Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960

Cultures of History

by Prachi Deshpande

The "Maratha period" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when an independent Maratha state successfully resisted the Mughals, is a defining era in the history of the region of Maharashtra in western India. In this book, Prachi Deshpande considers the importance of this period for a variety of political projects including anticolonial/Hindu nationalism and the non-Brahman movement, as well as popular debates throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concerning the meaning of tradition, culture, and the experience of colonialism and modernity.

Sampling from a rich body of literary and cultural sources, Deshpande highlights shifts in history writing in early modern and modern India and the deep connections between historical and literary narratives. She traces the reproduction of the Maratha period in various genres and public arenas, its incorporation into regional political symbolism, and its centrality to the making of a modern Marathi regional consciousness. She also shows how historical memory provided a space for Indians to negotiate among their national, religious, and regional identities, pointing to history's deeper potential in shaping politics within thoroughly diverse societies.

A truly unique study, "Creative Pasts" examines the practices of historiography and popular memory within a particular colonial context, and illuminates the impact of colonialism on colonized societies and cultures. Furthermore, it shows how modern history and historical memory are jointly created through the interplay of cultural activities, power structures, and political rhetoric.

Genres: India, History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[RKanimalkingdom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Objectively this is a 3-4 star book
But personally I found this to be around 2 stars

[Arvind · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very unique (meta-) book, presenting a sort of history of Maratha historiography. It wonderfully weaves together the various narratives and socio-political context under which historiography develops and evolves. This is particularly true for the sub-continent during the pre- and post-colonial periods.

The book very nicely articulates these different narratives, some of which could be contradictory to each other. Maratha history evolved across a wide-variety of competing contexts, pre-Modern vs. Modern historiography, History from Social/Collective Memory vs. History from Documentation, English elites vs. Maharashtrian elites, Brahman vs. non-Brahman elites, Hindus vs. Muslims, Maharashtra vs. India, Upper castes vs. Lower castes, Reformists vs. Nationalists, etc. All these, in many cases even orthogonal, aspects are beautifully brought out in the book. The book is heavy on terminology commonly used in historiography, and this was challenging at times for a non-specialist reader like me.

[Revanth Ukkalam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Influenced by V Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam's Textures of Time, this book traces a complex history of Maratha historiography. To write this the author has mastered a myriad of species of sources. She talks of bards, court poets and historians, politicians, academics, and administrators. The most beautiful fact about the book is how startlingly complicated everything. We don't have intelligible baskets of 'scientific' and 'sentimental' or 'Brahminical' and 'Anti-Brahmin', 'secular' and 'communal' or 'mythic'. There is beauty in every stance and every kind of history she speaks about. Thanks to this book, we are brought up to date with the political dynamics of Maharashtra.

[Sonali]

Excellent analytical approach to Maratha History.