James Tod

For the Lower Canada seigneur and politician, see James Tod (seigneur).

Lieutenant Colonel James Tod
by C. D. Blunt-Mackenzie

Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod (1782–1835), was an officer of the British East India Company and an Oriental scholar. Vijay Vaishishtha has described him, perhaps with some hyperbole, as "The Herodotus of the History of Rajasthan".

Life and career

Tod was born in Islington, London, on 20 March 1782. Following in the footsteps of various other members of his family, including his father, Tod went to India in 1799. He had undergone a period of training in England during the previous year and he journeyed as a cadet in the Bengal army. He was appointed lieutenant two months after his arrival and in 1805 was able to arrange his posting as a member of the escort to a family friend who had been appointed as Envoy and Resident to a royal court in Sindia. By 1813 he had achieved promotion to the rank of captain and was commanding the escort.

The royal court was peripatetic. Tod undertook various topographical and geological studies as it moved from one area to another, using his training as an engineer. These studies culminated in the production of a map in 1815. This map of "Central India", which was a phrase coined by him, became of strategic importance to the British as they were soon to be fighting the Third Anglo-Maratha War. During that war, which ran from 1817 to 1818, Tod acted as a superintendent of the intelligence department and was able to draw on other aspects of regional knowledge which he had acquired while moving around with the court. He also drew up various strategies for the military campaign.

In 1818 he was appointed Political Agent for various states of western Rajputana, where the British East India Company had come to amicable arrangements with the various Rajput rulers in order to exert overall, although indirect, control over the area. His responsibilities were extended quickly: initially involving himself with Mewar, Kota, Sirohi and Bundi, he soon added Marwar to his portfolio and then, in 1821, was also given responsibility for Jaisalmer. His successes were plentiful and Stephen Wheeler notes that Tod was

... so successful in his efforts to restore peace and confidence that within less than a year some three hundred deserted towns and villages were repeopled, trade revived, and, in spite of the abolition of transit duties and the reduction of frontier customs, the state revenue had reached an amount never before known. During the next five years Tod earned the respect of both the chiefs and the people; and was able to rescue more than one princely family, including that of the ranas of Udaipur, from the destitution to which they had been reduced by Mahratta raiders.

Tod was not, however, universally respected. His immediate superior, David Ochterlony, was unsettled by Tod's rapid rise and frequent failure to consult with him, while at least one Rajput prince objected to his close involvement in the affairs of his state and succeeded in persuading the authorities to remove Marwar from Tod's area of influence. In 1821 his favouritism towards one party in a princely dispute, contrary to the orders given to him, gave rise to a severe reprimand and a formal restriction of his ability to operate without reference to Ochterlony, as well as the removal of Kota from his charge. Jaisalmer was then taken out of his sphere of influence in 1822, as official concerns grew regarding his sympathy for the Rajput princes. This and other losses of status, such as the reduction in the size of his escort, caused him to believe that his personal reputation and ability to work successfully in Mewar, by now the one area still left to him, was too diminished to be acceptable. He resigned his role as Political Agent in Mewar later that year, citing ill-health. There is no doubt that he suffered from poor health for much of his life before and after that time. Reginald Heber commented that

His misfortune was that, in consequence of favouring native princes so much, the government of Calcutta were led to suspect him of corruption, and consequently to narrow his powers and associate other officers with him in his trust, till he was disgusted and resigned his place. They are now satisfied, I believe, that their suspicions were groundless.

He left India for England in February 1823, travelling first to Bombay.

During the last years of his life he talked about India at functions in Paris and elsewhere across Europe. He also worked as a librarian for the Royal Asiatic Society in London but retired from his military career in 1826, soon after he had been promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel. His marriage to Julia Clutterbuck in 1826 produced three children but his health was declining. He died in 1835, soon after his return from a convalescent visit to Italy.

