Historicizing India’s Nationhood: History as Contemporary Politics

Abstract

It is a truism to say that sources of historical sense generation in a society are not confined to history. Within the discipline of history itself, the recognition is growing that history’s own established procedures of making sense of the past cannot remain insulated from the influences of movements of ideas and action within the wider society. This has made the discipline pliable to modes of understanding the past developed in other disciplines such as arts, aesthetics, literary theory and criticism, ethnology, sociology, philosophy, linguistics and so on. This does not mean, however, that the discipline has lost, or is in the process of losing, its sense of boundary or its self-image as a rational, cognitive pursuit of objective truths about the past. Nor has its claim to dominance, if not to universality, of the historical mode over other modes of making sense of the past become negotiable. What has changed is that the discipline of history now accords recognition to ‘non-historical’ modes and shows a certain readiness to sift data and to process concepts of other ‘non-historical’ disciplines through the historical mode. This is true more at the level of theory than at the level of the actual procedures of doing history. In the process, the procedures are often sought to be expanded, even modified, to accommodate insights and approaches of other disciplines. This, in turn, has given rise to important controversies within the discipline which, in my view, have implications for changing the very orientation of the discipline itself about how to view the past.