allows for the creation of much
more numerous and varied grades of distinctions between groups, by
simply varying the context or frame of reference, it permits Self to
construct a multiplicity of Others who are, importantly, divided
among themselves. These divisions simultaneously permit Self to
establish a much more labile boundary with particular groups; sometimes including them, sometimes excluding them, again by varying
the frame of reference, as per strategic concerns. This dual capacity
(to create a multiplicity of Others and to establish a shifting boundary
between Self and Other) is crucial to the classic strategy of divide,
co-opt, and rule that was informed by the imperatives of early nineteenth-century global politics involving both colonial rivalries with
various indigenous powers in India and imperial rivalries with other
European powers who also had interests in India. In sum, due to its
global scope (both in terms of application and factors that it
accommodates), the segmented mode of Othering might be profitably
conceived of as an imperial discourse as opposed to the more narrowly
defined colonial one implied by the term 'Orientalism'.
In adopting this position, it is not my intent to turn my back on
the insights of Inden and Said. Rather, I aim to show that Orientalist
discourse, as narrowly defined by these authors, was only strategically
deployed within specific contexts and that this discourse was supplemented by other discourses of Otherness as well. Moreover, the divergent orientations of these multiple discourses produced many tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions in writings about the Orient.
While late twentieth-century scholars, like Inden, have dismissed
these discrepancies, or attempted unproblematically to resolve them
8 For a
superb analysis of this sort with reference to James Mill's Historyof British
India,see Majeed (I992). See also Kuklick (I984), for a somewhat parallel discussion
of the relationship between contemporary British politics and Evans-Pritchard's
understanding of the Nuer.
TOD
S 'RAJAST'HAN'
(e.g. Inden 1990:42-43),
AND
I9TH
CENTURY
INDIA
I9I
I shall argue that such attempts bring a
distorting systematicity to the discursive practices of these earlier

writers. In other words, Inden may have confused the 'essentializing'
rhetoricthat Orientalist writers deployed in their texts with the actual
existence of stable, all-regulating essences underlying those self-same
texts. Or to put it yet another way, while Inden valuably exposes
how essences are not facts of nature governing human behavior, but
are attempts to naturalize unequal power relations that are socially
constituted, he nevertheless continues to reify them as literary
artefacts that govern the construction of the text. Ironically, while
Inden has done a great service in alerting us to the subtle ways in
which Orientalist writing, despite the language of scientific naturalism, was not objective but, in fact, highly situated in social relations,
he has not done likewise concerning the 'scientific' claims concerning
the uniformity and fixity of the ontological foundations underlying
these writings.9 As I hope to demonstrate in this essay, a text, such
as Tod's Rajast'han,is inhabited by a multiplicity of 'essences' which
are non-congruent, divergent, or discrepant and which open up the
text to multiple, often strategically deployed, interpretations. Thus in
this limited, but important, respect I shall suggest that Inden still
conflates certain key aspects of the ideology of his own cultural milieu
with its actual practices.10This is to say, 'classical natural scientific

thinking"' is less of a fixed set of rules about how knowledge is actually constituted in the West than it is an 'officializing strategy'
(Bourdieu I977:38-40) that seeks to naturalize what are often highly
mutable practices and thereby insulate them from too close scrutiny
by giving them the air of invariant fixity.'2
9 In formulating this position, I am greatly indebted to Tambiah (i990) and,
Herzfeld (1987).
especially,
10
Alternatively, for those who find the distinction between ideology and practice
problematic, the above mentioned tension may be seen as a debate within the 'metaphysics of science' as to how science itself should be ordered and conducted. As
Tambiah (1973) showed so long ago through his use of the key and hierarchy principles of taxonomic classification, Western scientific principles have been constructed
on various foundations capable of producing diverse effects. The point here is that
what constitutes acceptable scientific practice is hotly contested and this lack of
accord is an important dimension of the phenomena that requires analysis.
l Inden (1990:I3) enumerates nine characteristics that he associates with 'classical natural scientific thinking.' They are that it is objective, unified, bounded,
atomist, complete, self-centred, self-regulating, determinist, and essentialist.
12 Ironically, Inden recognizes that this duplicity has
always been a feature of the
natural sciences, witness his references to Feyerabend and Kuhn (Inden 1990:2I),
but does not see it as a feature in the social sciences. Could it be that the social
sciences have upheld scientific principles where the natural sciences have not?!
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Inden's critical lapse in this regard is symptomatic of a larger problem with his basic approach toward textual analysis that again reflects
back onto some of his assumptions about the West. His readings of
various Orientalist texts are largely retrospective historical projections; that is, they have been decontextualized from the specific circumstances in which they were written and against which they were
expected to be read. Instead each Orientalist text is analyzed only
insofar as it is an instantiation of the 'metaphysics of natural science'
that Inden sees as underlying all Indological discourse. The danger
of relying solely on retrospective analysis is that the resulting history
of Orientalist thought tends to the unilinear and teleological.'3 The
past is seen as inexorably culminating in the present and outcome is
conflated with cause. As a result, Inden sees his Western, rational,
scientific thought as an unitary, stable, and determinist structure
underlying (and thereby outside of) several centuries of Indological
discourse rather than as a manifold, emergent, and potentialist set of
practices that were part and parcel of that discourse.'4 This is not to
say that Inden's retrospective analysis is wrong; rather that it ought
to be interrelated with a prospective view that takes into account the
goals and intentions (both manifest and latent) of the author and his
intended contemporary readership. This dual perspective opens up
the text to a greater range of interpretations and uses, and allows the
analyst to chart in a more open-ended way how the chips of success
and failure fall among the several discursive strategies. The pitfall
with Inden's approach is that, by arguing that there is a self-manifest
and governing 'metaphysics of natural science' underlying Indological discourse, he runs the risk of essentializing the Western mind
and re-admitting through the back door the very divide between Self
and Other that he cast out through the front.
Using Tod's Rajast'hanas our point of departure, let us then turn
to the range of early nineteenth-century discursive practices on which
the social construction of difference was based. I shall begin by briefly
outlining Inden's gloss of Rajput feudalism, as portrayed by Tod in
order to reveal more fully how Inden's retrospective reading has
13
This is an ironic accusation considering that one of the things that Inden wants
to do for India is to free it from such forms of historical reductionism and to fashion
a more potentialist, open-ended understanding of Indian history that explores human
activity in its own right. For a parallel critique of Said, see al-'Azm (I981).
14 Thus we find that the construction of the Western Selves and Indian Others
was not a dialecticalprocess after all.
TOD'S
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193
reduced a series of multiply constituted, social relationships that were

variously informed by several axes of valuation to a single opposition
of just two stable, bounded groups that were defined by asymmetrically ranked, essentialist dyads (whose negative valence was caste).
Following this, I shall briefly sketch something of the early nineteenth-century historical context in which Tod was writing in order
to open up Tod's text to an alternative, or parallel, reading. Two
areas that had a direct impact on how Tod constructed social difference will be examined: i) the British East India Company's rivalry
with indigenous powers, especially the Marathas, and 2) British paranoia about French and Russian designs on India. In light of these
circumstances, I shall next present and analyze an alternative discourse underlying Tod's notion of Rajput feudalism. If this discourse
had an essence, that essence was nationalism. Tod's discourse on
nationalism not only provided a unified framework for the social production of difference that divided the British Self from various Others,
both European and non-European, but the conditions of its application also helped divide those Others among themselves in such a way
that simultaneously provided a moral justification for intervention
into their affairs while articulating a basis for distinguishing between
those groups to be co-opted into and those to be excluded from the
apparatus of empire. In conclusion, I shall look at the fate of Tod's
Rajast'hanas it was appropriated by the Indian nationalist movement
during the second half of the nineteenth century, and I shall show
how this 'unauthorized' usage of Tod, in turn, shaped the direction
of later Indological writing. In examining the role of indigenous
agency in Indology's history, I shall argue that Inden too is a partial
inheritor of Orientalism's legacy insofar as he re-inscribes Orientalist
assumptions about Indian passivity into his analysis of the history of
colonial representations.
Inden's Rajast'han
Inden presents Tod's Rajast'hanas a counterpoint (albeit in only limited respects) to James Mill's The Historyof British India. According
to Inden, these texts differed in two interrelated respects. The first
concerned whether or not despotism was the essence of the Hindu
state. Whereas Mill claimed that it was, Tod, according to Inden
(I990:174-5),
held despotism to be a Muslim characteristic that had
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taken root in the Gangetic plain under the Mughals.'5 The essence
of Tod's Hindu state, instead, was a form of feudalism that he saw
as surviving in the remoteness of western India in what is now Rajasthan. The second difference concerned who in these two political
formations held the reigns of power. In Mill's despotism, it was the
Brahmans because Hindu laws were supposedly of divine origin and
only the priests were thereby qualified to interpret them. Both judicial
and legislative authority thus lay with priests, and the king was but
an instrument of Brahmanical power. Tod, on the other hand, placed:
'legislative authority' in his ideal Rajput state in the hands of the prince
and not, as the despoticists did, in the hands of Brahmans. He described
the prince, with the aid of his civic council, . . . as promulgating 'all the
legislative enactments in which the general rights and wants of the community were involved'. (Inden 1990:173-4 glossing Tod)
Although free from a 'conspiring' priestly caste, Tod saw the feudal
Rajput state as inherently unstable. Feudal ties 'produced mutual
sympathy or loyalty' among Rajputs, but these links were perpetually
threatened with dissolution by inherent Rajput combativeness. As a
result, the Rajput state persisted in a perennially weakened condition
that prohibited them from ever successfully uniting against the Mughals, Marathas, or British. Rajput truculence was itself rooted in the
agnatic, or 'patriarchal', structure of their clan system whose existence rested on a myth of divine origin. 'The Rajput prince ... shared
his sovereignty and divinity with other Rajput rulers and nobles by
virtue of their common descent from the Sun or Moon'. This mythic
charter fostered 'a system of "feuds" in which warriors of the two
"races" descended from these deities, and the dynasties within these,
were perennially related as rivals' (Inden [1990:I73] glossing Tod)
so, in the final analysis, 'Tod's prince was the instrument of a transcendent structure of clan rivalries' (Inden 1990:175).
Inden then ends his discussion of Tod with the following
conclusion:
Indological discourse vacillated before the Sepoy or Indian Mutiny of 1857,
between depicting the Hindu state as a despotism whose essence was the
abuse of power (Mill) and as something of a feudalism whose essence was
a tie of vassalage and vendetta (Tod, Wilson). From the verymomentof its
15 Inden
therebydismissesTod's musingson despotismas being superfluousto

