The writing of social history in India has come full circle since Dr. Tapan Raychaudhuri’s pioneering Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir (1953). In his Preface Dr. Raychaudhuri had defined the scope of social history, after G.M. Trevelyan, as ‘history with the politics left out’. In the 1969 edition of his book the author set aside Trevelyan’s ‘incorrect defini¬tion’ and replaced it with an ‘investigation of historical communities by the methods of social anthropology and sociology’. ‘The political’, quite categorically set aside in the first impression, was still on sufferance of the sister disciplines of history in the second. The essays by Profes¬sor Ravinder Kumar, written between 1969 and 1980 and collected in the book under review, offer a rather different mapping of the nebulous terrain of social history; for here we have a conscious effort to explore the relationship between ‘social structure and political processes.’
May-June 1984, volume 8, No 6