Neha Chatterji THE CALLING OF HISTORY: SIR JADUNATH SARKAR AND HIS EMPIRE OF TRUTH By Dipesh Chakrabarty Permanent Black , in association with Ashoka University, Delhi, 2015, pp. 320, Rs. 795.00 VOLUME XL NUMBER 2 February 2016 The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath
Sarkar and His Empire of Truth by
Dipesh Chakrabarty is remarkable for
the exceptionality of its organization. Its prose
is swift to communicate the basic argument
that the author makes: the coming into being
of academic history-writing in India from
within informal public sphere debates between
stalwart ‘amateur’ historians of early
twentieth century who voiced an enthusiasm
for ‘scientific history writing’. All these
‘amateur’ historians sought to serve the nation
and her people by serving history. The
nature of patriotic service contemplated by
someone like Sir Jadunath Sarkar would be
to bestow moral, political and historical wisdom
on the people of India by training them
to a judicious evaluation of ‘evidence’ and
giving them their ‘true’/ ‘accurate’ history,
‘fearlessly exposing faults’ in the national
character. The desire for history however,
could also be the desire to challenge ‘statements
of foreigners’—in the words of Tagore
quoted by the author—to regenerate the ‘lowered
heads and wounded hearts’ of the subjugated.
Mutually at war one with the other,
history was a sacred ‘calling’ from both these
perspectives. And the birth of professional
history-writing from within these debates
over authentic evidence and ‘genuine research’
embroiled in the tensions of public
life has left it exposed to variations of the
same tensions even today.
The author points out that it was Sarkar’s
emphasis on the distinction of the ‘historical
book meant for a permanent place on the
library shelf ’ from ‘table talk’ or ‘modern
political platform oration’ that worked to
secure for history a ‘cloistered life’ of the academy;
yet ‘he was all but forgotten’ in the
academic life of Indian history by the 1970s.
Sarkar’s idea of getting to the ‘historical truth’
by combating ‘biases’ was wholly displaced
by academic historians of succeeding generations
who ‘proudly wore their biases on
their sleeves (Marxist or otherwise)’. If
Chakrabarty’s endeavour, to begin with, was
to understand the impersonal nuances of a
Tonce-powerful-now-obsolete historical
project in India and trace the later course of
its obsolescence within the very institutions
that were born of it, he has ended up weaving
his argumentative prose in the literary trope
of a minor tragedy to narrate the unceremonious
‘fall’ from academic ‘grace’ of the individual
who epitomized that historical project.
The author makes the point that the
book is not a biography of Sarkar and yet
the narrative centres his ... Table of Contents >> |