A Tribute to D.N. Jha, a Historian Who Will Be Remembered for Treasuring Plurality

Abuses and threats to his life were hurled at him, but he did not flinch from putting forth the evidentiary and the analytical positions that emerged from his in-depth studies.

The passing away of Professor Dwijendra Narayan Jha on February 4, 2021, at the age of 81, caught many of us, including this writer, unawares.

True, this former Professor of History of Delhi University and one of the stalwarts in the study of early Indian history was not getting any younger these days and had been ailing for the last few years. Yet, there was absolutely no hint that his end was around when he came for his last public appearance for his online lecture, organised by the Kolkata-based academic body, Society for Understanding Culture and History in India (SUCHI) on January 10, 2021.

He was feeble and preferred his presentation be read out; but he stayed, though in a wheel-chair, throughout the programme and interacted with his customary liveliness with the audience after his paper was read out. He looked tired, but he also looked forward to seeing his new publication, Against the Grain, out soon.

That wish of his eluded him, but what he has left behind in the analytical understanding of early Indian history are wonderful intellectual gifts for future generations of scholars.

Even his swan song carries the typical markers of the intellectual profile of D.N. Jha. He was ‘Dwijen’ to his contemporaries like professors Harbans Mukhia, B.D. Chattopadhyaya and the late Sabyasachi Bhattacharyya, ‘Jha saab‘ to younger colleagues, and ‘Dwijen da’ for many who stood in between the two above groups.

Dwijen da, in spite of his failing health, made the presentation at SUCHI, as he had promised to do so. More importantly, he came with a 20-page written paper, fully annotated with references to a wide variety of primary sources and relevant secondary readings! This commitment to professionalism is the hallmark of his academic pursuits.

An affable, soft-spoken person, Dwijen da however never minced words. His Marxist leanings grew during his days as an undergraduate student in Presidency College, Calcutta, and this, he nurtured throughout his life. It paved the way for his life-long engagements with the socio-economic history of early India in terms of material cultures.

His first book, Revenue System in the Post-Maurya and Gupta Times (1967), tried to demonstrate the increasing burden of revenue demands on subjects during roughly the seven centuries of his studies. This, he combined with the demonstration of the growing power of the monarchical state in early India. The book pointed towards the impoverishment of the peasantry. His critical analyses of the Gupta period laid bare that the cultural efflorescence, which marked this age, hardly matched with the ostracisation of the chandalas and the extraction of forced labour (vishti/begar).

Dwijen da, along with several other scholars, cogently questioned the celebration of the Gupta period as the Golden Age in Indian history, popularised by the nationalist historiography. There was, and still is, vicious denouncement of this statement, but its author remained unfazed and dished out further empirical validation in support of his conclusions. 

D.N. Jha will be best remembered for his contributions to the study of what is called the feudal social formation in India (c. AD 300-1300). Taking the cue from D.D. Kosambi’s formulations and inspired by Marc Bloch’s view that feudal social formations took place in non-European contexts, Jha followed the footsteps of R.S. Sharma, his mentor.

He argued for a social formation marked by decentralised polity, preponderance of feudal lords (samantas), de-urbanisation, impoverishment of the peasantry and mounting influence of Brahmanical varna–jati norms at the cost of the lower social order, especially what is now called the a-varna group.

Also read: The Year That India Stood On Two Diverging Roads

From the 1960s till the late 1990s, this was the most important historiographical debate among the specialists on early India, as Hermann Kulke and B.P. Sahu (History of Precolonial India: Issues and Debates, 2019) demonstrate. 

A few things need to be noted here.

First, by arguing for a feudal formation in India, the thoroughbred Marxist historians – D.N. Jha included – moved away from Marx’s formulation of the Asiatic Mode of Production that perceived the pre-colonial Indian society as unchanging and immutable.

The proponents of Indian feudalism established the capacity of the Indian society to change and change outside dynastic shifts. This was the most significant impact of their studies and led to the coinage of a new period, the early medieval in Indian history. Ranging from roughly AD 400 to 1300, this period now figures as a phase of transitions from the ancient to the medieval.

