The debate on critical history has taken on a new dimension in recent years, challenging the very status of history’ as a privileged, objective discourse. Historians, and practitioners of other disciplines, have used the ‘voice from the edge’, and the ‘fragmentary statement’ to disturb the totalizing and normalizing character of historical writing. Other historians have condemned this disturbing of the ‘centre’, of the inherited form of historical narrative and of well‐established objects of investigation, for its nihilism and its ‘absolute’ relativism. The following article returns to this debate with some reflections based on materials drawn mainly from India.