After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography

Description

This book is about the production and consumption of specifically Indian history, framed by concerns with postmodernism and postcolonialism. 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 memorialization 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 played in public debates, or perhaps more accurately in public disputes.

About the author:

Benjamin Zachariah read history at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. His published work includes a biography of Nehru (2004), 'Developing India' (2005/2012), 'Nation Games' (2011/2016/2020), and the co-edited volumes 'The Internationalist Moment' (2015) and 'What's Left of Marxism' (2020/2022). He was Reader at the University of Sheffield before moving to Germany where, among other posts, he was Senior Research Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, and at the University of Trier. His research interests centre on historiography and historical thinking in public forums, intellectual histories of the twentieth century, international revolutionary networks, and global fascism.

Reviews

''This wide-ranging and polemical study unsettles many settled facts of professional historiography and does so with verve and brilliance. Looking back at the age of post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-truth, and many other posts, Benjamin Zachariah uncovers the self-deceptions, anachronisms, and memory lapses that enable historical narratives as well as styles of history-writing. His book is a salutary reminder of the public duty of the historian, and of history's complicated, but always necessary, relation with evidence and the archive. It should be essential reading.'' (Supriya Chaudhuri, Professor Emerita, Department of English, Jadavpur University )

Table of contents

Contents List

Preface to the South Asia Edition

Preface: Reflections on Reflexivity

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Instrumentalization of Historiography and the Production of Victimhood

PART I: MARKING THE POSTS

Chapter 1   Identifying the Beast Within: Postcolonial Theory and History

Chapter 2   Manifesto on Indirections: Histories, Collective Victimhood, and Postcolonialism

PART II: INSTRUMENTALIZATIONS

 Chapter 3   The Revolt of Memory: 1857 in the Nationalist Imagination

Chapter 4   Histories of Empire, Imperial Legitimation, and the Wartime Career of Penderel Moon

Chapter 5   History, Cinema, and the Politics of Cultural Sensitivity in Interwar India

PART III: POSTDISCURSIVE POSSIBILITIES

Chapter 6   Moving Ideas and How to Catch Them

Chapter 7   Travellers in Archives, or the Possibilities of a Post-Post Archival Historiography

Afterword: Is There a Discipline to This?