Publications

During his time in Rajputana Tod was able to collect materials for his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, which detailed the contemporary geography and history of Rajputana and central India along with the history of the Rajput clans who ruled most of the area at that time. The work was published in two volumes, in 1829 and 1832. So dominant did these volumes become in the popular and academic mind that they largely replaced the older accounts upon which Tod based much of his content, notably the Prithvirãj Rãjo and the Nainsi ri Khyãt.

Tod submitted archæological papers to the Royal Asiatic Society's Transactions series and a paper on the politics of Western India that was appended to the report of the House of Commons committee on Indian affairs, 1833. He had also taken notes on his journey to Bombay and collated them for another book, Travels in Western India. That book was published posthumously in 1839.

In the preface to his Annals, Tod explains that,

Being desirous of epitomising the chronicles of the martial races of Central and Western India, it was essential to ascertain the sources whence they draw, or claim to draw, their lineage. For this purpose I obtained from the library of the Rana of Oodipoor Udaipur their sacred volumes, the Pooráns, and laid them before a body of pundhits, over whom presided the learned Jetty Gyanchandra. From these extracts were made of all the genealogies of the great races [sic] of Soorya and Chandra, and of facts historical and geographical.

An amateur numismatist, Tod is known for having discovered the first specimens of Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins from the Hellenistic period following the conquests of Alexander the Great, which were described in his books. These ancient kingdoms had been largely forgotten or considered semi-legendary by posterity, but Tod's findings — the coins have since been found in vast quantities and are highly renowned for their artistic qualities — confirmed the long term Greek presence in Afghanistan and Punjab.

Reputation

Tod was of his time, an officer in the British imperial system working in India. With regard to his writings on the Rajputs, he was also a soldier writing about a caste renowned for its martial abilities, and he was aided and abetted in his writings by the very people whom he was documenting. Furthermore, he had been entranced by their story even prior to dealing with them, as he came to do, in his official capacity as administrator of the region in which they lived. All of these factors, says Jason Freitag, contribute to why the Annals were "manifestly biased".

It is acknowledged that Tod made some poor decisions in his interpretations. Examples of these include asserting the ancestry of the Mohils when, even today, there is insufficient evidence to prove his point, and mistaking Rana Kumbha as the husband of Mira Bai. Michael Meister has commented that Tod had a "general reputation for inaccuracy ... among Indologists by late in the nineteenth century", although the opinion of those Indologists sometimes prevented them from appreciating some of the useful aspects in his work. That reputation persists, with one modern writer commenting that his works "... are erroneous and misleading at places and they are to be used with caution as a part of sober history".

In India itself, he is revered by those whose ancestors he documented in good light. In 1997 the Maharana Mewar Charitable Foundation instituted an award named after him and intended to be given to modern non-Indian writers who exemplified his understanding of the area and its people. In other recognition of his work in Mewar Province, a village has been named Todgarh. Freitag describes the opinion of the Rajput people

Tod, here, is not about history as such, but is a repository for "truth" and "splendor" ... The danger, therefore, is that the old received wisdom - evident and expressed in the work of people like Tod - will not be challenged at all, but will become much more deeply ingrained.

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

• "Tod, James" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
• Freitag, Jason (2009). Serving empire, serving nation: James Tod and the Rajputs of Rajasthan. BRILL. ISBN 9789004175945.
• Vaishishtha, Vijay Kumar (1992). "James Tod as a Historian". In Sharma, Gopi Nath; Bhatnagar, V. S. (eds.). The Historians and sources of history of Rajasthan. Centre for Rajasthan Studies, University of Rajasthan. p. 152.

Further reading

By Tod

• Tod, James (1829). Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han or the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India, Volume 1. London: Smith, Elder.
• Tod, James (1832). Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han or the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India, Volume 2. London: Smith, Elder.
• Tod, James (1839). Travels in Western India. London: W. H. Allen.

By others

• Ojha, Gaurishankar Hirachand (2002). Suprasiddha itihaskara Karnala James Toda ka jivana charitra (in Hindi). Jodhpur: Rajasthani Granthagara.
• Tillotson, Giles (2008). James Tod's Rajasthan: The Historian and His Collections. Marg Publications. ISBN 8185026807.

External links

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)