A village elder in Bibhutibhusan's Ashani Sangket is hard put to
answer the query of a fellow villager about the location of
Singapore, which, according to the village gossip, has recently been
captured by the Germans. Various guesses are made – is it in the
district of Jessore or Khulna or somewhere in the vicinity of the
neighboring village of Mamudpur? No less ingenious is the guess
ventured by the elder himself – since the place is on the sea coast
it must be in the district of Midnapore near Puri. And he is
supported in his view by the learned village pundit. What is
significant here is not so much the villagers' ignorance about
Singapore as their ignorance about the districts of Jessore, Khulna
and Midnapore or their neighboring village of Mamudpur. Here they
have lived and died for generations. Here they will go on doing so
unless swept away by famines and floods or some other calamity
either natural or man made.
A master artist that he is Bibhutibhusan avoids the melodramatic,
yet in his seemingly artless style depicts the horrors of the great
Bengal famine of 1943 to the life. What amazes his readers most is
the utter helplessness of the villagers. Their very survival is at
stake and steeped in superstition and ignorance they do not know the
cause of the crisis and they passively suffer. This poignant tale of
human tragedy shows how abysmal is the ignorance of the villagers
about their own native place. The root cause of the famine is remote
no doubt and beyond their control, but it would not be far from the
truth to say that their helplessness is due not to a small degree to
their ignorance. As a rational being man's goal is not mere survival
but a civilized existence, decent and comfortable both materially
and spiritually. Knowledge about the environment coupled with his
ingenuity make the achievement of this goal possible for him. For
betterment of the conditions of his existence he deliberately
adjusts himself to his environment by suitable patterning of his
behavior and controlling the environment wherever possible. Instead
of being fatalistic his attitude and outlook is possibilistic.
We have come a long way since the days of that cataclysmic event in
our history and our ignorance about our immediate environment may
not be as abysmal yet it is still quite pervasive. We know a great
deal about great many things but we very often know very little
about things that concern us most – our home, our village, our
district, our own little society. In the words of Rabindranath, we
travel long distances at great costs to see mountains and oceans but
rarely bother to enjoy the simple beauty of a dew drop on the blades
of a grass at our doorstep.
It is here that gazetteers can be of great help to us. The British
are said to have acquired an empire in this country in a fit of
absentmindedness but at the hour of its consolidation they were wide
awake and alert. Once the heroic deeds had been done they did
something very prosaic indeed yet immensely useful. Good shopkeepers
as they were they now settled down to take stock of their new
acquisition which was a totally unknown entity to them. It was a
sort of inventory preparation item by item. They surveyed its myriad
aspects in order how best to administer it to their own interest. In
the process they produced a genre of literature called gazetteer
which was entirely new in this country. Geographical descriptions of
our country are strewn in our ancient and classical literature but
they are neither systematic nor comprehensive. Only Abul Fazl's
Ain-I-Akbari, compiled during the reign of Akbar, is a crude
approximation to a gazetteer.
The purpose of the gazetteers compiled by these foreigners was to
acquaint themselves with an alien land and its people. It was to be
a kind of a manual or handbook which the administrators could carry
about their person and consult as an aid to their administrative
work. And the compilers were the administrators themselves. Not only
gazetteers but also many other scholarly works on various aspects of
the place of their work and its people were produced by these
bureaucrats most of which remain standard works of reference to this
day. Such works appear to have been viewed as a mark of distinction
in the service and received official encouragement. The Secretary of
State for India by an order of 12th November, 1885, directed that
particulars of "any literary work of a public or official character
undertaken by an officer" should be duly noted in the History of
Services maintained to record the performances of the officers.
Every district and sub-divisional office had a small library of its
own where gazetteers and allied literature were easily available. In
fact the gazetteer was the field officers' Bible. And the government
took steps for their wide distribution. Today things have changed so
much that the district gazetteer has become a rare commodity in the
district itself. A couple of years ago the Collector of a district '
found the only available copy of the gazetteer in a dilapidated
condition in the Bar library' of his district and had to make twenty
copies of it 'for the posterity'. Such being the state of affairs
the question which one once asked, "who reads your gazetteers,
anyway?" does not appear to admit of any very satisfactory answer.
Though their utility was purely official these gazetteers also came
in handy to those who cared to know and satisfy their intellectual
curiosity about a particular geographical area. But the number of
such non-official users has always been very limited – mostly
scholars and academicians. In the matter of such use of gazetteers
the position in the post-independence period has sadly not remained
the same, it has become worse. And outside this exclusive circle,
very few amongst the common people are aware that such things as
gazetteers exist or they are of any use to them. The chief reason
seems to be that the linguistic medium of their compilation has
remained English making them inaccessible to the common man. The
result is that the common man's mental picture of his district or
subdivision or block has remained hazy and a matter of guesswork, if
not as wild as that of the villagers of Ashani Sanket.
