HISTORY AND THE PRESENT

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This volume brings together historians and anthropologiests to reflect on the place of history and the historical within present-day conditions. The central focues here is on aspects fo the popular, on the ways in which the popular relates to teh scientific, the professional, the aesthetic, the religious, the legal, and the political.The book offers a critique of the disciplinary practices of history. It shares the impulse that produced "history from below" and Subaltern Studies. But it also reflects the urge to rethink the place of history in the present. It examines the historian's practices and assumptions, and is concerned to find a set of practices of history-writing that are more truthful as well as more ethical. Its essays are united by the desire to find a way out of the self-constructed eage of scientific history which has made hsitorienas wary of the popular. About Author : Partha Chatterjee is the author of A Princely Imposter? the Kumar of Bhawal and the Secret History of Indian Nationalism. A founder member of Subalter Studies, he is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, and Director, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Anjan Ghosh is a Fellow of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Contents : PrefaceNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: History and the PresentOn Retelling the Muslim Conquest of North IndiaMythicising the White Man: colonialism and Fantasy in a Folk TraditionThe Endangered Yakshi: Careers of an Ancient Art Object in Modern IndiaGenealogy, History and the Law: The Case of the RajamalaVillage Histories: Coalescing the Past and PresentThe Two Pasts of Nasser's Peasant: Political Memories and Everyday Life in an Egyptian VillageWriting the Riot: Between the Historiography and Ethnography of Communal Violence in IndiaRe-Presting Pasts: Santals in Nineteenth-century Bengal