The three men who wrote modern India’s history
5 years ago

The three men who wrote modern India’s history

Live Mint  

Writing in 1937 to the future president of India, Rajendra Prasad, historian Jadunath Sarkar put forth his views on what would constitute a good “national history” for the country. The historian’s job, Sarkar insisted, was “not to suppress any defect of the national character, but add to his portraiture those higher qualities which, taken together with the former, help to constitute the entire individual”. Language politics also played a role: Sardesai wrote in Marathi for the most part, but Sarkar’s support highlighted Sardesai’s work outside Maharashtra, to the angst of his rivals. And while students of history will entirely relate to Sarkar’s use of the term “mouth-watering” in the context of finding new records, Raghavan’s tribute to the man and his peers is equally delightful, revealing also to the lay reader what investigating the past entails, and the dynamics that shape any mission to understand India’s history—a story not just of chronicles but also of the chroniclers.

History India Men Work Maratha Book Indians Jaipur Sarkar Sardesai Many Ways Sinh  men  modern  history  indias  sarkar  ways  sarkars  book  sardesai  work  school  sinhs  wrote

History of this topic

Book Review | ‘Eminent Distorians’ exposes the selective Marxist retelling of Bharat’s history
3 weeks, 4 days ago

Book Review | ‘Eminent Distorians’ exposes the selective Marxist retelling of Bharat’s history

Firstpost  

Utpal Kumar’s book challenges the ideological conditioning that views India’s historical trajectory as one of feudal stagnation and oppression until external ideas—particularly those rooted in socialism, Marxism, and even English systems—provided a more ‘just’ alternative In Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History, Utpal Kumar embarks on a mission to challenge and deconstruct the established narratives that have long …

Aditya Mukherjee Book Review: Analyzing Nehru’s India Through History and Time
3 months, 2 weeks ago

Aditya Mukherjee Book Review: Analyzing Nehru’s India Through History and Time

The Hindu  

Published : Dec 11, 2024 14:59 IST - 7 MINS READ At the launch of historian Aditya Mukherjee’s Nehru’s India: Past Present & Future in New Delhi earlier this month, invited speakers shared their own sense of intellectual, political and cultural affinity with Nehru, referring to certain highpoints of Mukherjee’s book in passing. I would like to concentrate on Mukherjee’s …

Review of A New History of India — From its Origins to the 21st Century: Heroes and villains
1 year, 10 months ago

Review of A New History of India — From its Origins to the 21st Century: Heroes and villains

The Hindu  

For some time, professional historians have wondered whether a single, usable, Indian past can any longer be written. Professional historians have of late also been dealing with the political challenge to their practice, as a wide range of ‘custodians’ of the past have emerged, from amateurs, ‘scientists’ and community gatekeepers, to hyper-ethno-nationalists, who lay exclusive claim not only to historical …

A Kanisetti, Lords of the Deccan author: I feel gleeful when I demolish binaries
2 years, 3 months ago

A Kanisetti, Lords of the Deccan author: I feel gleeful when I demolish binaries

Hindustan Times  

When you began writing Lords of the Deccan, you saw yourself as “an outsider to the academic world of history and historiography”? Since Neelakanta Sastri’s A History of South India and Noburu Karashima’s book A Concise History of South India, there has been no significant work on South India for a general audience. You reject a tripartite division of India’s …

Review: Crimson Spring by Navtej Sarna
2 years, 7 months ago

Review: Crimson Spring by Navtej Sarna

Hindustan Times  

Large events that make it to the history books often subsequently remain in public memory as stand-alone incidents. Inspired by real events and historical figures, Navtej Sarna’s Crimson Spring recreates a turning point in India’s history and is a detailed look at the cascading effects of a single event upon the peoples of both India and Britain. Though a work …

First Draft | Indian history is badly distorted: Here’s how it can be rewritten
2 years, 8 months ago

First Draft | Indian history is badly distorted: Here’s how it can be rewritten

Firstpost  

Since Independence it has become almost a religious dogma of Indian and Western historians to rewrite history and to project ancient Indian/Hindu civilisation as a remarkably and uniquely inhuman civilisation, whose only characteristic was an iniquitous caste system Is Indian history being “rewritten” at the moment? But after 1947 it became almost a religious dogma of Indian and Western historians, …

Mohan Guruswamy | Rewriting history, with an open mind or empty mind?
2 years, 8 months ago

Mohan Guruswamy | Rewriting history, with an open mind or empty mind?

