Govind Sakharam Sardesai

Govind Sakharam Sardesai, around 1910 (?)

Govind (Govindrao) Sakharam Sardesai ( Marathi गोविंद सखाराम सरदेसाई IAST Govind Sakhārām Saradesāī ; born May 17, 1865 in Hasol Village , Ratnagiri District , Bombay , British India ; died November 29, 1959 in Kamshet , Poona District , Bombay , India ) was an Indian civil servant and historian . His on Marathi written history of the Maratha princely states that Riyāsats (hindi रियासत "principality State"), as well as its English-language New History of the Marathas and its source editions are considered standard works.

Life

Youth and education

Sardesai was one of seven children of a native Brahmin family from the subgroup of the Karhaḍe, whose ancestors had served the Marathen - Peshwa and the Bhonsle - princes of Kolhapur . However, the father had switched to farming - with little success - so that the family lived in the most modest of circumstances, and Sardesai still had to look after the family's small livestock in his youth. After attending elementary school, the English Government School in neighboring Ratnagiri (1879-1884) and the colleges in Pune and Mumbai (graduation in 1888), he became personal assistant to the Maharajas of Baroda, Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III , in 1889 on the recommendation of a patron . (1875–1939), and entered the civil service of the princely state of Baroda ( Vadodara ) in western India. Immediately after graduating from school in 1884, Sardesai married the eldest daughter of his former headmaster in Ratnagiri, Lakshmi Bai Kirtane († 1943).

Private secretary of the Gaekwad, educator of the princes

From 1889 to 1925 Sardesai served the Maharaja of Baroda first as a reader, later as head master in the education of the male and female princes, whereupon, after almost 25 years of service, he was appointed his personal accounting officer. In the wake of the prince, Sardesai traveled all over India and, since he spoke fluent English, on four trips to Europe in the years 1892–1911.

First work, Marathi Riyāsat

With the support of the Maharajas, Sardesai, who had earned the recognition of his surroundings through his methodical approach, meticulous accuracy and constant diligence, had previously used the book and document collection of the princely library and archive, and in 1890 and 1893 at the behest of the prince two Translations made from English into the vernacular Marathi ( Machiavelli , The Prince ; Seely , Expansion of England ), both of which were published at state expense. Although not a historian in terms of his education and his life goal, he wrote the first, fundamental history of the Marathi state in eight volumes - Marathi Riyāsat ("Maratha Principality"), also in Marathi, due to his teaching activities for the princely children and after extensive literature study 1902–1932 . In addition to the Marathi Riyāsat, he wrote two volumes of Musulmani Riyāsat (1898) and two volumes of British Riyāsat (1908 and 1939). These publications earned him the nickname Riyāsatkar and covered the period from AD 632-1857.

Traveling with his employer took Sardesai not only to the historical sites in the vicinity ( Presidency of Bombay , Central Provinces ) in numerous other regions of the country, so that in historical and current issues he was able to adopt an "all-Indian perspective" beyond narrow local and regional patriotism ( Sarkar) won; his trips to Europe have already been mentioned.

The weaknesses of his work at that time, criticized by contemporaries, lay in the lack of analysis, evaluation and classification of people, events and sources, which Sardesai either allowed to speak without comment or interpreted one-sidedly. With the publication in the national language he was on the line of nationally proud Marathas like the historian Rajwade (1863-1926), who rejected English as a scientific language in principle. Not least because of its clear, understandable style, it was comparable in its broad impact to the historians Heinrich von Treitschke or Otto Zierer , and in the English-speaking world to Edward Gibbon .

Retirement, further publications

The marriage with Lakshmi Bai had two sons, but both died early at the age of 13 and 27 years (1903-1915, 1889-1925). After 37 years of service, Sardesai retired early in 1925 with a tiny pension (“starvation wages”) against the will of the prince, who under no circumstances wanted to forego his further services. Sardesai did not repay him for this disgraceful treatment, but kept his life in high esteem for Sayaji Rao Gaekwad, to whom he also dedicated his New History of the Marathas . After his retirement he settled in Kamshet near Pune , where he devoted himself entirely to historical and archival studies. He was therefore also called the "Hermit of Kamshet"

Govind Sakharam Sardesai, around 1938

Selections from the Peshwa Daftar

The British government in Bombay commissioned Sardesai at the suggestion of the doyen of Indian history, the Bengal Jadunath Sarkar , with the sighting, reconditioning and Edition of the extensive official and personal estate of the Peshwa of Pune, known as the Peshwa (or Peshwe) Daftar ( "Office "Or" Chancellery of Peshwa "). As a kind of chancellor of the mighty Marathas Federation, the Peshwa had played a decisive role in the rise of the alliance and the fall of the Muslim Mughals of Delhi in the 18th century , before he himself was ousted by his minister and finally the British after the 3rd Marath War in the year Took power in 1818. At the suggestion of his friend Sarkar, Sardesai began to publish in English for a broader Indian audience outside of Maharasthra. This resulted in the Patna Lectures on the Fundamentals of Marathic History held in English (1926). Sardesai remained on friendly terms with Sarkar from the first contact in 1904 until the end of his life.

With Sarkar's scientific guidance and with an all-Indian perspective, Sardesai began to process the Peshwa files.

The Peshwa Daftar Controversy

The University of Pune initially resisted Sardesai, whom they did not recognize as a historian and researcher (hindi संशोदक "samshodak"), denied him knowledge of the scripts and instead called him a sankalankar (hindi संकलनकर compiler ) and "storyteller"; Antibrahmanism also played a role - Sardesai was a Brahmin - but also the fact that his Bengali historian and friend Sarkar was critical of the Marathon hero Shivaji and published in English for an all-Indian audience. In 1930, the Peshwa Daftar controversy was finally decided in the Bombay Legislative Council against "the howling mob" (Sarkar) in favor of Sardesai. In his memoirs, Sardesai did not mention this "sad episode" (Rao) with the reluctance that is typical for him.

"" Had he [Prof. Rajwade] and the other scholars of this school [from Pune] published the results of their research in English instead of exclusively in Marathi, they would have reached history students all over India and made the history of the Marathi a fruitful one The subject of higher studies ... would have become. ... but as it did it remained a book with seven seals for all other provinces of India and indeed for the entire rest of the non-Marathic world ""

- Sardesai, New History of the Marathas , vol. 1, foreword p. 3

The Herculean task, the scope of which had once been estimated at a period of 30 years and a cost of 800,000 rupees, had already been tried by three earlier workers by 1914 before work came to a standstill. Sardesai sifted through - often under bureaucratic difficulties, financial and time pressure - in the course of only four years and at a cost of only Rs. 42,000, the approx. 35,000 documents of the disordered archive from the period 1729-1817, which had been in place since the transfer of power to the British Year 1818 as a closed stock ("Alienation Office") was almost untouched in Pune; it comprised around 27,000 documents written in Marathi (in Moḍī script ), around 7,500 in English, 129 in Gujarati and 29 in Persian , most of which were undated ; Conclusions about the time allocation could therefore only be drawn with difficulty through content-related information, which initially led to numerous errors. The last year of work could only be bridged by private donations, as the government of Bombay refused to make further grants. The completion of the work that Sardesai accomplished between 1929 and 1934 with the help of initially ten, then six helpers - his most important colleague and co-author was Tryambak Shankar Shejwalkar - formed the 45 printed volumes of the Peshwa daftar , which despite all the deficiencies and the fact that they were attached to that it was only a selection from the entire collection, were compared in scope and importance for Indian historiography with Theodor Mommsen's mammoth work, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL).

The holdings of the State Archives in Pune suddenly ended in 1776 with the assumption of office of the new Plenipotentiary Minister, Nana Fadnavis , who had moved the archives to his home town, from where the widow took them to Menavali in 1800; Sardesai was gradually able to bring the papers stored there to light. The papers of the important Marathi prince Mahadji Shinde , which were withheld by RB Parasnis (1870–1926), were made accessible again by Sardesai and Sarkar.

Poona Residency Correspondence (PRC)

Together with Jadunath Sarkar, Sardesai published the extensive correspondence of the British resident in Pune, installed since 1782 ( Poona Residency Correspondence ), from 1936–1958 ; Both of them received neither a fee nor reimbursement of expenses for their work from the then British government in Bombay. The series came out in monographs in 14 volumes and comprised more than 7,000 pages and more than 4,000 letters; Sarkar translated the 99 documents written in Persian - the diplomatic language of the time, as Sardesai did not speak the Persian necessary for the sources all his life, which he regretted most. Sardesai always tried to ensure a good English style and a rich vocabulary by reading English ("Modern Review" from Kolkata) and asking questions. With their editions, Sarkar and Sardesai made a 62-volume source basis available to students of Marathic history for the first time in a short time.

New History of the Marathas

Already over 80 years old, Sardesai wrote his magnum opus , the three-volume New History of the Marathas , with the help of his assistant, on the basis of his eight-volume work Marathi Riyasat, which had already been written in Marathi earlier , and with the help of new sources in English , by historian VG Dighe and after reviewing the manuscript by Jadunath Sarkar.

