'Medieval India': An Alien Conceptual Hegemony?

Abstract

The notion of a 'Muslim' period of Indian history inhered in the numerous court chronicles of "medieval' India, written in the Persian language. This derived from the assumption of the rise of Islam as the dividing line in 'world history', going back to Arab and Iranian historiographical tradi tions. Abul Fazl, writing at the end of the sixteenth century, posited an alternative conception of historical time as continuous and teleological. James Mills formalised the periodisation into the tripartite 'Hindu, Mohammedan and British India' in 1818. The 'British' period, with a heavy emphasis on its secular, modern and modernising identity was deliberately asymmetrical to the denominational determinants of the first two periods. The tripartite nomenclature was to be translated at the turn of the twentieth century into Ancient, Medieval and Modern India though the two remained interchangeable. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the growing influence of Marxism redefined the boundaries of the tripartite division through a shift of focus from dynastic history to socio-economic problematics, though the division itself remained in place. The 1990s are witness to still newer problematics which by their nature tend to erode these boundaries.