understandinghis conceptionof the Indian (i.e. Hindu) state. However,as we shall
see below,althoughTod did conceiveof despotismas an ideal type in the Weberian
sense, it did not constitutethe essence of a specificgroup. Tod clearly held that
Rajputswere equallycapableof despotismas were the British.
TOD'S
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195
formation, however, Indological discourse, whichever these positions its

makers have taken, has agreed on one thing: Hindu kingship is the instrument of the transcendent post-tribal or ancient society typical of India, that
of her castes, tribes, and clans. They differed primarily over whether that
caste system was a form of disorder or inferior order, but not over its position
as the true ruler of India. (Inden 1990:176,
emphasis added)
In other words, although Tod may have explicitly argued that Rajput
feudalism was the essence of the Indian state, Inden contends that
he latently rooted this form of feudalism in a deeper essence: caste.
And it is on this basis that Inden apparently feels justified in labeling
Tod's Rajput feudalism as 'Oriental feudalism'.'6 By arguing that
caste was at the heart of Tod's conception of the Rajput polity, Inden
suggests that Tod not only made the Rajputs ancient but also ontologically distinct from Europeans.
While Inden's reading of Tod may be plausible, let me suggest
here that it is only partial. For the contemporary student of India,
one of the refreshing aspects of Tod's Rajast'han is how little space is
devoted to the topic of caste.'7 Although perhaps not the most reliable
of indicators, Inden himself was able to gloss Tod's argument using
the word only once before reaching his remarkable conclusion that
Tod held caste to be 'the true ruler of India'. In his nearly 600o
pages of text, Tod singled out many categories for analytic scrutiny,
including geography, state formation, mythology, customs, festivals,
agriculture, and land revenue (to name a few); caste is not among
them. Even Tod's discussion of 'religious hierarchy', a place where
one might think he would tackle the issue of caste, turns out to be
an examination of the 'unnatural' amount of land controlled by the
'church'."8 The centrality placed by Inden on caste in his analysis of
Tod may be, in fact, another of his retrospective projections. For one,
the link between the kinship system within particular castes, such as
the clan system of the Rajputs, and the caste system writ large was
only made later toward the end of the nineteenth century with the
study of asymmetrical (particularly hypergamous) systems of marriage alliance. The plausibility of Inden's argument thus may rest on
the fact that his point of reference (and that of his readership) is
the mid-to-late twentieth century, when caste indeed became the
16
Inden, thereby, uses metonymic juxtaposition to equate Rajput feudalism with
the quintessential category of political Otherness, (Oriental) 'despotism'.
17 See also
Bayly (forthcoming).
18 Tod's discussion is
largely informed by Hallam's (1819, II:198-374) critique of
the power of the church in feudal Europe which was itself a thinly veiled criticism
of ecclesiastical privilege in early nineteenth-century England.
I96
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dominant trope for interpreting Indian society. This is not to contend

that early Orientalists did not exercise themselves over caste, but
whether Inden's specific hierarchy of essences, in which caste lay
at the root, was already generally and firmly established within all
Indological discourse 'from the very moment of its formation' is open
to question. Indeed, it may be worth considering whether Inden's
assertion that caste is the essence behind two centuries of Indology
would better be reformulated as a historical question that asks how
over the course of this same period caste emerged, from a range of
competing metaphors, to become dominant.
This question becomes more vexing if one asks why Tod deployed
the analogy of feudalism in the first place, considering all the other
terms of Otherness that were available to him including 'Oriental
despotism'. If all Indological discourse is simply about establishing
an unambiguous boundary between European Selves and Indian
Others, as Inden argues, then one wonders why Tod placed this
separation at risk by using a trope that would naturally invite close
comparison (as opposed to contrast) with Europe? That Tod's attitudes had this unsettling effect among certain of his contemporaries
(particularly Ochterlony) is borne out by the fact that, as Bishop
Heber wrote in I824 (I828,
1:42-3), his Company career ended in
premature retirement amidst accusations of favoring native princes

and Rajput partisanship (see also Sen [I944]).19 Furthermore, con-
temporary reviews of Tod's Rajast'han expressed nearly universal

skepticism about the feudalism analogy on the grounds that European
and Rajput feudalism were fundamentally different, thus implying
that they understood Tod to be arguing that they were fundamentally
the same.20 So if Tod did make an ontological distinction between
European and Rajput variants of feudalism on the grounds of caste,
it was not readily apparent to his contemporary readership on whom
it was supposedly having this inebriating effect. Indeed, the one
reviewer who did comment on the type of dichotomy proposed by
Inden did so precisely in the context of pointing out how contradictory Tod's own evidence and conclusions on the matter were. The
reviewer notes that in some places Tod rooted Rajput combativeness
19 Tod did not
complete his Rajast'hanuntil after returning to England (though
significant portions of it were written as early as I820-21 while he was still in India).
Nevertheless, many of the attitudes that he expressed in the text already informed
his activities and policies when he was Political Agent (1818-22) as will become
apparent below.
0
See, for example,

(1839).
Anonymous
(1829); Anonymous
(1830);
and Anonymous
TOD'S
'RAJAST'HAN5
AND
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I97
and political disunity in Hindu myth and religion but he elsewhere

claimed that this martial spirit owed its origins to non-Indian and
non-Hindu sources. To support the second position, the reviewer
(Anonymous
1832:8-9) cites the following passage from Tod
(I829:69;
I914,
1:57; 1920:81-2):
The religion of the martial Rajpoot, and the rites of Har, the god of battle,
are little analogous to those of the meek Hindus, the followers of the pastoral
divinity, the worshippers of kine and feeders on fruits, herbs and water. The
Rajpoot delights in blood: his offerings to the god of battle are sanguinary,
blood and wine; the cup (cupra) of libation is the human skull ... Is this
Hinduism acquired on the burning plains of India? Is it not rather a perfect
picture of the manners of the Scandinavian heroes? The Rajpoot ... worships his horse, his sword, and the sun, and attends more to the martial
song of the bard, than the litany of the Brahman. In the martial mythology
and warlike poetry of the Scandinavians, a wide field exists for assimilation,
and comparison of the poetical remains of the Asi of the East and West
would alone suffice to suggest a common origin.21
In this context it may be indicative that Tod situated his discussion
of Rajput feudalism, not within extant debates about the Indian state,
but within debates about the nature of various European states. Tod's
decision to place his discussion of Rajput feudalism in this context
reflects, I feel, his inclination to see at least some aspects of India
and Europe within a unified analytic field rather than a dichotomous
one. And as such, Tod was not constituting a knowledge whose use
was simply restricted to governing the East; it was also intended to
be of value in understanding (and dominating) the West. Therefore,
Inden's framing of his discussion of Tod solely with reference to Mill's
History of British India is somewhat misleading. Tod's explicit source
of inspiration and focus of contention was Henry Hallam's View of the
State of Europe during the Middle Ages.22 Although Mill's History first
appeared in I81I7, Tod himself never expressly engaged with it.23 He
21 See also Tod
(1827:303-9;
22
1830).
Hallam's Middle Ages was first published in i818 (in two volumes) and was
reprinted in several editions both in England and abroad by several different publishers in the years immediately thereafter. From Tod's incomplete citations of
Hallam, it appears that he consulted the second edition (in three volumes) which
was published in 1819. I, therefore, shall quote from this edition.
23 Mill and
Hallam, of course, were both leading members of the Society for the
Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and it is likely they knew each other's work. Their
membership in this organization is perhaps further evidence of the way in which
Indian and European historiography were still explicitly seen as resting on the same
epistemological foundations rather than separate ones (C. A. Bayly: personal
communication). See also Majeed (1992).
I98
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preferred, instead, to address historians of Europe including Gibbon,

