Articles by Dipesh Chakrabarty

For all the criticisms that can be made of it, E P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class remains a magnifi cent and majestic tribute to human political will and imagination, the sheer capacity of the oppressed to struggle, however inchoately and inconclusively, for imagined and better alternatives to the present.

After Utopia: Modernity, Socialism, and the Postcolony by Aditya Nigam (New Delhi: Viva Books), 2010; pp x + 282, Rs 895.

When the state acts as a mechanism that abstracts documents from their points of origin and make them into the signifiers of an abstract entity called "history", and the market performs this function of abstraction, we have the processes, respectively, of reification and commodification of documents. The process of creating "unfettered" access to historical information can be seen as the prying open of information that was otherwise accessible only to a "privileged" community. This is a tension that is central to the very idea of the public sphere: it can act simultaneously both as a utopia of "bourgeois" equality and as an ideology of domination. It can be simultaneously democratic and undemocratic. The agents and advocates of the public sphere are often the bearers of this tension for we never find a society where all its members, inspired by the social value of what we call "history", volunteer to convert willingly all "private" documents into "public" records. The rendering of private papers into public documents must remain, in the end, a political question. This paper illustrates this proposition by looking at a fragment of the history of history in colonial India in the 20th century. At the centre of the story is the historian Jadunath Sarkar who may be regarded as one of the earliest proponents in the subcontinent of the Rankean ideals of "scientific" history.

To discuss the practice of memory and its relations to politics, social scientists rely on three kinds of practices - memorialising, memorising and the act of remembering/forgetting. The commemoration of "1857" is unique in that official celebrations of the event have been instituted even as 1857 continues to refigure in myths and endures as a symbol of popular resistance. The articles in this special issue address the seeming contradictions and complexities that "remembering" 1857 involves, and the tension that prevails between different kinds of recall.

While postcolonial theorists recognise that the colonial situation did produce some forms of hybridity, anti-colonial theorists have been driven by the urge to decolonise. The politics of decolonisation followed by newly independent nations of the mid-20th century often displayed an uncritical emphasis on modernisation; development, that pursued with technology and tools of scientific progress, was a "catch-up" exercise with the west. However, with the globalisation of ideas and practices, commensurate with the "democratisation" of politics around the 1970s, hitherto marginalised groups also sought a more global, "deterritorialised" identity. The period saw the rise of post-structuralist and postmodern theories, that were opposed to the territorial imagination of the nation state. Currently, as humans, objects and practices continue to move seamlessly beyond nation states, this other side of decolonisation - representing the thoughts of the colonised on a "dialogue across differences" - remains vital but as yet an unfinished project.