IHS Book Talk: History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000

The History Faculty New Book Series presents:

History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000
(University of Washington Press, 2019)

A book talk and discussion with
SUMIT GUHA
Professor of History
The University of Texas at Austin
https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/history/faculty/profile.php?eid=sg7967

With discussant:
ANUPAMA RAO
TOW Associate Professor of History,
Barnard College and Columbia University
https://history.barnard.edu/profiles/anupama-rao

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization.

Dr. Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

• “Dr. Guha’s expertise in early modern Indian history allows him to explore “social structure and historical narration in western India” in great depth.
  – Journal of Asian Studies
• “Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions toprovide the rst intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historicalmemory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes todebates beyond the eld of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.”
  – New Books in South Asian Studies

Dr. Sumit Guha is holds the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professorship in History at the University of Texas at Austin. Educated at St Stephen’s College, Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the University of Cambridge, he has taught at St. Stephen’s College, the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, the Delhi School of Economics, and Rutgers University. Among his numerous books and co-edited volumes he is the author most recently of Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Brill, 2013), and Health and Population in South Asia (Permanent Black, and C. Hurst and Co., 2001). Read more about Dr. Guha’s publications on his faculty profile page, and on his Academia page, and read more of his work on Not Even Past.

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