What do you think?
Rate this book
The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth
A leading scholar in early twentieth-century India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. By the end of his lifetime, however, he had been marginalized by the Indian history establishment, as postcolonial historians embraced alternative approaches in the name of democracy and anti-colonialism. The Calling of History examines Sarkar’s career—and poignant obsolescence—as a way into larger questions about the discipline of history and its public life.
Through close readings of more than twelve hundred letters to and from Sarkar along with other archival documents, Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates that historians in colonial India formulated the basic concepts and practices of the field via vigorous—and at times bitter and hurtful—debates in the public sphere. He furthermore shows that because of its non-technical nature, the discipline as a whole remains susceptible to pressure from both the public and the academy even today. Methodological debates and the changing reputations of scholars like Sarkar, he argues, must therefore be understood within the specific contexts in which particular histories are written.
Insightful and with far-reaching implications for all historians, The Calling of History offers a valuable look at the double life of history and how tensions between its public and private sides played out in a major scholar’s career.
Through close readings of more than twelve hundred letters to and from Sarkar along with other archival documents, Dipesh Chakrabarty demonstrates that historians in colonial India formulated the basic concepts and practices of the field via vigorous—and at times bitter and hurtful—debates in the public sphere. He furthermore shows that because of its non-technical nature, the discipline as a whole remains susceptible to pressure from both the public and the academy even today. Methodological debates and the changing reputations of scholars like Sarkar, he argues, must therefore be understood within the specific contexts in which particular histories are written.
Insightful and with far-reaching implications for all historians, The Calling of History offers a valuable look at the double life of history and how tensions between its public and private sides played out in a major scholar’s career.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
320 pages, Paperback
First published June 8, 2015
6 people are currently reading
100 people want to read
About the author
Dipesh Chakrabarty
57 books70 followersDipesh Chakrabarty (b. 1948) is a Bengali historian who has also made contributions to postcolonial theory and subaltern studies.
He attended Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, where he received his undergraduate degree in physics. He also received a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (MBA) from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Later he moved on to the Australian National University in Canberra, from where he earned a PhD in history.
He is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting faculty at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Chakrabarty also serves as a contributing editor for Public Culture, an academic journal published by Duke University Press.
He was a member of the Subaltern Studies collective. He has recently made important contributions to the intersections between history and postcolonial theory (Provincializing Europe [PE]), which continues and revises his earlier historical work on working-class history in Bengal (Rethinking Working-Class History). PE adds considerably to the debate of how postcolonial discourse engages in the writing of history (e.g., Robert J. C. Young's "White Mythologies"), critiquing historicism, which is intimately related to the West's notion of linear time. Chakrabarty argues that Western historiography's historicism universalizes liberalism, projecting it to all ends of the map. He suggests that, under the rubric of historicism, the end-goal of every society is to develop towards nationalism.
In 2011 he received an Honorary degree from the University of Antwerp.
He attended Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, where he received his undergraduate degree in physics. He also received a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (MBA) from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Later he moved on to the Australian National University in Canberra, from where he earned a PhD in history.
He is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He was a visiting faculty at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Chakrabarty also serves as a contributing editor for Public Culture, an academic journal published by Duke University Press.
He was a member of the Subaltern Studies collective. He has recently made important contributions to the intersections between history and postcolonial theory (Provincializing Europe [PE]), which continues and revises his earlier historical work on working-class history in Bengal (Rethinking Working-Class History). PE adds considerably to the debate of how postcolonial discourse engages in the writing of history (e.g., Robert J. C. Young's "White Mythologies"), critiquing historicism, which is intimately related to the West's notion of linear time. Chakrabarty argues that Western historiography's historicism universalizes liberalism, projecting it to all ends of the map. He suggests that, under the rubric of historicism, the end-goal of every society is to develop towards nationalism.
In 2011 he received an Honorary degree from the University of Antwerp.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 29, 2016
Seemed more like notes towards a monograph than a proper scholarly monograph about the historian Jadunath Sarkar. Endless summaries, an erratic profusion of redundant sub-headings, tedious quotations followed by a lazy "Let us hear from so-and-so again:" while abjuring a scholarly responsibility to analyze what is being said and why it is significant for the argument.
This was especially disappointing to those of us eager to read about the formation of our discipline as it emerged in the subcontinent. The stakes were high. Would precolonial modes of memory-keeping be dismissed as worthless for the historian? If so, then all that came before the British arrived would be lost and the history of a largely unlettered subaltern population would be treated as so much gibberish. Who would have access to institutions that kept surviving records? Who would be in charge of said institutions and what would be the abiding concern of newly minted archives? Jadunath Sarkar weighed in on nearly all of these questions. His views were staunchly pro-colonial government, conservative, contemptuous of indigenous, subaltern historical modes like bakhars and determined to bar access to records for all but a chosen few.
