Colin Mackenzie’s Archival Project and the Telugu Historical Record

Abstract

Warren Hastings’s policies in his early years as governor-general set an explicit intellectual agenda toward recovering original and “pure” Hindu social and political institutions from historical obscurity.¹ This Hindu orientation, which was also taken up by the research agenda at the Asiatic Society of Bengal, characterizes much of early colonial engagement with Indian textual traditions. Colin Mackenzie felt the reverberations of this as he himself was quite close to the scholars and researches coming out of Calcutta at the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In fact, throughout his travels and collecting adventures, Mackenzie maintained frequent correspondence with the historian Mark Wilks and with Orientalists such as H. H. Wilson and Charles Wilkins. With Wilson and Wilkins, Mackenzie shared documents and texts in which he felt they would take particular interest. With Wilks, Mackenzie shared his ideas of history, the chaos of the historical record in India, and the need to collect historical materials for the Hindu history of the subcontinent. There was a discernable bias toward Hindu history as Mackenzie relied on Brahmins to provide texts on the political and religious history of south India. During the mid-nineteenth century, when C. P. Brown examined the contents of the Mackenzie archive, he immediately recognized the prevalence and importance of Hindu accounts.