The public life of history: an argument out of India

This essay, using India as a case in point, asks if history, the discipline, can any longer play an adjudicatory role in contemporary democracies at moments when matters relating to the past are in dispute in public life. It documents the rise of an atmosphere of nationalist enthusiasm for ‘scientific history’ in late nineteenth-century India. This ‘scientific history’, however, came into conflict with ‘identity histories’ as nationalism progressed into the twentieth century. In contemporary India, electoral politics of the lower castes are often accompanied by combative and passionate identity-histories. The essay ends by discussing the implications of such developments for the future of historical knowledge.