1992/01/01 by Darshan Perusek · 1 citation
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Archaeology #Art #Consciousness #Epistemology #Historiography #History #Law #Literature #Philippine History and Culture #Philosophy #Political science #Politics #Psychoanalysis #Psychology #South Asian Studies and Conflicts #Subaltern
paper · doi:10.2307/1345889
openalex publication_date 1992/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
My interest in the 1857 rebellion is more than academic. It to do partly with the story of how my great-grandfather Baba Karaak Singh was awarded a jagir (an estate and its revenues) by the British for loyalty, in the midst of a contagion of betrayal and treachery by mutinous sepoys (soldiers) and disaffected landlords, magnates, and peasants. Faithful to his masters, the old man, so the family legend goes, rode like the wind on a dark and moonless night to bring to the officer in charge details of the secret military plans of the rebels. My great-grandfather's name does not appear in any official roll-call of heroes or villains, pre-independence or post-independence; he was too minor a figure, too insignificant to be deserving of such notice by history. But he was remembered very well by his children and their children for the ill-gotten land that he left them, which grew sugar-cane that share-croppers planted and harvested and paid one-third as revenue to him, and the freshness and sweetness of which my mother could still taste in her mouth years later when she spoke of Baba Karaak Singh and his family jagir. So much for innocence. But I tell this story less as a confession of complicity by inheritance than as an explanation of the initial enthusiasm with which I read in the early 1980s the first essays in Indian social history by a group of post-independence historians in Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, the first volume of which appeared in 1982 under the general editorship of Ranajit Guha, Australian National University, Canberra. The historiography of Indian nationalism, Guha states in the first essay of the volume, has for a long time been dominated by elitism--colonialist and bourgeois-nationalist elitism (Historiography of Colonial India, Subaltern Studies I, 1)-an which saw the making of the Indian nation, predominantly, as the achievement of ruling-class ideas, institutions, and personalities.