summer vacations delhi schools 2015

jerry rao: myconnection with dipesh is a little different from whatmany of you scholars may have. dipesh, one summerwhen my daughter was doing herundergrad at chicago she called me and shesaid she was staying over for the summer. and don't worry you don't haveto send me too much money. you still have to sendme some money, but not too much because i have ajob as a research assistant

to this very distinguishedprofessor called dipesh chakrabarty. of whom i had at that timevery limited knowledge. a few months later i bumped intocarol breckenridge [inaudible] in bombay and isaid, hey you know my daughter's workingwith dipesh in chicago and he's a history professor. and carol looked at meand said no he's not a history professor.

he is the creator of a newschool of indian history. don't kid yourself. he's more than justa history professor. so since then, one hasbecome friendly with dipesh and his lovely wiferochona, who also as a distinction of giving ana to my daughter in her course. and we have corresponded,we have met, and we stayed in touch. and certainly settingup this center

has been something which hasbeen a passion for dipesh and a little bit morethan a passion for me. we do have jadunathsarkar's photo there. gary assures me that we now havea bust of jadunath sarkar which is going to shortly land here. and which we will have ourprofessor of astrophysics come down from chicago to unveil. so the ongoing connectionbetween chicago and india is something that wewant to keep exploring.

and i believe this center undergary's leadership and ably assisted by [inaudible]and by [inaudible] is doing an extraordinary job. and i'm so glad we're able todo this function for dipesh and his book here. the interesting thingabout dipesh's evolution, if you will, as ahistorian, he started with doing something as crassas an mba and then moved on. before that he actually studiedphysics which was not so crass.

and then he moved on to history. and of course, as you know we'vehad so many different schools of history over the last100 years in our country and elsewhere in the world. he was one of theleading lights, or is one of the leading lightsof the [? subalten group. ?] but really i thinkwhat carol was trying to say is, it's alittle bit more than that. you can't slop the man.

he's evolved, he'sgrown, and he's become something quitebrilliant and almost miraculous in some respects. and while thedistinguished panel is going to talkabout this book so i won't spend toomuch time on that. this one, provincializingeurope, i think, was one of the more importantfounding text of understanding the nature of indian history.

and frankly i have nohesitation saying this because these areall historians here. history is far superior toanthropology or sociology in terms of any value. so understanding of ourselvesas we are through history is something that ithink dipesh has brought a lot of intellectual rigor anda lot of emotional sensitivity to. the book has an earlyuniversity of chicago

story as you will find out whenyou buy it, which you should. authors need royalties. so you should buy the book. and it opens with asession that dipesh has at regensteinlibrary in chicago. one of the strange things aboutthe 1960s when we were starving was that the americancongress passed something called the public law 480. so that those of us in southindia who were accustomed

to eating rice were forcedto eat wheat in order to not starve,because wheat was what america was shipping to india. in return the us governmentaccumulated an enormous amount of rupee funds in india. and luckily for us the librarianat regenstein was very clever and understood this. so chicago becamethe biggest recipient of indian books,publications, and newspapers.

i, myself have read inregenstein 1920s [? calkain ?] [? levi ?] [? gran ?][inaudible] magazines, which you probably can'tfind in madras today. so it became anextraordinary repository, it's not just dipesh, ramanajindiscovered [inaudible] and some veryimportant [inaudible] some tamil writingsin regenstein. and dipesh discovered thisextraordinary correspondence between [? rao ?] [? bahadur ?][? sardesai ?] and jadunath

sarkar, which is the theme, orit's the excuse for a theme. he uses that to build up a wholeextraordinary book around that. but regenstein in chicagoshould take credit that it enabled theevolution of this book. and i think even to thisday regenstein remains one of the extraordinaryrepositories of knowledge on and about india. the panel will be discussingthe book so i'm not going to say much more.

