Rethinking historical objectivity: Rankean principles v/s Rajasthan’s bardic traditions
In a Rajasthani court two centuries ago, a coloniser asks for records. The clerk produces a bundle of Persian documents, but a bard begins to recite an epic describing the ancestral lineage of the royal house. For the clerk, the papers are the record. For the community, the bard is the record.
In one of my previous posts (read here), I discussed how E. H. Carr wrote about the historian and their facts. Beginning with the positivist notion that history could be approached as a science, and with the assumption that facts must first be established before conclusions are drawn, Carr traced in this the intellectual legacy of historians such as Leopold von Ranke and the generations of German, British, and French historians influenced by him from the 1830s onward. Their insistence on empirical fact rested upon the belief that the historian’s task was ‘simply to show how it really was’.
Carr, however, challenged what appears to be the commonsensical understanding of history. In the characteristic wit that ran throughout What Is History?, he remarked that ‘to praise a historian for his accuracy is like praising an architect for using well-seasoned timber or properly mixed concrete in his building’. Accuracy, therefore, was merely a necessary condition of historical writing, not its essential function.
However, it would be unfair to dismiss Ranke as a crude positivist. The nineteenth-century German historian who helped define what we still call ‘objective’ history transformed the discipline in ways that remain fundamental even today. He would certainly have recognised the clerk in our opening scene as a colleague. His method, built upon the critical examination of written records and the reconstruction of ‘what actually happened’, continues to shape our instincts about what counts as a proper historical source. But what do we do with the bard?
Rajasthan’s bardic literature—khyats (carries more or less the same meaning as histories), heroic epics, genealogies (vamshavalis), praise poems—and oral traditions preserved by Charans, Bhats, and other communities, sit uneasily within a Rankean conception of historical scholarship. On the one hand, these traditions are partisan, fluid, performative, and frequently embellished with miracle and myth. On the other, they preserve names, places, lineages, rivalries, memories, and social worlds that would otherwise be lost.
Taking Ranke seriously in the face of Rajasthan’s bardic traditions does not require us to dismiss them as legend. Rather, it invites us to rethink the meaning of historical objectivity itself.
What Ranke actually changed
Few historians have exercised a greater influence on the modern historical profession than Leopold von Ranke. A scholar of extraordinary productivity who authored more than sixty works during a remarkably long career, Ranke sought to transform history from a branch of literature and philosophy into an independent academic discipline. According to Richard J. Evans, his contribution was threefold.
First, he insisted upon the autonomy of history. Rejecting the tendency to use the past merely as a vehicle for moral instruction or philosophical speculation, he famously declared:
To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire; it wants only to show what actually happened.
The task of the historian was, thus, not to praise or condemn but to understand.
Second, Ranke sought to strip away what later historians have called the ‘condescension of posterity’. The past had to be understood on its own terms. Historical actors were individuals operating within their own intellectual, political, economic, and socio-cultural worlds.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, Ranke introduced into historical scholarship the methods that philologists had then developed for the study of ancient and medieval texts. Historians had to establish authorship, identify interpolations, compare manuscripts, expose forgeries, and evaluate the reliability of competing accounts. They had to investigate the provenance of documents, examine their internal consistency, compare them with contemporary records, and establish their authenticity. Eyewitness accounts and documents produced close to the events they described were privileged over retrospective narratives. Historians were expected to leave libraries and immerse themselves in archives, patiently working through vast collections of manuscripts preserved by states and institutions.
This was nothing short of a methodological revolution. Even today, historians continue to engage in this basic Rankean spadework. We ask who produced a source, why it was produced, under what circumstances it was produced, and how it relates to other available evidence. As Evans has argued, these procedures remain indispensable. Without them, history collapses into speculation.
But the success of the Rankean method produced an unintended consequence. It established an implicit hierarchy of evidence. Written documents came to be valued over oral traditions; archives over memory; administrative records over performance; and states over communities. It is precisely at this point that Rajasthan’s bardic traditions become difficult to accommodate.
When historical truth was sung
Long before the arrival of modern historical scholarship, Rajasthan possessed a rich historical culture of its own. Charans, Bhats, and other bardic communities functioned as custodians of memory. Attached to courts, lineages, and local communities, they preserved genealogies, narrated military exploits, celebrated acts of loyalty and sacrifice, and articulated ideals of kingship and honour. Their compositions ranged from heroic epics and praise poetry to khyats and genealogical records.
These texts do not fit comfortably within the categories established by modern historiography. They are neither straightforward chronicles nor pure works of imagination. Many were transmitted orally before being committed to writing. Their wording could vary across performances. Their narratives were shaped by patronage and audience expectations. To a strict follower of Ranke, the problems are obvious. How does one establish an original text when multiple revisions exist? How does one verify miraculous events or divine interventions? How should one treat narratives composed centuries after the events they describe? What does one do when historical figures stand alongside mythical ancestors?
From a Rankean perspective, such sources appear deeply suspect. However, the problem is not so simple. A bardic narrative may exaggerate a battle, but it often preserves details about kinship networks, territorial rivalries, political alliances, and social values absent from official records. A genealogy may contain mythical elements, yet simultaneously provide invaluable evidence regarding status claims and lineage formation. These sources tell us not only what happened but also what communities believed had happened, what they considered worth remembering, and how they understood themselves.
The question, therefore, is not whether bardic literature qualifies as history. The question is what kind of history it represents.
The nineteenth-century crisis of historical truth
The tension between bardic traditions and modern historical scholarship was not first encountered by contemporary historians. It was already unfolding within Rajasthan itself during the nineteenth century. As Shankar Goyal demonstrates in The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions in the Historiography of Rajasthan (2021), bardic historiography entered a period of decline soon after much of its literature began to be committed to writing during the eighteenth century. The reasons were historical rather than literary.