Hume, Millar, and Montesquieu.24
It was the English Whig historian Hallam, however, who exercised
Tod most for he had argued that feudalism was a phenomenon that
was unique to England, France, and parts of Germany and had no
counterpart elsewhere in the world, including India and the rest of
Europe.
It has been very common to seek the origin of feuds,25or at least analogies
to them, in the history of various countries: but though it is of great importance to trace the similarity of customs in different parts of the world, we
should guard against seeming analogies, which vanish away when they are
closely observed. It is easy to find partial resemblances to the feudal system
... Such a resemblance may be found in the Zemindars of Hindust'han and
the Timariots of Turkey. The clans of the Highlanders and the Irish followed
the chieftain into the field: but their tie was that of imagined kindred and
birth, not the spontaneous compact of vassalage.
quoted by Tod I829:I32; I914, I:109; 1920:156-7)
(Hallam
1819, I:200;
A large portion of Tod's analysis, on the contrary, contested this

distinction and attempted to establish several important underlying
commonalties between the Rajputs and the English (albeit on firmly
prejudicial, Eurocentric terms) that, in turn, distinguished the
Rajputs from other Indian (and European) groups. Thus, Tod argued
that the tribes of early Europe and 'the Rajpoot tribes' had a common
Scythic origin in Central Asia and, in the more recent past, the
Rajputs of western India had a feudal system similar to that which
had existed in parts of Europe.26
The argument about feudalism is significant because, although
Tod's mentor, Hallam, did not see feudalism as representing a condition of political perfection, he did feel that the feudal system was the
chrysalis out of which emerged many of Europe's most cherished
ideas about itself, including the creation of a civil society that secured,
among other things, basic civil liberties and private property. Hallam
wrote:
(1819, I:320-I)
24
By the same token, Tod did not engage with Edmund Burke's earlier Indian
of the feudalism metaphor.
application
25
When Hallam and Tod used the term 'feud,' they used it in two different senses;
the first, meaning a 'feudal benefice' or 'fief', and the second, meaning a 'contention'
or 'quarrel'. The first sense is implied in this quotation.
26
Bayly (I989:154-5) has suggested Tod's archaizing, 'neo-Gothic' writing style
was part of a deliberate attempt to establish the connexion between Rajasthan and
Europe aestheticallyas well as metaphorically. Concerning Tod's translations of the
poet Chand, another commentator noted that he adopted a specifically 'Ossianic
rhythm' (Anonymous I839: v).
TOD
S 'RAJAST'HAN'
AND
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I99
If we look at the feudal polity as a scheme of civil freedom, it bears a noble

countenance. To the feudal law it is owing, that the very names of right and
privilege were not swept away, as in Asia, by the desolating hand of power.
The tyranny which, on every favourable moment, was breaking through all
barriers, would have rioted without controul, if, when the people were poor
and disunited, the nobility had not been brave and free. So far as the sphere
of feudality extended, it diffused the spirit of liberty, and the notions of
private right.
Tod, no doubt, asymmetrically distinguished between Rajput feudalism, which was patriarchal and therefore rooted in status, and
English feudalism, which was monarchical and therefore based on
contract,27 as Inden rightly observes, but this is the same order of
distinction that Hallam drew within Europe among the German,
French, and English variants of feudalism. Here Hallam was keen to
show how English feudalism represented the most perfect example of
this institution, for it enabled the establishment of a 'free and just
constitution' that instituted a formal equality (i.e. unity) among all
citizens under the law, whereas the French and German manifestations were lacking by comparison in one way or another.28 Hallam's
castigation of the French and German models is instructive for it
plays on the very themes of political unity and disunity that Inden
uncovers as the essence of Tod's Orientalist thought. Paradoxically,
Hallam argued that the inherent disunity in French and German
societies produced, respectively, despotism and extreme political fragmentation. In France during the Middle Ages, Hallam argued that
the aristocracy's refusal to relinquish various formal privileges and
immunities divided them from the gentry and freemen. This internal
division then enabled the monarchy to achieve a commanding and
unassailable position in France leading to French despotism starting
with the reign of Louis XI, which in turn, resulted in the absolutism
of Louis XIV, the Jacobin Revolution, and ultimately Napoleon.29
In medieval Germany, it was the failure of the nobility to adopt
primogeniture that led political authority to become fragmented and
the state to remain weak (Hallam 1819, II:ii6ff). Significantly,
Hallam (1819, 11:135) saw the fragmentation of the German nobility
as the ultimate cause for Germany's capitulation to 'the unprincipled
27
Tod articulated this distinction most succinctly in his 'Letter to T. Hyde Villi-
ers, Esq.' (Tod 1832b).
This point is most forcefully made in Hallam's Constitutional

Historyof England
from theAccessionof Henry VII to the Death of GeorgeIII (Burrow 1981:31-2). See also
28
Hallam (1819, 1:357).

29 See also Burrow
(198I:31-3).
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rapacity of our own age' (i.e. Napoleon). In sum, Tod's distinctions

were not unique to the colonial situation, but also could be fit into a
broader set of distinctions that the British were making within Europe
as well.
In any case, the term feudalism, as applied to the English, Rajput,
French and German cases, whatever their internal differences, was
intended as a category of political inclusion whenread against other
less desirable forms of government. Hallam thus contrasted the feudalisms of England, France, and Germany with the more primitive,
non-feudal governments that existed in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe,
the Mediterranean, Turkey and India. Likewise, Tod favourably contrasted the Rajput feudal polity with two other types, Mughal 'despotism' and Maratha 'predation'. It is only by dropping this further
comparison, as Inden has done, that Tod's initial distinction between
the English and Rajput variants of feudalism which had been conceived in terms of a difference of degree could be reconstituted in
terms of a difference of kind. While Tod may have strategically narrowed his frame of reference in particularcontexts(for example, when
discussing the potential threat that the Rajputs posed to the British),
Inden has narrowed Tod's frame of reference categorically.As a result,
Inden has impoverished much of the polysemic, or what Herzfeld

(I982;
I987:95-150) has called 'disemic', richness of Tod's text.30 But
before exploring this matter more fully, let us turn to the historical
context that shaped Tod's thought helping to explain why disemia
was an important facet in early nineteenth century British writing
about India.3'
30 Herzfeld has coined the term 'disemia' to
express the 'semiotic phenomenon in
which individuals are able to negotiate social, national, ethnic, or political boundaries
through a potentially inexhaustible range of co-domains.' (I982:205; see also 1987:
In this circumstance, it is not the sign but rather the way the sign is read
95-150).
against a set of different contexts that gives it varied meanings. In other words, the
sign is a 'shifter' whose interpretation 'depends on the relationship between the
context of the utterance and the context of the action' (Herzfeld 1987: 2o8n 5). Take,
for example, the theme of Rajput political atomism in Tod's work. This trait is
seen as a cultural deficiency (political disunity) when placed in relation to British
constitutionality (i.e. political unity). However, the same sign is read as 'patriotism'
and 'love of country'-the highest of European virtues-when it was directed against
the Marathas or, potentially, the Russians (see also Herzfeld 1987:123-7). Because
Orientalist discourse often clothes the sign in the rhetoric of naturalism, essentialism,
and fixity, we are substantially blinded to the shifting meanings and relative values
that are associated with them. This blindness does not mean that such multiple
meanings do not exist.
31 In
coining the term disemia, Herzfeld was primarily concerned with the phenomenon as it existed in the colonial and para-colonial context of Greece. In doing
TOD
S 'RAJAST'HAN'
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Anxieties of Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century
201
India
Although Inden has read Tod's discussion of Rajput feudalism as a

