Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles

by Saurabh Dube

Destined to become a key work of subaltern studies and a crucial intervention in postcolonial scholarship, Stitches on Time probes the relationships between empire and modernity, nation and history, the colonial and the postcolonial, and power and difference. Saurabh Dube combines history and anthropology to provide critical understandings of the theory and practice of historical ethnography and contemporary historiography. Drawing on extensive archival research and innovative fieldwork as well as political economy and social theory—including considerations of gender—he unpacks the implications of specific Indian pasts from the middle of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Dube provides incisive accounts of the interactions between North American evangelical missionaries and Christian converts of central India, and between colonial legal systems and Indian popular laws. He reflects on the difficulties of history writing by considering the production and reception of recent Hindu nationalist histories. Assessing the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, he offers substantial critical readings of major writings by Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, and others. Dube develops the concept and practice of a “history without warranty” as a means of rigorously rethinking categories such as modernity, colonialism, the West, the postcolonial, and the nation.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

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".