Abstract
In a remarkable episode of the Indian play wright Girish Karnad’s The Dreams of Tipu Sultan, Colin Mackenzie is depicted as the spokesperson for a “European” mode of historical knowledge:
Mackenzie: Surely you’re being melodramatic now. Every bit of evidence we’ve gathered proves he asked for it.
Kirmani: Yes. For you, he’s made up of bits of evidence, bits of argument that prove that your side was right. And that’s what I don’t understand. You have your version of history, all worked out. Why do you want my side? Why do you care?
Mackenzie: I am interested in the other side. You could say that’s how we Europeans are brought up… to be interested in the other side as well. That I suppose is our strength.
Kirmani: I find a lifetime insufficient to understand my own. Besides I spent my life serving him and his father. And now I work for you, his enemies. What does that make me? A traitor? Am I trustworthy anymore? Doesn’t that worry you? It worries me.
Mackenzie: Our loyalty is to history, Kirmaniji. Keep emotion out. Stick to the facts.1
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Notes
Girish Karnad, The Dreams of Tipu Sultan and Bali: The Sacrifice. Two Plays by Girish Karnad (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).
See Nicholas B. Dirks’s “Foreword” to Bernard S. Cohn’s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, JN: Princeton University Press, 1996), ix.
Edinburgh Review published a scathing critique of Buchanan’s methods by Alexander Hamilton. See Alexander Hamilton, “Review of Francis Buchanan’s Travels in the Mysore” Edinburgh Review 8 (Oct 1808): 82–100. Also see M. Vicziany’s “Imperialism, Botany and Statistics in Early Nineteenth-Century India: The Surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762–1829)” Modern Asian Studies (1986), 20: 625–60.
Peter Pels, “The Rise and Fall of the Indian Aborigines: Orientalism, Anglicism, and the Emergence of an Ethnology of India, 1833–1869,” in Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology, eds. Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 88–89.
See W. C. Mackenzie, Colonel Colin Mackenzie: First Surveyor-General of India (W. & R. Chambers Ltd: Edinburgh and London, 1952), with a foreword by Colonel R. H. Phillimore C.I.E., D.S.O.
There has been a great deal of speculation as to what Mackenzie’s training in Scotland was like based on Alexander Johnston’s account of Mackenzie early life in Madras as well as his familial background in Scotland, which was reproduced in H. H. Wilson’s catalog of the Mackenzie manuscripts. There are a couple of references Mackenzie makes of his early childhood that are cited by his biographer (Mackenzie, Colonel Colin Mackenzie. However, thanks to the Stornoway historical society’s secretary Willie Foulger who brought to my attention a work by George Clavey. Clavey was a historian of a masonic lodge called the Fortrose Lodge No. 108 founded in Stornoway in 1767 Clavey has documented the following: “Alexander Anderson — Schoolmaster. He attended the first meeting and became a member of the Lodge on the 16th August 1769. Reputed to be a brilliant tutor of the Sciences and Mathematics, he was responsible for the early education of Sir Alexander Mackenzie and Colin Mackenzie, Surveyor-General of India. Colin Mackenzie wrote in a letter many years later ‘I must however attribute some part of the early seeds of passion for discovery and acquisition of knowledge to ideas first implanted in my native isle.’ For a short time Alexander Anderson was also Procurator Fiscal in Stornoway”. See George Clavey, History of Lodge Fortrose No. 108 (Lodge Fortrose, Stornoway, 1993), 159.
Colonel R. H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Surve y of India, Volume 1: 18 th Century (Dehra Dun (U.P), India: Survey Of India, 1945), 351.
See Peter Robb’s “Completing ‘our Stock of Geography’, or an Object ‘Still More Sublime’: Colin Mackenzie’s Survey of Mysore, 1799–1810,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third series) 8, no. 2 (1998): 181–206; and
Matthew Edney’s Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Martha McLaren, British India & British Scotland 1780–1830: Career Building, Empire Building & a Scottish School of Thought on Indian Governance (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001), 22. Kapil Raj also suggests that the Scots were at an advantage over their contemporaries in England, than did their contemporaries in England, because of their educational system, which allowed themto gain access to higher education. Raj also suggests that a focus on history, geography, and mathematics distinguished them from the dominance of classical learning in England. See
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Nicholas Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)
Bernard Cohn writes that Lord Wellesley, who possessed an imperial vision for the future of India, ordered numerous surveys that were modeled on John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland and that recognized the need for information on the land, manufactures, and the social and economic conditions of the new territories after the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799. See Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 80.
In the preface to C. P. Brown’s translation of Memoirs of Hyder and Tippoo, Rulers of Seringapatam, Written in the Mahratta Language by Ram Chandra Rao
See Mackenzie, Colonial Colin Mackenzie, and Jennifer Howes, Illustrating India: The Early Colonial Investigations of Colin Mackenzie (1784–1821) (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Jennifer Howes, “Colin Mackenzie, the Madras School of Orientalism, and Investigations at Mahabalipuram,” in The Madras School of Orientalism: Producing Knowledge in Colonial South India, ed. Thomas Trautmann. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). Many of the drawings of architectural and archeological antiquities in Mackenzie’s collection were by these draftsmen.
Nicholas Dirks has persuasively argued for Mackenzie’s centrality in the formation of early colonial knowledge in India, even if the colonial state found much of Mackenzie’s archival material to be “too sullied by myth and fancy” for developing administrative policies. See Dirks, Castes of Mind, 82. See also Nicholas Dirks, “Guiltless Spoliations: Picturesque Beauty, Colonial Knowledge, and Colin Mackenzie’s Survey of India,” in Catherine B. Asher and Thomas R. Metcalf, eds, Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1994). Bernard Cohn’s monumental work on colonial knowledge can be found in his two collections, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Charles Philip Brown, Literary Autobiography of Charles Philip Brown (Tirupati: Sri Venkateswara University, 1978).
See Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
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© 2012 Rama Sundari Mantena
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Mantena, R.S. (2012). Colin Mackenzie and the Search for History. In: The Origins of Modern Historiography in India. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011923_3
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