Deccan Chronicle  

Historical revisionism is the process of rewriting history to correct the misinterpretations of the past or for an ideological purpose. British scholars, who seemed genuinely interested in how this country evolved, wrote most of modern India’s history. As a young student in a Catholic school, in recently independent India, the first history lessons imparted to me told that story, particularly …

Book Review | Raising a toast to 15 British men who parted veil of India’s history
3 years, 2 months ago

Book Review | Raising a toast to 15 British men who parted veil of India’s history

Deccan Chronicle  

It has become fashionable in India to condemn British who came to India during the Raj as nothing but freebooters, racists and british administrators. Centuries of Islamic rule coupled with the economic and cultural decline of Hindu communities in the subcontinent had led to the almost complete erasure of India’s past, including its ancient philosophies, culture, history and architectural achievements. …

What modern India owes its maharajahs
3 years, 6 months ago

What modern India owes its maharajahs

Live Mint  

The epigraph to Manu S. Pillai’s new book, False Allies: India’s Maharajahs In The Age Of Ravi Varma, is a scathing indictment by Indira Gandhi of the erstwhile kings and queens of India. At the heart of his narrative is Ravi Varma, a highly sought-after royal portrait painter of his time who depicted several generations of India’s princely states. While …

How India’s historians have reflected on the country’s history, culture and heritage
4 years, 6 months ago

How India’s historians have reflected on the country’s history, culture and heritage

The Hindu  

THE term ‘Indian history’ is deceptively simple at first sight, so much so that we take it as a given rather than as a point of reflection: it assays a study of the past of the Indian subcontinent. As early as in 1935, Shafa’at Ahmad Khan, in his presidential address to the first All India Modern History Congress, warned of …

British Raj was complicated, its social history ignored in colonial bashing: Historian
6 years, 3 months ago

British Raj was complicated, its social history ignored in colonial bashing: Historian

The Quint  

The book cover of "The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience". By Saket Suman New Delhi, Dec 21 The history of the British Raj is much more complicated than what has been presented in various books, including the bestselling "An Era of Darkness" by Shashi Tharoor; it cannot be looked at only from a polemic point of …

Politics of history
6 years, 6 months ago

Politics of history

The Hindu  

H ISTORY has played havoc with India’s nationalism and its secular ideal, in recent decades especially. In an able article in Janata, a Mumbai weekly founded by Jayaprakash Narayan, Neeraj Jain records how British rule reduced India, which until the early 18th century “was one of the world’s most developed regions.into one of the world’s poorest countries”. Mill’s History became …

Sunil Khilnani | Writing a history of angry young men and women
9 years ago

Sunil Khilnani | Writing a history of angry young men and women

Live Mint  

Sunil Khilnani’s last major book was about how India is constituted by its politics. But if you think about it, since that book, there’ve been not that many efforts at these more general accounts often driven by urgent political questions. If one of the distinctive marks of liberal historiography is a kind of easy progressivism that wants to argue that …

Remembering Bipan Chandra: Iconic historian and scholar
10 years, 6 months ago

Remembering Bipan Chandra: Iconic historian and scholar

Firstpost  

While a number of leaders and scholars expressed grief over the demise of veteran historian Bipan Chandra, President Pranab Mukherjee condoled his death saying the country had lost one of its “foremost scholars on modern India” who had an immense contribution towards the study of Indian history. Others heaped rich praise on the left-leaning scholar too, notably Pratap Bhanu Mehta …

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