British paramountcy transformed Rajasthan’s political landscape. Western education introduced new standards of evidence and rationality. Institutions associated with the heroic tradition—such as jauhar, sati, and unquestioning loyalty to patrons—came under increasing scrutiny. The heroic worldview that had sustained bardic literature for centuries no longer possessed the same authority. The result was a profound crisis of historical imagination.
For instance, commenting on Suryamal Mishran’s Vir Satasai (1857), a collection of seven hundred verses composed during the upheaval of 1857, historian M. S. Jain observed:
Vir Satasai, excepting the date of its composition, betrays little relevance to the outbreak of 1857 ... [It] was a loud proclamation that the appeal to chivalry and dynastic pride was not only ineffective in persuading the feudal aristocracy to come out of its indolence, lethargy and luxury but was also unpleasant to their ears. This failure of Mishran was not personal; it was the failure of the entire past tradition.
Jain’s observation is revealing. What failed was not merely a poem but an entire way of understanding the past. As concepts of documentary accuracy gained prestige, the poet’s conception of historical truth increasingly came under attack. The materials employed by heroic poetry may have been historical, but their arrangement, adaptation, and embellishment were often imaginative and romantic. Once factual accuracy became the dominant criterion of historical legitimacy, the older conception of truth nurtured by heroic literature rapidly lost ground.
Bankidas, Dayaldas, and Shyamaldas
The transition becomes visible in the careers of individual writers. Bankidas, the celebrated court poet of Man Singh of Jodhpur and author of the three-volume Bankidas Granthavali (1803-33), remains famous for his poem Aya Ingrez Muluk ra Oopar. Writing about British expansion, he lamented the submission of Rajput rulers and condemned the loss of martial virtues. The poem stands as a powerful critique of colonial domination, but it also reflects an older heroic conception of history in which honour, bravery, and loyalty remained central categories of understanding.
On the other hand, Dayaldas of Bikaner confronted a different challenge. Responding to James Tod’s characterisation of Bikaner as a state of secondary importance, he sought to restore the prestige of the ruling house through his Bikaner re Rathoran ri Khyat (also known as Dayaldas ri Khyat). He highlighted the role of Bikaner rulers at the Mughal court and supplied information ignored by Mughal chroniclers. Despite writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, he all the same remained deeply embedded within the older dynastic tradition and sought to glorify the Rathor rulers of Bikaner.
Shyamaldas occupied a more transitional position. His Vir Vinod (1886), a monumental history running to nearly 2800 pages, adopted a more documentary style and incorporated a wider range of written evidence; and a basic internet search may have us believe that it was the a foundational text in the trend of positivist history writing in Mewar of the nineteenth century India. However, subjectivity marked by patronage bias crept in with the author utterly unconscious of the decadence which had sent in the socio-political system of the state.
Taken together, these figures reveal a historical culture struggling to adapt to changing standards of truth.
Ranke’s heirs in Rajasthan
The influence of Rankean principles became even more visible among professional historians of twentieth-century Rajasthan. G. H. Ojha’s monumental works, including Rajputana ka Itihas (Vols I-V, 1924-40) and Udaipur Rajya ka Itihas (Vols I-II, 1928-31), embodied a commitment to factual accuracy that would have pleased Ranke himself.
Like Ranke and Indian orientalist R. G. Bhandarkar, Ojha believed that facts constituted the lifeblood of history. He possessed an extraordinary concern for dates, chronology, documentary verification, and comparative analysis. However, as Goyal points out, Ojha’s commitment to objectivity too had its limits. A loyal servant, unfortunately first of the colonial state and later of Udaipur, his own assumptions shaped his interpretation of more recent events. His distrust of oral traditions sometimes prevented him from appreciating the grains of historical truth contained within bardic narratives. Moreover, his overwhelming focus on political history left social, economic, and religious developments largely unexplored.
R. P. Vyas—with his Rajasthan ka Brihat Itihas (1702-1818 A.D.) (1986) and Adhunik Rajasthan ka Brihat Itihas (1818-1950) (1995)—represented a later generation. Although influenced by the documentary tradition associated with Bhandarkar and Ranke, he was also receptive to newer developments in historical scholarship. He recognised the importance of social and economic history and approvingly cited historians such as Carr and Marc Bloch. For Vyas, history was not simply a collection of facts. It was, as he put it, ‘a search for truth, an approximation rather than a final formulation’. Echoing Carr, he described history as a dialogue between the past and the present.
The shift is significant. The historian was no longer merely recovering facts but interpreting them.
Listening to the bard
Having detailed the historical impact of Ranke in western as well as Rajasthani scholarship, one can perhaps insist on the significance of Rajasthan’s bardic literature as historical sources, despite its poetic exaggerations. After all, the exaggeration itself is historical evidence. It reveals what qualities were admired, what forms of conduct were celebrated, what political ideals were upheld, and what communities considered worthy of remembrance. A historian who approaches a bardic text solely in search of dates and events will inevitably be disappointed. But a historian interested in memory, legitimacy, political culture, social values, and historical consciousness will find a wealth of material.
The answer to the Rankean principles v/s Rajasthan’s bardic traditions conundrum, therefore, is not to abandon Ranke. The questions he taught historians to ask remain indispensable. Who composed a text? For whom was it composed? Under what circumstances? How was it transmitted? What interests did it serve? At the same time, Rajasthan’s bardic traditions remind us that historical evidence is not confined to the archive. Ranke taught historians to distrust the bard. Rajasthan teaches us to historicise him.
The challenge is hence not to choose between the archive and the bard. It is to develop a form of historical objectivity capable of reading an archive and listening to a song, both at the same time.
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