A History of the Mahrattas v1.c5.s2: II. ‘A History of the Mahrattas’
A History of the Mahrattas v1.c5.s2
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- English
II. ‘A History of the Mahrattas’
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Both as a monument of careful research and as an authoritative account of the political rise and decline of the Marāthā power in India, Grant Duff's *History of the Mahrattas* still commands unqualified praise. Details of the history of the ‘imperial banditti’ will be found in the works of Orme, Mill, Elphinstone, Wilks and others, or in the pages of Scott Waring, Blacker, Broughton, Thorn and Tone, to say nothing of the dispatches of Lord Wellesley.¹ But for a comprehensive survey of Marāthā political history and achievements, none of these writers were so favourably circumstanced as Captain Grant Duff, who served as a military and civil officer of the East India Company in the very heart of the Marāthā country, obtained access in his official capacity to important State documents and the correspondence of the Pēshwās, received charge of the Sātāra State records and other papers in the possession of the Rājā of Sātāra, the existence of which was unknown to the Pēshwā, and was also granted free access to the Company’s records at Bombay and Surat, as well as to those of the Portuguese Government at Goa. Moreover, Grant Duff was enabled to extract a mass of information from Marāthī manuscripts, from Persian and other documents which were either presented to, or purchased by, him, and from family and temple archives, of the existence of which his personal acquaintance with Marāthā chieftains and people enabled him to obtain direct information.¹
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¹ See article on ‘Marāthā Historical Literature,’ by D. B. Parasnis in *J.B.B.R.A.S.*, vol. xxii (1905–7), pp. 168 ff.
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¹ See Grant Duff’s preface to original edition, reprinted at pp. lxxxvi–xcii, *post*, and introduction to Calcutta edition, 1912 (Cambray & Co.).
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Two circumstances may be held to have contributed to the permanent value of Grant Duff’s literary achievement; the first being his own personal experience of the people about whom he wrote and his natural impartiality, and the second, the advice and criticism of his friend and official chief, Mountstuart Elphinstone. As regards the former, the following extract from the *Calcutta Review*, vol. iv, p. 178, is pertinent to the subject.
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‘Grant Duff lived among them (the Marāthās) for years, understood their peculiar character, and without any pretension to commanding talent, seems to have combined the chief qualifications necessary to a good Political Agent. He was industrious, impartial and benevolent. He was not, moreover, a mere bookworm. He studied men and manners in the camp, the cabinet, and in the peasant’s field, as well as in the dusty records of his office. He examined the past that he might understand the present. . . . He was eminently practical. His book is written with the candour and gentlemanliness of the accomplished soldier, combined with the kindliness to be expected from a disciple of Mountstuart Elphinstone. . . . The record of that portion of Mahratta history that came under Grant Duff’s personal observation appears to us to possess the rare merit of thorough impartiality. Each topic and individual is treated manfully and courteously. Truth was his grand object. He sank no point by which it might be ascertained or illustrated; but while doing so, he uniformly treated his opponents with unassuming candour.’
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As regards Mountstuart Elphinstone’s guidance, the following extracts from letters which he wrote to Grant Duff in 1822 testify to the constant interest which he took in the preparation of the work :
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‘I got through your first three chapters sooner than I had hoped ; I read them with great pleasure. You have acquired a much more calm, matured historical style than you had at first, and have absolutely none of the faults that I used to attribute to you. You will find my remarks chiefly censures, and chiefly in petty details ; but to be useful, they must be censures. . . . I think, however, you should have introduced more of the manners of the Mahrattas, more to put the people and their leaders before the eyes of the reader, and to enable him to understand their motives and modes of action. This can only be done by a picture of the Mahrattas as they now stand, and it may be a question whether that does not come more naturally when you reach the present period ; but, on the whole I think that, as you are writing for Europe, you should make people acquainted with your actors before you begin your play.’
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A month later he wrote :
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‘I send you my notes on Rājā Rām. The materials are admirably got together, and most of the transactions of the time set in full light, but there is a want of arrangement and of filling up, which may easily be supplied at your leisure. Your difficulty, and yet what none but you could accomplish, was to get at facts and to combine them with judgment so as to make a consistent and rational history out of a mass of gossiping Bukkurs and gasconading Tawareekhs (chronicles).’ ¹
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¹ Colebrooke, *Life*, ii. 136 ff.
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Elphinstone also helped Grant Duff with information about documents relating to Marāthā history. Colebrooke records the fact that one of Elphinstone’s letters contained ‘a long list of public documents to be found in the records of Poona, Hyderābād, Calcutta, etc., besides other materials, native and European’ ² ; while in a letter to Colonel Close, dated May 5, 1822, Elphinstone wrote :
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² Ibid., 138.
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‘Grant will have written to you about materials for his Mahratta history. By the by, I am not so sure of that, for I believe you hardly know him ; but it will be an excellent history. Sivajee, Sumbajee and Ram Raja now stand in full light, as simple and intelligible as Hyder and Tippoo. Grant does not ask for information about Sindia, Holkar, &c. &c., but he must want it ; and you might get Bukkurs, Persian Memoirs, &c., that would greatly assist him. Copies of Sindia’s principal treaties would be good things.’ ¹
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¹ Colebrooke, *Life*, ii. 140.
