Marathas, Marauders, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century India.

• Author: Conlon, Frank F.

For the past quarter century Stewart Gordon has played a significant part in the modern historiography of pre-colonial Maharashtra and of the Marathas and their raj. Gordon's pen has yielded some of the most imaginative and stimulating interpretative essays in the field and he has been recognized as one of a handful of non-Maharashtrian scholars whose contributions have reoriented the historiographical debates concerning the region and the period. That Gordon accomplished this without the conventional "benefits" of an academic appointment, pursuing scholarship as a secondary vocation whilst managing a business concern, must also be acknowledged and applauded.

The essays are in order of chronological appearance, although the original place and date of publication is not specified. Gordon introduces his essays by situating them in a project of correcting older colonialist/orientalist dismissals of eighteenth-century India as a time of chaos and decay. Perhaps it is inevitable that in generalizing he over-corrects. For example the statement that, when his first essay was published (1969), "art historians found decadence" in the period ignores the work three decades earlier of Hermann Goetz. So too, the implication that the Peshwa Daftar archives were restricted by the colonial power in order to promote a view of Marathas as marauders is, if true, at best secondary to the more pragmatic effort to hinder use or abuse of the documentary horde for perpetuation of law suits over land and rights in the colonial Deccan.

The academic virus of "deconstruction" had not yet made its appearance when Gordon published his initial "Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders and State-formation in Eighteenth Century Malwa," yet this was deconstruction in the best sense - an imaginative rethinking of "thugee" and a linkage of its phenomena to pre-colonial state formation. Placing the context of political relations in Malwa region, he correctly emphasizes the need to understand not just structure, but process, for it was in the unfolding processes of exercising political power that the real story lay (p. 16).

The collection includes seminal essays which informed Gordon's recent The Marathas, 1600-1818 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), namely, "The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha...