When Does History Begin? by Harjot Oberoi (Hardback)
No reviews
- Regular price
- £30.00
- Sale price
- £30.00
- Regular price
-
£72.27 - Unit price
- /per
Sale
Sold out
Taxes Included. For international orders, any additional duties or customs fees upon delivery are the responsibility of the purchaser.
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Adding product to your cart
Focusing on important issues in Sikh religious identity and memory, Harjot Oberoi shows how premodern techniques of narrating the past and truth-telling in South Asia were deeply transformed by colonialism. Indian historiographical praxis has long been problematic. Al-Biruni, the eleventh-century polymath, was puzzled by how people in the subcontinent treated the protocols of history; it escaped his learning that Indian narrative constructions of the past were embedded in an intricate canon of poetical traditions and represented a radical departure from historical narratives in the Islamic, Sinic, and Greco-Roman worlds. Where others tended to search for "facts," people in South Asia looked for "affect." This alternative model for comprehending and evaluating the past—through aesthetics and gradients of taste—generated a crucially different variety of historical consciousness. Oberoi's examination of the Sikh tradition demonstrates what modern critical narrative achieves when it moves away from classical models, traversing significant moments in colonialism, coercion and protest in the Raj, the production of knowledge, the rise of secular nationalism, and modern notions of the self within and outside India.
Use left/right arrows to navigate the slideshow or swipe left/right if using a mobile device