The experience and skills gained from the work on Mackenzie’s archival project led Ramaswami to venture into the field of writing and to establish himself as an author in his own right. For Lakshmayya, the work on Mackenzie’s collection led him to pursue the building of institutions within the city of Madras for the dissemination of those intellectual practices and skills (that he himself had gained) to natives with scholarly ambitions. He clearly desired to continue historical researches begun by Mackenzie but that was evidently not his sole preoccupation. Lakshmayya spent considerable energy in trying to start a literary society (an institutional site for the pursuit of his intellectual agenda) for native scholars.

Lakshmayya established the Madras Hindu Literary Society devoted to what he saw as the particular needs of native scholars. However, he faced considerable setbacks in the process. Part of the reason seems to be that despite his prominence after the work accomplished under the direction of Colin Mackenzie, Lakshmayya was unable to pursue his intellectual agendas as he was no longer attached to a colonial patron. These setbacks that he faced, especially from the Asiatic Society of Bengal (under the direction and leadership of James Prinsep), which felt that Lakshmayya’s scholarly work did not measure up to the standards of modern scholarship, reveal the limits of colonial patronage in Madras in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In part, this confirms the thesis that Tapati Guha-Thakurta put forward that the native scholar was not able to come into his own until the later decades of the nineteenth century when there was a larger network of institutions that enabled Indians to take part in multiple scholarly communities[19].

This was partly due to the dearth of institutional encouragement of natives in the early colonial period to cultivate scholarly skills and practices. While individual colonial officer-scholars gave encouragement and the necessary patronage to their Indian assistants (pundits or otherwise), the latter were left to fend for themselves when their patrons left their posts in India. Although native scholarly authority was rarely questioned when it came to knowledge of the textual traditions (whether Sanskrit, Telugu, or Tamil), when it came to practices of history, there were lingering doubts regarding native authority in this field. Therefore there was a combination of factors that left the efforts and achievements of the Kavali brothers in relative historical obscurity in the early colonial period. First, there were institutional constraints—the lack of institutions that encouraged and cultivated native scholarly ambitions. Second, there were explicit ideological constraints working against native Indian scholars, such as the Kavali brothers, with claims that they were not capable of doing the ‘rational’ work of historical scholarship.

Despite the exclusions the three Kāvali brothers faced, they managed to contribute a great deal toward expanding the scope of historical knowledge in early colonial Madras. The boldness of Ramaswami (as manifested in his published works), the confidence of Borayya’s plans for histories, and finally the meticulousness of Lakshmayya’s documentation of his own historical researches may all have been the result of the expansive intellectual world to which the Kāvali brothers had access, initially through Mackenzie but later through their own persistent efforts. Mackenzie’s archival project enabled Indian assistants, such as the Kāvali brothers, to make significant contributions toward producing historical knowledge of south India by collating and assessing a historical record.

Notes and References

1. I am not suggesting that the modern idea of history took shape in the colonies first and was then brought back to England, either. This kind of argument was made very persuasively by Gauri Viswanathan with her Masks of Conquest back in 1989 in which she argued that the subject of English literature was formulated in colonial India and was then instituted back in England as a subject that was equivalent to the study of Greek and Latin. See Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
2. An argument that is most clearly articulated by J. G. A. Pocock in Barbarism and Religion: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764. 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3. Ranajit Guha in “Dominance without Hegemony” argued that the colonial state exercised dominance rather than hegemony in the sense that colonial subjects could not possibly consent to colonial rule. However, Guha’s argument regarding political dominance in colonial India might not be adequate for understanding the porous nature of the intellectual encounter. See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
4. British Library, Oriental and India Office Collection (OIOC), Mackenzie Collection, General, 1, 367–9.
5. Velcheru Narayana Rao, Sanjay SubrahmanyaM and David Shulman, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001.
6. See Sumit Guha, “Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Dakhan, 1500–1800,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24, no. 2 (2004).
7. J. Sinclair went to villages in Scotland and asked questions similar to the ones that Mackenzie had asked.
8. I have used the more contemporary spellings of Borayya, Lakshmayya, and Ramaswami to replace the many different variations that appear in colonial records.
9. Madras Public Consultations (MPC): 23 February 23,. 1809, Mackenzie to George Buchan, chief secretary to government at Fort St. George.
10. Cynthia Talbot, in Precolonial History in Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), shows that already in the twelfth century a distinction between two types of Brahmins appears in the records. Brahmins engaged in ‘secular’ occupations—essentially administrative or clerical—bore different titles than the religious specialists: amatya, mantri, pregada, or raju for the former; bhatta or pandita adopted by the latter. However, the term Niyogi was a later development (57).
11. N.S. Ramaswami (1985), 72.
12. MPC: 23rd February 23,. 1809, Colin Mackenzie to George Buchan, Chief Secretary to Government at Fort St. George.
13. 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).
14. Many of the drawings of architectural and archeological antiquities in Mackenzie’s collection were by these draftsmen.
15. OIOC: Mackenzie Collection: General 21, 26. 12 May 12, 1803, Colin Mackenzie to Lakshman.
16. OIOC: Mackenzie Collection: General 1, 38, Memorandum: Of information required from any of the learned & intelligent Bramins of Sreerungam & Trichinopoly, 1804.
17. See Appendix 2.
18. Phillip Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals and Production of Colonial Knowledge,” in Comparative Study of Society and History Vol 45, no. 4 (Oct 2003).
19. Velcheru Narayana Rao, “Print and Prose: Pandits, Karanams and the East India Company in the Making of Modern Telugu,” in India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, eds. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 150.
20. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).