Introduction: The Origins of Modern Historiography in India

Abstract

It is indisputable that the status of historical knowledge in modern India has been highly contested in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Because history and history writing were so essential to the nationalist project, they were accorded a central place in postindependence India—whose first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was himself an accomplished amateur historian. While a political prisoner in the early 1940s, Nehru wrote his sweeping history of India, The Discovery of India, which provided a unitary narrative of historical becoming of the Indian nation-state—a bildungsroman of sorts with the nation-state as its protagonist.1 For Nehru, a believer in science and progress, the discipline of history provided powerful tools for the young nation in its formative phase. History provided a rational account of the progress and unity of India from time immemorial. And history, with its reliable empirical method, could be used to dispel superstition and myth. This particular strand of nationalist historiography, which believed in the science of historical truth, came to occupy a prominent place in postindependence India.2 This category of history has been repeatedly singled out as a nonexistent one in Indian, specifically Hindu, literary traditions ever since the British took upon themselves the task of writing Indian history.