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This book is about the production and consumption of history, themes that have gained in importance since the discipline's attempts to disavow its own authority with the ascendancy of postmodern and postcolonial perspectives. Several parallel themes crosscut the book's central focus on the discipline of history: its intellectual history, its historiography, and its connection to memory, particularly in relation to the need to establish the collective identity of 'nation', 'community' or state through a memorialisation process that has much to do with history, or at least with claiming a historicity for collective memory. None of this can be undertaken without an understanding of the roles that history-writing and history-reading have been made to perform in public debates, or perhaps more accurately in public disputes. The book addresses a discomfort with postcolonial theories in and as history. Following are essays that examine the state of the discipline, the art of reading and using archives, practices of tracking the history of ideas, and the themes of history, memory and identity

Historiography of India during 1930-50 period

In this study, Benjamin Zachariah questions the tendency to regard nationalism as a necessary, inevitable and natural basis upon which to organise the world. In doing so, he embarks on a series of reflections on a longstanding project in Indian historiography which has until today not reached successful resolution: that of "decentring" the nation as the central focus of history-writing in and about India. This outstanding collection presents essays held together with one common thread: a concern with writing histories of India that cannot be subsumed within a bland and obligatory history of Indian nationalism, and a concern with not writing histories of nationalism while writing histories of absolutely anything or everything. Claiming to speak from the perspective of internationalism and celebrating the rootless cosmopolitanism of the merely human, Benjamin Zachariah urges historians to begin the completion of this incomplete yet necessary "decentring" project by placing their own histories, politics, and "interests" before a readership and leaving these open for scrutiny and comment

"Born into a wealthy, politically influential Indian family in the waning years of the Raj, Jawaharlal Nehru was raised, under his father's careful guidance, on Western secularism and the humanist ideas of the Enlightenment. But it was not until he met Gandhi in 1916 that Nehru was transformed from an uninspired student into a fiery and motivated activist. The theories of democracy, human dignity, and self-determination from his student days became ideals to fight and live for. In Nehru and Gandhi, India found an invincible team - a spiritual father who could move millions and a political tactician who could galvanize them into action. Together, they led the nonviolent struggle for India's independence, a struggle that wasn't won until 1947. But neither Nehru nor Gandhi could prevent the horrific price for independence: partition." "In this fascinating account of an extraordinary life and career, Shashi Tharoor, eminent United Nations diplomat and author of India: From Midnight to the Millennium, traces Nehru's development from privileged child, posturing young nationalist, and valiant fighter for independence, to unchallengeable prime minister and global statesman. Tharoor casts an unflinching eye on Nehru's heroic efforts for, and stewardship of, independent, India and gives us a careful appraisal of his legacy to the world."--BOOK JACKET

Using historical material from India, this essay is part of a larger attempt to rethink the Eurocentrism, explicit or implicit, that marks our understanding of fascism, and also to rethink Indian fascism using (often Eurocentric) theories of fascism. It conceives of fascism as a family of ideas, with common––though often disavowed––roots, intellectual underpinnings, styles and organisations of movements, and sometimes even a strong overlap of personnel. The argument hinges on the contention that the emergence of a fascist imaginary and a fascist set of political organisations in the 1920s and 1930s depended to a large extent on what I call a "voluntary Gleichschaltung" of ideas, movements, and institutions, which recognized one another as belonging to the same family, but adopted some of the characteristics of a more successful sibling. A number of these ideas existed in earlier versions from the previous century, and they lent themselves to a fascist repertoire that found its conjuncture between the two world wars––a repertoire that was drawn upon by a number of movements that are entitled to the use of the adjective "fascist."

Narratives of Indian responses to the British Empire are usually structured around the 'national movement'. This essay attempts instead to understand some of the psycho-social and psycho-political dynamics of a colonised society in the first half of the twentieth century. It takes a strategically subjectivist view of the British Indian empire in attempting to approach the subject not from the perspective of retrospective scholarly work, but from perspectives that can be seen to have been relevant to those who experienced that empire. In doing so, it also decentres the national paradigm, which merely reifies the category 'Indian', without enabling us to get any closer to non-elite figures, or indeed to relatively elite figures who did not belong adequately in the 'national movement'. This narrative, therefore, tries to address some of the perspectives of marginal figures and groups, to the extent this is possible, while acknowledging that an Alltagsgeschichte of the British Indian Empire remains to be written.