India’s Nationhood: History as Contemporary Politics
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023013507174 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Military-Madrasa-Mullah Complex 127
India Quarterly, 66, 2 (2010): 133–149
A Global Threat 127
Article
India’s Nationhood: History as
Contemporary Politics1
D.L. Sheth
Abstract
The discipline of history has failed to recognize that it has always been affected by contemporary
politics in diverse ways, despite attempts to maintain its autonomy. The article argues that unless the
relationship between history and contemporary politics is defined, both would be misused for partisan
ends. On this backdrop, the article explores relations between the two in the Indian context and argues
that, in India, history was always influenced by political imperatives and contestations. History was used
to affirm or deny the claims of the existence of an Indian nation since times immemorial. The article
further argues that the use of history for the political project of historically constituting an Indian nation
was integral to the events surrounding independence and partition.
Keywords
History-writing, nationalism, politics, India’s independence movement
It is a truism that sources of historical sense generation in a society are not confined to history. Even in
the discipline of history itself the recognition is growing that history’s own established procedures of
making sense of the past cannot remain insulated from influences of movements of ideas and action
in the wider, contemporary society. This has made the discipline pliable to modes of understanding the
past developed in other disciplines, such as, arts, aesthetics, literary theory and criticism, ethnology,
sociology, philosophy, linguistics and so on.
This, however, does not mean that the discipline has lost, or is in the process of losing, its sense of
boundary or its self-image as a rational, cognitive pursuit of objective truths about the past. Nor has its
claim to dominance, if not to universality, of the historical mode over other modes of making sense of
the past become negotiable. What has changed is that the discipline of history now accords recognition
to the conventionally considered ‘non-historical’ modes (for example, the so-called oral histories), and
shows a certain readiness to sift data and to process concepts of other academic disciplines through the
historical mode. This, however, is true, more at the level of the theory than at the level of actual proce-
dures of doing history. But in this process, often the procedures are also sought to be expanded, even
modified, to accommodate insights and approaches of other disciplines. This has given rise to important
controversies within the discipline, which in my view have implications for changing the narrowly
defined orientation of the discipline about viewing the past.
The newly acquired catholicity of history lives uneasily with a vast arena of the modern life in which
contestations are made for truths about the past for settling social, cultural and economic equations in
the present. This is the arena of politics. History’s ambivalence to politics arises from the fact that
if historians do not participate in contemporary political discourses about the various conflicting
D.L. Sheth is Senior Fellow, CSDS, Delhi. E-mail: dlsheth@csds.in
Studies in Indian Politics
1(2) 127–133
© 2013 Lokniti, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi, Singapore,
Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/2321023013507174
http://inp.sagepub.com
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