After Conversion: Cultural Histories of Modern India

by Saurabh Dube

After Conversion imaginatively addresses issues of modernity and its margins, based upon an interplay between a variety of Western and non-Western perspectives. Saurabh Dube critically considers questions of conversion by examining colonial writings of a vernacular Christianity and by tracking the transformations of caste and sect in South Asia. He provides personal portraits of his anthropologist father as well as of an important visual artist in order to convey the dense sensuousness and moving contradictions of everyday worlds. Dube incisively explores the mutual intersections between culture and power and the past and the present, while prudently unravelling the ways in which academic categories and social worlds come together yet fall apart.

232 pages, Paperback

Published February 27, 2009

About the author

Saurabh Dube is an Indian scholar whose work combines history and anthropology, archival and field research, subaltern studies and postcolonial-decolonial perspectives, and social theory and critical thought. After teaching at the University of Delhi, since 1995 he is Professor of History – elected to the Distinguished Category of Professor-Researcher in 2009 – at the Centre of Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. Dube is a member also of the National System of Researchers (SNI), Mexico, in which since 2005 he holds the highest rank.
Saurabh Dube has been described recently as "one of the most generative, creative, and surprising thinkers of our time" ( Sunil Amrith) as well as "a thinker who in these times is fundamental to the Global South" ( Mario Rufer). He has been considered as having "long been one of the most interesting and perceptive scholars addressing the dilemmas of modernity in South Asia"; as issuing "excellent reminder[s] of the possibilities as well as the perils of modernity" at large; and as "bringing an electric urgency to the task of historiography of modernity", encompassing "the genealogies of the modern in Europe, the Americas, and South Asia".

Reviews

[Elzira Rai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mind the huge gap between theoretical ambitions and readings of archival/ethnographic materials.