Description:
In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization.
Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.
Brief description: Sumit Guha is professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Brill, 2013), Health and Population in South Asia: From Earliest Times to the Present (Permanent Black, 2001), Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200-1991 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, 1818-1941 (Oxford University Press, 1985); and editor of Growth, Stagnation, or Decline? Agricultural Productivity in British India (Oxford University Press, 1992).
Review Quotes:
"Guha's book comes at a time when the authority of specialist historians is increasingly under challenge, while the gap between academic and public history seems larger and more in open conflict than ever. Through meticulous presentation of how the practice of history writing is shaped by the social-political context of the recording agents, Guha problematises the view that history writing can be seen as an autonomous cognitive practice of a specialised group."
-- "South Asia Research"