cipher for interpreting the Hindu political order writ large, and
although Tod's text may have indeed become such a cipher in the
hands of later colonial commentators such as Lyall (1882) and Crooke
Tod himself did not write his
(in his introduction to Tod [1920]),
Rajast'hansolely with this goal in mind. The Rajputs may have been
exemplary Hindus to Tod, but they certainly did not represent all
Hindus. Instead, they were just one of a number of Indian groups
with whom the British were engaged at that time, and Tod's Rajast'hanwas part of a larger effort that specifically aimed to distinguish
among different groups on the ground.32 The most notable of the
non-Rajput groups that concerned Tod were the Marathas, who had
been the main indigenous rivals of the British in India during his
Company career (I798-1822) and had dominated Rajasthan in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before the British finally
expelled them during the Third Anglo-Maratha War (1816-18).
Tod, himself, knew the Marathas firsthand, having served the British Resident at the court/camp of Daulat Rao Sindhia from I805
until his appointment as Political Agent to the Western Rajput States
in I8I8.33 Significantly, he spent much of the years 81 7-18 enlisting
Rajput military and logistical support for the British against the
Marathas. Several other independent indigenous powers, in addition
to the Marathas, preoccupied the British at the beginning of the
so, he skillfully charts how its manifestation among the colonizedwas informed by
unequal power relations between Greece and 'the Great Powers' of Western Europe.
I am extending the potential usage of Herzfeld's concept in two ways. First, geographically, by applying it to India and, second, and more importantly, by showing
how it also illuminates much about the slippery play of social representations among
the colonizers.By explicitly examining the constraints informing the British production
of social representations about India, I hope to put our understanding of colonial
'power' on a somewhat different footing than has heretofore been fashionable.
32 That Tod's text was interpreted in this light at the time is revealed in the review
of his book in The EdinburghReview.The anonymous reviewer praises Tod's work
as an important contribution to the ongoing effort of revealing India's diversity.
Significantly, this diversity is not seen as a hallmark of Indian Otherness but is
explicitly likened to Europe: 'The bulk of Europeans conceive of the people of India
as a homogeneous mass, yet its various nations are as much disunited by physical
circumstances, and as broadly discriminated by language, complexion, habits and
character, as are the inhabitants of the different countries of Europe, not excluding
even the Turks.' (Anonymous 1830:86). These sentiments are repeated by Anonymous (I832a:73).
33
For a more complete biography of Tod, see Anonymous (1839).
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nineteenth century, including the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, the

Amirs of Sind, the Afghans, and the Gurkhas.34The Rajput states,
which were, as Tod reminded King George IV in the dedication of
his book, 'the most remote tributaries to Your Majesty's extensive
empire', remained exposed to the disruptive threat of these, as yet,
independent polities to the north-west.35 In fact, during the I82os
and 30s the north-west frontier remained the quarter from which the
British most expected trouble. This fear was only deepened by the
fact that within British India the British relied heavily on indigenous
groups to do their bidding.36 Tod, for example, candidly admitted:
'We are few: to use an Oriental metaphor, our agents must "use the
eyes and ears of others"' (Tod
1829:125;
1914,
I:103;
I920:I49).37
British concerns about the north-west were further augmented by

an additional, European, threat from this direction. The Russians at
this time were busy expanding their empire in Central Asia and were
poised, it was feared, to push further south across Afghanistan
through the Khyber Pass into India (Tod I832b:I28). This was the
origin of Kim's 'Great Game', and even Lord Bentinck
(Governor-General of India, I828-35) believed that there were Russian spies in Calcutta (Rosselli 1974:233). Tod (I832b:128) warned
that the Russians could make common cause with every malcontent
See, for example,Tod (1832b:I27-28) and Bentinck(I977 [I835]).
The fear here was less of invasion from these native powers than that instability
in these states would spill over into those areas under British influence and would
incite insurrection against the British among 'discontented' groups like the Marathas
and the Pindaris (Tod i832b:127-8).
36 For British dependence on i) native troops, see Metcalfe (1977 [1829]),
Rosselli
34
35
(1974:182), and Alavi (1993), on 2) native capital, see Bayly (i983) and Washbrook
(I990), and on 3) native information networks, see Bayly (i993).
37 Lest Tod's anxieties be dismissed as a lone voice in the wilderness, let me also
quote from the 'Minute on the Future Government of India' (ii October I829) of
Sir Charles Metcalfe (later Governor-General of India 1835-38) which largely met
with approval from Lord Bentinck (Governor-General of India 1828-35): 'Our hold
is so precarious, that a very little mismanagement might accomplish our expulsion:
and the course of events may be of itself sufficient, without any mismanagement.
'We are to appearance more powerful in India than we ever were. Nevertheless
our downfall may be short work. When it commences it will probably be rapid: and
the world will wonder more at the suddenness with which our immense Indian
empire may vanish, than it has done at the surprising conquest that we have
achieved.
'The cause of this precariousness is, that our power does not rest in actual strength,
but on impression. Our whole real strength consists in the few European regiments,
speaking comparatively, that are scattered singly over the vast sphere of subjugated
India. This is the only portion of our soldiery whose hearts are with us, and whose
constancy can be relied on in the hour of trial.' (Metcalfe I977 [I829]:3 0-1 I).
TOD'S 'RAJAST'HAN'
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203
in India, especially the Marathas, leading to disastrous consequences

for the British.38 The Russians, in fact, were just the latest of Britain's
European rivals in India. Most of Tod's career coincided with the
French Wars (1793-1815)
and, as Bayly (I989:100-32) has argued,
British imperial policy both within and beyond Europe during the
early nineteenth century was largely driven by conservative Britain's
desire to contain the Jacobin threat of revolutionary France (see also
Colley 1992). An interesting feature of this overriding fear of the
French is that the British often 'Gallicized' their Indian rivals. For
example, Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) decried the
Nizam of Hyderabad's army as being 'French and Jacobin' (Batbedat
I990: I16) and, significantly for our present purposes, the Marathas
were denigrated as 'the Frenchmen of Asia' (Bayly I989: I 4) .39 Mar-
atha and Sikh employment of well-known French officers, such as de

Boigne, Perron, Allard, Ventura, and Court, further fueled British
paranoia about the French. In sum, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century the British remained highly insecure about the strength of
their position in India.40The Company Raj was not robust and selfconfident; at best, it could be said that its mood swung wildly between
moments of superhuman invincibility and moments of deep fear of
being exposed as a hollow crown.
Given these early nineteenth-century
concerns, it was not only
important for the British to define themselves over and against Indians but also in opposition to other Europeans who, to complicate
matters, often had competing interests in India (or so it was feared).
As a result of these interlocking, multilateral oppositions, the British

established their relationship with different groups within their colonies in a much more multifarious fashion than allowed by Inden, and
indeed Said. Inden treats the European colonial powers as if they
were monolithic entities, whose internal divisions left no impact on
how Europe engaged with the 'Orient'. European rivalries, however,
deeply affected how Europeans thought about and dealt with the
'Orient'. In fact, the undifferentiated landscape of the Orient broke
38
Although the Marathas had been defeated in I8I8, Tod (I832b: 123) feared that
their power easily could become resurgent. This apprehension should not be surprising considering that the British had fought no less than three wars with the Marathas
in Tod's lifetime.
39
At the very end of his Travelsin WesternIndia (I839:500-I),
Tod too drew a
poetic connexion between Napoleon and the Mughals as falling under the same
'northern star' of'[i]ll-weaved ambition'.
40 For British anxiety about empire, see Rosselli (I974:181-83); Bayly (I989:0oo-
32); and Leask (1992).
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down into a highly varied terrain under these pressures as it became

important not simply to pacify, but to co-opt, local groups to take
part in the global struggle. Maintaining the active support of groups,
like the Rajputs for example, was not only important in meeting
the threat of indigenous rivals41but also in countering the imperial
aspirations of other European powers.42Inden's analysis ignores this
dimension of the problem, and although he claims to include relations
between colony and metropole within his analysis he has not been
sufficiently alive to how European rivalries, both within Europe and
in the broader arena of world-wide empire, recursively shaped how
European metropoles engaged with their colonies.43 Due to this
lacuna, Inden's redrawing of the boundaries of colonialism has not
been radical enough, and he, therefore, overly simplifies, in terms of
stark and fixed dichotomies, how Orientalist writers, such as Tod,
depicted India.
In the remainder of this essay I shall explore an alternative discourse by which Tod constructed social difference. This discourse did
not 'essentialize' India in caste in opposition to the West. Rather, if
an essence did inhabit this discourse, it was Romantic nationalism
insofar as Tod treated the Rajputs, Marathas, and Mughals as distinct, transcendent 'nations'. Moreover, the specific terms with which
Tod depicted these Indian nations were much the same as applied
by the British to other European nations. Although multi-nationalism
and imperialism may initially appear to be fundamentally contradictory tenets (that is, as Anderson has argued [I99I:67-82], nationalism
has been the principal ideological cudgel in most nineteenth- and
twentieth-century anti-imperial movements), I shall show how multiple nationalisms could also be strategically deployed in supporting
the work of empire, particularly during a period of imperial competition and expansion.
(An)Other Tod's Rajast'han: The Rajput Nation
This section consists of three parts. The first will briefly explore some
of the early nineteenth-century meanings that Tod associated with
41 For example, Tod acknowledged in several instances that Rajput support was
crucial to the eventual success of the British in defeating the Marathas (e.g. I832a:
550; I914, II:444; I920:1571).
42
For the importance of the Rajputs in countering the Russians, see Tod
(1832b: 28).
43 See Rosselli
(I974);
Bayly (I989);
and Colley (1992).
TOD S 'RAJAST'HAN'
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205
the term 'nation'. The second will then show how these ideas were put
into practice in order to construct difference among nations thereby
servicing an empire that was expanding both in India and in Europe.
And the last part will show how this discourse on nationalism informs
many of Tod's apparently contradictory statements about different
Indian groups.
i. The 'nation' in early nineteenth-century
thought
It is well known that the term 'nation' has a long history of use and
its semantic content has not been stable.44 However, both Hobsbawm
and Anderson agree that at least several of the most important characteristics now associated with Romantic nationalism emerged during
the early nineteenth century when Tod was writing,45 and that Tod's
application of the term 'nation' to the Rajputs was informed by these
ideas is borne out in the policies that he enacted, or advocated, during
his career. Anderson's (199I:7) minimal definition of the nation, as
a social group that is imagined to be limited, sovereign, and a community, may thus serve as a convenient point of departure. According
to Anderson, the nation is limited insofar as it has 'finite, if elastic,
boundaries, beyond which lie other nations'. In other words, its territorial jurisdiction is contiguous and circumscribed. The nation is imagined as sovereign insofar as it does not accept inclusion within any
larger 'divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm'.46 And finally,
it is imagined as a community insofar as it maintains the ideology
(whatever the reality) of 'a deep, horizontal comradeship' among all
those who belong to it. That is to say, there is an undifferentiated
unity and formal equality of all citizens.47 To this basic definition, one
44 See Hobsbawm
(1991:I4-45)
for some of the distinctive
eighteenth-century
meanings associated with the term.