The third point of note is their profuse use of inscriptional data, mainly gleaned from copper plates recording grants of revenue-free landed properties in favour of brahmanas and other religious grantees. These documents are descriptive sources, no less significant than the prescriptive Brahmanical sources in the Sruti-Smriti tradition. Raging debates ensued for and against feudal formations in India of the pre-1300 days.

Also read: Textual Evidence from Early India Tells Us the Ancients Weren’t as Tolerant as We Think

A striking point is that major critiques to R.S. Sharma, D.N. Jha, B.N.S. Yadava and K.M. Shrimali came from several Marxist historians themselves, notably Harbans Mukhia. Using the same genre of inscriptional data, scholars like B.D. Chattopadhyaya, Noboru Karashima, Hermann Kulke and B.N. Mukherjee presented images to the contrary and portrayed the consolidation of the monarchical state-society, vibrant trade, new forms of urban growth and most importantly, the significance of socio-political formations at local levels. The search for centralisation and decentralisation of the state machinery was not given centrality in the counter-arguments to the proponents to Indian feudalism. 

This is not the place to delve further into this extremely significant debate and intellectual exercise, nor can we place even a bird’s eye view of Dwijen da’s many publications. An outstanding aspect of the debate was that the points of the other side were accommodated by both proponents and critiques of the Indian feudalism question.

When D.N. Jha edited a volume in honour of R.S. Sharma (1996), a contribution from Chattopadhyaya – known for critiquing Sharma – figured in this volume. This writer too has been the beneficiary of this open-mindedness. I did not subscribe to the portrayal of the decay of trade and urban centres during the early medieval times. Yet I, at that time a young and raw practitioner of the craft, was asked to contribute a piece.

The same happened when D.N. Jha edited a massive volume in memory of R.S. Sharma (2014) and this same writer’s essay was once again included in the anthology, in spite of the fact that my piece would take up positions against both Sharma and Jha. This spirit of accommodating a critique to a dominant perspective sums the intellectual openness of  D.N. Jha.

If one’s empirical wherewithal and analytical tools were sound enough, Jha would not mind if someone countered him strongly. This does not at all mean that any quarter was given by Jha during heated debates. But he and many other historians of his time (Marxists and non-Marxists alike) had cultivated this broadness of mind. This is now, very sadly, eroding at an alarming pace. 

As I have already said, D.N. Jha was ready to enter into controversial issues and topics in the light of historical evidence. His faith in empirical accuracy was as firm as a rock. And he would treat his sources in a diachronic manner and not with a synchronic treatment, like many cultural historians practise nowadays.

In other words, he would not put a hymn of the Rigveda next to a passage from the Arthasastra, or would not combine a Roman coin with a 12th century coin. He invariably looked at the spatial and temporal contexts of his sources. That lifted the study of early India from the hackneyed narratives of repetitive socio-economic and cultural histories to the portrayals of lived experiences in the interplay of the agents of changes and continuities.

Also read: Ayodhya Dispute Is a Battle Between Faith and Rationality, Says Historian D.N. Jha

This prompted him to delve deep into the examinations of beef eating in the dietary practices in India in remote pasts, firmly on the basis of his primary sources. Abuses and threats to his life were hurled at him, but he did not flinch from uttering what the evidentiary and the analytical positions emerged from his in-depth studies. He would counter his critiques with his empirical baggage and his sharp interpretations, but would never engage in diatribe against his critiques. Historical enquiries, to Dwijen da, were a life-long intellectual exercise to understand and explain the past. He did not study the past merely to glorify the past of India and to vilify the ‘other’(s). 

This illustrates why he stoutly resisted the communal interpretations of Indian history, now made often in the garb of nationalist historiography of India. Till his very last breath, D.N. Jha read the history of the subcontinent to highlight, celebrate and uphold its plurality and was at the forefront against a homogenisation of the past which rides on majoritarian agenda.

He is no more and will be sadly missed, but will inspire many minds towards professional history-writing (distinct from faiths and myths) in years to come. 

Ranabir Chakravarti retired as professor of Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, JNU. He has authored several books.