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Essay On Indian Historiography

Decent Essays

How the Indian historiography has evolved from precolonial to post-colonial period?

Over the three millenniums, India has developed opulent and complex layers of culture, since geographically India lies at crossroads of trading routes. From ancient times, people from diverse background and ethnicity came into India as traders and invaders via land as well as sea routes. They settled down here and, over the time, India assimilated them in its cultural and social mosaic. Also, India remained a home of host of empires and kingdoms with each having a peculiar history. Pre-colonial empires and kingships had history but it would be told orally and would occasionally be chronicled. It were the Europeans particularly the British armed with documentation and statistical knowledge who introduced a systematic chronology of the Indian history upon seizing India. The modern Indian historiography was …show more content…

. As Jalal and Bose have argued that “the cracking and crumbling of the modern nation-state system, the disintegration of the socialist alternative, the disillusionment with the false promises of capitalism, and the resurgence of redefined social identities thought to have been obliterated by the steam-roller of modernization have all rendered interpretations of the modern era in South Asian and world history much more complex. Recent themes in South Asian historiography have been the role of intermediate social groups in the construction of the British raj and that of ‘subaltern’ social groups in anti-colonial resistance; the part played by the colonial state in the reinvention of communal and caste categories; the refashioning of social relations of class by the linking of Indian economic regions to wider capitalist systems; and the impact of the interplay between national, communal and regional levels of politics on the process of

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