Editorial

Guest editing a special history issue for The Book Review was a good opportunity to reflect on what history means and what it represents, standing in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The discipline has moved beyond the Positivist idea of ‘scientific history’; yet, in popular perception (substantiated by the recent comments of a well-read novelist), History remains primarily a chronology of events. The academia—particularly in humanities—has become largely interdisciplinary, and that definitely reshaped our way of reconstructing the past. But, how ‘authentic’ is the reconstructed past? While Benedetto Croce had considered history an ‘art’, the Narrativist Postmodernists like W.B. Gallie and Hayden White have treated the historical narrative as constructed story, posing serious challenges to the truth-claim and the fetish of facts history once thrived on.

While the philosophy of history has undergone such varied changes, the significance of history has scarcely been lost. Construction of a past to back the specific perceptions of what the past stands for—which gave rise to multiple historical traditions since ancient times—remains important till date. The past is still a powerful source of legitimacy for the various politics of nation-building, identity formation, communal consolidation or revivalist glorification. Thus, on several social issues and political questions, intellectual enquiries and strategies of mass mobilization, we see the consolidated existence of the ‘past as present.’ As the varied pasts interact with each other and contest for space, where does the academic discipline of history stand? Is history fighting a losing battle against these ‘histories’, for the latter evidently holds a greater hold on the masses than the research of the academic historian? Are there ways for history, the discipline, to reach out to the larger audience and reclaim its place? Should history convert itself into a shared space for the various ‘histories’ living together as equally valid narrative constructions, renouncing the professional historian’s claim of presenting authoritatively the authenticated past? Should the methodologies of the discipline succeed in maintaining their importance, and better ways to understand and accommodate the popular histories devised? While we seek answers to these questions, going through a set of writings of recent historical scholarship can be immensely helpful.

It is, indeed, high time to look back at the philosophical question of the conceptual framework of history. Akash Bhattacharya’s review in the volume analyses one such attempt by Deba Prosad Chowdhury who goads the reader to ask more epistemological questions about the discipline but leaves a lot of questions unasked. While we reconsider the very nature of our discipline that started its academic journey in our country not earlier than the colonial period, Neha Chatterji’s review of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work on Sir Jadunath Sarkar shows the interesting empathetic reflection of an erstwhile Subaltern historian on the worldview of an earlier historian with declaredly elite sensibilities.