20th century
A01=Dipesh Chakrabarty
academy
american historical association
Author_Dipesh Chakrabarty
biography
british empire
career
Category=JNM
Category=NHAH
Category=NHF
civilizations
colonial
colony
context
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
historian
historiography
history of aurangzib
imperialism
india
marginalization
marginalized
mughal dynasty
postcolonial
postcolonialism
public life
scholarly work
scholarship
sir jadunath sarkar
south asia
understanding
Product details
- ISBN 9780226100456
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jul 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Features a leading scholar in early twentieth-century India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958) was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. By the end of his lifetime, however, he had been marginalized by the Indian history establishment, as postcolonial historians embraced alternative approaches in the name of democracy and anti-colonialism. The Calling of History examines Sarkar's career - and poignant obsolescence - as a way in to larger questions about the discipline of history and its public life. Through close readings of more than twelve hundred letters to and from Sarkar along with other archival documents, Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates that historians in colonial India formulated the basic concepts and practices of the field via vigorous-and at times bitter and hurtful-debates in the public sphere. He furthermore shows that because of its non-technical nature, the discipline as a whole remains susceptible to pressure from both the public and the academy even today.
Methodological debates and the changing reputations of scholars like Sarkar, he argues, must therefore be understood within the specific contexts in which particular histories are written. Insightful and with far-reaching implications for all historians, The Calling of History offers a valuable look at the double life of history and how tensions between its public and private sides played out in a major scholar's career.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
