Articles by Anirudh Deshpande

Changes in historiography and historical methods challenged the professional historian’s obsession with the state archive from the late 19th century, but the distance between academic and public histories continued to grow wider in the 20th century. The possibility of bringing public and academic histories together to make history-writing a meaningful activity for both the public and the historian has been done by treating the visual as an archive which no historian can ignore in the age of smartphones, internet and fake news. By imaginatively integrating the visual and literary archives, the historian can reclaim a social relevance denied to him by the very practice of professional academic history.

Oral history is an aid to movements for social justice across the world. It is particularly significant in countries like India where literacy levels are low and where memories of the oppressed are routinely erased from public memory. This article questions the presumed superiority of the written over the oral. It presents a critique of “establishment” historiography and suggests that historians should adopt a receptive and balanced approach to different forms of history. Oral history reorients the historian’s craft in interesting ways. The oral history method is crucial for capturing histories that flourish outside the dominant narratives of modern societies.

The myth of India being a largely vegetarian country is shattered by the fact that across the country, the great majority of people consume meat and fish.

Unlike literature, which results from an imaginative plunder of individual and collective memory, professional history is based on primary and secondary sources which verify the historian's truth. Compared with literature, history's relationship with memory appears complicated, primarily because of its institutionalised modernisation. This paper underlines the need to expand the horizons of history by approaching memory more constructively than Indian historians usually do. In India, this means analysing the memory of the majority who remain excluded from academic constructions of knowledge. Several modes of remembering have flourished in the pre-literate, literate and post-literate contexts of Indian society since the early 20th century outside professional history. This paper suggests that written history and unwritten memory must both be used critically by the historian. The historian must begin by interrogating his vocation to examine why history, once a popular discipline, has steadily lost social importance since 1947. This paper favours histories appropriate to present and future Indian conditions; it tries to offer possible solutions to the "problem" of history with reference to Indian conditions.

Understanding Politics and Society (1910-1997) by Hardwari Lal, edited by Prem Chowdhry (New Delhi: Manak Publications), 2010; pp 423, Rs 700.