There are people indeed who may scoff at the gazetteers yet their
usefulness cannot be over-emphasized. From ancient times the
district – known as Bishaya in the time of Ashoka, for example – has
been the basic unit of administration in this country and a synoptic
knowledge about its geography, history, its people and their
socio-economic conditions has always been an essential requirement
in a successful administrator. As a geographical unit many Indian
districts are larger than some states elsewhere and the number of
souls the former contain is more than the latter do. This is what
O'Malley had to say about the district of Midnapore about a century
ago: "The largest and the most populous of the Bengal regulation
districts, it has an area of 5,186 square miles and contains, as
ascertained at the census of 1901, of 2,780,114 persons. Its area
is, indeed, nearly equal to that of the Patiala State or the kingdom
of Saxony while it contains more inhabitants than Berar, or the
kingdom of Denmark." With the devolution of greater powers of
governance, both administrative and financial, to the Panchayat
bodies we have to take serious notice of the districts as
administrative units not in the older sense – a district officer
reigning over it as a guardian angel – but in the modern sense – the
common people at long last taking things in their own hands and
deciding their own fate. They need information for identification of
their needs and aspirations, planning for their realization and for
assessment of their achievements and failures. They need facts
perhaps to argue their case before the State Finance Commission over
allocation of resources, or before the State Election Commission
over questions of delimitation. Instances could be multiplied where
a gazetteer is an immensely useful manual. The compiler's aim should
therefore be to best serve this practical purpose.
About the kind of information that should be collected and compiled
in a gazetteer opinions may vary, but it is generally agreed that it
should cover as many aspects of the area as possible within a short
compass so as to present a fairly comprehensive picture of that area
– its physical aspects, its history, its inhabitants and their
social, economic and cultural life etc. In doing so the compiler
cannot undertake original research or field survey. He has to depend
on the published works of various scholars and authorities, reports
of organs and departments of governments, publications of reputed
educational and research institutions and relevant literary works.
His motto should be to make the compilation as authoritative as
possible. Limitations of time and space of course do not allow him
to go into great details. For extensive and intensive information on
any specific matter the reader will have to consult the scholarly
works on the subject. He should avoid all controversy and give a
succinct account of all the relevant views on the contentious
issues. In this respect a gazetteer is also a kind of bibliography
for a thorough study of the area. In the collection and presentation
of his materials the compiler has to be selective. For,
metaphorically speaking, every district has a personality of its own
– certain peculiarities which are unique and uncommon – and it
should be the endeavor of the compiler to bring out that
personality. And his motto should be, in the words of Lytton
Strachey, "to preserve a becoming brevity – a brevity which excludes
everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant." He
however need not sacrifice the uniformity or general plan which is
essential to facilitate comparison between districts.
Another thing the compiler does rather unwittingly. He writes
history – the history of the district of his time. Much of what he
includes in his gazetteer will most probably perish with the files
in government offices or periodical publications of the time, but
they will definitely live on in his compilation. We do not know if
any such pretensions were harbored by Hunter or O'Malley or their
likes but the fact remains that today their works partake of the
character of history. Many eyebrows may be raised at such a
presumptuous claim, but if one wants to know how a Bengal district
was a century ago one will have to consult the gazetteers of Hunter
and O'Malley. Posterity will similarly view the gazetteers of the
present. This fact devolves a great responsibility on the shoulders
of the compiler. He must be scrupulously objective, for he is a
historian in spite of himself.
Those who are reluctant to accept this claim for the gazetteer in
general will certainly scoff at the idea of re-issue of old
gazetteers and consider it a waste of public money. They may dispute
the claim that all history is contemporary history or it is the
elucidation of the present by the past, yet they may do well to heed
what Trevelyan has to say on the matter: "Disinterested intellectual
curiosity is the life-blood of real civilization – the appeal of
history is imaginative. Our imagination craves to behold our
ancestors as they really were, going about their daily business and
daily pleasure." In a modest way gazetteers satisfy such cravings of
ours. It must however be admitted that what an old gazetteer gives
is a photograph – a skeleton of the past. In order to see the past
in flesh and blood one has to seek elsewhere like the great
historical novels of Scott or Tolstoy and others.
Finally, the compiler should have no pretension to originality, for
what he does he does it by taking materials in bits and pieces from
others. At his worst he is a tinker or a mechanic and a drudge. At
his best he is a florist who makes a beautiful bouquet with other
men's flowers. He has a chance of success if he is diligent and
intelligent. If his sources fail him, or he is lazy and careless he
is doomed to failure.
Boloji.com is owned and managed by
Boloji Media Inc Privacy Policy |
Disclaimer No part of this Internet site may
be reproduced without prior written permission of the copyright holder.