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In a later letter to his friend Strachey he speaks of
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‘Captain Grant the Resident, formerly adjutant of the Grenadier battalion, and now historian of the Mahratta Empire, for which he has collected inimitable materials.’
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With a man of Mountstuart Elphinstone’s genius as its literary sponsor and critic, it is not surprising that Grant Duff’s work ‘takes its place in the very first rank of historical compositions.’
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In a paper read before the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society on January 19, 1905,² Rao Bahādur D. B. Parasnis remarks that Pratāp Singh, the Rājā of Sātāra, had Grant Duff’s work translated into Marāthī, but that the translation had never been printed. He adds that he had obtained a copy of the translation, which he intended to present to the Society. The Rājā had been urged to make the translation by General Briggs, who wrote to him as follows on August 20, 1827 :
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² *J.B.B.R.A.S.*, vol. xxii, pp. 168 ff.
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‘I trust your Highness has received his (Grant Duff’s) History of the Marāthā Empire, which your Highness should procure to be translated by degrees into the Marāthī language, after which it might be struck off by lithography (chhāpp) at Bombay, which would obtain as great a name for your Highness in the East as your friend Captain Grant Duff has established for himself in Europe by compiling his excellent history.’
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As to the conditions under which Grant Duff wrote his history, and the details of its publication in 1826 by Messrs. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green of Paternoster Row, we have information in a letter written by Grant Duff from ‘Eden, by Banff,’ on January 30, 1846, to Mr. H. E. Goldsmid of the Bombay Civil Service.¹ The latter, when on furlough in 1845–6, wrote to Grant Duff urging him to publish a second edition of his work, and received the reply of January 30, 1846, from which the following extract is taken.
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¹ *J.B.B.R.A.S.* (1871–4), art. xi, p. 120, contains a note by James Taylor, Honorary Secretary of the Society, read August 8, 1872, describing how he obtained from Mr. Goldsmid in 1854 a copy of the letter which Grant Duff wrote to the latter in 1846. Mr. Goldsmid carried out with Captain Wingate the great revenue survey of the Deccan and Southern Marāthā Country. He died in Cairo at the beginning of 1855.
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After referring to the fact that his *History of the Mahrattas* was out of print, and that a proposal which he had made to the publishers for a second edition had met with little encouragement, Grant Duff proceeds as follows :
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‘It (i.e. *The History of the Mahrattas*) ought, and perhaps would have been undertaken by Mr. Elphinstone, had he not so soon then removed from the Deccan to Bombay. I began to collect materials at his (Mr. E.’s) and Sir Thomas Munro’s suggestion, lest we should lose the only chance of recovering the records of a very extraordinary power, the history of which was only known in a very superficial manner. As I went on collecting, I was obliged to unite the fragments in order to ascertain what was wanted, and I soon found myself obliged to employ agents, not merely within the confines of Mahārāshtra, but all over India.
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‘I wrote the greater part of the work when otherwise working twelve and fourteen hours daily without intermission (and of what sort you know), whilst some of the gentlemen with me, who had their full share of public business, particularly Mr. W. R. Morris, still in the Service, most zealously assisted in translating the mass of materials which were selected from a still larger mass, read over without discovering a single fact upon which we could depend. To account for some apparently very careless passages, I must tell you that I was subject to very serious headaches, which at last became very agonizing, returning every fifth day, and lasting from six to sixteen hours at a time, requiring me to work with wet cloths girt about my head, and I always could do best and most as the fit went off, so that I very often was induced to write on, upon these occasions, requiring no sleep until next night.
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‘ I was, as might have been expected, driven home; but it was some time before I had health or inclination to get through the task I had undertaken. At last I sent the MS. to the late Mr. Murray. It was read and approved of by the person to whom he submitted it. I waited upon the potentate of Albemarle Street, who told me he would publish the work if I would alter the title. I said “it was a history of the Mahrattas, and only of the Mahrattas.” “Who knows anything about the Mahrattas?” “That’s the reason,” said I, “the book has been written; no one does know much about them.” “Well,” replied Murray, “and who cares to know? If you call it the Downfall of the Moguls, and the Rise of the English, or something of that kind it may do, but *A History of the Mahrattas*—that will never sell!” I was not in the least discouraged, although I too well knew that what Mr. Murray said was true, and amongst other drawbacks, although India is now beginning to excite a little more interest in England, no one can write or speak of India as of Europe—the feeling which cheers and impels the writer or the orator by an indescribable . . . .¹ sympathy is wanting, and hence the tiresome task which the narration of events purely Indian imposes. Of course I do not mean such narratives as Orme’s *Carnatic*, which is more exciting than it could have been made by the fancy of De Foe. I got the MS. laid before Sir James Mackintosh, who most kindly, without stopping to finish it, walked from Cadogan Place to Paternoster Row (before the days of omnibuses), and at his recommendation Longman & Co. immediately wrote to me offering to publish it. It went through the press in six weeks, and many errors corrected by me escaped the vigilance of the compositor; the reason was the MS. was too distinctly copied; had it been in such an abominably indistinct hand as mine, one of their best men would have been selected, but because distinct I got one of the less experienced.