but except with arequest to dipesh because given the intellectualachievements he's now-- the kind of levelshe's reached-- i would request the nextone be about [inaudible] i think this extraordinaryobsession with only bengal should kind of leave you dipesh. you stand from beyond, muchbeyond that, which tells me something about the panel. they're all bengalis exceptmrs. lahiri who is i take it,

a bengali by marriage. so it is a kind of inbredgroup of people who are going to talk about this. for them the worldbegins and ends with their intellectualpredilections there. but they're brilliant and thatwe have to give them credit. professor lahiri iswith ashoka university and previously was withthe university of course. the most recent book on ashokais something many of you

might have read. but she's got great interestswhich go just beyond ashoka, [? pre-ahom ?][? assam ?], the works. and it'll beinteresting to see what she has to say on jadunathsarkar, sardesai correspondence as seen through dipesh's eyes. the center of currentcontroversy, jnu is represented byprofessor battacharya, needladri bhattacharyawho, of course is closer

to some of the issues here whichis about 18th, 19th century historical encountersthat we in india are still tryingto wrestle with. rudrangshu is a bit of a friend. he is the vice chancellorof ashoka university. and he has done some remarkablework on something that again-- which has relevanceto contemporary india, the whole [? bose ?][? nehru ?] controversy. his gorgeous bookon that is something

that i'll never forget becauseone learned so much from it. welcome rudrangshu. and of course to make sure thatwe have appropriate balance we have somebody from theright side and by right i mean the correctside of spectrum. swapan who manages to do what isvery difficult for those of us who are on the rightside of spectrum which is to retain a certainamount of intellectual gaiety while propounding the correctsmithian view of the world.

so this is a distinguishedpanel dipesh is going to speak and then the panelwill take over. welcome all of you. thank you for being here. and dipesh, onceagain it's an honor. thank you for gracingthe center, and for-- and it's because of your namethat we have such a large draw. thank you. dipesh chakrabarty: thanksto you all for being here

this evening. it's wonderful that you're here. so as jerry said i've beencorrecting one mistake after another in my life. the first mistake was physicsand the second mistake was business management,third was history. but the professor who gotme interested in history, the late professor[? borende ?], who was a wonderfulteacher by the way,

of [? into ?] management. and because i had notdone history before ever, except in up to yeareight in school. and of course in[? nowruz, ?] india once you opted forthe science dream you were led off the humanities. only i should do [inaudible]at a reasonably serious level. but english wasonly compositional. you don't have to read anytext and forget history

and these sort of subjects. so what he did was tostart me off on history. knowing that i might justfind history books boring he started me off with threeclassics on historical methods and philosophical history. so [inaudible] started off myyoung student-hood of history with eh carr's what ishistory?, collingwood's the idea of history, and marcbloch's the historian's craft. and i always said to[inaudible] and others,

looking at what i'vebeen doing, that i must have been such a backwardstudent in his class that, in his career thati could not ever get beyond eh carr's question. what is history? and in all my books andincluding my present work on climate change insome ways or other is trying to answer thequestion, what history is for particular times.

so when i did my mbaor the pgdm as it was called and got a jobwith a scottish company. i remember[? borende ?] asking me, do you want to do manager[? hobby ?], , not historian . [? hobby ?]. and with all my extra of[inaudible] sympathies and everythingmobilized within me, i said historian [? hobby ?],not knowing what there is, what was comingtogether at that age.

and so here i am asa result of this. and so in this book-- i mean theorigins of the book actually go back to conversations i usedto have at the university of chicago in some, with[? darjina ?] [? pudre ?] actually. because it's really--our dream was already thinking about doingresearch on research. and it sort of mademe think that yes of course, when you appliedto do phd in a university

that you're just talking tosome prospective students. research is aneveryday word and you say i'm going to do research. so the question became,so when did people, when did that sentence beginto make sense to people that i'm going to do research? i mean how did it becomean everyday sentence? and this question arose. i developed an interest inthe history of the practice

called research. because the word researchis of 17th century vintage in english. and i have some discussion inthe book of what it actually meant before it acquired thekind of meaning we give to it. so i was thinking of thatquestion, of doing research on the history of research. and there are otherbooks being published in the meanwhile, historyof the research university.

