Sunday Posts

Are we witnessing the end of an imperial era? Usually, these periods are fraught with violence and uncertainty. Empires are power structures, which crumbles from inside, and everything that stood on its edifice, values, ideas and systems, go down with them. Empires are stable - that's their raison d'etre! Even those who are disadvantaged by the empire support its existence because people would rather tolerate tyranny than anarchy. The end of any empire is therefore accompanied by instability. I know it is odd for me to think this is the end of an empire. The second Trump Presidency is as imperial as it gets. The United States, the world's overlord, is throwing its power around, threatening other countries with tariff and even invasion. It has approached major world issues unilaterally, pulling out of multilateral institutions or conventions, sitting down with Russia without other parties around and proposed to turn Gaza, in defiance of the all norms and wishes of everyone...

As a historian, I am fascinated by Hitler. Of course, he is the most studied persona not just in modern history, but perhaps all history. The phenomena of Hitler - his impact - has led to the creation of specialist areas of research within the history profession, as well as new disciplines such as social psychology. And yet, he is still very fresh - new biographies and histories of Hitler years come up all the time - throwing up new perspectives all the time. Part of reason for this is the difficulty of studying Hitler. His odious, short-lived regime ended in flames. He, in person, disappeared from history as suddenly as he appeared, giving a free hand to conspiracy theorists. The world that emerged from the rubbles was divided, one where truth became a political weapon. The Nazi disruption became veiled by an iron curtain, which, we should not forget, had two sides. With him conveniently dead, Hitler became the ultimate bad guy, as all shades of enablers and collaborators looked to re...

As History with a capital H makes a comeback, would we return to studying history? History is an endangered discipline now. There are those who believe study of the past is rather meaningless, when we can just create - with the power of technology - the future.  And, then, there are those who use history all the time - or rather, make it up - to further their own goals. For them, unlike the historians, the lure of the past is due to its obscurity, its uncertainties and tentative nature. Instead, they confidently create the narratives of the past that they want - shaping and controlling it in their bid to own the future.  However, history as political propaganda isn't really that new, but it's not history. At the core of history, there is a search for truth, even when such truth may be unknowable. It's true even the best of history writing is a narrative, an interpretation of what happened, and there are inevitably a lot of missing parts. But what distinguishes history from ...

We have an ambiguous relationship with history. We did genuinely suppose that history had ended, with the collapse of the Soviet Union - and yet we claim to be making history all the time, with every speech made, every feature upgraded and every ribbon cut. Between the two, it's possible to come up with an explanation about the two kinds of history: The faceless force of time that shaped our lives, ideas and civilisations seem to have lost its potency - or at least so we believe - and our newfound technological prowess has given us the opportunity to shape the future and fashion departures from History, thus make history. The History with the big H are therefore purged from the school curriculum and increasingly from the universities. Unemployed historians now take comfort that the popular history as a literary genré seems to be exploding, keeping the bookstores and public broadcasters - those two should have been history by now - alive and kicking. Therefore, when History makes a ...

When India was made, no special need for making Indians was felt. That should be somewhat surprising. There was this great aspiration of building a republican polity based on universal suffrage.  The whole Indian freedom struggle was a long pedagogical project, led by Gandhi but also enthusiastically enjoined by leaders at various levels, of transforming the political imagination and creating new rules of engagement. 1947 was not just the realisation of that project, it was to be a beginning of a more comprehensive transformation of what it means to be an Indian. As Independence unfolded, various leaders, Nehru and Ambedkar among them, stressed how this would require a new political imagination. There was the vast and ambitious project of the constitution, pulling the disparate communities together into the union. And, yet, precise little was said about what it means to be this new Indian; the debate was muted and deemed unnecessary. The educational enterprise that the new country ...

All humans are not born equal. Some are born in the shadows of a colonial past, with an indelible history embedded in themselves. Whatever they may do - and many of them do a lot - they remain unerringly colonial. Even if they are accepted by kind friends, behaviour with them - towards them - falls under tolerance; and indeed, they are always periodically reminded of who they are by others not so kind. They are confronted with stereotypes of themselves in daily lives, and even when those stereotypes are positive - for me, being considered an IT specialist just because I am Indian, for example - it is often living another person's life: That of a historical person, who we don't know and aren't ourselves, but who was present at birth and will always stay with me. It's hard to explain this experience to someone who is not born into this perpetual coloniality. There are things a colonial can see - even when she chooses to ignore it - which the others may not notic...

The business of Nationalism has been left to the Fascists. Those who cherish freedom of views, opinions and beliefs, accept the global condition of existence and strive for peace and harmony among different peoples and communities, have taken Nationalism as a dirty word. It represents, one argued, the sort of narrow territorial and cultural identities the educated and the cultured should seek to supersede. It seems that the emotion of nationalism stood in the direct contrast of the rationalism of human histories defined by the class. It was in opposition to cool economic calculations of advantages and incentives in a market economy. In short, in the evocation of global humanity, nationalism appeared to be a dated idea to be left for the fools. So the Fascists stepped in, gratefully. They were clinging to those outdated and outmoded ideas of race, pseudo-histories and rites and rituals and were effectively marginalised ever since the late twentieth-century liberal boom. An...

