This paper was delivered as the Loyola College Endowment lecture at the Tirunelveli session of the South Indian History Congress, January 30-Feb 1 2009. The author thanks Dr G Chandrika, Reader, Department of History, Pondicherry University, for making valuable suggestions.Mark Wilks (1759-1831) remains a curiously neglected historian of the early nineteenth century, a period that saw the emergence of British paramountcy over India.
As a soldier, Lt Col. Mark Wilks participated in several of the battles that were fought in southern India and was with General James Stuart when Tipu Sultan’s capital was stormed in May 1799. As a diplomat, Mark Wills, the Resident at the restored court of the Wodiyars at Mysore, was quite successful in bringing Mysore firmly into the grip of the administration of the Madras Presidency.
Committed to the restoration of what was then regarded as an ‘ancient dynasty’ Mark Wilks had to deftly subvert powerful votaries of outright annexation of the territories of Tipu Sultan and he undertook a long range historical investigation that combined the principles of enlightenment historiography with the analysis and representation of the histories of states,
cultures and societies that differ fundamentally from the prevailing notions of property, civil society and government. Wilks in his Historical Sketches of the south of India made a pioneering attempt to place the political structure encountered by the English in southern India in the historical context of the disintegration
of the Vijayanagara Empire and in so doing laid the basis for a historical methodology that is still relevant in that the combined epigraphic evidence with the material collected by Colin Mackenzie: the weakness of the later corrected by the strengths of the former.
