Utopias of the past: a reading of A. K. Forbes’ Ras Mala

ABSTRACT Alexander Kinloch Forbes, a British colonial official, wrote the Ras Mala, a history of Gujarat, in 1856. When he was looking for sources for writing this history, he received a response from his interlocutors in Gujarat that itihasa resides in the volumes of kavya. The essay attempts to understand this response, and study the shared genealogies of history and poetry in the context of nineteenth century Gujarat. It argues that the shared genealogies of itihasa and kavya in Gujarati discursive traditions sustained a plural vision of the past. This plural vision stood at variance from the one that was projected through the European teleological project of history in the nineteenth century Enlightenment philosophy and the Kantian model of education. The essay proposes to read Forbes’ Ras Mala in the light of the shared genealogy of itihasa and kavya to understand how it both contests and collaborates with the dominant European modes of constructing the past. In the light of Ashish Nandy’s concept of the open past, the paper seeks to understand what visions of utopias Ras Mala had to offer on the site of colonial modernity.