45 Hobsbawm (I991:38) suggests that 1830 was the watershed date for this usage
whereas Anderson ( 1991:8i) pushes the modern concept back a decade or two earlier.
46 As Hobsbawm
points out (I99I:3I-2)
this characteristic
may not have been
generally accepted until later in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the
century, the 'threshold principle', whereby nation's aspirations to sovereignty were
conditional upon its capacity to be 'economically and culturally viable', still held
currency among many political theorists. The criteria of national 'viability' (however
variably that may have been defined) was used, for example, to deny sovereignty to
the Scottish and Welsh 'nations', and it no doubt could have been deployed against
the Rajput 'petty states'. Tod, however, himself a Scotsman, did not subscribe to
this principle, as should become clear below.
47 For the purposes of the present argument, it is not necessary to get into the
various debates concerning the central role that Anderson assigns to the use of
vernacular languages in defining the community in the first place (e.g. Hobsbawm
1991:93-100).
Suffice it to say, the community is imagined on some basis.
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might add (as Anderson himself does) that the nation is imagined
as a transcendent reality.48Its existence is absolute and everlasting
(infinitely stretching both backward and, hopefully, forward in
history), though at any moment in time this national identity may
not be fully manifest.49
Significantly, three of Tod's policy recommendations, the first two
of which were implemented and a third that was not, were informed
by these ideas. The first reflected a belief that the nation consists of
a single community. A precondition of the treaties that Tod negotiated with the Rajput rulers in Rajasthan in 1817-I818 was the expulsion from 'Rajput' territories of all 'foreign' groups, by which was
typically meant Pindaris and, especially, Marathas.50 The second
reflected the belief that the nation-state should be territorially
bounded. From the perspective of European statist ideologies, one of
the striking features of early nineteenth-century Rajasthani polities
was that they were built on webs of criss-crossing, non-exclusive political relationships that produced state formations that were neither
founded on the basis of territorial integrity nor absolute and exclusive
political loyalties. Tod saw this condition as an aberration resulting
from the disruptive effects of the Maratha invasions during the eightThis feature is particularly strong in 'Old World' nationalisms.
According to Hobsbawm (I991:102) the term 'nationalism', meaning 'devotion
to one's nation; a policy of national independence', may only date to the end of the
nineteenth century (the O.E.D. dates the term to I844). Tod himself did not use the
word, while his contemporary Wilson (I86i, 11:365) used the phrase 'the spirit of
nationalisation'. Hobsbawm prefers the expression 'principle of nationality' to
describe the early and mid nineteenth-century phenomenon, and he restricts the use
of 'nationalism' to the conservative 'official nationalisms' (to borrow Anderson's
expression) of various dynastic regimes that struggled on for survival into the early
48
49
twentieth century. Anderson (I99i:67),
on the other hand, applies the term more
broadly, both temporally and politically (he includes earlier revolutionary antidynastic movements within this category). Though Anderson's usage may be somewhat anachronistic, I will follow his usage in preference to Hobsbawm's more cumbersome 'principle of nationality' with the defense that a thing need not be named
as such in order for it to exist.
50 In Kota, for example, any of these groups had long-standing roots and left
neither of their own volition nor with the active intrigue of the Kota durbar. The case
of Lalaji Ballal Gulgule is unusual only insofar as he was one of the few successfully to
resist 'repatriation'. The Gulgules had been the Maratha vakils in Kota responsible
for collecting tribute there and in surrounding states. They also were heavily involved
in money-lending in Kota, particularly to the Kota court. Thus, when the British
attempted to move the Marathas out of Rajasthan, Lalaji Gulgule resisted because
he stood to lose a lucrative business, and it was uncertain that once gone the Kota
durbar would make good on any of its outstanding debts. For its part, the Kota
durbar stood behind Lalaji Gulgule because he was one of the most important sources
of credit and ready cash in Kota.
TOD'S
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INDIA
207
eenth century,5' and he aimed to correct this 'degradation' by transferring territory among various princes and military commanders,
thereby (re)creating consolidated states, and routinizing political
hierarchies along more 'bureaucratic' principles.52
Tod's most radical policy recommendation, which unsurprisingly
was never accepted, concerned Rajput sovereignty. Although Tod
remained confident to the end that the British had 'liberated' the
Rajputs from 'Maratha thralldom', he felt the conditions that the
British imposed on the Rajputs in the treaties of alliance and protection were having precisely the same deleterious effect on the Rajputs
as Maratha domination. Although Tod is often credited with being
one of the early architects of the doctrine of 'indirect rule' over the
Native States (e.g. Inden 1990:176), in fact, he himself was acutely
aware of how this policy was utterly subversive to the stated goal of
preserving them as viable entities. Under the terms of'indirect rule',
local princes theoretically maintained control over the internal
administration of their domains while accepting British protection
and control over their foreign affairs (for which they were expected
to pay tribute and supply troops to the Company). This arrangement
was intended to provide increased political stability to the region
without increasing the cost of empire, but Tod surmised:
Our anomalous and inconsistent interference in some cases, and our noninterference in others, operate alike to augment the dislocation induced by
[the] long predatory oppression [of the Marathas] . . ., instead of restoring
that harmony and continuity which previously existed. The great danger,
nay, the inevitable consequence of perseverance in this line of conduct, will
be their reduction to the same degradation with our other allies, and their
ultimate incorporation with our already too extended dominion. (Tod 1829:
I24; I9I4, I: 02: I920:I48-9)
Moreover, Tod did not merely advocate a policy of more scrupulous

non-interference with respect to the internal affairs of the Rajput
states (while maintaining control over their foreign affairs), he felt
51
Schwartzberg (1992:295) has commented on the lack of an indigenous tradition
of political map-making in South Asia. His observation has good reason. It is hard
to represent in two dimensions a series of socio-political relationships that were never
conceived in terms of spatial referents.
52 In order to 'reconstitute' the integrity of Mewar, not only were the Marathas
forced to renounce their revenue interests in large amounts of territory in southern
Rajasthan in favor of the Rana, but rulers of other Rajput states such as Kota also
had to renounce their rights in various lands that fell 'within' Mewar. For example,
Tod forced Kota to relinquish claims over the parganasofJahazpur and Itoda because
they were not contiguous to the bulk of Kota and were surrounded by territory
otherwise attached to Mewar.
208
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that they would be best dealt with as sovereign states. Concerning

the 'two grand principles of mutual benefit' on which the treaties of
subsidiary alliance were built, that is 'perfect internal independence'
of the Rajputs and 'acknowledged supremacy' of the British, he himself realized how mutually incompatible they were. Tod (I829:125;
1914,
I:Io2;
I920:149)
maintained
that 'far from possessing
those
durable qualities which the contracting parties define, ... on the

contrary, they are ... the good and evil principles of contention.'
Tod later concluded that '[t]rue policy would enfranchise them altogether
from our alliance'
(Tod
I829:I26;
I914,
I:Io3;
I920:I50).53
The real danger of the treaties, however, was in their 'denationalising'

effect. Under the treaties, he feared:
The inevitable consequence is the perpetuation of that denationalising principle, so well understood by the Mahrattas,
'divide et impera.' . . . [A]11 the
sentiments of gratitude which [the Rajputs] ... owe, and acknowledge to

be our due, will gradually fade with the national degradation. That our
alliances have this tendency cannot be disputed ... Who will dare to urge
that a government, which cannot support its internal rule without restriction, can be national? that without power unshackled and unrestrained by
exterior council or espionage, it can maintain its self-respect. . .? This first of
feelings these treaties utterly annihilate. Can we suppose such denationalised
allies are to be depended upon in emergencies? or, if allowed to retain a
spark of their ancient moral inheritance, that it will not be kindled into a
flame against us when opportunity offers . ..? (Tod i829:I25-6;
I920: I49-50)
I914, 1:103;
2. Imperialism, nationalism, and the social constructionof difference

