Fall 2007
280F.003, Epistemic Moments?: South Asian Historiography
Dwinelle 3104, 2-4 pm

Dr. Prachi Deshpande

Office Hours: Wed 2-4 pm
3223 Dwinelle Hall

This course will interrogate different theoretical and methodological perspectives from the 1950s onwards on South Asia's past. We will talk about the Cambridge school, old and new, Marxist social history, Subaltern Studies and post-colonialism, gender, urban and environmental history and transnational history. One of the objectives will be to consider the philosophical issues underlying these different approaches, especially in their treatment of concepts of empire, nationalism and modernity. Another is to think about the methodological innovations and historical problems generated by fresh perspectives and debates on various periods and aspects of South Asian history, ranging from peasant resistance and colonial knowledge to nationalist discourse, political economy and popular memory. A third is to examine the ways in which this scholarship has generated introspective debate, within South Asian studies and beyond, on the very nature and practice of history as a modern intellectual discipline.

This is by no means a representative list, nor is all of it strictly disciplinary. Moreover, it restricts itself to primarily the early modern and modern periods post seventeenth-century, but the previous centuries and historiographic arguments about them will hopefully serve as more than ghost presences in discussion; certainly, the production of the pre-colonial past in modern scholarship is an important, continuous theme the course will address. Although seemingly a "greatest hits" compilation at first glance, therefore, the assigned readings are intended as gateways to a wider discussion, to place these prominent works in a broader field of scholarship, with the objective of teasing out methodological and intellectual connections and debates. Rather than spend time on listing or delineating salient features of different schools, we will seek to examine how different kinds of scholarship has overlapped and contributed to the development and deepening of South Asian history, both in terms of ideas and geographic contexts.

Required Texts Available for purchase at the bookstore:

C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge,1996)
V.N. Rao, S. Subrahmanyam & D. Shulman, Textures of Time, (Other Press, 2003)
Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (Duke, 1999 or 2005)
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minnesota, 1993)
Bernard Cohn, The Bernard Cohn Omnibus (Oxford 2001)
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial power & Popular politics (Cambridge, 1998)
Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons (Harvard 2006)
Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Duke, 2006)
Manu Goswami, Producing India, from Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004)

Articles are listed below in the schedule of readings. Those marked with an (*) are available online on bspace (bspace.berkeley.edu), or may be directly accessed through JSTOR and other academic databases. A couple marked with an (+) are available on reserve in the library, and will be made available online in due course.

Course Requirements:

1. Classroom discussion (35%): The bulk of class time will be devoted to discussing the week's assigned readings. Each of you (in some cases two students) will take responsibility for leading the discussion one week. For the week you are to lead discussion, you should email the entire class a series of questions, critical issues and overview of the assigned readings on Wednesday by 5 pm. Ideally this should provide a succinct summary of the analytic framework and salient features of the readings and lay out an agenda for the class to discuss, give us fodder for thought – a mixture of discussion bullet points and narrative, no more than 3 double-spaced pages. I will assign specific weeks on the first day of class.

1. Of course, it goes without saying that all seminar participants will read the texts closely for argument, interpretive framework and methodology as well as empirical details and come to class prepared with questions and comments. As the weeks progress some cumulative and comparative comments will also be welcome. Quality as well as quantity of participation will count. I have also set up a discussion forum on bspace where initial thoughts, clarifications can be exchanged among students; this is a new but useful tool and I encourage everyone to use it.

1. A 6-8 page double-spaced short paper (25%) due October 18 in the b-space drop-box (by noon) or in class. From the list given below, you should pick any one scholar and write a critical, historiographical survey of his/her oeuvre. Rather than a book-by-book survey, you should aim for an analytical overview that brings out the major methodological, interpretive and conceptual themes in this scholar’s work, the shifts in them and their contributions to the field at large. These contributions may be philosophical or methodological. Students may pick a scholar outside this list, after consultation with me.

Shahid Amin, Muzaffar Alam, Athar Ali, David Arnold, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, K.N. Chaudhuri, Nicholas Dirks, Richard Eaton, Sumit Guha, Irfan Habib, David Hardiman, Peter Hardy, Mushirul Hasan, Ronald Inden, Ayesha Jalal, Sudipta Kaviraj, D.D. Kosambi, A. R. Kulkarni, David Ludden, Ashis Nandy, Gyanendra Pandey, Mahesh Rangarajan, Lloyd & Susanne Rudolph, Sumit Sarkar, Sudipta Sen, K.Sivaramakrishnan, Burton Stein, Eric Stokes, Romila Thapar, David Washbrook, Andre Wink.

