Reinterpreting Indian History- Essays in Honour of Professor Sobhag Mathur

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I am indeed happy to learn that a festschrift entitled Reinterpreting Indian History in honour of Professor Sobhag Mathur, Former Head, Department of History, Jai Narain Vyas University, Jodhpur, is being published on the occasion of his 75th birthday by some of his colleagues and friends. I congratulate its editor Dr. Shankar Goyal, his student and colleague in the Department, for the noble task he undertook in his hand sometime last year and completed it not only successfully but in the best possible manner he could.

Professor Mathur needs no introduction to the world of scholarship. A perfect gentleman, that he is, his contribution to the discipline of history, more particularly to modern Indian histroy and the history of Rajasthan, is indeed great from any yardstick. In his Introduction (pp. xiii-xxiii) to the work Dr. Goyal has very ably introduced to his manifold contributions in the field to the readers. Professor Mathur's works definitely betray his command over original sources, and I very sincerely congratulate him for possessing it most authoritatively and making use of it so successfully in all his works.

It is a matter of great pleasure that as many as seventeen historians, namely, Professors L.S. Rathore, S.R. Goyal, P.R. Arya, T.K. Mathur, V.K. Vashishtha, B.K. Sharma, T.P. Verma, M.V. Singh, A. Chandrasekaran, Nalini Chandrasekaran, G.J. Sudhakar, A.K. Sinha, Vibha Upadhyaya, K.L. Mathur, Vinita Parihar and Meghna Vig, hailing from numerous universities have come together in this volume to produce a work worthy of both teachers and students. The intrinsic merit of their essays, the wide range of themes they encompass, the questions they raise and the facts they uncover make this a valuable collection in itself of interest to any reader of history and historiography. I hope that it will be received warmly by the scholarly world.

Professor Sobhag Mathur (b. August, 1939) is a scholar of exceptional abilities. In his illustrious career of over three decades, he has published more than six research works and over 50 research papers which generally cover different aspects of modern Indian history, more particularly, the history of Rajasthan. To me he seems to be one of the more clear-thinking historians of Rajasthan today. His doctoral dissertation Struggle for Responsible Government in Marwar (Jodhpur, 1986) is certainly a major contribution on the subject. Soon after the independence of India the question of writing a history of the freedom movement arose. R.C. Majumdar, who was initially entrusted with this task, gave his views in the two volumes of the History of Freedom Movement. Then, Tarachand, who took over the work from him, wrote four volumes. But these works have not given the required attention to the princely states of Rajasthan. This lacuna was later sought to be filled by enthusiastic younger scholars such as Sobhag Mathur. In the present monograph he has confined himself to an account of the struggle for responsible government and civil liberties which the people of Marwar carried on during the fateful period 1923-1949. No such independent study was made till then on this subject though other aspects of the history of modern Marwar were studied in some detail.

For Sobhag Mathur in a way it has been his own subject, for from his childhood he witnessed and heard about the activities of the Lok Parishad and its leaders in and around his house which important political figures of Jodhpur used to visit. He had also the privilege of meeting its leaders who often visited his family members. This childhood association with the subject continued in his later years even when he became a research scholar and then a teacher.

But it was not all plain sailing. The subject relates to a period the prejudices and predilections of which will take a long time to die down. The sources are also widely scattered. But Mathur enjoyed approaching the individuals (many of them were still living) who played a prominent part in this political drama. He candidly admits that all along he had to face one particular difficulty. He tried to meet the leaders of the Lok Parishad who were still alive and asked them to discuss the past events but he found that instead of helping him they often tried to give a twist to the events, either exaggerating or underestimating their share in them. Some people whom he met refused even to talk to him. But putting together the results of "all this cooperation and non-cooperation," he tried to "correlate the facts and sifted the evidence in the most objective manner he could."

The work of Sobhag Mathur is divided into seven chapters. In this work he has used the archival material exhaustively, and for the first time. Its first chapter deals with the historical background of those stirring events. Here, the impact of the British on Marwar has been studied and its effects on the administration are pointed out.