As should be transparent from the preceding, in proposing that the
Rajputs possessed a transcendent national identity, Tod was not without self-interested goals. The way in which Tod prefaced his advocacy
of the Rajput nation furthered British imperial ambitions in at least
three ways. First, by defining national identities at a relatively local
level, in terms of separate Rajput and Maratha nations, Tod divided
the Rajputs and Marathas into two opposed groups where previously
no such absolute distinction had existed.54 With this division, Tod
3 This
position is put even more forcefully in the Anonymous ( 832a:95-7) review
of Tod's Rajast'hanin The EdinburghReview.
54 The precolonial divide between Maratha and Rajput had been much more
labile and contextually contingent. For example, during the height of the Maratha
power in Rajasthan in the eighteenth century, many Rajputs eagerly established
'fictive' kin relations with the wives of important Maratha leaders through the ritual
TOD'S
'RAJAST'HAN'
AND
I9TH
CENTURY
INDIA
209
simultaneously delegitimated the Maratha presence in Rajasthan.

The Marathas became 'foreign' invaders who had a 'denationalising'
effect on the 'indigenous' Rajputs.55 Third, by claiming the Rajput
nation had become 'denationalised' under the Marathas, Tod delegitimated the contemporary Rajput polity as 'degraded' or 'fallen'. British imperialism could then be recast in a (potentially) paternalistic
guise whose goal was to revivify a lapsed local nationality. Tod thus
used the transcendent national identities of various Indian peoples to
create a taxonomy of indigenous groups that not only divided them
among themselves (denationalising vs. denationalised) but provided
a justification for intervention (to rescue the denationalised regimes)
while articulating a basis for who could be safely co-opted into the
apparatus of empire (non-threatening, denationalised regimes) and
who should be excluded (threatening denationalising regimes).
Although Tod deployed this discourse on nationalism with great
skill and effect in Rajasthan, it is important to note that it was not
uniquely applied to the colonial context but was also used by the
British in relation to the rest of Europe, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars.56 Here the 'denationalising' French were typically castigated for leaving in the wake of imperial conquest such 'denationalised'
countries as Spain, Italy, and Poland (to name a few). British imperialism was then heralded as a force which provided the proper conditions of stability and freedom under which these same suppressed
nationalities could re-emerge and flourish. These ideas clearly
informed Bentinck's famous chauvinistic statement, on his arrival at
Palermo in I8II, that 'Bonaparte made kings; England makes
nations' (Rosselli I974:155). Indeed, the case of Bentinck is significant because his career, like that of many other senior British officials
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (e.g. Cornwallis,
Wellesley, Metcalfe), encompassed imperial theatres of operation in
both the West and the East. Before becoming Governor-General of
of rakhi bhandan.Moreover, Sivaji's earlier seventeenth-century claims to Sisodia
Rajput descent were turned around by eighteenth-century Sisodia Rajputs to claim
that they were, in fact, Marathas and thus entitled to various privileges under the
Maratha svarajya(Sumit Guha: personal communication). For more on the fluid
manner in which the social boundaries of India's 'martial' castes were traditionally
constructed, see Kolff (1990).
55
Thus the British goal of excluding the Marathas from the rich trading centres
of Rajasthan (including the militarily significant horse markets in Jaipur and Kota)
could be justified on the grounds of liberating the Rajputs from 'Maratha thralldom'.
56 For a typical example, see Wilson (i86i, II:363ff.). For
analysis of nationalist
discourse as applied by the British in Europe and India, see Rosselli (1974).
210
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India, Bentinck had been in charge of British operations in Sicily and

Italy during which the British attempted to create and foster Italian
nationalism with the goal of inciting a popular insurrection that
would bring to an end French and Austrian dominance over the
peninsula (Rosselli 1974:147-89). Therefore, Tod's use in an Indian
context of the same discourse that was being deployed in Europe,
served to link directly two widely separated spheres of empire to the
same 'noble' mission. This connexion had the additional effect of
shoring up inconstant support within Britain for a distant imperialism
that from certain quarterswas perceived as benefiting only a few privileged traders who enjoyed unfair monopolies.57
Tod's strategic division of India did not end with a simple distinction between denationalised and denationalising regimes. He also created an additional set of distinctions among those groups he branded
as denationalising. For example, the Mughals and the Marathas constituted two different modalities of denationalising government that
could be distinguished in terms of the manner in which they disregarded civil liberties and private property. Mughal governance was
'despotic' whereas the Marathas were 'predatory'. The distinctive
feature of the despot was his ownership of all land and his absolute
monopoly of physical power. Or, to use Goody's distinction, he controlled both the 'means of production' and the 'means of destruction'.
These features permitted the despot to rule, for a while at least, without the consent of his subject population. Coercion, intimidation, and
espionage maintained compliance,but there was no spontaneous loyalty
among the populace. For Tod, the most important indicator of this
power was the despot's unfettered ability to tax his subject population, of which the imposition of the 'obnoxious jeziya', or poll tax on
non-Muslims, was the prime example. For Tod, however, such power
was ultimately unstable, and the demise of the Mughal Empire was
proof. Significantly, Tod counseled that from a review of the causes
of the fall of the Mughal Empire:
a political lesson of great value may be learned, which will show a beacon
warning [the British] . . . against the danger of trusting to mere physical
power, unaided by latent, but more durable support of moral influence.
When Aurangzeb neglected the indigenous Rajpoots, he endangered the
57
For the issues surroundingthe debate in Britainon the renewalof the East
India Company's charter and Tod's place in this debate, see Anonymous (I829:187),
Anonymous (1830), and, especially, ParliamentaryPapers, 183 -32, Reportfrom the Select
Committee
ontheAffairsof theEast India Company
to which Tod himself was a contributor
(Tod r832b).
TOD'S
'RAJAST'HAN'
AND
I9TH
key-stone of his power: .. . demonstrating
CENTURY
INDIA
211
to conviction that the highest
order of talent, either for government or war, though aided by unlimited

resources, will not suffice for the maintenance of power, unsupported by the
affections of the governed. (Tod 1829:396; 1914, 1:315; I920:46I-2)
Whereas the despotic regime was settled and predictable, if tyrannical and unjust, Tod's 'predatory' regime was erratic and unsystematic. The 'nomadism' of the Maratha court/camp was symptomatic
of the 'lawlessness' of Maratha government, whose defining characteristic was that the rights and prerogatives of the government vis-avis the people were in no way defined or codified. The Maratha penal
regime, therefore, was portrayed as irregular and arbitrary,58 and its
revenue 'system' consisted of random and wanton pillage.59 Thus, if
there was no private property under Mughal 'despotism', Maratha
'predation' made whatever private property that may have existed
highly insecure. Like despotism, this form of government, too, was
extremely unstable in the long run. The capricious demands for revenue soon demoralized the peasantry (if not actually exterminating
it), and this led to declining rates of production and a shrinkage in
the creation of wealth.60
3. Nationalism and 'shifters' in Tod's Rajast'han

Because Tod's notion of the nation was based on the differentiation
of insider from outsider, or native from foreigner, categories whose
context dependency
makes them classic examples
'group shifters'
Tod was easily able to negoti(Galaty I982; Herzfeld I987:I52-7),61
ate situationally
the boundary between
Self an Other by deftly
58 See also Guha

