“Revisiting ‘Bakhar’: Power, Knowledge and Communities” Essay example -

This paper concentrates on the study of the selected bakhars. The bakhar, means a Marathi prose historical narrative. Except Mahikavati bakhar, most of the bakhars were pen from the 17th century to early 19th century. These bakhars were written by Maratha officials on the directions from their masters or senior officials. Those officials were considered as Mahitigar i.e. well-informed and knowledgeable persons. The articulate bakhar derived from Arabic word khabar, which means news or information. The bakhars were more or less biographies of nifty personalities, descriptions of great battles or genealogies of prominent families. The origin of bakhar literature, from Persian tawarikhs and akhabarats or from Sanskrit akhyans and puranas, is a matter of debate among the scholars of Maratha history and Marathi linguistics. The most of the historians raised serious questions about the authenticity of bakhar as a reliable source for history writing. However, historians had evermore used and still using bakhar as source. The Marathi literary critics, considering bakhars as an significant Marathi prose genre of the pre-colonial period, focused on various aspects in their studies of bakhars such as writing styles, sketches of characters and events, uses of puranic and mythical legends, ideal and moral values, uses of divine interventions, descriptions of ordination and places, vocabulary and uses of phrases, changing meanings of words, constructions of sentences etc in bakhar literature. Unlike the literary critics who primarily analyze the origin of bakhar through literary studies as mention above mainly focused on one question i.e. from where bakhar is derived. Making departure from this point, Sumit Guha locates the s... .... Sumit Guha, discourse Historically The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India. American Historical Review 109, no.4(October 2004)1084-2004. Prachi Deshpande, Creative Past Historical Memory and individuation in W estern India 1700-1960 Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2007, p.39. Ibid. See, Anirudh Deshpande, Marathas,Rajputs and Afghans in Mid-Eighteenth-Century India Bhausahebanchi Bakhar and the Articulation of ethnic difference in Pre-Colonial India , Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Occasional Paper memorial and Society, New Series-10, 2013 Sabhasad Bakhar, Introduction, p.15 Ibid, pp.1&2. Ibid pp. 29-38, 116-127. Ibid, p.131 Ibid, p.132 Chitnis Bakhar, Introduction, p. 17&18, for more details visit G S Sardesai, Marathi Riyasat Khand 2, Popular Prakashan, Mumabai, 2011. Chitnis Bakhar, Introduction, p. 17 Ibid, p.1&2