i was reading about 18th centurygerman debates about what should be the highest degree,to acknowledge research masters, or doctor. and the argument on masterwas that since lord god is our master there could not beany higher degree than master. doctor should be reservedfor medical doctors. but some other doctoratewon and the idea of research got formalized. and when i was thinking ofall this in regenstein--

as you said a wonderfullibrary-- browsing, i suddenly chanced uponthese letters, excerpts between sarkar and sardesai. and two things happened. jadunath sarkar i usedto, for a few years, i used to work in thecentre for studies in social sciences in calcutta,which is housed in his house. but there wasn't muchmemory left of him. and partly becausehe was already

a somewhat discarded historian. so first of all, itwas amazing to find out what a character he was. i mean everybody spokeof him as a character. and all those storieslike, jadunath sarkar tells the story ofcoming to see him. actually that's thestory that influences the beginning of theconversation i have with him. jadunath sarkar,who would later on

became a very respectedhistorian of all times, came to see jadunath sarkarand the story that he tells is that jadunath sarkar justopened the door, an inch and said [inaudible]. so he wasn'twelcoming of people. and [inaudible]explained that he wanted to talk to himabout local history and sarkar said, do youknow parsi, [inaudible]. and he said no.

and he just shut the door. and apparently he went backafter two years and jadunath sarkar opened the door again. and the firstquestion he asked was, have you read some persian? and he said yes. he said, ok, the then come in. stories like if he wastalking to somebody, somebody had come to seehim and if he thought

the time was up for him, hecouldn't give this man anymore time, he would leave inthe middle of a sentence. and the man wouldn't knowwhat he was doing there. he would look around finally. and this one story which is thisidea of idealism of research that i tell in the book, itis told by an old rajasthani historian that he was allowedto work in jadunath's library using the documents. and jadunath would--you had to sort of write

the name of thedocument on a slip. give it to him. he would bring thedocument, like in archives, place them in front ofyou, not say a word. at 3:00 in theafternoon he would come with a cup of tea foryou and with one for himself. he would sit acrossthe table from you, sip the tea, nota word, go back. and he would give theslip for next day.

and for three daysnobody told this man where the bathroom was. and only when sirjadunath was confirmed to infer that this wasa genuine researcher. not somebody juststraying into his library. and on the third dayhe sent his grandson to tell the man wherethe bathroom was. so when you read thereminisces of this man it becomes very obvious thatthis man is a character.

but he's also deeplyinterested profounding the idea of character. the history analyzesus through characters. so it got me interestedin to the history, apart from thehistory of research, the history of thisidea of character and why it was soinfluential, why it became part of historical method. or in the late yearsyou'd call somebody,

somebody who does otherwise,would [? remember ?] respectfully an infernal liar. talking about [inaudible],the other person with whom he had had veryinteresting disagreements. and who also had a lot ofcontempt for jadunath sarkar, was [? rajwade ?] on whom ithink several pieces should be written. and he's a wonderful marathicollector of document history. he really is aninstitution by himself.

and [? rajwade ?] who set up theresearch institution in pune. [inaudible] it's interestingbecause he had a fight-- he set it up in 1910-- hehad a fight on the question of whether the[? priapus ?] were important in [? shivaji's ?] cabinet. he though they were not. but the fight waswith the man who thought the [? priapus ?] were.

and this man,[? prabodhankar thackeray ?] was [? none else than ?][? bal thackeray's ?] father. and it was through that fightthat [? rajwade ?] left. but [? rajwade ?]made this decision early on that he wouldnever write in english. and when he met jadunathsarkar-- this is a story i tell in the book. he said to jadunath sarkarwhy do you write in english? you want to impressthe europeans, right?

and jadunath actually didwant to impress europeans. there's no question. he had a principal stand on it. the stories varied. jadunath said, theni told him would you have read me if ihadn't written in english? but i don't know ifhe actually said that. so there are allthese characters in the letters betweenthese two people.

but what reallyamazed me was the fact that these letters,which began in 1904, when sardesai, who is workingon maratha history, didn't know persian, got aletter in beautiful hand. jadunath-- [? this ?][? i'm going ?] [? to ?] discuss it-- working withjadunath letters copying them. because national library incalcutta has a fabulous rule. you can't xerox them. you can't take photographs.

you are only allowed tohand copy these letters. and the problem withthat was of course that jadunath's writingwas so beautiful and clear and mine was so horrible. i slur my alphabet. that after a while you begin tofeel inferior and small, which you are, compared to this man. and initially ihad this-- that's how i began to argue jadunath.

i was dealing with myown sense of inferiority. why do i go like this? let's say ing's always sortof a slur and his is not. and i said, oh iknow, in my childhood i used to get those exercisebooks with four lines so that you learn to rightthing in the scribal manner. so i said this iscolonial education. that's why. that's what you have.