View of history

Sardesai always remained a conventional pragmatist in his way of presenting and understanding, but changed in the course of his publishing activities from the original "storyteller" of Maharashtra, due to the constant inclusion of new local sources, to Indian, finally - through the processing of European documents and writings - to the universal historian. He believed that "India cannot afford to ignore the lessons of Marathas history".

Private

Sardesai was known for his disciplined, almost ascetic way of life in his "Hermitage" ( Ashram ) in Kamshet; Even in his seventies, Sardesai managed the steep ascent to Sinhagad Fort (1312 m above sea level) without stopping.

"He [d. H. the young student AR Kulkarni ] came to Sardesai's house in Kamshet, where he found the ninety-year-old scientist doing his daily practice of chopping wood. When Sardesai was done, he encouraged him to stick with his plan, gave him some source editions and allowed him to use his library. "

- Sumit Guha 2009

Appreciation and criticism

"The eternal vigilance of self-criticism formed the preserving salt of his writings"

- Sarkar 1938

In his biography of Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao ("Nanasahib", 1721–1761), Sardesai put the theses of his student Shejwalkar about the third Peshwa, which differed from his own assessment, because he was of the opinion that scientific controversies promoted understanding of the complex processes. Shejwalkar also made the harshest criticism of Sardesai by pointing out the open questions that are simply ignored in Sardesai's work and his inherent lack of conception: Sardesai's New History of the Marathas is "a framework without a steel frame, a body without a backbone". Indeed, Sardesai's focus on the history of people and events neglected the socio-historical dynamics of the Marathas, the rapid change in society, the economic background, religious currents, administrative structures and lines of development that he - almost a victim of his sources - in the flood of the traditional Failed to notice documents; he asked, so to speak, "not the right questions". No mere source compiler like the American Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832–1918) or a pure statistician like the British Robert Montgomery Martin (1801–1868), however, laid the foundations for Sardesai to continue working with the still only partially accessible sources.

• “The discovery and publication of the documents in Moḍī script and the use of French, Persian and Portuguese sources have revolutionized Marathi historiography since the beginning of the 20th century; that is the lasting merit of Sardesai and his employees ... wealth, luck or even fame were not bestowed on him ... but ... lasting achievements. "- Sarkar 1938

• “Sardesai is the first and also - without saying anything wrong - the only Marathi author who has left us a coherent history of the Marathi. He paved the way for those who came after him. ”- Rao 1973

Awards

• Honorary Degree from the Government of Bombay, Rao Sāhib , 1932
• Honorary robe ( Sade tin vastre ) of the Chhatrapati Bhonsle of Satara , 1934
• Honorary Title of the Government of India, Rao Bahādur , 1937
• Itihas Mārṭaṇḍ ("Sun of History") award from the Dhule historians' association , 1946
• Award from the State of Baroda , 1947
• Honorary Doctor of Literature (D.Litt.) From the University of Pune 1951
• Presidency of the Bharatiya Itihas Parishad ("Indian Historians Association") 1951 - highest honor for an Indian historian
• Honorary robe ( Mahavastra ) of Pant Sachiv (Rajput ruler ) of Bhor (state) 1952
• Padma Bhushan Order ("Lotus Order ") for Literature and Education of the Government of India 1957 Padmabhushan Order

Works (in selection)

A bibliography of Sardesai's printed works can be found in Kulkarni, Maratha Historiography , Appendix "Books By GS Sardesai", pp. 265–267 On Marathi:

• Musulmani Riyasat , 2 vol., 1898
• Marathi Riyasat , 8 vols., 1902-1932
• British Riyasat , 2 vols, 1923-1939
• Marathyancha Itihasache Sahita , 1924
• Aitihasik Vishayanchi Suchi , 1925
• Kavyetihas Samgrahat Prasiddha Zalele Aitihasik Patre Yadi Vagaire Lekh , 1930
• Peshwe Daftar , 45 vols., 1930-1934
• Aithihasik Patravyavara , 1933
• Mazi Sansar Yatra ( My Journey through Life ), 1956 - autobiography
• Biographies of Marathi Personalities, on Marathi

In English:

