History and Collective Memory in South Asia (1200-2000)

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In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context.

He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to the unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization.

Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

SUMIT GUHA read history at St Stephen's College, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Cambridge University. He was a professor of history at Brown University and Rutgers University, and is currently a professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin. His books include Beyond Caste (Brill Publishers and Permanent Black, 2013), and Health and Population in South Asia (Permanent Black and Hurst Publishers, 2001).

Our times are testing the truth of Orwell's bitter aphorism "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." I was working on an article in 2004 that came to form part of this book when a leading research institute in Pune, India, was invaded and vandalized by a mob that objected to the institute's remote connection to an American scholar who was said to have written disrespectfully of the seventeenth-century King Shivaji. The history wars and the wholesale replacement of truth with "truthiness" might have seemed to be passing phenomena, but they have lasted. This book was completed soon after "post-truth" became the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year in 2016.

The word had been a decade or more coming. Soon after the launching of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political journalist Ron Suskind interviewed a number of the decision-makers involved in that historic blunder. One of them dismissed Suskind's questions about facts and consequences. Suskind was told that he was a mere dweller in the reality-based community, one of the people who accepted things as they were. His interlocutor, on the other hand, dwelt among those whose acts of will made reality for lesser mortals to inhabit and historians to analyze. It is almost as though the anonymous official had read Foucault and decided to mold discourse through power. Postmodern thought had thus been captured by its inveterate critics in the power elite. Reality and knowledge of it (including historical knowledge) were judged but artifacts of the time. According to the unnamed Bush administration official quoted by Suskind in a 2004 New York Times piece, "When we act; we create our own reality. Less than twenty years later, even action has become redundant: reality is what- ever was last tweeted.

Alongside this, however, is the contradictory concept of history and the past as "monumental," permanent. That is especially so in the United States, where "history" or "our past" is seen as solidly embodied in stone and bronze.

IT IS NOW THIRTY YEARS SINCE THE CHICAGO HISTORIAN PETER Novick published his study of the shaping of the historical profession in the United States. His work won the Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association (AHA) for the best book in American history in 1991. It was centrally an institutional study of the struggle for academic freedom and professional autonomy in the United States. This was needed, so the argument ran, for the pursuit of objective research unimpeded by administrative or political pressure-that was the "noble dream."

The book was concerned with the century-long struggle of the historical profession to establish its place in the emerging American academy. After chronicling how that was achieved, it moved to consider debates among established members of the guild of historians in the United States. Novick's frame narrative was therefore principally focused on intramural disputes in the history departments of leading universities. These were often cushioned by sizable endowments from the dictates of legislatures and protected by their own police from the disruption of the streets.

But already in 1988, Novick thought that the professional independence of US academic historians had been achieved at the cost of abandoning the "aspiration to achieve a dominant position in providing history for the general reading public." Novick, nonetheless, classified himself as an "anti- objectivist," a historian who rejected the search for objective truth as an uninteresting project. He was prepared, though, to coexist with its votaries, since in his view their practice differed little from his own. But he thought that the real threat to history came from outside the profession, in the very demand for an unattainable objectivity. He warned of a "very serious conservative backlash in the academy-massively funded by right-wing foundations, cheered on by the mass media." He saw these changes as a dangerous threat to the hard-won institutional autonomy of the profession, all the more so as they had "increasing support from middle-of-the-road academics." That political change, he thought, threatened the recently secured power of his- tory departments to determine their membership as well as their research methods.