Do ‘People’ Exist?: The Problems of Writing People's History

Abstract

The first problem of writing people’s history is the sheer variety of related genres of history named by different scholars, but often without showing any distinction between them. Thus people’s history is considered to be similar with subaltern history, oral history, folk history, social history, ethno-history, etc. Second, the subject matter of people’s history itself has been used to mean different things for different historians. Bryant and Clark, for instance, focus on ‘historical empathy’ as the subject matter of people’s history in Canada. People’s history has been largely successful in India in areas like Partition studies. If Darjeeling is conceived merely as a place, the answer is no, because people’s history is, according to Raphael Samuel, not about ‘places’ but about ‘faces’, or individuals and their lived experiences.