(I994).
59 Unlike
despotic governments that relied on codified and standardized forms of

taxation, albeit inequitably applied and at oppressive rates.
60
For a very different appraisal of the long-term effects of the Maratha conquest
of Malwa, see Gordon (I977). In Rajasthan itself, the Rajput polity that was most
closely integrated into the Maratha sphere of influence, i.e. Kota, was, by Tod's own
account, the most tranquil and prosperous.
61 Adapting a concept first popularized byJakobson, Herzfeld (1987:154) explains
that 'shifters', terms such as 'insider' and 'outsider': 'are signs whose meaning
depends both on the perspective of the speaker and that of the people whose actions
are described. There is no fixed social definition of outsider;the meaning of this term
depends on the character of the reference-group, which is in turn determined by the
speaker's intentions and social identity (see Galaty 1982). Even ethnic labels, which
commonly seem to refer to absolutely defined cultural identities, often possess this
semantic slipperiness . .. '.
NORBERT
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redefining the context against which 'insider' and 'outsider' status

was judged. Therefore, although Tod closely linked each of his political types (feudal, despotic, and predatory) to specific groups (Rajput,
Mughal, and Maratha respectively), he did not have these political
forms emerge directly from inherent, fixed, and timeless essences in
the sense suggested by Inden. For example, while Tod held that the
Marathas were 'predatory' (and thus 'denationalising') when in the
'foreign' land of Rajasthan, he maintained that previously they had
not been this way in their 'homeland' of the Deccan, and thus Tod
implicitly held that they could be 'rehabilitated' provided they peaceably returned there (something that British strategists desperately
desired). Concerning the early history of the Marathas in the Deccan,
Tod wrote:
[The Maratha] emergence to power claims our admiration, when [Mughal]
tyranny transformed the industrious husbandman, and minister of religion,
into a hardy and enterprising soldier, and a skilfull functionary of government. Had their ambition been restrained within legitimate bounds, it would
have been no less gratifying than politically and morally just that the family
of Sivaji should have retained its authority in countries which his active
valour wrested from Aurangzeb. But the genius of conquest changed their
natural habits . . . Had they, retaining their original character been content
with their propersphereof action,theDekhan,they might of held the sovereignty

of that vast region, where their habitsand languageassimilated them with the
people. But as they spread over the north they encountered nationalantipathies ...
(Tod I829:406-7;
1914, I:322-3;
1920:472-3 emphases added)
In other words, the 'predatory' nature of the Marathas was not inherent in their being. Rather, 'foreign' conquest 'changed their natural
habits'. On the basis of this distinction, Tod could then praise the
greatest of all Maratha leaders, Sivaji, as a patriot who had liberated
the Deccan from the 'foreign' domination of the Mughal Emperor
Aurangzeb, while condemning the activities of his descendants in
Rajasthan.
This form of disemia, whose context dependency was prefaced in
the discourse on nationalism, is most fully illustrated in Tod's complex and ambiguous attitude toward Jhala Zalim Singh, the Rajput
who dominated the affairs of Kota, in particular, and most of southeastern Rajasthan, in general, from I770 until his death in I824. On
the one hand, Tod lauded Zalim Singh in the highest terms as a
'national savior' whose diplomatic skill had preserved the Rajput
state of Kota from Maratha domination during the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, whose administrative skill had made
Kota 'an island of tranquility and prosperity in central India' and,
perhaps most importantly, whose military and logistical support was
TOD'S
'RAJAST'HAN'
AND
I TH
CENTURY
INDIA
213
instrumental in the eventual British defeat of the Marathas in i8I8.

On the other hand, Tod insisted that Zalim Singh was also a 'denationalising despot' and not to be trusted by the British. Given Zalim
Singh's support of the British against the Marathas, the basis of Tod's
praise is patent enough, and Tod could portray Zalim Singh as a
Rajput patriot in relation to the 'foreign' Marathas. The continued
presence of Zalim Singh, however, also left in the field a powerful
leader who could potentially become an adversary to the British. So
in particular contexts Tod strategically redefined the criteria by which
the insider/outsider distinction was made in order to portray Zalim
Singh as 'foreign' in relation to Kota. To understand how Tod
accomplished this legerdemain,a brief biographical note about Zalim
Singh is required.
Zalim Singh was a Rajput from the Jhala clan whose great grandfather, Madhu Singh, had first come to Kota from Gujarat in i696
and had successfully worked his way into various positions of importance in Kota's army and court, the most important of which was
faujdar (military commander) of Kota City. This position was then
held hereditarily by Madhu Singh's descendants until Jhala Zalim
Singh assumed the position in 1758. In 1764, Kota's ruler Maharao
Guman Singh, who belonged to the Hada clan of Rajputs, elevated
Zalim Singh to prime minister. When Guman Singh died in 177I his
ten-year-old son and heir, Umed Singh, was entrusted to Zalim Singh
as regent. After Umed Singh reached his majority, however, Zalim
Singh retained power, and the Kota Maharao was reduced to a
puppet.
During the period of Jhala Zalim Singh's ascendancy, he made
various attempts to secure his dominant position in Kota. He forged
multiple marriage links with the ruling Hada lineage of Kota (and
that of its parent state Bundi). He became the leading patron and
devotee of the ishta devata (personal deity) of the Hada ruling line.
And he publicly engaged in the construction and reconstruction of
the Hada royal cenotaphs which were popular objects of local veneration. In sum, his aim was less to replace the Hada ruling lineage with
a Jhala one, than it was effectively to merge the Jhala and Hada
identities in Kota. In a sense, his 'usurpation' of the throne would
be better seen as the 'slow conquest' of a political order by colonizing
it from within, and this strategy earned him significant local support
including backing from influential members of the Hada clan.62
62
For example, Zalim Singh's agent to the British, who negotiated the first treaty
of alliance, was Hada Sheodan Singh of Gainta, one of the leading members of the
Hada clan in Kota.
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Tod did not portray Zalim Singh's success in this light. Rather he
saw the basis for Zalim Singh's power in various 'despotic' measures.
Among the offenses for which Zalim Singh was guilty was the summary seizure of lands from their 'hereditary' holders, a reliance upon
extensive networks of spies to inform on his enemies, and employing
an army of 'foreign' mercenaries to maintain his political position.63
In other words, Zalim Singh did not respect the rights of private
property, did not sustain basic civil liberties and, most importantly,
his apparatus of government was not indigenous and therefore not
truly national. Moreover, according to Tod, Zalim Singh, as a Jhala
Rajput from Gujarat, was a foreigner in relation to the Hada clan
whom Tod held as the rightful rulers of Kota. Thus by simply redefining the criteria against which outsider status was judged, Tod simultaneously co-opted and excluded Zalim Singh from the apparatus
of empire.
From Feudal to Tribal: Colonial Contradictions and

Orientalism's Legacy
In the introduction to this essay, I argued that Inden has uncritically
adopted what Said (1978:92) has called a 'textual attitude' toward
Orientalist discourse (if I may invoke tradition against itself) and,
occasional statements to the contrary aside, has not situated these
texts within a set of practices that to some extent were contingent
upon shifting historical circumstances. As a result, the fundamentals
of Orientalism in the early nineteenth century are much the same as
at the end of the twentieth. James Mill or Romila Thapar, there is
not much to distinguish them in Inden's account. As I also mentioned
earlier, a corollary problem in Inden's analysis is his taking Western
representations of Self at face value. I shall argue in this conclusion
that this critical lapse has important implications for understanding
the scope of indigenous agency under colonial rule. Though Indology
may have set out to use its knowledge of India in order to define the
passivity of her peoples (and thus justify colonial intervention), Indians themselves obviously were not passive prior the British, nor did
they become so under the British. Even if native agency was channeled in powerful ways by colonial discourse, that agency was never
eliminated. Moreover, Indology's own failure to suppress this agency
63
See, for example, Tod (r832a:546-47;
I914,
1:441-42;
1920:1568-9).
TOD
S 'RAJAST'HAN'
AND
I TH
CENTURY
INDIA
215
is inscribed within Indological discourse itself and remains an important part of the story that Inden neglects to tell.
This is not so say that Inden's treatment of Indological discourse
is entirely atemporal (even if it is teleological). To his credit, Inden
is aware that certain (superficial?) aspects of Indological discourse
did change over time (though the determining position of the 'metaphysics of natural science' remains constant throughout). However,
the manner in which Inden accounts for these changes reveals that
he too is a partial inheritor of Orientalism's legacy. Inden places the
impetus for such changes squarely within the context of European
concerns and activities and neglects the instrumentality of Indians in
shaping the direction in which this narrative was to develop. In other
words, Inden remains blind to how the categories of Indological discourse were often co-opted by the colonized for unintended purposes
and how later Orientalist writers were forced to counter these unauthorized uses.
This blind-spot is well illustrated in how Inden accounts for
changes in attitude towards the Rajputs over the course of the nineteenth century. In his discussion of Alfred Comyn Lyall, who wrote
on the Rajputs fifty years after Tod, Inden (1990:I 76-80) charts how
Tod's 'feudal' classification was gutted in favour of a 'tribal' one.
According to Inden, Tod's classification was problematic to Lyall
because the idea that the Rajputs 'were feudal implied that they were
about to become, as in Germany, modern sovereign states' (Inden
'If Asians were organized, like Europeans, into sovereign
I990:I77).
nation-states, then it would not be legitimate for the "governing
class" of another nation-state such as Britain ... to impose its "foreign rule"
[1882:195]).
on them'
(Inden
I990:I76
glossing
Lyall
I899:221-2
The potential for political 'evolution' entailed in Tod's