and mine is a rejectionof colonial education. but of course sardesai'shandwriting was as bad as mine. so the argument didn't work andsardesai [? was ?] [? even ?] [? anything ?] older byabout five, six years. so eventually yourealized that you're dealing with a manwho pays attention to every little thingin front of him. and his devotionto accuracy was-- i found it just amazingbecause-- so i'm probably

the only reader ofjadunath who has read different editions of thebook on shijavi, side by side. and then i noticed thatfrom the first addition to the third edition he keptchanging the number of hours it took shivaji escaping from[? aurangzeb's ?] prison then reaching benares. and you know if itwent from 16 to 23 it didn't make anydifference to the narrative. none of his readers would'veactually picked it up.

but this man was tryingto correct himself. and he was sodevoted to actually, this question of accuracy,getting it right, that it clearly was aquestion of value for him. so there wassomething about-- he made me think about what is theethics of being a historian, with respect to the past. and the other amazingthing about the letters also was that theywere discussing

the history of research. i mean i suddenlythought this is the material they're actuallydiscussing what does it mean to have an archive? what does it mean to talkabout truth in history? what does it actuallymean to do research? they were constantly sayingthere are genuine researchers. the [? pune ?] gang arenot good researchers. we are the real researchers.

these lettersshould be preserved so that future students findout what research is about. and i realized that thewhole history of research is caught up indebates in public life. because neitherjadunath nor sardesai were actually by professionhistorians, by occupation. jadunath was aprofessor of literature. sardesai basically workedfor the [inaudible] until 1926 when he retired.

and the [inaudible] was[inaudible] with his retirement and he could get awaywith these things those days, that heimmediately halved his pension. which meant he couldn'tafford to live in bombay. he couldn't affordto live in pune. his brother had ahouse in [inaudible]. so he could live there for free. and that's why he wentto [inaudible] because he wanted to write history.

he wanted to devotehimself full-time. but that letter, the firstletter jadunath sarkar is also, he showed a discipline, becausejadunath sarkar writes saying, you don't know persian but youknow you can read old marathi. and i have persian but ican't read old marathi. i'm writing a book onaurangzeb and the late mughals. i need to know about what'shappening in the marathi empire. and you need to know aboutthe mughal, my sources.

so the friendship is itselfmade possible by an emerging sense of modern discipline. i mean, i don't knowof any premodern, pre-british historiansin india becoming friends purely on the basis of thecomplementarity of the source material. and that friendship lasted. it had an ideological side. they both saw themselves-- goingback to jerry, your point--

as overcoming provincialism. they for a long timetoyed with the idea of getting marriages arrangedbetween the families. it didn't work out. and the friendshipwas very interesting because jadunathdominated at intellecture. he was the younger but thedominant intellectual partner. but there were veryinteresting points of tension because jadunath wasvery proud of his english

and he'd often correctsardesai's english. i discuss some of this. but things i don'tdiscuss for instance, sardesai needed money. this is one reasonwhy jadunath made him, got the british [inaudible]to appoint him to edit the [? peshwa ?][? daftar ?] records. but jadunath alsoarranged for sardesai to write columns inhindustan standard.

so sardesai submitsone of theses essays that he's done to jadunath andjadunath corrects it and sends it back to him for submission. and sardesai says, you knowthis has become your article. you should takethe money for it. and jadunath says no thepoint of view is yours. i don't agree with you. only the english is mine. so you should get the moneyfor your point of view.

it was a fascinating friendshipbetween two individuals who disagreed often. and then it was wonderful togo to the deccan college which actually, fortunately hassardesai's library intact. unlike the nationallibrary which dispersed jadunathsarkar's library stupidly. sorry. so i began to read copiesof jadunath sarkar's book in sardesai's library.

i wanted to see howsardesai actually read them. so again began to read themargin area, the comments. and sardesai's commentswere pretty harsh. i mean if some i quote wherehe says to jadunath sarkar, one should firstknow and then write. but he would never say that ina letter to jadunath sarkar. so the friendshipitself was fascinating. but i realized that thisis the material you look at to do the history of research.

and the other reason why iwas interested in-- the fact that the disciplinewas emerging in it's kind of disciplinary structurein the clamor of public life, outside of universities forthe period i'm talking about, which took me backto my participation in intellectual skirmishesto do with history, out of [inaudible] studies,out of my time in australia. in the late '80s and'90s when postmodernism hit the university,deconstruction

hit the university. and most historiansattitude was ok, like a man who doesn'tknow how to swim in the sea seeing a bigwave coming, post-modernism. duck your head it'llgo over. [inaudible] basically happened andwe'll see what happens. but those are the hugefights breaking out. is memory moreimportant than history? is my experience my history?

