History at the margins: Koch-Rajbanshis and their politics of resistance and rewriting their history and identity (original) (raw)

Abstract

The conscious effort to rewrite history from the margins inherently involves the challenging and resisting of a dominant historiography. However the emergence of this history could be treated as expressing of modern self. Thus, the writing of history has been increasingly associated with and central to debates on identity formation and politics. Today, the Koch-Rajbanshis are rewriting a history that existed but was silenced and excluded from the histories. The rewriting of history also presents the 'marginalized' with the 'key moment' to indelibly re-inscribe oneself in the past. To rewrite history thus is not to bring a mere variation in the master narrative or dominant historiography nor an innocuous reflection of multiple narratives or histories but draws ones attention to the re-appropriation of history and of competing claims. This perhaps provides the fertile ground for the development of non-metropolitan histories and subaltern pasts. Here we reconfirm that the writing of history from the margins appears contentious and as the new sites of struggle. We argue in this paper, that the rewriting of histories becomes a part of larger social movements and contextualized within the contemporary socio-political setup. In late nineteenth century, the Rajbanshis had aspired to be a part of Brahminical social order. After hundred years the same group of people preferred to bring out their tribal past and re-indentified differently and couched the movement in the secular language of socio-economic injustices and socio-cultural differences. The ruptures and discontinuity in their history makes them as vulnerable as their identity.

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