Unshackling Post-colonial History : a brief study of historicism in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (original) (raw)

Narratives of Hegemony and Marginalization: Deconstructing the History Legends of India

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

Myths and legends as local sources of history reveal their implicit assumptions and demonstrate the way in which events are filtered through the interpretations of their authors. By examining a variety of these interpretations, we might piece together a refracted image of the past which will ultimately present a history of "what actually happened". There is also an attempt to create a single narrative supported by various sources that claim to reveal the truth in political and social terms about what may have happened there. I have substantiated my arguments by drawing examples from the compilation of legends, Aithihyamala (Garland of Legends), a pioneering and exhaustive collection of 126 legends of Kerala (India), compiled and published between 1909 and 1934 by the Sanskrit-Malayalam scholar Kottarathil Sankunni. My contention in this paper is that there is a politics behind the subversion of "other histories" (local or subaltern) to establish a hegemonic history. One finds a "politics" behind the legend-making, a deliberate attempt at compiling an elitist record of legends and through it the homogenizing of the cultural past of a region.

The question of history in precolonial india

History and Theory, 2007

This essay considers an important and enduring problem in the writing of Indian history: how do we historians approach precolonial narratives of the past? A rich and suggestive new study of South Indian modes of historiography, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600-1800, by Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, has positioned itself at the center of this debate. For a variety of reasons, precolonial narratives have been demoted to the status of mere information, and genres of South Indian writing have been dismissed as showing that South Indians lacked the ability to write history and indeed lacked historical consciousness. Textures of Time responds to this picture by proposing a novel historical method for locating historical sensibility in precolonial narratives of the past. The authors ask us not to judge all textual traditions in India, especially narratives of the past, on the basis of the verifiability of facts contained in them. Rather they suggest a radical openness of the text, and they argue that a historical narrative is constituted in the act of reading itself. They do this by examining the role of genre and what they call texture in precolonial South Indian writing.

Robert J.C. Young. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West

Historical studies in education, 2005

In White Mythologies Robert Young enters into the debate concerning the relation of theory to history by repudiating conventional assumptions that post-structuralism denies, withdraws from, or randomizes history. As Young sees it, the objections raised against post-structuralism arise not from any demonstrable neglect of history, but rather from its highly political and ethical challenge to the orthodox Marxist belief that history operates according to the dialectic and toward a specific end. The teleological version of history in which all human experience can be incorporated into a single, linear, rational, coherent, and optimistic chronological narrative (i.e., History) is, for Young, a humanist invention that depends on an excluded non-Western other and the assimilation of contradictions and difference to reconstitute a Western self. In this sense, History, with a big H, is "the west's greatest myth" (p. 3) and one that "uncannily simulates the project of 19 th century imperialism" (p. 34) by operating within the limits of a Eurocentric perspective to affect an egotistical and, indeed, white supremacist constitution of the West that negates, appropriates, and incorporates the Other. Young begins his powerful critique of Western Marxism by drawing upon the work of Lukacs, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévi-Strauss, among others, to illustrate that the system of the Hegelian dialect has long rested upon Eurocentric presuppositions that human history is singularly intelligible, united for all humanity, and equivalent to the history of the West. Even Sartre, despite the obvious anti-colonialism that was prominent both in his street-level politics and in his theoretical emphasis upon human subjectivity, was unable to escape the ethnocentrism of such totalizing accounts of history. Young moves on to illustrate how Althusser invoked the alternative historical epistemology of Bachelard to argue for a new theorization of Marxist history that turned on differentiated and irreconcilable temporalities. Notwithstanding Althusser's apparent failure to address how transition between modes of production constituted by different times and histories was effected, his theorization of a decentred totality that allowed for the possibility of difference outside the dialectic laid the basis, Young claims, for subsequent theoretical investigations of history by the likes of Derrida, Foucault, and Young himself. Young obviously shares Foucault's skepticism toward progressivist and homogeneous histories and his endorsement of historiography as an ethicopolitical project. He defends the Foucauldian method of historical enquiry that explicitly counters

The ancient past in the historical present: Postcolonial theory and ancient Indian history

The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory, 2024

As a critical analytic, postcolonial theory has forced reckonings with the enduring legacies of imperialism and colonialism and the implications of Eurocentric scholarship. Debates in postcolonial South Asia over such legacies and implications fostered the formation of postcolonial theory. This chapter demonstrates how debates in the field of South Asian history were crucial to the formation of postcolonial critiques. I particularly focus on insights from the field of ancient Indian history that informed postcolonial critiques.