Virginia Review of Asian Studies: 19 (2017): 201-205

Virginia Review of Asian Studies: 19 (2017): 201-205

ISSN: 2169-6306

Hauser: Bernard S. Cohn

BERNARD S. COHN: UNDERSTANDING 20th CENTURY INDIA AND BEYOND

Walter Hauser [1] University of Virginia

Few thinkers have been as influential to our collective understanding of India’s social experience, especially in its colonial incarnation, than has Bernard Cohn. Cohn was active, primarily at the University of Chicago from the middle and late 1950s to the time of his death in 2003. In the circumstances it seems appropriate to introduce Cohn to a new generation of students, or to re-familiarize those who know his work with the depth of his scholarship. The Virginia Review of Asian Studies is fortunate to be able to do so by reissuing the 2004 Remembrance written by our friend and colleague, Professor Walter Hauser of the University of Virginia. Professor Hauser, who has been Emeritus since 1995, was, not coincidentally, one of the founders of the Virginia Consortium for Asian Studies.

Remembering Barney Cohn

Memory is inevitably a function of time, as it is most certainly of place and lived experience. It was my happy good fortune to intersect Barney Cohn’s career at critical points in each of those dimensions, beginning quite remarkably, as it turns out, exactly fifty years ago this spring. This was in the Village India seminar of the American anthropologist Robert Redfield at the University of Chicago in April and May of 1954. Barney and I were near contemporaries, then in our middle twenties. At the time of the Redfield seminar Barney’s Cornell Ph.D. was freshly minted, whereas I was at the front end of my Chicago Ph.D. project, in which Barney would soon be intimately involved. Redfield’s seminal role in our collective study of India was his assertion that the villages of the countryside and the peasants who inhabited them were in fact intimate players in the experience of this Great Civilization. In the five decades since, no one elaborated that logic more powerfully or with a greater sensitivity to its conceptual and historical meanings than did Barney Cohn.

For Barney it all started, as he would like to say, in Brooklyn on May 13, 1928. He attended the public schools of New York City, earned his B.A. in history in 1949 from the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1954 from Cornell University. In 1952-53 Barney did field work in Jaunpur district of eastern U.P. as part of the Cornell India Project. His first public report on that research was presented in the Redfield seminar and appeared as one of the eight essays in the published proceedings of the seminar. “The Changing Status of a Depressed Caste,” was Barney’s first publication, but in its thoroughness and clarity, it already conveyed the richness of substance and style Barney would bring to everything he wrote over the next 35 years.

After Cornell and the Redfield seminar, Barney would serve for two years in the U.S. Army at Fort Benning, Georgia. In the summer of 1956 there followed a seminar on law and society at Harvard, which almost certainly influenced the direction of some of Barney’s later work on law and change in colonial North India. These were ideas Barney was clearly formulating as a post-doctoral fellow at Chicago in 1956 and ’57, a fifteen month phase which melded into the two years, 1957-59 which included twenty months of archival work in the U.K. and India. This took Barney to London and the India Office Library and Records, to the National Archives in New Delhi, and most critically, beginning in the fall of 1958, to the Uttar Pradesh State Archives in Allahabad.

As we reflect on the developing trajectory of Barney’s career from the perspective of 2004, it seems fair to suggest that the Allahabad experience of 1958 was a significant confluence of scholarship and ideas in the research agenda Barney seemed consciously to be setting for himself. This may be relying too heavily on the advantages of hindsight, but I think not. Barney and I overlapped for some months in Allahabad in the fall of 1958 when he was beginning his Banaras research in the district-level records of the U.P. archives and I was winding down the U.P. phase of my dissertation research and preparing to move on to Patna and the study of peasant activism in neighboring Bihar. I remember distinctly sensing in our conversations in those weeks and months that Cohn the cultural anthropologist was in equal parts Cohn the social historian and that in his mind’s eye and the representations he was making, each disciplinary perception would and did inform the other. The social relations in the towns and villages of Eastern U.P. that concerned Cohn inevitably had historical dimensions. And everything he wrote from that time on was couched in those terms.

It is, of course, impossible to list as example of the intellectual confluence I have in mind here all of Barney’s essays that would make the point, but mentioning three of those early titles will serve my purpose nicely. Among many others, I think especially of his “Political Systems in Eighteenth Century India: the Banaras Region,” “Structural Change in Indian Rural Society, 1596-1885,” and “From Indian Status to British Contract.” What Cohn gave us in these and other essays was a rich sense of the internal dynamics of agrarian change while at the same time placing local political systems within the wider regional and imperial contexts within which they had their being. For those of us in the 1950s and 1960s accustomed to reading what I can now only describe as standard narrative history, Barney’s work moved us in many new directions. It was like a breath of fresh air, and to use Barney’s own apt description, there was indeed a new social history of India. It was a history that not only sought new and more relevant sources but new and more relevant analytic meanings. And it should surprise no one that Bernard Cohn was one of its most innovative practitioners.

