James Grant Duff

James Grant Duff governed a Maratha state for four years and then wrote the history that told the British what the Marathas had been. He was a Banffshire laird's son who joined the Bombay army at sixteen, learned Marathi and Persian, and served as an interpreter and political assistant during the wars that ended Maratha independence. After the last of them he was made Resident at Satara from 1818 to 1822, administering the small restored kingdom of the Raja Pratap Singh - the descendant of Shivaji, reinstalled on a throne with no power as a gesture of legitimacy over the territory the East India Company had just annexed. The residency gave him the archive. He collected bakhars, the Marathi chronicle histories, along with Persian records and the papers of the Peshwa's own administration, and used them for A History of the Mahrattas, published in three volumes in 1826. The bakhars are worth describing, because they are not archives. They are narrative chronicles, often written down a generation or more after the events and shaped by the family that commissioned them, so they preserve a great deal that no official record kept and argue a case while doing it. He was the first European to use them seriously and he used them largely at face value. It was the first systematic account in English and it stayed the standard one for the better part of a century, translated into Marathi and read in India as well as Britain. Its authority is also the problem with it. He wrote as the officer of the power that had just destroyed his subject, from records selected by that circumstance, and the frame - a vigorous rise, a decadent decline, a conquest that was therefore in the order of things - shaped English understanding of the Marathas for generations and is what later Indian historians spent a great deal of effort undoing. He went home to Scotland in 1823 in poor health, managed the family estate, and died in 1858.

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