CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF DISCRIMINATION & EXCLUSION (CSDE)
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY
Invites you to a talk on
Contesting the Claims over the Past: The Differing Perceptions of the Elite and Community Historians in India
Dr. Raj Sekhar Basu
Department of History, University of Calcutta
Date: 22nd January, 2018
Venue: Room no. 402, CSDE, SSS-I
Time: 2:30pm
Historians are not the only people who are concerned with the grand task of representing historical developments, often couched in terms of the contemparaniety. In India, the politically articulate sections of the marginalised and the oppressed often find in history an intellectual mechanism through which they could obliterate the hierarchical systems and create honourable, if not alternative spaces for the expression of the voices of the voiceless. Mainstream history privileges some ideas which are considered to be sacrosanct for the well being of the nation, thereby overruling the 'other' voices which are treated as ideational expressions of the passive subjects, denied of a history of their own. However, the so called 'other' communities have their own depictions of their past, which are often a part of times immemorial. Their constructions and imaginations of the past are intertwined with their myths, experiences of encounters with the 'others' and through their own lexicons of social communication. Indeed, all these inform their epistemological understanding of the present/contemporary, a representation of the future and the promise of a return to an idyllic past. Professional history writings professing to be political or apolitical, consciously or unconsciously determined, have been involved with the dehistoricization of the marginalised humanity. The Adivasi and Dalit histories question this element of somnolence and they seemed to be grounded on their own constructions and realization of the contemporary more often which comes under the rubric of lived experiences.
