Gaurishankar Ojha, the Archivist Who Forged Rajasthan’s Historical Edifice

Part 3 - Ojha painstakingly sifted inscriptions, challenged Persian court chronicles and pioneered regional history to give Rajasthan a past rooted in fact rather than fable.

Tod and Ojha – the two names are the ‘open sesame’ to Rajasthan’s past. To invoke them is to unlock the vault of Rajput memory, just as Ranke and Mommsen summon visions of Germany, or Michelet and Guizot conjure France.

If Col. James Tod, the romantic East India Company (EIC) soldier-scholar of the early 19th century, cast Rajasthan in the mould of a Homeric epic in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829-32) with his dramatic mise-en-scène of Rajput warrior clans, chivalry and sacrifices, then it was left to Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha to supply the austere corrective by paying more attention to fact than fable.

Together, Tod and Ojha form the twin gateways to Rajasthan’s historical imagination, standing like Janus - one gazing outward to a romantic past, the other inward to a grounded record. Both form the arch through which all subsequent scholarship on Rajasthan must pass.

Upon its publication, Tod’s famous work captured the imagination of both Britons and Indians. Its romantic depictions of Rajput chivalry and courtly honour painted Rajasthan as a feudal wonderland of loyalty and sacrifice. Tod often relied on bardic tales, oral traditions and exaggerations that suited his thesis. For all its charm, the book was riddled with historical inaccuracies.

It was left to Ojha, more than a century later, to perform the hard task of subjecting Tod’s account to scholarly scrutiny by pointing out misreadings of inscriptions, misinterpretations of dynastic chronology and fanciful leaps from folklore to fact. In his monumental ‘History of Rajputana’ and later works, Ojha established a more reliable genealogy of the Rajput clans, fixed their chronology through epigraphic evidence and replaced Tod’s romanticised ‘feudal anarchy’ with a clearer account of political processes and state formation even as he recognised Tod’s pioneering zeal.

To students of Rajasthan’s history, Ojha remains a towering figure. Yet to the wider world, this meticulous historian who wrote in vernacular Hindi remains obscure.

Born in the impoverished state of Sirohi in 1863, he scraped through his early education and attempted college in Bombay, only to fail for want of health and means. It was in the library of the Asiatic Society that he learned his metier.

Inspired by pioneering Gujarati archaeologist Bhagwan Lal Indraji to study ancient scripts and coins, Ojha published the now-classic ‘Bharatiya Pracheen Lipimala’ (‘The Paleography of India’) in 1894. The book was the first in any language to systematically trace the development of ancient Indian scripts.

So impressive was it that even the great German savant George Bühler drew on it for his ‘Indische Paläographie’ (1904). More vitally, by making palaeography accessible in Hindi, Ojha equipped a generation of Indian students to read inscriptions and shaped the university syllabus for decades.

He published the first volume of his opus - ‘Rajputana ka Itihas’ (‘History of Rajasthan’) in 1926 but soon changed tack. It struck him as both more logical and commercially viable to write the histories of individual princely states.

Thus, Ojha produced the two-volume ‘Udaipur Rajya ka Itihas’ (1928, 1931) focusing on the glories of Mewar.

For Ojha, the history of Mewar was a monumental freedom struggle against Islamic and Mughal imperialism. At a time when most Hindu states had bent before Mughal suzerainty, Mewar alone sustained a ceaseless struggle for centuries. For Ojha, Mewar’s saga was an example unparalleled in world history – a selfless sacrifice coupled with an idealistic love of liberty.

In his eyes, Udaipur was not merely another princely state but the keeper of Rajput honour.

Conversely, Ojha’s verdict on the Marathas, who had filled the political vacuum left by the Mughals, was very harsh.

For him, they were agents of destruction in Rajasthan. He observed that against the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, Mewar had fought for 450 years without serious weakening. But in just six decades after Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the Marathas had sapped Rajput vitality to such an extent that without British protection, it would have been annexed outright.

This conclusion is clearly flawed and does not bear historical scrutiny. For by the time Mewar signed treaties with the British in December 1818, the Marathas had already ceased to be a menace. Yet Ojha insisted that the very act of treaty-signing reflected the terror of Maratha and Pindari depredations. He cast the British as ‘saviours’ of the Rajput states.

The texts of the treaties, however, tell an altogether different story: they make no mention of Marathas, only a promise to transfer tribute payments to the East India Company.

But Ojha was sharply critical of the Rajput clans as well, blaming the Rajputs’ own disunity for their vulnerability while noting that nobles themselves had invited Maratha aid in their petty disputes, only to fall prey to them.

He observed that the Hurda pact of 1734, whereby the Rajput states of Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur agreed to act jointly against the Marathas, might have offered hope, but Ojha found its failure inevitable as the Rajput rulers, he argued, could never yield precedence to one another.

Ojha’s hostility to the Marathas revealed more than a historical misjudgment. It betrayed his Rajput partisanship and his difficulty in acknowledging the Marathas as nation-builders in their own right. This was because many of the records he used came from Rajput courts impoverished by Maratha exactions. Their bitterness became his.

Diagnosing Rajput decline

In his histories of Marwar and Bikaner, he stressed that internal rivalries had repeatedly opened the door to outsiders. In Jodhpur, he traced Maratha intervention to the feuds between Ram Singh and Bakht Singh in the mid-18th century. He did not flinch from censuring Ajit Singh for his ingratitude towards Durga Das, the legendary noble who had defended Marwar against Mughal wrath, noting that Nemesis overtook Ahit when he was murdered by his own son.

But Ojha also fell prey to courtly patronage. His history of Bikaner (1939–40) devotes a staggering 120 pages to Maharaja Ganga Singh, extolling him as a ‘visionary moderniser.’ Here, Ojha is less the historian than the court panegyrist, shaped by the constraints of his employment, careful never to offend conservative Rajput interests.

Yet, his pioneering achievement cannot be denied. As curator at Udaipur’s Victoria Hall Museum and later at Ajmer’s Rajputana Museum, his collection of epigraphs and documents became the bedrock of Rajasthani historiography. He demonstrated that India’s history could not be reconstructed by Persian chroniclers alone, who habitually dismissed Rajput rulers as mere ‘zamindars.’

Ojha’s insistence on local sources restored dignity to the Rajput past and rescued it from the biases of court historians in Delhi. His industry was titanic as he outshone his contemporaries by the sheer weight and volume of his publications. But his work also reveals the limitations of his age. He mainly wrote political and dynastic history, reducing his narrative to one of rulers, battles, treaties and genealogies.

What, then, is Ojha’s legacy? He gave Rajasthan its documentary foundation. Without him, much of the region’s archival wealth might have remained scattered, neglected or lost.

Importantly, by writing in Hindi, he asserted the intellectual dignity of Indian languages at a time when English monopolised academic prestige.

Without Ojha, Rajasthan’s history might have remained in the shadows of Mughal chronicles and British fantasy. In doing so, he ensured that Rajasthan be remembered as a region with its own record, agency and pride. If Tod gave Rajasthan its legend, Ojha gave it its archive.