historians normally say thatyour experiences produces your testimony but i have tointerrogate your testimony to get to the truth. but in the '80s and '90s,globally, so not just historians who spokefor dalits here but actually historianswho spoke for aboriginals, or aboriginals whospoke for themselves. in the identity movementsin the united states people were saying myexperience is my history.

my testimony is my history. and this eventuallybecame a debate in which many importanthistorians from the west participated. but what i realizedreading jadunath sarkar [? and people ?] thatall of those debates between historians treatedhistory in the abstract. is history better than memory? it doesn't matter whose memory.

it doesn't matter whose history. and reading jadunath irealized these are questions where the [? valence ?]of every term he's worked out inparticular context. so maybe in a particularcontext somebody's memory is more important or effectivethan what historians find. maybe in anothercontext, history is more important than whatyou would think you'd remember. so the book is actuallya historian's answer

to an abstract question. in other words it'slike a historian said, it depends on the context. you might thinkit's a weak answer but that's what the book does. so on one hand the bookdoes a history of research. and i'm also trying toanswer my own dilemmas. and let me just finish bysaying a couple of things. and i'm thinking aboutthe legacy of jadunath

that i see as important in thecontext of indian democracy. with all those debatesabout history and memory were also debates aboutdemocratizing history. and [? subaltern cities ?]was part of this. so when [inaudible]wrote about gandhi in terms of the rumorsthat were going around about him and his bookon [? chora chora, ?] which actuallyends with memories, but memories of peasantsincited by government promise

of pension. so [inaudible] getsinto that territory. so this is what iwas thinking about in writing the book isthat in any democracy there are two kinds ofquestions and they're not the same question. and i think democraciessuffer [inaudible] two kind of questions arise. and i think democraciessuffer when they're

not able to preserveboth questions or tend to both questionswith equal attention. so the first question is,there are many groups not just [? subaltern ?] groupsbut also elite groups, who in many situations canwith legitimacy say that the history i'vebeen given does not make me feel proud of my identity. so indian nationalistssaid this with regard to histories of india writtenby europeans or british people.

similarly, a lowcaste person can say, look, the historythat the elites have given me makes mehumiliated, makes me feel i shouldn't beproud of my identity. this is what the aboriginalswere doing in australia. african americans have done it. and i think that's alegitimate question and as a democracyhas to attend to it. but what sometimes thisquestion trumps or [? swamps ?]

is another question veryimportant for democracy and that's where ithink jadunath has a legacy for indian history. which is in other words,he was a conservative man but i think here there isa very important legacy. and the secondquestion is, should we struggle to create spaces inour public life for discussions for the discoveries fordebates about facts? and now the reason why i saythis is because as a historian

i considered you comeacross two kinds of facts. one of is the sort offact that's obvious. when was nehru born,or somebody born? maybe you show thebirth certificate. it's not a problem[? adding fact. ?] but there are many factswhich leave room for debate and therefore theyhave to be inferred. in other words they'renot given to you. you have to infer thosefacts from evidence,

which means thesefacts that you have to infer call for rationalevidence based argumentation. now sometimes whathappens, a group, it could be an elite group or itcould be a subaltern group that feels oppressed, orhumiliated or made to feel ashamed of itselffor whatever reason invents facts, and then gets veryupset if we tell them the fact is invented. and if a democracy moves toan extreme, where completely

invented facts have to be torevered as inferred facts, then a democracygets into trouble. so jadunath sarkar and sardesaiand [inaudible] historians were actually struggling inthe clamor of public space where people were debating. most of our debatesbefore independence was to do with the late mughalperiod or early modern period. and [? aurangzeb ?] and[? shivaji ?] emerged as the two mostcontested characters,

at least in thenorth indian scene. and in that turmoil wheresardesai himself was feeling that the marathas have been harddone by european historians. i need to justify the maratha,restore maratha pride. and in that clamor,including sardesai, these two people andothers were struggling to keep a space wherefacts could be inferred. and to end let me remindyou, and if you probably know to read collingwood.

