Papers by Aparna Vaidik
Peer-reviewed pedagogy article, 2024
Cracking History's Cold Cases - Interrogating Colonial Documents and Narratives - my latest publi... more Cracking History's Cold Cases - Interrogating Colonial Documents and Narratives - my latest publication on History pedagogy. This article arises from a historical methods course 'History Sleuths' that I have been offering since last year. The article is for history instructors on how to create an essay assignment (using colonial documents) that visibilises the 'research process'. That is, how to help students experience the messiness and non-linearity of historical research; to highlight the significance of 'conjecture' as a doorway into historical thinking; how to encourage students to embrace frustration and failure as part of research; how to question one's frameworks and to appreciate the fallibility of narratives. It also introduces the instructors to 'Labour-grading' as a form of decolonialzing pedagogical praxis. The assignment can be adapted for any level of teaching - K12, UG or PG.
Book Chapter, 2022
As ‘global’ historical thinking increasingly becomes the order of the day, academics and the educ... more As ‘global’ historical thinking increasingly becomes the order of the day, academics and the educated public alike have begun seeing global narratives that straddle diverse sets of spaces across the globe as emancipatory, as correctives to moral relativism, and as applicable to the historical particularities of nation, community and family.i In view of the heightened tendency for the consumption and production of global narratives, one may raise the question: do histories that resolutely do not assert larger connections and do not express the particular in terms of the universal, disrupt and demand a re- ordering of the world as ordered by the globalization narrative?
History and Theory
ABSTRACTHistorians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral quest... more ABSTRACTHistorians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in Time's Monster: How History Makes History, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. It enabled the British colonists to assuage their conscience and made the empire an ethically thinkable reality. It helped whitewash colonial violence and generate public acceptance for colonization. The historians’ power lay in anointing history as providence and in using it to paper over the cracks in the British conscience. Be...
Identities in South Asia, 2019
The American Historical Review, 2014
Asian Review of World Histories, 2019
In this paper we examine some of the problems of world historical frames especially as they are m... more In this paper we examine some of the problems of world historical frames especially as they are made manifest in the classroom, and we show how we designed a course to resist and avoid reproducing Eurocentrism and other biases. We reject frameworks that insist on focusing solely on connectivities, entanglements, braidedness, and “Big History.” Drawing pedagogical and intellectual inspiration from the writings of Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, John Holt, and Rudolf Steiner, we make a case for widening the scope of world history by insisting that it take on board the ruptures, dissonances, and messiness of a human past that defies easy cataloguing and facile connectivities. We centered the course around developing students’ understanding of how history is constructed and written, including how we can construct, write, and teach many possible narratives of world history. We argue that a course taught in such a way can be a vehicle for deepening human understanding, for decolonizing thought...
Studies in History, 2004
nuns rarely appear as donors. Buddhist nuns often identify themselves via their kinship relations... more nuns rarely appear as donors. Buddhist nuns often identify themselves via their kinship relations, whereas the Jaina nuns are never identified in this manner. Buddhist nuns appear as donors in the inscriptions of central India, the Deccan and south India, but are completely absent in the inscriptions of the north-west. Most of the lay women of Jaina inscriptions identify themselves as daughters and daughters-in-law, while very few women of the Buddhist donative records do the
Studies in History, 2006
The social history of convicts is an area of study which has hitherto remained an uncharted terri... more The social history of convicts is an area of study which has hitherto remained an uncharted territory. The muted convict voice makes an ephemeral appearance in most colonial histories as ‘convict resistance’, which is seen as the sum total of the convict's life experience. On the other hand, colonial records and monographs oscillate between two extremes in the categorization of the convict's social life. There is either a romanticization of the idyllic penal colonies where the convicts have the appearance of reformed savages, peacefully going about their daily chores, no different from the Indian peasants; or the convicts are seen as conniving brutes obsessed with the idea of ‘escape’, where the state of unfreedom that they are subjected to is seen as the most defining characteristic of their life in the penal settlement. Breaking out of these moulds, this essay has used the colonial project of settling the convict in the penal colony on the Andaman Islands as an entry point...
Postcolonial Studies, 2013
This paper highlights an understudied aspect of the history of anti-colonial resistance – the rol... more This paper highlights an understudied aspect of the history of anti-colonial resistance – the role of people who sat on the fence, displayed ambivalence, or at times played an active role in wrecking, damaging and sabotaging resistance against the state. Such people appear, if at all, in popular parlance as ‘traitors’ and in academia as ‘collaborators’, labels which carry a categorical moral bias. By examining nationalism through the lens of betrayal, this paper engages with a methodological question – is there a way of broadening the scope of the history of anti-colonial nationalism which incorporates acts of collaboration (e.g. spying, informing, perfidy, denunciation), without the implicit moral judgment embodied in each term? To tackle this question, this paper reconstructs the history of one renegade revolutionary, Hans Raj Vohra (1909–1985), a government witness who testified against his comrades, the revolutionaries of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army in the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial (192...
The American Historical Review
Book Reviews by Aparna Vaidik
Book Review
Singh Majithia, a public-spirited philanthropist, and is run by a trust comprising five eminent p... more Singh Majithia, a public-spirited philanthropist, and is run by a trust comprising five eminent persons as trustees. The Tribune, the largest selling English daily in North India, publishes news and views without any bias or prejudice of any kind. Restraint and moderation, rather than agitational language and partisanship, are the hallmarks of the newspaper. It is an independent newspaper in the real sense of the term.
book review, 2024
We need your support to keep journalism independent. Representational image of an Indian Muslim. ... more We need your support to keep journalism independent. Representational image of an Indian Muslim. Photo: Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 (ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-NODERIVS 2.0 GENERIC)
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Papers by Aparna Vaidik
Book Reviews by Aparna Vaidik