Introduction to Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (original) (raw)

Review of Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip Menon, eds., Capitalisms. Towards a Global Historyy

The Indian Economic and Social History Review 58, 2021

Book Reviews / 429 organic histories. Such accounts shift the order of pre-eminence from political capitals (such as Delhi) to Gujarat as a site of a deeper history of a community in a unique geography-a 'unique and regional identity'. Narrative Pasts makes an important methodological intervention, where Balachandran critically reads texts deemed 'religious' or 'hagiographic' for their political, historical, and commemorative significance. It is a model for premodern scholarship that takes seriously the ways in which history and memory are equally invested in the making of community. Balachandran joins a group of a stellar new cohort of scholars of history and religion who are rewriting our understanding of the subcontinent through the early modern past: scholars such as Supriya Gandhi, Abhishek Kaicker, Aparna Kapadia, Shankar Nair and Anubhuti Maurya. Reading across these new works necessitates us to not only rethink 'region' but also critically reimagine geographies and the limits of ideas of 'diaspora', 'settler', and 'migrant'. Balachandran's rich study offers new approaches to other histories of mobilities that shape a 'region', for example in the lives and narratives of Jahanian Jahan-Gasht (d. 1384) for Sindh or Guru Nanak (d. 1539) for Punjab. Balachandran opens Narrative Pasts with a visit to a sayyid in Mangrol who had preserved his own family's history, rendered as a shajara back to the Prophet, through his ancestors in Gujarat. As we think alongside Balachandran on the 'making' of Gujarat not as an 'idea' but as a 'embedded' place, we see how Gujarat is knitted together from diverse histories, memories and families of belonging. In Narrative Pasts, we are given a way of conceiving anew such senses of belonging.