Today, the discipline of history is inundated with Bengali historians (mostly working on Calcutta) and their fetishization of all things Bangla. Tanika Sarkar characterizes Chakrabarty as a "cultural nationalist" and that charge seems justified by his latest work. Quoting liberally from Tagore and trying to fit Jadunath within a niche of European historiography, Chakrabarty strains the reader's patience. It is when the author steps gingerly out of his Bangla-centric comfort zone that potentially more interesting details emerge. Specifically, bitter rivalries and clashing perspectives held by proponents of the two strands, Bengali and Marathi, are fascinating. Unfortunately, Chakrabarty gives the latter short shrift.
Although modern Bangla historians often operate as if Bengal were a satellite of Europe, an earlier generation from which Jadunath Sarkar hailed was actively engaged with other regions--especially Maharashtra. During the late nineteenth century-early 20th c, Marathi historians and archivists were busy collecting manuscripts from remote villages, fighting with ordinary people who were hostile to a project that involved handing over their family letters, personal effects, et cetera. These texts are priceless because they provide historians of South Asia with indigenous forms of history writing that conformed to protocols radically distinct from Rankean historical methods. Without them, we have little way of understanding the life-worlds of the millions of peasants who never appeared on the pages of court chroniclers. Instead of wholesale dismissal of those methods like Sarkar, Chakrabarty might have explored how those modes enrich historical scholarship. He could have relied on his friend Ashis Nandy's article "History's Forgotten Doubles" and taken up where Prachi Deshpande left off in her chapter on bakhar historiography in Creative Pasts, noting Jadunath Sarkar's disgust with them as worthless for historians. Or even simpler--take seriously the claims made in Partha Chatterjee's introduction to his edited anthology History and the Vernacular. But that would have been draft 10 and what we are reading in Calling of History is draft 2.
Not a Marathi speaker himself, Chakrabarty leans heavily on Sarkar's English correspondence and traces his European literary influences. Unlike the current lot of modern US-based Bengali historians, Sarkar spoke many languages. His friendships may not have extended to Australia and US like Chakrabarty. However, his lifelong friendship with a Marathi historian named Sardesai attest that these were deeper intellectual engagements than the ones his biographer draws upon (largely male like Sarkar, upper-caste and Bengali). Sarkar was the more dominating personality who critiqued his colleague's writing and modes of historical scholarship. At some points, Sardesai would offer a defence by saying to his friend: "I am just a writer of kaifiyats."Kaifiyats were form of historical records kept by village accountants and passed down through generations. The author notes this but then does not give Sardesai's rebuttal its due, characterizing Sardesai and his contemporary Marathi historians as "regional chauvinists." While we can agree that there was a vein of regional zealotry amongst the latter, there was a much larger contest being waged about forms of history writing. What would it have meant for an Indian writing under colonialism to make that claim, as against Sarkar's effort to mimic Europeans like Ranke? To be a kaifiyat was to be a locally rooted guardian of popular memory, accountable to the community in which one lived. It was a position prior to the professionalization of the discipline. While Sarkar was gushing over Gibbon and reading Macaulay, Sardesai was representing himself as a historian oriented towards a vernacular music, hard to detect for ears only accustomed to English. The mimic man enjoyed patronage from the colonial authorities, his work is receiving a reappraisal from Western historians and now a respectful invitation into the canon from no less than a Toynbee-awarded professor. Meanwhile, the aspiring kaifiyat writer languishes in obscurity. All the time Chakrabarty is excavating the Anglo-European etymology of 'tragedy' and how Sarkar used it, it is this other tragedy that goes unremarked.
This was especially disappointing to those of us eager to read about the formation of our discipline as it emerged in the subcontinent. The stakes were high. Would precolonial modes of memory-keeping be dismissed as worthless for the historian? If so, then all that came before the British arrived would be lost and the history of a largely unlettered subaltern population would be treated as so much gibberish. Who would have access to institutions that kept surviving records? Who would be in charge of said institutions and what would be the abiding concern of newly minted archives? Jadunath Sarkar weighed in on nearly all of these questions. His views were staunchly pro-colonial government, conservative, contemptuous of indigenous, subaltern historical modes like bakhars and determined to bar access to records for all but a chosen few.
Today, the discipline of history is inundated with Bengali historians (mostly working on Calcutta) and their fetishization of all things Bangla. Tanika Sarkar characterizes Chakrabarty as a "cultural nationalist" and that charge seems justified by his latest work. Quoting liberally from Tagore and trying to fit Jadunath within a niche of European historiography, Chakrabarty strains the reader's patience. It is when the author steps gingerly out of his Bangla-centric comfort zone that potentially more interesting details emerge. Specifically, bitter rivalries and clashing perspectives held by proponents of the two strands, Bengali and Marathi, are fascinating. Unfortunately, Chakrabarty gives the latter short shrift.
