The Practice of History in India

Historicity, the ability and the willingness to explain the present by the past, may well be a human universal but it is enabled and framed by social organization. To produce collective historicity, memory must be linked to a community. This is where caste comes in, since community, here, is a reference that renders such a link easier. The first argument here is that because of caste, subaltern communities in India are enabled to produce and represent their past well beyond what is feasible for subalterns in a less communitarian setting. I then explore different kinds of historicity among subaltern communities in India, to investigate the way in which events may be used by a community and to construct a historicized construction that explains the community's present position. I also discuss the danger of these constructions being appropriated by the higher castes.

RED’SHINE PUBLICATION PVT. LTD., 2024

This research paper explores the crucial role of historians in shaping the Indian historical narrative, examining their contributions to the development of Indian historiography from ancient to modern times. The study analyzes the various trends in Indian historiography, including colonial, nationalist, Marxist, subaltern, postcolonial, communal, feminist, regional, and environmental perspectives. It highlights the ways in which historians have challenged dominant narratives, promoted diversity, and informed national identity and cultural heritage. The paper also discusses the importance of historians' engagement with contemporary issues and debates, demonstrating the relevance of historical study in addressing pressing concerns. Ultimately, the research emphasizes the vital role of historians in constructing a nuanced, inclusive, and accurate understanding of India's complex past, essential for building a more just, equitable, and culturally vibrant society.

History Workshop Journal , 2016

2016

The longevity and persistence of what we generally understand to be "Indian civilization" is profound in its scope, stretching our sense of "history" and challenging the epistemological tools we have at our disposal to understand the myriad of "event horizons" that constitute the development of its culture. Here, I want to halt for a second and make sure that we are sensitive to the terms "culture," "country" and "nation." They are often combined and defined in ways that confuse their unique, and I emphasize, separate roles in defining who we are as a society and culture. Perhaps it is a result of the exigencies of India's struggle for freedom from British rule that the conflation of culture and nation developed as a convenient political thesis in the early years of India's birth as a nation-state. But, such a pairing tends to confuse what are the causes of cultural or social problems in contradistinction to problems or weaknesses in political structure. I will come back to this problem of the conflation of culture, nation, country, when I mention how the difference between how the historian practices "history," and how the nation state practices "history." Allow me to introduce the subject of this seminar at this point. Thinking about caste and gender from an historical perspective inevitably requires us to tackle the question: what is the relationship between culture, literature and power? After all, we are forced to conceive of "history" as a series of events. Yet, to understand the culture in which events take place, particularly when those events took place hundreds or thousands of years ago requires us to account for, or at least be sensitive to, the burden of data associated with said events. In this regard, we need a theoretical position regarding the particularities of the relationship of caste and gender from an historical perspective. Such theorization had led to the particulars from which generalized universalizations have been typically produced. Extrapolating from such particulars and applying them to the contemporary situation needs serious examination and justification. For understanding the non-capitalist, non-modern, non-West, the theory problem that confronts us is acute. Scholars typically reduce culture to power or power to culture, and miss what may have been different about their relation to each other in the past. We need to be aware of how social, economic and political orders cohere, of the mechanisms at work in their coherence, and how they have been uniform, if at all, throughout history. This point is particularly important when we think about caste and gender historically. It is not an easy thing to theorize pre-modernity without deploying the theoretical instruments

Economic and Political Weekly, 2024

This is the text written for the 7th Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Memorial Lecture organised by the Indian Council for Historical Research and delivered on 11 November 2014 in Delhi.

In German Ideology, Marx defined ideology as a misunderstanding of history. The present-day communalism, which grounds itself upon a self-perceived victim status or a former ruling class, is one such ideology which is based upon a misunderstanding of history. This approach virtually divides the complex and overlapping social classes and groups into two blocs, neatly defined by religious identities. This approach, then, paradoxically becomes the basis of an “imagined community” , first defined as a religious community, and then, as a national community, to the exclusion of both authentic religious or national identities of the ‘other’.