There are those who believe History has ended. No, seriously, even after the man who made that claim bluntly and famously, Francis Fukuyama, has recanted and wrote a new book explaining why his previous article and book were wrong, there is a general consensus that history may be meaningless as technology changes everything. It is a strange phenomena indeed. On one hand, the popularity of 'popular history' books are at all time high, and historical fiction writers are receiving literary awards as well as topping the charts. On the other hand, however, the enrolment in history majors are falling and the public funding for history research is high on priority - for cut-backs! The fate of history needs more attention than it has received hitherto. That Technology has made a decisive break with the past and there is no reason to look back anymore is the usual, but apparently false, explanation. In fact, technological change doesn't shut off the questions about social ...

When he presented his Minutes in 1835, Macaulay’s mission was to align the educational funds, after its ten-fold increase, with the Utilitarian project of administrative and legal reforms. This was a break with the past, of all reverence towards any ‘ancient constitution’, but a reaffirmation of some continuities as well : The vision of a Military-Fiscal-Pedagogical state, a statement of moral confidence and recognition of a modernising mission. The Orientalist corpus of Indian antiquity supplied the idea of an antiquated India that needed to be transformed with European knowledge, just as Peter the Great effected on ancient Muscovy. The post-abolitionist confidence enabled Macaulay to transcend the fears of an reawakened Indian nation breaking off from the British, that constrained the thinking of earlier generations; rather, he celebrated such a possibility. Macaulay’s arguments were based on appeal to pragmatic reason, and part of his own project of creating Codes of Law for I...

In 1813, when the Company’s charter came up for renewal, Company territories in India were already a vast empire and its supremacy, over all the regional rivals as well as the Mughal Emperor, had been decidedly established. The mercantile interests in England were a spent force and the combined demands of British and Indian merchants to abolish the Company’s monopoly and open the India trade were too powerful to be ignored again. The expansion of British manufacture made the demands for a reversal of trade flow - treating India as a market for the British products - the ascendant force against the quaint monopolist interests in Indian salt, tea and fabric. The Company Court duly resisted, but, unlike in 1793, it had to give up its monopoly (except for that on tea and China trade), setting in motion an economic transformation of India, opening its markets to the full force of competition from British textiles and other manufactured products. This economic change set off a new phase...

The Company state was in the middle of a rapid transformation in the 1790s. It was to be engaged in wars, with local rulers as well as in the broader global war with the French, for the next quarter century. Starting with Cornwallis’ wars with Tipu Sultan followed by Wellesley brothers’ wider conflicts across India and the Anglo-Maratha wars, the wars expanded the Company territories across the Indian peninsula and established the Company as the preeminent power in India. There were other changes equally as significant: The rise of evangelical christianity and the English nationalism rekindled by the French wars led to a separation between the English and the Indians in a much greater degree. Cornwallis’ administration had excluded Indians from all important government positions. The more moralistic positions of these administrations discouraged gambling, drinking, cohabitation with Indian women and embezzlement of government funds. Also, the conflicts between Indian and English ...

However, even when Hastings left Calcutta, forces that irreversibly altered India’s ‘ancient constitution’ were already ascendant. Paradoxically, the radical changes arose from the deeply conservative British attempts to preserve what they perceived to be the Indian culture and polity. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, an institution Hastings patronised, was established in 1784 and over the next half century, would take the lead in the production of ‘reliable legal knowledge’. William Jones, its Founder-President, with his colleagues and successors, would be engaged in a vast enterprise of translating ancient Hindu and Muslim legal texts, that would end up transforming India’s tradition and custom-based context-sensitive legal system (‘three thousand years of despotism’, as Macaulay would describe it in his speech) into an European-style legal code. In this ‘Orientalist’ enterprise, Jones and his colleagues were supported by Hindu and Muslim scholars, a collaboration that produced...

Alternative history is usually treated as nonsense or worse - by historians! Justifiably so, as there is so much falsification of history already. At a time of battle against the alternative facts, it is best to stand guard against the intrusion of even the slightest hint of imaginary history-making.  What-ifs have no space in real life. History has happened, irreversibly so it seems, and there is no point going back on what could have happened. But, in that very statement itself, there is a hint why alternative historical imaginary may be useful. History may have happened, but it was no way inevitable: Speculations of alternative history guards against the tendency of treating history as it happened as inevitable; emphasising the contingency leads to an escape from teleology trap. So, that was my indulgence on a World Cup free day: What if the British did never rule India? Sure, they did rule India, for about 190 years starting the triumph in Bengal, and now we see that ...

Unlike the American founders, the Founders of Modern India generally get a bad press. Indeed, many people do not think of them as Founders at all - India was there for thousands of years, they say - and merely see them as political operators who negotiated Independence, a bad one, with the British, only in order to grab power for themselves. That the creation of Modern India was an act of political imagination is overlooked with purpose and intention. That the 'founding' generation had to come up with the idea of timeless India which we now take for granted - and give us the sense of History that we now have - has been completely forgotten. Besides, we are now in a destructive frenzy of an adolescent tearing down the house they built: There was never a worse time to claim the Foundership of what is being considered a great country and a failed experiment at the same time. In this era of 'unfounding', speaking about Tagore's idea of India may only have the effe...