Killer Khilats, Part 2: Imperial Collecting of Poison Dress Legends in India

Folklore, Oct, 2001 by Michelle Maskiell, Adrienne Mayor

Controversies about poison khilats also reflect the way some collectors evaluated the written and oral materials that claimed to represent the Indian past. Historians--both Europeans and Western-educated Indians--who wrote during the British Raj tended to accept Turkish and Persian court chronicles as valid sources for Indian history and to dismiss pre-existing Hindu sources as ahistorical. Hindu history expressed through khyats (historical chronicles) in regional languages was a mode of "embedded history" in which "historical consciousness has to be prised out," and this escaped many Raj historians (Thapar 1994, 137-9). More recently, however, the "historical anecdotes" of khyats are seen as "authentic description[s] of contemporary events" (Kathuria 1987, 206-8; see also Ziegler 1976, 219-50).

Meanwhile, amateur folklorists and imperial ethnographers "produced knowledge" about living Indian peoples (Islam 1982, 17-18 and 31). The history of Indian folklore collection from the early nineteenth century, when travellers "typically published a few legends, myths or tales," to the mid- to late-nineteenth-century work of British officers, missionaries, and their Indian translators, who collected folktales and beliefs, is traced by Mazharul Islam and A. K. Ramanujan. After 1878, when the Folk-Lore Society was established in Britain, "a new scholarship" of annotation, footnotes, and motif indexes determined the methods of collecting Indian folklore (Islam 1982, 30; also Ramanujan 1987).

The disciplinary boundaries between folklore and history, separated during the professionalisation of the social sciences in nineteenth-century Europe, are today melded through interdisciplinary "cultural studies." Thus, the Rajasthani legends collected by James Tod and others (see later), including those featuring poisoned robes of honour, now prove to be an important primary source for both historians and folklorists (Srivastava 1994, 589-614; Peabody 1996).

The Tales

During British rule, the Rajputs and their British supporters consistently claimed that Rajputs were the historical defenders of indigenous Hindu tradition when it was challenged by foreign Muslim invasions and rule. Rajput bardic lore recounted how their ancestors were forced by Turkish Muslims from richer farmlands to the poorer lands around modern Rajasthan, where these "uprooted royal clans" preserved "age-old traditions of the last Hindu kings of north central India" (Ganguli 1983, 96 and 89). The British colonial-era interpretation of several centuries of Turkish invasions and Rajput displacements developed within the complex power politics of the weakened Mughal Empire and aggressive British commercialism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In "Killer Khilats, Part 1," we presented the chief variant of each of the seven tales within its historical context. Here we will suggest how to read multiple versions of the tales in light of the preconceptions of their British and Indian English-language collectors.