Post-Colonial Histories of South Asia: Some Reflections

Abstract

Any consideration of historical writing and public understanding of the past in the subcontinent reveals that history was an important terrain of the battles that led to political transformations rather than simply being transformed in their wake. The anti-colonial challenge in the domain of historiography long preceded the actual defeat of the colonial system. Yet the onset of colonial modernity also led self-avowedly nationalist intellectuals from the later nineteenth century to share historiographical conventions established by European scholarship that often refused to acknowledge earlier, pre-colonial representations of the past as 'proper' history. The struggle to redesign the past in the context of colonial rule and its aftermath in South Asia has proved to be an especially long-drawn-out and complex one. On one level, the rejection of colonial historiography is as old as colonial rule itself. On another, the decolonization of the historians' archive and history-writing has lagged nearly half a century behind the formal processes of political decolonization. At the same time, the process of 'decolonizing' South Asian history has in recent years been rendered more complex and controversial by the transformations of contemporary South Asian politics. Ranajit Guha, founding editor of the influential 'subaltern studies' school of historians, has written that 'education in history [in colonial India], was ... designed as a servant's education an education to conform undeviatingly to the master's gaze in regarding the past'.1 'A historiography of colonial India', in Guha's formulation, 'would qualify as genuinely Indian and autonomous if and only if it allowed bahubol [physical force] to operate as a decisive element.' There were many pitfalls and roadblocks that had to be encountered and negotiated before Indian historiography could 'make the Indian people, constituted as a nation, the subject of their own history'.2 An exhortation to Indians to write their own history was articulated in a chorus of educated middle-class voices emanating from different regions of