Ideas and Society in India from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries.

• Author: Heitzman, James
• Position: Review

By EUGENIA VANINA. Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. 215, index. Rs 375.

A determination of when and why this book was written may play an important part in evaluating its scholarly position. The author, a member of the Centre of Indian Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, states at one point that the work was originally composed for the Soviet public, "to make readers, especially in the author's home country, familiar with the treasures of Indian thought and culture" (p. 12). Its purpose also lay in an attempt to let foreign scholars "understand the ideas of the Soviet Indological school of medieval studies" (p. 13). It appears, therefore, although it is nowhere explicitly stated, that this is a revision and translation of a book originally written and composed in Russian for a general audience when there still was a Soviet Union. The absence of any references in the bibliography after 1990 confirms an original publication date in the 1980s, with little subsequent research to update the manuscript. Clearly, then, this book is a historical artifact in its own right, allowing a vision of the intellectual position of Indology in its terminal phases under the Soviet dispensation.

The author's concept of the "medieval" is strictly limited to the territories covered by the Mughal Empire from Akbar's reign (1556-1605) until the eighteenth century, when the polity slowly collapsed. The methodology consists of reading literature composed during this period in order to discuss "trends of thought reflecting social processes" (p. 8). The rather nebulous concept of social processes actually focuses on the role of the state in moving the economy of South Asia from feudalism into new forms of authoritarianism that could pave the way for capitalist accumulation. Ultimately, all the ideas and movements covered in this book are subjected to an analysis of their rationalism as responses to contemporary situations or as progressive elements in the development of a mode of production. The author repeatedly projects a post-Stalinist, multi-vector vision of diversity within a universal process: "These laws or general tendencies of human development are, in reality, numerous and varied and have no one model or standard" (p. 2). The movement toward diversity under law could, in theory, clear the way for empirical study. In practice, it allows the author to depart regularly from South Asian materials and engage in long discussions of what...