Rambhakts: Defining "Us" and Depicting "Our Story" 29the British colonization was a boon to India, as British administration and
legislation would end the backwardness of India. Utilitarian James Mill
divided the Indian history into Hindu, Muslim, and British periods in his
book History of British India and prompted the communal interpretation
of Indian history. Although the subsequent historians used the nomen-
clatures of ancient, medieval, and modern for the above periods, they did
consider the change in the religion of the major dynasties of the time as the
basis of the division.^45
The belief in European superiority and Indian inferiority, or "the domi-
nance of reason over superstition and civilization over barbarism," was
the governing hypothesis of most of the works by British historians.^46
Quoting Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that "the production of a colo-
nialist historiography was from the very outset an exercise in dominance
and not an act of charity."^47 Ronald Inden sums up succinctly that the
privileged voice within what he calls the "Indological discourse" denies
to Indians the power to represent themselves and appropriates that power
by hierarchizing the knowledges Indians have of themselves and turning
them into subjugated knowledges. Thus Indian civilization becomes fun-
damentally a defective product of its environment, unlike the European
one, which is a product of rational human action. Thus, by the end of
the nineteenth century, the communal riot narrative became a dominant
strand in colonialist historiography.^48
As a counter to this approach, the nationalist Indian historians of the
early twentieth century glorified the ancient Hindu period (about 1000
B.C.E. to 1200 C.E.) and drew a kind of consolation for the present humili-
ation.^49 Such an interface between patriotic consciousness and the colo-
nial framework of knowledge imposed upon it resulted in nationalistic
thought and nationalist historiography.^50 This derivative discourse of
nationalist historians pictured the rise of a nation-state in ancient Hindu
empires, claimed everything good in India having indigenous origins,
and called the Gupta empire (320-540 C.E.) the "Golden Age." According
to this rendition, everything went downhill when the Muslims came in the
eleventh and twelfth centuries.^51
Marxist historians focused on writing histories of domination, rebel-
lions, and movements with the conviction that the Orientalists and the
nationalists wrongly portrayed India as an undivided entity that had tran-
scended class and ethnic divisions, and that nonclass histories suppressed
the history of the oppressed. The social historians preferred placing India
in the larger focus of world history to restricting it to the national one.
Political economy was the major emphasis for both Marxist and social his-
torians, and they described India's Third Worldness with issues such as
production systems and political control.^52
While colonialist historiography characterized Indian nationalism as a
function of stimulus and response, bourgeois-nationalist historiography