Although modern Bangla historians often operate as if Bengal were a satellite of Europe, an earlier generation from which Jadunath Sarkar hailed was actively engaged with other regions--especially Maharashtra. During the late nineteenth century-early 20th c, Marathi historians and archivists were busy collecting manuscripts from remote villages, fighting with ordinary people who were hostile to a project that involved handing over their family letters, personal effects, et cetera. These texts are priceless because they provide historians of South Asia with indigenous forms of history writing that conformed to protocols radically distinct from Rankean historical methods. Without them, we have little way of understanding the life-worlds of the millions of peasants who never appeared on the pages of court chroniclers. Instead of wholesale dismissal of those methods like Sarkar, Chakrabarty might have explored how those modes enrich historical scholarship. He could have relied on his friend Ashis Nandy's article "History's Forgotten Doubles" and taken up where Prachi Deshpande left off in her chapter on bakhar historiography in Creative Pasts, noting Jadunath Sarkar's disgust with them as worthless for historians. Or even simpler--take seriously the claims made in Partha Chatterjee's introduction to his edited anthology History and the Vernacular. But that would have been draft 10 and what we are reading in Calling of History is draft 2.
Not a Marathi speaker himself, Chakrabarty leans heavily on Sarkar's English correspondence and traces his European literary influences. Unlike the current lot of modern US-based Bengali historians, Sarkar spoke many languages. His friendships may not have extended to Australia and US like Chakrabarty. However, his lifelong friendship with a Marathi historian named Sardesai attest that these were deeper intellectual engagements than the ones his biographer draws upon (largely male like Sarkar, upper-caste and Bengali). Sarkar was the more dominating personality who critiqued his colleague's writing and modes of historical scholarship. At some points, Sardesai would offer a defence by saying to his friend: "I am just a writer of kaifiyats."Kaifiyats were form of historical records kept by village accountants and passed down through generations. The author notes this but then does not give Sardesai's rebuttal its due, characterizing Sardesai and his contemporary Marathi historians as "regional chauvinists." While we can agree that there was a vein of regional zealotry amongst the latter, there was a much larger contest being waged about forms of history writing. What would it have meant for an Indian writing under colonialism to make that claim, as against Sarkar's effort to mimic Europeans like Ranke? To be a kaifiyat was to be a locally rooted guardian of popular memory, accountable to the community in which one lived. It was a position prior to the professionalization of the discipline. While Sarkar was gushing over Gibbon and reading Macaulay, Sardesai was representing himself as a historian oriented towards a vernacular music, hard to detect for ears only accustomed to English. The mimic man enjoyed patronage from the colonial authorities, his work is receiving a reappraisal from Western historians and now a respectful invitation into the canon from no less than a Toynbee-awarded professor. Meanwhile, the aspiring kaifiyat writer languishes in obscurity. All the time Chakrabarty is excavating the Anglo-European etymology of 'tragedy' and how Sarkar used it, it is this other tragedy that goes unremarked.
August 4, 2024
To me this book was a massive throwback - to Deccan College and Pune. The film begins with a lie - that this book is not a historiography. Of course it is! And much about Sarkar can indeed be extended it to so many scholars so unlike what you might expect from an ex Subalternite and from a world-renowned Postmodernist like Chakrabarty, this book is not to be read for the big ideas but the hard facts, about Sarkar's obsession with truth, love for empire, faith in history-work, and distaste for cheap patriotisms. And even more so - his deep and almost vitriolic disgust for the Maratha nationalists, and in particular the Bharat Itihas Samshodhak Mandal scholars like Rajawade. It is the gossip that lets the book set us on fire. Delicious delicious gossip in this book!
April 24, 2023
povidential / anachronistic / deterministically / teleologically. all in one sentence. at times feels more like a book on literature rather than history .
A good depiction of "Sarkar" the person. His idiosyncrasies are well documented . Sir Jadunat Sarkars fascination with Sivaji and Aurangazeb is well documented. The rise of study of History in India is something I learnt from here. Importance of Research . Sarkars devotion to the "calling of truth" as he says is well brought out. Very few people have the passion and consistency as Sarkar has shown. He was british educated, and showed his inclination for the Language and discipline. A stickler for details. he has a good grasp over poetry and contemporary English literature. He tried to be as politically
the importance of the british and how they created the need to study our history , why the british wanted to know , why the Mughal Empire declined. How was Aurangzeb responsible for the decline . The marathas . the warring faction, the Holkars vs the Scindias.
A good depiction of "Sarkar" the person. His idiosyncrasies are well documented . Sir Jadunat Sarkars fascination with Sivaji and Aurangazeb is well documented. The rise of study of History in India is something I learnt from here. Importance of Research . Sarkars devotion to the "calling of truth" as he says is well brought out. Very few people have the passion and consistency as Sarkar has shown. He was british educated, and showed his inclination for the Language and discipline. A stickler for details. he has a good grasp over poetry and contemporary English literature. He tried to be as politically
the importance of the british and how they created the need to study our history , why the british wanted to know , why the Mughal Empire declined. How was Aurangzeb responsible for the decline . The marathas . the warring faction, the Holkars vs the Scindias.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews