Ali Raza

Benjamin Zachariah

Franziska Roy

The years between the First and Second World Wars comprise a critical moment in the history of the world. In the aftermath of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, individuals and countries sought new solutions and blueprints for a world of greater stability, equality, and interdependency. Their divergent ends and objectives were held together, if temporarily, by a euphoria for the vastness and integratedness of the world and the desire and optimism to remake it and shape the future of humanity. This volume highlights this period in the political and social mobilization that comprises the “internationalist moment,” through the lens of South Asians’ interactions with a wider world and the wider world’s interactions with South Asia. The essays contribute to a growing, but as yet, inadequate field of the intellectual history of South Asia.

South Asia, Worlds, and World Views 1917–39

The Internationalist Moment

This book is about the production and consumption of history, themes that have gained in importance since the discipline's attempts to disavow its own authority with the ascendancy of postmodern and postcolonial perspectives. Several parallel themes crosscut the book’s central focus on the discipline of history: its intellectual history, its historiography, and its connection to memory, particularly in relation to the need to establish the collective identity of ‘nation’, ‘community’ or state through a memorialisation process that has much to do with history, or at least with claiming a historicity for collective memory. None of this can be undertaken without an understanding of the roles that history-writing and history-reading have been made to perform in public debates, or perhaps more accurately in public disputes. The book addresses a discomfort with postcolonial theories in and as history. Following are essays that examine the state of the discipline, the art of reading and using archives, practices of tracking the history of ideas, and the themes of history, memory and identity.

The Lives of Indian Historiography

After the Last Post

Lutz Raphael

Brigitta Bernet

Have Marxian ideas been relevant or influential in the writing and interpretation of history? What are the Marxist legacies that are now re-emerging in present-day histories? This volume is an attempt at relearning what the “discipline” of history once knew – whether one considered oneself a Marxist, a non-Marxist or an anti-Marxist.

Benjamin Zachariah

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