Sumit Guha. History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000.

Abstract

The past two decades have seen an increasing interest in the evolution of historical knowledge and social memory in South Asia. Sumit Guha’s new book, History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000, is an important contribution to this growing body of literature. Guha’s aim is to trace the changing nature of collective memory and historical narratives and to understand the social processes and institutions that shape them. Most scholars who investigated this problem in the past chose to focus on a particular event, figure, or genre, and then traced their changing memorialization and narrativization across time. Guha, however, casts a wider gaze, comparable perhaps only with Romila Thapar’s work on historical traditions in early India. In keeping with his earlier works, Guha covers a long time period, ranging from the early thirteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Spatially, he considers the entire Indian subcontinent, with some emphasis on Maharashtra and Bengal.