Table Of ContentH V
ISTORY IN THE ERNACULAR
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History in the
Vernacular
edited by
Raziuddin Aquil &
Partha Chatterjee
Published by
PERMANENT BLACK
‘Himalayana’, Mall Road, Ranikhet Cantt,
Ranikhet 263645
[email protected]
Distributed by
Orient Blackswan Private Limited
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Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Noida, Patna
Copyright © 2008 individual authors for their essays
Copyright © 2008 volume form Permanent Black
eISBN 978 81 7824 403 7
e-edition:First Published 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including
photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,
without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case
of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other
noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission
requests write to the publisher.
In memory of
P G
APIYA HOSH
Contents
Preface
Notes on Contributors
1. Introduction: History in the Vernacular
PARTHA CHATTERJEE
2. History and Politics in the Vernacular: Reflections on Medieval
and Early Modern South India
VELCHERU NARAYANA RAO
SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
AND
3. Eighteenth-Century Passages to a History of Mysore
JANAKI NAIR
4. e King of Controversy: History and Nation-Making in Late
Colonial India
KUMKUM CHATTERJEE
5. Gait’s Way: Writing History in Early-Twentieth-Century Assam
ARUPJYOTI SAIKIA
6. Restructuring the Past in Early-Twentieth-Century Assam:
Historiography and Surya Kumar Bhuyan
SUDESHNA PURKAYASTHA
7. System and History in Rajwade’s Grammar for the Dnyaneswari
MILIND WAKANKAR
8. Captives of Enchantment? Gender, Genre, and Transmemoration
INDRANI CHATTERJEE
9. Incredible Stories in the Time of Credible Histories: Colonial
Assam and Translations of Vernacular Geographies
BODHISATTVA KAR
10. e Study of Islam and Indian History at the Darul Musannefin,
Azamgarh
RAZIUDDIN AQUIL
11. ‘Searching for Old Histories’: Social Movements and the Project of
Writing History in Twentieth-Century Kerala
SANAL MOHAN
12. History in Poetry: Nabinchandra Sen’s Palashir Yuddha(Battle of
Palashi) (1875) and the Question of Truth
ROSINKA CHAUDHURI
13. Autobiography as a Way of Writing History: Personal Narratives
from Kerala and the Inhabitation of Modernity
UDAYA KUMAR
14. A Nineteenth-Century Romance of Counterfactual Time
PRADIP KUMAR DATTA
Preface
W
e at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
(CSSSC), have been trying for some time to take stock of the
place of history—both as an academic discipline and as a
mode of public representation of the past—in contemporary
India. An earlier volume on this theme, based on presentations at a
conference held in 1999, was edited by Partha Chatterjee and Anjan
Ghosh and published under the title History and the Present (Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2002). e present volume continues that project, this
time by specifically exploring the status of vernacular histories in
relation to academic histories written, almost exclusively in the English
language, by professional historians of India.
Most of the essays in this volume were discussed at a conference held
at the CSSSC in December 2004. We are immensely grateful to the Ford
Foundation, which provided financial support for the conference and
for preparing the manuscript of this volume under their grant to the
CSSSC project on 'Writing New Cultural Histories'. e conference is
still remembered for the astonishing range and intensity ofinformed
discussion on so many regions, periods, and genres of history writing in
India. We were fortunate to have had as participants, among others,
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Kunal Chakrabarti,
Avinash Kumar, Shail Mayaram, Gyanendra Pandey, Rajat Kanta Ray,
Tapan Raychaudhuri, Padmanabh Samarendra, Samita Sen, Jayanta
Sengupta, Lakshmi Subramanian, and A.R. Venkatachalapathy. Among
our CSSSC colleagues, we are especially grateful to Gautam Bha- dra,
Anjan Ghosh, and Tapati Guha-akurta for their help in putting
together this volume. Our special thanks also to Prabir Basu of the
CSSSC and Susanta Ghosh of the ICSSR Eastern Regional Centre for
providing logistical support.
As we were putting together this volume, news arrived in December
2006 of the brutal murder in Patna of Papiya Ghosh, historian, social
analyst, and dedicated teacher. Several of the contributors to this
volume had been associated with her work in various capacities, and
some indeed were her close friends. Given Papiya's lifelong
commitment to the encouragement of historical scholarship in
institutions far removed from the centres of metropolitan privilege, we
dedicate this volume to her memory.
Kolkata R A
AZIUDDIN QUIL
1 January 2008 P C
ARTHA HATTERJEE
Notes on Contributors
RAZIUDDIN AQUIL is Fellow in History at the Centre for Studies in
Social Sciences, Calcutta. He is the author of Sufism, Culture, and
Politics: Afghans and Islam in Medieval North India (2007). He is
completing another book manuscript entitled 'In the Name of Allah:
Islam in Indian History and Society'.
INDRANI CHATTERJEE is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers
University, New Brunswick. Her research interests include histories of
slavery, domesticity, and vernacular narratives. Besides publishing
journal articles and chapters in volumes on these themes, she is the
author of Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (1999), editor of
Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (2004), and co-
editor (with Richard M. Eaton) of Slavery and South Asian History
(2006).
KUMKUM CHATTERJEE is Associate Professor ofHistory at
Pennsylvania State University. Her publications include Merchants,
Politics and Society in Early Modern India: Bihar 1733—1820 (1996),
and Europe Observed: e Reversed Gaze in Early Modern Encounters,
edited with Clement Hawes (forthcoming). She has recently completed
work on another book manuscript entitled 'e Cultures of History in
Early Modern Bengal: Persianisation and Mughal Culture in 17th and
18 th Century Bengal'.
PARTHA CHATTERJEE is Professor of Political Science at the Centre
for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and Professor ofAnthropology
at Columbia University, New York. Among his published books are
Nationalist ought and the Colonial World (1986), e Nation and Its
Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), and A Princely
