February 4, 2021 claimed two great historians. Both were from different villages of Madhubani district in Bihar, both educated from Patna, both with the surname Jha. They were Jata Shankar Jha and Dwijendra Narayan Jha (1940-2021).
Jata Shankar Jha did not teach at a university. He was with the KP Jaiswal Research Institute (KPJRI) Patna, from where he retired in 1984, having also served as its director. He did not write a textbook, nor did he intervene in certain contentious issues which needed a historian’s intervention. He did not belong, to the best of my knowledge, to any ideologically motivated groups or factions.
He was a professional historian looking for, and into, primary evidence, making the sharpest possible analysis of those, and then serving them to readers in the simplest possible prose. His simple sentences took every care not to let the ‘story’ go away from history, and not to tell anything which does not have credible evidence.
He did not go to ‘elite’ institutions of the western world to obtain degrees of recognition or to claim fame for his fantastic scholarship. He was not seen in seminars and conferences. His regional focus is testified by the fact that he hardly wrote about anything other than Bihar. Even though his work may not qualify as ‘micro-history’, his history-writing did stand to a large extent for what Heather Murray (2004) said about the advantages of micro-historic method:
“History with a human face, face of the daily, the ordinary, the subaltern. Microhistory tells a story, often structured as the attempt to solve an interpretational puzzle…This is a method suited to the writing of history on the margins, where documentation may be scant… ‘Micro’ then is a question not of size but of scale or of proportionality… local phenomena, events, and formations are in fact the most promising foci for a new literary-historical analysis.”
Interestingly, Jha wrote about Bihar and its Mithila sub-region precisely at the time when Carlo Ginzburg’s magisterial work of micro-history The Cheese and the Worms (1976) came out.
Jha was possibly reclusive, preferring to lead the life of a modest human being and scholar. For the last many decades, he has been leading a life of academic oblivion. One does not know if this oblivion was a self-imposed one, or was forced by the overall apathy of the academic world in and beyond Patna.
I am told he did not share such complaints or grievances. He was confident of the quality of his work. He led a life of, one may call, old rural world. May we say, he not only wrote history, he also tried to live history?
Living with his sons and their children in a house in the Patna’s Patliputra Colony, he preferred to be at the third floor (teesra talla). Jha had a simple bedroom, with just a few books, and a radio. Every morning, he would come down to the ground. He would take a rather long bath in the open, near the hand-pump and offer prayers before going back upstairs with a bucket of water. His did not interact much, even with his own family.
The radio perhaps kept him connected to the outside world. He never took to television, as if, in this fast changing era of capital and technology, he was trying to guard his own charming old world. Possibly because of this lifestyle, he remained quite healthy and robust until he breathed his last at the age of 95. Though, he had stopped writing a long time ago, his memory remained sharp.
Most of his works were published by the KPJRI and its rigorous Journal of Bihar Research Society, which is sadly not publishing now, owing to some judicial trappings.
He wrote extensively on colonial Bihar: academic essays, monographs and books. No historian interested in modern Bihar can do without referring to his work. All his work draws heavily from virgin archival sources. He was one of those few historians of the ‘old beautiful world’ who had the ‘allure of archives’, about which the French historian Arlette Farge said ‘surrendering to the archive’s allure can forever change how we understand the past’.
His books were published by publications that might be considered ‘obscure’ – not in terms of rigour, but in terms of marketing. But due to the sheer originality of his scholarship, his work could not be ignored and was widely cited.
In 1961, he obtained his PhD, supervised by K.K. Datta (1905-1982). It was published as ‘Historical Research Series-XVII’, under the patronage of the Government of Bihar, with the title Education in Bihar, 1813-1859 (1979). It details the unpopularity of the education system introduced by the East India Company.
Even a customary look at the preface will suffice to provide a lot of professional inputs and trade-secrets to researchers of history. His journey to find the records for the proposed Hindu College in Tirhut (1811-1821) ended in the revenue records section, rather than in education-related record. This is an important tale for researchers. He proposes to look into ‘private archives of the several ex-zamindars’ which are a ‘very important source for writing history of education’. He further introduces another set of evidence from ‘some old khanqahs where records bearing on education are to be found, as a madrasa was generally maintained on their premises and teachers and students were provided with food and lodging’.
To promote research in the development of education in parts of Bihar, he also published some primary documents in 1972, titled Beginnings of Modern Education in Mithila: Selections from Educational Records, Darbhanga Raj, 1860-1930.
Jha’s book-length essay, the History of Darbhanga Raj forms a backbone material for Stephen Henningham’s A Great Estate and Its Landlords in Colonial India: Darbhanga, 1860-1942 (Oxford University Press, 1990), and also for Henningham’s essay ‘Bureaucracy and control in India’s Great Landed Estates: The Raj Darbhanga of Bihar, 1879-1950’.
Reviewing three of Jha’s books together, Clive Dewey called his work ‘competent and original pieces of research’. They represent a “dual breakthrough in the historiography of Bihar”, he said, also patting Jha for based his work “upon a kind of source material till now almost completely neglected”. He added, “[T]he very choice of subject steps outside the modern Indian historian’s conventional frame of reference.”
Jata Shankar Jha
Biography of an Indian Patriot: Maharaja Lakshmishwar Singh (1858-1898) of Darbhanga
His 1972 book, Biography of an Indian Patriot: Maharaja Lakshmishwar Singh (1858-1898) of Darbhanga, is an exercise in exploring various facets of the history of 19th century India, as it was chafing under colonial hegemony and was preparing to resist it. In the ‘Foreword’, K.K. Datta appreciates his student as a ‘conscientious and zealous researcher devoted to higher historical studies’. He praises Jha for his ‘careful and critical study of original documents’ and urges ‘him to continue his efforts for further discovery of private records of historical importance from secluded corners to help much needed reconstruction of history of modern India in all aspects, political, administrative, economic and socio-cultural’.
Jha did not confine his engagement to the feudal raj only. He co-authored with Qeyamuddin Ahmad (1930-1998) for the biography of Mazharul Haque (1976). His output of ‘biography as history’ took him also to the revolutionary anti-colonial movements of early 20th century Bihar (1977).
His other essays revealed the social-base and backdrop of the Bihar Hindu Sabha; produced evidence pertaining to the dissensions created by the colonial administration between the Urdu and Nagri protagonists; and traced the emergence of anti-colonial movements in late 19th and early 20th centuries among the Muslim elites of Some of the essays make a content-analysis of Urdu newspapers of Bihar to comprehend the socio-political churning in the late 19th and early 20th century Bihar. With his teacher K.K. Datta, he also edited the three-volume Comprehensive History of Bihar (1976).
Jata Shankar Jha’s work is an interesting guide to those who care for finding new sets of evidence, rather than indulging in unnecessary, tiresome theorisations. Jargon-loving academics who quote from incomprehensible philosophers have done a great disservice to the discipline of history (and other social sciences). This is, at least in part, what led to the communication gap between historians and common literati. Right-wing reactionaries and religious bigots have sought to fill this gap through their concoctions and falsehood.
Even if this diagnosis may appear arguable, it should be considered by the historians and social scientists who are willing to fight this battle between motivated falsehood of the bigots and the scientific, rational, progressive history of genuine nation-makers.
The latter is what Jata Shankar Jha will be remembered for.
Mohammad Sajjad, professor of history, Aligarh Muslim University.