classification is the reason that Lyall argued that the Rajputs were
'tribal' in organization. This designation placed the Rajputs safely
outside the ambit of historical and political development.
Inden suggests that the problem of native sovereignty became particularly acute after the transition from Company to Imperial rule
after 1857, and it was this event that induced Lyall's reclassification.
Inden (I990:I76)
explains: 'The question that none of [the] prewriters
had
to face ... was whether the Indian kingdoms
Mutiny
were "sovereign" nation states. This became an issue when the British replaced the East India Company and the prenumbral Mughal
Empire with an empire of their own. It precipitated some rethinking
about the essence of the ancient Indian state.' In other words, the
216
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existence of local national sovereignties within an imperial framework

was contradictory, and the presence of this contradiction demanded
some sort of resolution by Orientalist writers.
One of the problems with Inden's account is there is no logical
reason why (potential) Rajput sovereignty should have been less
problematic for the East India Company than for Queen Victoria's
Crown Government. In fact, one might expect just the opposite. The
discrepancy of having a trading company ruling over other people
(much less other nations) was already an issue in the late eighteenth
century when Edmund Burke rebuked the 'cosmopolitan' foundations
of Company rule (that asserted a single human civilization) with his
defense of the unique complexity of each national culture. And Tod's
book, after all, was in part a 'nationalist' critique of Company rule
that was prefaced with a plea to King George IV to return the Rajputs
'to their former independence'.64One might even argue that the transition to imperial rule was itself an attempt to resolve the contradictions inherent in a multi-national empire.65
However, several other things had changed palpably over the
course of the nineteenth century. By the latter half of the century,
the British had consolidated their dominance over nearly the entire
subcontinent. The threat (real or perceived) of various territorially
defined indigenous rivals, such as the Marathas and Sikhs, had been
neutralized. The French threat to the British (in Asia at least) had
disappeared, and occasional outbursts of paranoia aside, even fear
of the Russians had largely receded. Under these changed political
conditions, Rajput nationality was no longer of much use to the British. In place of these early nineteenth-century concerns, however, a
new indigenous threat had emerged that could not be isolated to a
particular ethnic group or a particular part of India. This was panIndian nationalism. Whereas at the beginning of the century the indigenous nationalisms were largely hypothetical (no Indian group was
actually using nationalist rhetoric to express anti-colonial
sentiments), by the end of the century Indian nationalism was becoming tangible and it was beginning to articulate a critique of British
colonial rule (however fitfully and incompletely). Recall that the
Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 just three years after
Lyall first published his essay on the Rajputs, and the emergence of
this new pan-Indian national consciousness can be dated at least from
64 See also Anonymous
(I829) and, particularly, Anonymous
65
See, for example, Metcalfe (i977 [1829]).
(i832a:95-7).
TOD'S
'RAJAST'HAN'
AND
19TH
CENTURY
INDIA
217
the i85os with various precursors to the Congress, such as the British
Indian Association (established 1851), East Indian Association
(established i866), and even in several quasi-religious societies such
as the Brahmo Samaj (established I846) and Theosophical Society
(established 1875).66
Significantly, Tod's Rajast'hanwas directly implicated in the nationalist movement as it was reworked by innumerable later nineteenthcentury nationalist poets and playwrights, particularly in Bengal.
Popular literary figures such as Rangalal Banerjee (in PadminiUpakhyan, 1858), Michael Madhusudan Dutt (in KrishnaKumari, I861),
Jyotirindranath Tagore (in Sarojiniba ChittorAkraman,1875), Bankimchandra (in Raj Singh, 1877), and Girishchandra Ghosh (in Ananda
Raho, I882) all produced works that reinterpreted Tod's story about
the Rajput nation as a call for Indian resistance against the British.67
Although the nationalist thought of these writers may have been a
'derivative discourse' (Chatterjee I986),68 it was nevertheless a discourse that was reinterpreted and deployed in novel ways that were
unanticipated by the British and that forced the British continually
to redefine and amend their position. Lyall, therefore, was not
reacting to a newly emergent logical contradiction in the colonial
position. This contradiction had been manifest all along. Rather,
what Lyall was reacting to was the fact that Indians were for the
first time beginning to exploit this contradiction to their own ends.
Ironically, the first exponents ofpan-Indiannationalism often explicitly
legitimated their position by claiming that it was the natural extension of the putative localnationalisms of groups, such as the Rajputs,
that had been initially articulated by earlier Orientalist writers such
as Tod.69
Thus, unearthing contradictions within Indological discourse,
while necessary, is not sufficient. Contradictory positions abound
within any discourse. What is significant is that only some of these
66
See Seal (1968:245ff.).

I am extremely grateful to Subho Basu for bringing this information to my
attention. See also Chakrabarty (I984).
68 Even Chatterjee's position may
prove simplistic as closer scrutiny is directed
toward how the emergence of nationalist thought was itself not simply an Enlightenment idea that was hatched in Europe and then exported to, or 'pirated by'
(Anderson I991:81) the East but, rather, only developed at all in the early nineteenth
century precisely because of the way in which East and West had already become
conjoined. From such a perspective, Chatterjee's originary/derivative dichotomy may
then obscure more than it reveals, and Chatterjee's more recent thinking on this
matter (Chatterjee 1993) appears to recognize this problem.
69
See Seal (I968:245ff.).
67
218
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contradictions became the loci of critical contestations. Exactly which

contradictions are brought to the fore, and when, and whose interest
they serve, are crucial elements of the story that still need to be
explored. When the emergence of contradictions within Orientalist
discourse is treated as a mechanical outcome of the exercise of colonial
of when and over whom that dompower in the abstract-regardless
ination is asserted and what their response is to it-then the history
of Orientalism that results becomes every bit as determinist and
essentialist as the Orientalist histories condemned by Inden.
References
Anonymous. 1829. 'Review of AnnalsandAntiquitiesof Rajast'han.By James Tod. Vol.
I' TheAsiaticReviewand MonthlyRegister28:187-98.
Anonymous. I830. 'Review of AnnalsandAntiquitiesof Rajast'han.By James Tod. Vol.
I' The EdinburghReview52:86-o19.
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Tod's Rajast'han and the Boundaries of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century India

Author(s): Norbert Peabody

Modern Asian Studies 30, I (1996), pp.

Printed in Great Britain

Tod'sRajast'han and theBoundariesof

I996 Cambridge University

example has been Ronald Inden's Imagining India (i990) in which he

In an important respect, Inden proposes a more measured reworking of Nandy's

India. In this article (Inden I986:402), he states 'Indological discourse ...

Inden thereby projects many of the same qualities of'irrationality'

became fully manifest at particular moments in history. Moreover,

modes of constructing difference have typically been conflated, or

of this point is immediately indebted to Herzfeld (1987:

various orders of society, be they conceived on the basis of religion,

(e.g. Inden 1990:42-43),

I shall argue that such attempts bring a

distorting systematicity to the discursive practices of these earlier

with its actual practices.10This is to say, 'classical natural scientific

reduced a series of multiply constituted, social relationships that were

held despotism to be a Muslim characteristic that had

therebydismissesTod's musingson despotismas being superfluousto

formation, however, Indological discourse, whichever these positions its

dominant trope for interpreting Indian society. This is not to contend

1:42-3), his Company career ended in

premature retirement amidst accusations of favoring native princes

temporary reviews of Tod's Rajast'han expressed nearly universal

See, for example,

and political disunity in Hindu myth and religion but he elsewhere

preferred, instead, to address historians of Europe including Gibbon,

A large portion of Tod's analysis, on the contrary, contested this

If we look at the feudal polity as a scheme of civil freedom, it bears a noble

ers, Esq.' (Tod 1832b).

This point is most forcefully made in Hallam's Constitutional

Hallam (1819, 1:357).

rapacity of our own age' (i.e. Napoleon). In sum, Tod's distinctions

Inden has impoverished much of the polysemic, or what Herzfeld

I987:95-150) has called 'disemic', richness of Tod's text.30 But

Anxieties of Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century

Although Inden has read Tod's discussion of Rajput feudalism as a

For a more complete biography of Tod, see Anonymous (1839).

nineteenth century, including the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh, the

British concerns about the north-west were further augmented by

in India, especially the Marathas, leading to disastrous consequences

atha and Sikh employment of well-known French officers, such as de

concerns, it was not only

As a result of these interlocking, multilateral oppositions, the British

32); and Leask (1992).

down into a highly varied terrain under these pressures as it became

and Colley (1992).

for some of the distinctive

meanings associated with the term.

points out (I99I:3I-2)

may not have been

Suffice it to say, the community is imagined on some basis.

twentieth century. Anderson (I99i:67),

on the other hand, applies the term more

Moreover, Tod did not merely advocate a policy of more scrupulous

Schwartzberg (1992:295) has commented on the lack of an indigenous tradition

that they would be best dealt with as sovereign states. Concerning

that 'far from possessing

durable qualities which the contracting parties define, ... on the

from our alliance'

The real danger of the treaties, however, was in their 'denationalising'

'divide et impera.' . . . [A]11 the

Peabody, Tod's Rajasthan (1996)

Peabody, Tod's Rajasthan (1996)