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¹ Word illegible in the original.
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‘ The late Mr. Rees was the partner with whom I chiefly communicated. No publisher in London at that time understood the business so thoroughly. When calculating the sale, I was surprised when he put down a very small proportion for India. The reason he said was “people in India don’t buy—
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they read, but borrow—and it would be long before the Mahratta History would be bought as an outfit book.” Murray was so far quite right—people require to know something before they desire to know more.
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‘The publishers took the risk. The book cost me upwards of £2,000 before it went to press. The Court of Directors took forty copies—which they would have done equally, had it been a Mahratta Vocabulary—and as a general rule, is liberal; but, although I collected all those materials, certainly valuable to Government, and gave them an original and most valuable map, they never even acknowledged the receipt of the latter. They never inquired, and I certainly never stated, that I lost upwards of £1,700 by what I had done, and indeed excepting a very few, I do not suppose any director or aspirant of that period even opened the Mahratta History after they became directors—a matter of no consequence, excepting as discouraging to such servants of the Company as may engage in extraordinary labour, and whom most certainly it is their province at least . . . .¹ in order to stimulate others in a like course.
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¹ Word illegible in the original.
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‘It is not unusual to send copies of new books to the principal reviews, and even to make interest, to ensure a favourable notice; but I begged Mr. Rees in this case to do nothing of the kind, as time, and time only, could prove whether the matter was correct—and that must be tried by Indian authority hereafter. I had in the first instance the favourable opinion of the best authorities of the period as regarded my facts, and the praise even of a favourable critique was therefore but a mere puff—of use principally to the booksellers. Mr. Rees, however, quite agreed with me.
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‘These details, if not useful, may be amusing to you.’
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Grant Duff, as will be seen from the concluding paragraph of this letter, left the final verdict on his work to posterity, which has fully endorsed the praise bestowed upon it by Mountstuart Elphinstone. Every leading authority on Indian history, both in the nineteenth and present centuries, has acknowledged the debt which he owes to Grant Duff’s careful presentment of Marāthā affairs. That minor mistakes should be discoverable here and there, that the dates of some transactions should now require revision, or that information as to persons, places and miscellaneous matters supplied by the author should have become capable of further illumination or more critical discussion, is only natural on a consideration of the considerable addition to our knowledge of the past history of the Deccan and Hindustan provided by the researches of historians, archæologists and students of popular manners and beliefs during the last sixty years. But such amendments, resulting from the discoveries of later inquirers, both in India and Europe, in no wise detract from the general value of Grant Duff’s work. Moreover, in several directions the researches of later authorities only serve to confirm the accuracy of Grant Duff’s opinions and conclusions. The case of the unjustifiable murder of Chandra Rāo More (pp. 116-18, vol. i, of text) exemplifies this proposition. An attempt has been made by two modern students of Marāthā history to show that Sivājī was not privy to the assassination of the unfortunate Rājā of Jāvli and his kinsmen, and that Grant Duff’s account of the matter is based on insufficient data. To substantiate their view they depend upon ‘more authentic and reliable documents that have lately been discovered,’ and in the last resort adopt the view that as Sivājī was not actually present at the moment of Chandra Rāo More’s death, he could not be declared guilty of murder under the modern penal law.¹ A complete answer to this unfortunate attempt to supersede the authoritative verdict of Grant Duff has been given by a critical authority on Mughal and Marāthā history, Professor Jadunāth Sarkar of the Indian Educational Service, on pages 54–55 of his recent (1919) publication, *Shivaji and His Times*. This careful historian, whose strictures on the credibility of the various Marāthī *bakhars* or chronicles should deter others from blindly accepting any Marāthī account of Sivājī’s career, excepting possibly that by Krishnājī Anant Sabhāsad, remarks on page 7 of his preface to the above-mentioned publication that,
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¹ Kincaid and Parasnis, *A History of the Marāthā People*, pp. 150–1; Kincaid’s letter, dated June 10, 1919, in *Times Literary Supplement*; Parasnis, *Itihasa Sangraha*, Sfuta Lekh i. 26–29 and ii. 11, and *Mahābleshwar*, pp. 17–21.
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‘So many false legends about Shivaji are current in our country, and the Shivaji myth is developing so fast (attended at times with the fabrication of documents), that I have considered it necessary in the interests of historical truth to give every fact, however small, about him that has been ascertained on unimpeachable evidence, and to discuss the probabilities of the others.’
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The net result of his careful examination of the evidence bearing upon Sivājī’s career is a delineation of the Marāthā chieftain’s character, qualities and achievements, which corresponds in many respects very closely with the estimate formed by Grant Duff nearly a century ago.