• The Main Currents of Maratha History . Adult, umgeschr. u. act. New edition. Bombay: Keshaw 1933. - First published. Calcutta: Sarkar 1926, based on his seven Patna University Readership Lectures
• Poona Residency Correspondence (5 of 14 volumes), together with Jadunath Sarkar, 1936–1958
• New history of the Marathas . 3 vols. Bombay: Phoenix Publications 1946–1948
  • Vol. 1: Shivaji & his line [1600-1707] (1946)
  • Vol. 2: The Expansion of the Maratha Power 1707–1772 (1946)
  • Vol. 3: Sunset over Maharashtra 1772-1848 (1948)

literature

• Jadunath Sarkar : Govind Sakharam Sardesai . In: Shripad R. Tikekar (ed.): Sardesai Commemoration Volume. Bombay: Dhavale 1938. pp. 291-304. - The Bengali historian Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1959) was a lifelong friend, correspondent and co-author of numerous publications
• Vasant D. Rao: Govind Sakharam Sardesai . In: SP Sen (ed.): Historians and Historiography in Modern India. Calcutta: Institute of Historical Studies 1973, pp. 222-234
• Vaman Narhar Sardesai: Kauśikagotrī Māvaḷaṅkara gharāṇyācā itihāsa: arthāt Māvaḷaṅkara, Aradesāī, Desāī, Laḷita va Govilakara yā śākhān̄cā kulavṛttānta . Pune: Sardesai 1961 - Family History of the Sardesai Brahmins
• AR Kulkarni : Maratha Historiography . New Delhi: Manohar 2005, pp. 136–168

Remarks

1. ↑ The other two subgroups were the coastal Citpavan (or Konkanastha) and the inland Deshastha. "They are generally well educated and the majority of them aspire to civil servants ... They are intelligent and generally reliable workers"; RV Russell: The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India. 4 Vols. London: Macmillan 1916, Vol. 2 pp. 392–393 sv "Brahman, Mahārāshtra, Marātha".
2. ↑ The real name of the family, which could trace their ancestors back seven centuries, was Mavalankar, Sardesai was only the official designation of the ancestors; Rao, Sardesai , p. 223. - The son of Shivaji , the Marathan ruler Sambhaji (1657–1689), is said to have been arrested in 1689 at the Sardesai family seat in Sangameshvar; ibid.
3. ↑ Sardesai's curriculum vitae and origin resembles that of his contemporaries and colleagues UV Swaminatha Iyer , VK Rajwade, AR Kulkarni or RC Majumdar in many respects
4. ↑ Sarkar 1938 p. 293 f .; Rao, Sardesai , p. 223
5. ↑ Sarkar 1938, p. 294; Rao, Sardesai p. 223
6. ^ Sarkar, pp. 294 and 297
7. ^ Rao p. 223
8. ^ Sarkar, p. 297
9. ^ AR Kulkarni : Maratha Historiography . New Delhi: Manohar 2005, pp. 136–168
10. ^ Kulkarni, Historiography , p. 242
11. ↑ "Gaekwad ... granting him a pittance as pension"; Sarkar, p. 295. The pension was only 60% of the normal rate; Kulkarni, Historiography , p. 259
12. ↑ Vol. 1, flyleaf. The relationship with the House of Barode was restored after the death of Gaekwad, Sardesai received the full pension from his grandson.
13. ↑ Kulkarni, Historiography , p. 247
14. ↑ Excerpts of his friendship and his correspondence with Sarkar, which lasted for a lifetime, are documented; Hari Ram Gupta (ed.): Life and Letters of Sir Jadunath Sarkar . Hoshiarpur 1957 ( Sir Jadunath Sarkar Commemoration volume 1 ).
15. ↑ Rao p. 228 f .; Dipesh Chakrabarty: The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth . Chicago. London: University of Chicago Press 2015, p. 155 ff.
16. ↑ Rao, Sardesai p. 228
17. ↑ Sarkar 1938, p. 298 f., Rao p. 227
18. ↑ Sarkar 1938, p. 299
19. ^ Rao p. 227
20. ↑ Kulkarni, Historiography , p. 236 f.
21. ↑ Sarkar 1938, pp. 301 f., Rao
22. ↑ Sarkar 1938, p. 299
23. ↑ Kulkarni, Historiography , p. 238 f.
24. ↑ Vol. 2 and Vol. 8 (1943), Foreword Acknowledgment
25. ^ "I have ever regretted my ignorance of Persian ... altogether essential"; Rao, Sardesai p. 222
26. ^ "Sardesai was a pragmatist in his approach to history"; Kulkarni, Historiography , p. 245
27. ^ Sardesai's Presidential Address at the Indian Congress of Historians in Jaipur in 1951; quoted according to Kulkarni, Historiography , p. 246
28. ↑ Prof. AR Kulkarni remembered . In: Prof. AR Kulkarni in memoriam Folhas de História
29. ↑ Sarkar 1938, p. 298
30. ^ Kulkarni, Historiography , p. 229
31. ↑ Shejwalkar, quoted by Kulkarni, Historiography , p 252
32. ↑ A good research overview is provided by Stuart Gordon: The Marathas, 1600-1818 . Cambridge et al. a .: CUP 1993 (The New Cambridge History of India II.4)
33. ↑ Sarkar 1938, p. 304
34. ^ Rao, Sardesai , p. 233