1. A 15-20 page double-spaced final paper (40%) due December 10 by 5 pm in the b-space drop-box or in my office. For this paper, you should pick one particular theme or topic in South Asian history and address its historiography. This theme can be empirical (e.g. regional patriotisms, gender and law, indirect rule and colonial power, social history of migration, religious reform, the social life of documents, narratives of partition) or it can relate to specific schools of historical practice (historical anthropology, Thompsonian social history, post-coloniality). You should ideally pick a theme that allows you to both draw on class materials but transcend them to analyze works and topics that cohere into a fruitful paradigm, or investigate thoroughly the historiography of a particular topic.

1. Both paper topics should be discussed with me in advance. Please pick your final paper topic latest by October-end. Deadlines are non-negotiable, late submissions will lose a grade point for every date that the assignment is late.

Readings and Topics Schedule (Subject to change!)

Aug 30 Introduction to themes of the course
Neeladri Bhattacharya, "The problem", Seminar, # 522, Feb 2003
Tanika Sarkar, "Historiography of the Sangh parivar" Seminar, # 522, Feb 2003

Sep 6 The "Cambridge school"
*Anil Seal, "Imperialism and Nationalism in India"
*C.A. Bayly, "Patrons and Politics in Northern India"
*Francis Robinson, "Municipal Government and Muslim Separatism in UP, 1883-1916"
*Richard Gordon, "Non-Cooperation and Council Entry, 1919 to 1920"
(all in Modern Asian Studies, Vol 7, No 3. 1973)

Sep 13 The thematic/problematic of Nationalism
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?
*Ayesha Jalal, "Striking a just balance: Maulana Azad as a theorist of transnational Jihad," Modern Intellectual History, 4, 1 (2007), pp. 95–107

Sep 20 Labour history & Marxism
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, Imperial Power & Popular Politics: Class, Resistance & the State in India
*Irfan Habib, "The Peasant in Indian History," Social Scientist, Vol. 11, No. 3, (Mar 1983), pp. 21-64.

Sep 27 Subalternity and history from below
Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
+Shahid Amin, "Gandhi as Mahatma," Subaltern Studies III, pp. 1-71

Oct 4 Anthropologists among the historians
Bernard Cohn, selected articles from the Bernard Cohn Omnibus:
An Anthropologist among the historians: A Field Study
Anthropology & History in the 1980s: Towards a Rapprochement
Notes on the history of the Study of Indian Society and Culture
The Census, Social Structure & Objectification in South Asia
The Changing Traditions of a Low Caste
Introduction to Colonialism & its forms of knowledge
The Command of Language and the Language of Command
Law & the Colonial State in India
The Transformation of Objects into Artifacts, Antiquities and Art
*Louis Dumont, "Introduction" to Homo Hierarchicus

Oct 11 No class

Oct 18 Subaltern Studies and Postcoloniality – Midterm paper due by 2 pm in b-space drop-box or in class
*Gyan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist histories of the Third World," Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Apr., 1990), pp. 383-408
*Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?," Representations, No. 37, (Winter, 1992), pp. 1-26
*Nicholas Dirks, "Castes of Mind," Representations No. 37, (Winter, 1992), pp. 56-78
*Florencia Mallon, "The Promise & Dilemma of Subaltern Studies," The American Historical Review, Vol. 99, No. 5 (Dec., 1994), pp. 1491-1515
*Gayatri Spivak, "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives," History and Theory, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Oct., 1985), pp. 247-272
+Sumit Sarkar, "Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies", in Writing Social History, Delhi 1997, pp.82-108

Oct 25 Revisiting the 18th century
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering & Social Communication in India

Nov 1 Narratives, Archives and Historical consciousness
V.N. Rao, Sanjay Subrahmanyam & David Shulman, Textures of Time: History Writing in South India, 1600-1800
*Sumit Guha, "Speaking Historically: The Changing Voices of Historical Narration in Western India," American Historical Review, Vol. 109, No. 4, Oct 2004.

Nov 8 The "Indian" ocean
Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons
*Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia," Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, (Jul., 1997), pp. 735-762

Nov 15 Gendering histories of empires
Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire
*Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal north India," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1999), pp. 47-93

Nov 22 The Return of Political Economy?
Manu Goswami, Producing India: from Colonial Economy to National Space
*Tirthankar Roy, "Flourishing Branches, Wilting Core: Research in Modern Indian Economic History," Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2004, pp. 221-240

Nov 29 Thanksgiving: no class

Dec 6 Last class, wrap up. Final paper due Monday December 10, 5 pm via b-space drop-box or in my office.