The following year, 1959-60, Barney pursued these ideas, again at the University of Chicago, with appointments as Research Associate in Anthropology and Visiting Assistant Professor of History. For me personally this was an especially fortuitous arrangement given that I too was back at Chicago funded as a Teaching Intern in the India Civilization course in the College, and of course, to write a dissertation. The idea of interacting for a year with the emerging Chicago South Asia group, and with Barney Cohn as chair of my committee, was more than I could ever have hoped for. It was in the most creative sense a time of genuine intellectual excitement about the very idea of India.

In 1960 Barney went to the University of Rochester as chair of Anthropology, a position he held until 1964 when he returned to Chicago as Professor of History and of Anthropology. It was an arrangement that formalized the intellectual sensibilities of a decade to the happy good fortune of generations of graduate students at Chicago in both disciplines and of colleagues, students, and friends well beyond the Chicago Midway. I have in mind the fact that Barney was always available to the community of scholars world wide, whether for visiting appointments, lectures, seminars and conferences, or personal visits.

His several visits to Charlottesville and the University of Virginia are a case in point, which I am sure were replicated at other institutions many times over. At the same time Barney went to Rochester in 1960, I joined the History faculty at Virginia, and very early on, in 1962 as I recall, I recommended Barney as the Page-Barbour and James W. Richard Lecturer for 1964. This was (and remains) the most prestigious lectureship at the University and almost inevitably, given the state of Indian studies in the United States at the time, there had been no speakers focusing on India since the inauguration of the series in 1907. Barney’s three lecture series titled “The Making of Traditional India,” gave him an opportunity to present in an academic forum the early results of his Banaras research. He was, of course, the quintessential essayist and the good news for all of us concerned with India is that virtually all of Cohn’s essays are available in book form through the good offices of Ranajit Guha and Nick Dirks. I have in mind the 1987 collection of essays, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press), with an insightful introduction to Cohn’s early scholarship by Guha. Certainly for three or four clusters of graduate students at Virginia, these essays served as core reading and made of Barney a virtual visiting colleague-in-residence in those years.

The same was true for the four essays appearing in the volume put together by Nick Dirks in 1996, that is, Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton University Press). These essays, ranging from 1982 to 1989 examine issues of colonial knowledge and power and how these themes relate to the history of colonialism and to our perceptions as social scientists, of that fundamental historical phenomenon. Other than bringing these essays together between hard covers, this title has the additional advantage of a trenchant nine page forward by Dirks, and most importantly, Cohn’s twelve-page introduction. To my knowledge it is one of the few and perhaps the last of Barney’s reflective observations on what he was writing and why, though in all fairness, everything that Barney wrote was presciently reflective about meanings of the lived social experience of Indians and their encounter with British colonialism.

Nevertheless, that introductory essay and Barney’s brief three-page preface to his India: The Social Anthropology of a Civilization (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), are the two places where he wrote explicitly about the meanings he was seeking to convey. That small book, however, had another wonderful advantage for undergraduates and for those of us fortunate enough to teach them. In its modest yet clinical mode, it talked about social experience and cultural meanings in ways that students could easily grasp.

Barney was always pushing the frontiers of knowing, concerned not simply with looking for answers but rather asking the right questions, and always with rethinking and reformulating the issues on the table. In any serious academic engagement in which Barney was involved, his inevitable question would be “Now, how shall we put it?” Or, “What shall we say?” The issue was always how could we think anew about India, about the social relations and cultural experience of that great civilization? For more than fifty years, Bernard Cohn’s ideas and most fundamentally his decency and humanity were powerful influences in how we pursued that project. And those of us who continue the quest of learning and knowing, have the advantage of standing on some very broad shoulders. So we thank you Barney, all of us. It has been a wonderful run.

Bernard S. Cohn retired in 1995 as Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology at the University of Chicago. With the help of his wife Rella and many students and friends, he remained intellectually engaged in the years that followed despite the debilitating illness that in the end took his life. Barney died at his home in Chicago on November 25, 2003.

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[1] Walter Hauser is Professor Emeritus of South Asian History at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His most recent book is Culture: Vernacular Politics, and the Peasants: India, 1889-1950. An edited translation of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati’s Mera Jivan Sangharsh (My Life Struggle). Translated and edited by Walter Hauser with Kailash Chandra Jha (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2015). For details of Dr. Hauser’s academic career see his 2008 festschrift: Speaking of Peasants: Essays on Indian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser, edited by William R. Pinch (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2008).