AS WE’VE NARRATED in an earlier episode, B.A. Saletore was the first Indian historian who correctly grasped and expounded upon the innate value of epigraphic records. He also lit the path of unearthing priceless historical truths hidden in these records. By doing this, he courageously swam against the tide of history research and writing in India, which was faithfully aping the Eurocentric model. This model regarded epigraphy at best as an ancillary source that had no real evidentiary value.
Apart from their Biblical and racial bias, there was another fundamental reason for this Eurocentric rejection of our epigraphy. Although a good number of European scholars had learnt Indian languages to a high degree of proficiency, they could never truly understand the cultural and civilizational nuances that a person will naturally imbibe by birth, i.e., only by living in that cultural atmosphere. This umbilical cord of affinity is the mother that feeds the milk of culture from her breast. In the realm of history, our inscriptions, grants, etc., are these mothers. They tell us the real history because they are the surviving, first-hand proofs of how our ancestors had lived their present. This point cleanly ties in with K.M. Munshi’s grand conception of writing Indian history:
To be a history in the true sense of the word, the work must be the story of the people inhabiting a country. It must be a record of their life from age to age presented through the life and achievements of men whose exploits become the beacon lights of tradition. The history of [Indians] having a common culture…flows as a running stream through time, urged forward by the momentum of certain values and ideas and must be viewed as such… without such an attempt, the past would have no message and the future no direction.
These are the exact elements that we notice most pronouncedly in Saletore’s magnum opus on the Vijayanagara Empire titled Social and Political Life in the Vijayanagara Empire.
Overall, Saletore’s approach to history and the historical works he wrote are permeated by these fivefold features:
(1) Legends, Puranas, etc.
(2) Primary sources from epigraphy
(3) Accounts of foreign travelers
(4) Folk sources
(5) Literary sources
His final output was an exquisite, illuminative and exhaustive blend of these elements. As we shall see, Saletore’s work on Vijayanagara remains so exhaustive that everyone who wrote on it after his time either supplemented his foundational work or proved him right in the light of newer research findings.
Indeed, when we read Saletore, we recognize a touching sense of earnestness, an abiding gratitude to the past masters in the field and an open-mindedness to subject himself to critical scrutiny.
Above all, Saletore was a fierce patriot and an uncompromising upholder of the Sanatana culture in an all-encompassing sense. In fact, he sought to delineate and expound upon the flowering, development and the downfall of the Hindu civilization and culture using history as a vehicle, and his body of work is the surest proof of the success of this method. An inextricable part of his cultural patriotism was his abiding love for the Kannada land, language, its people and their customs. He declared in so many words that "the values and ideals that are sorely needed in contemporary India are to be found in the history and culture of the Kannada people."
And he put this precept into practice by becoming one of the pioneers who radiated light on the religious, cultural, political and socio-economic aspects of Karnataka throughout the ages. It has since remained an enduring beacon for anyone interested in the subject.
And now, we can briefly survey a few of his acclaimed works. We will begin with his final work, which is widely considered as his masterpiece. Saletore died a year after its publication. This is the magnificent, Ancient Indian Political Thought and Institutions, a majestic tome spread over nearly eight hundred pages. The work is a brilliant study of the great Indian political minds and the institutions they created throughout the ages since the dawn of the Hindu civilisation. It is also a sign of the poverty of our own era that this book continues to remain in obscurity.
In Ancient Indian Political Thought and Institutions, Saletore for the first time, makes an extraordinary comparative analysis of the four greatest political thinkers of all time: Manu, Kautilya, Hammurabi, and Aristotle.
To be continued
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