Stories of Us

This ably edited anthology is a reminder of the acute sophistication with which some of these questions have been debated in recent historiography. The list of suspects is familiar: Guha on empire, Cohn on representing authority, Dirks on the ethnographic state, Rao on torture and truth, Kaviraj on modernity, Chaterjee on nation, Amin on the complex relation between history and memory, Menon and Bhasin on women and partition, Pandey on citizenship, Dube on subaltern communities, Prakash on the reproduction of caste, Dipesh Chakrabarty on the minority histories in relation to the marginalisations historians produce and Urvashi Butalia on the difficulties of representing experience in history. These essays are framed by a sophisticated theoretical introduction by Saurabh Dube, and a thoughtful conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty on the complicated relationship between universal categories of European social theory and particular histories.

Ironically, the best essays in this collection are not the ones over burdened by an endless anxiety about method. Shahid Amin, Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Partha Chaterjee still display something of old fashioned virtues: a command over the texture of an archive, a capacity to recreate an experience or reveal human nature in its complexity, an ability to tell a riveting tale.

The theoretical reflections, for all their sophistication, seem too self-referential and miss some major ironies. The title “Post Colonial Passages” is meant to suggest an attempt to contest the mystifications produced by colonialism, understood in the widest possible sense. But the book manages to avoid the obvious question: Whose histories should be authoritative and why? More disturbingly, there is the paradox that the more historians assert that collective identities like nations are contingent, the more eternal they seem in politics, the more we are told they abridge messy realities, the more attractive they become, the more we are told everything has a complex history, the more ahistorical or consciousness becomes. Dube’s introduction has a line: “the problem with nationalism is that it refuses to go away.” In the context of a collection that is marked by a theoretical hyper awareness, and a resolve to demystify every other narrative, this statement seemed almost darkly comic — a reminder of the gap between the historian’s self-consciousness and historical self-consciousness.