collingwood, apart from hisgreat book the idea of history, gave a lecture inoxford in 1936 called can historians be partisan? and his resounding answerto that was not only are historians partisan,entitled to be partisan, they should be partisan. and he has a very interestingjustification for it. his justification was, so longas historians were following the rules of evidencewhile being partisan,

because they would be investedin defending, or justifying, or proving to the hilt thevery partisan point of view that they assumed,it would overall have an interesting improvingeffect on historical methods. so he was welcomingof partisanship on the part of historiansassuming that partisanship would not squashthe space that i was calling the space inwhich facts are inferred. you struggle therational debate that

takes place about the past. and i think that'swhere i personally see jadunath's legacy, orthe message of the story that i have written. that indian historyor historiography for the last 100 yearsor so has been a struggle between these two questions. it should not be a struggle. eventually in a democracyyou have to maintain both.

that is the demand that imust have a past that makes me feel proud in my identity. but the strugglein the tension is that you must notlet that demand swamp the other question,which is that i need space in which i caninfer the facts of the past. because that's where ourinvestment in method, investment in rules ofevidence, investment in rational argumentation is.

and the reason public life is. so on the one hand you don'twant the recent public life to swamp that firstquestion, that people are not allowed to have paststhat make them feel proud. but you don't want thefirst question answering it. you don't want toanswer it in such a way as to swamp the spacefor the second one. and maintaining thattension is, i think, really critical to themaintenance of the public life

of pasts in a democracy. thank you very much. rudrangshu mukherjee:i must thank you for emphasizing the pointabout how important facts are in a democracy. and this is where jadunath'slasting legacy is. there's a question that i'dlike you to come back to that is one with which you ended. but you can comeback to it later,

the relationship betweenhistory and pride. but before that may i asknayanjot to comment on or raise questions about dipesh's book. nayanjot lahiri:many of the things that you have raisedtoday are actually very relevant and important. now i might, as jerryrao may well have felt, be a kind of interloper. what is a person who writeson ashoka in ancient india

doing here talking aboutdipesh chakrabarty's book? but actually there's a way inwhich dipesh's own book breaks the barriers between themedieval and the modern. where do you place thefigure of jadunath sarkar? he's a historian whowrote mainly on medieval and early modern india. but his writing was done inthe context of modern india which impacted hiswork in many ways. so i feel absolutely fineas a person from antiquity,

or who deals withantiquity talking actually about dipesh's book. now the book of course is aroundthe persona of jadunath sarkar. whose name is-- i mean he'sa historian who's inseparable from indian history. it's an amazing workthat dipesh's done for all kinds of reasons. first of all, it is ahomage of sorts as dipesh himself pointed out, to theformidable figure that sarkar

was. sarkar's ferociouslove for the sources, his discipline inwhich is described as a kind of [? sides ?] notspiritual pursuit for truth in history, hisskills with languages, his prodigious output. all this is actuallyvery movingly brought out in this book. and it is not ahomage which is blind.

it does engage with jadunathsarkar's contradictions with the limitationsof his work. but unlike theromantical silence that many historians ofindia, until some years ago, maintained about thecontributions of sarkar, there's actually anevenness and an empathy with which dipeshchakrabarty unravels his work and his method. i must also say thatthe archaeologist in me

hugely enjoyed dipesh'sdescription of the adventures involved in writing this book. for instance, theway in which you found the house of gs sardesai,his comrade in arms in 2012. this parsi real estate developerwhose driver and caretaker took him and his colleaguesfrom chicago to the house. and in this bookactually very early on from that decrepithouse, one of the documents, a photograph that dipesh managedto find, is also reproduced.

so the sense i got was thatvery much like a species that he describesin his book, he calls the speciesthe hunter gathers of historical documents. to describe the historiansof colonial india who were so anxiousto be the first to get their hands on documents. i really thinkthat comes across. you are also a huntergatherer of documents.

but it's lovely to see thatpilgrimage of sorts described with such pleasure and love. and of course thereis this wonderful body of letters, severalhundred letters which made this book possible. in fact the first halfof the 20th century is marked by this prolific groupof people who write letters. we've always known of thepolitical leaders and statesmen who have written hundredsof letters to each other,

people like gandhi and nehru,and so on and so forth. but obviously therewere historians as well who wrote prolifically, notjust jadunath sarkar but also others. i read dipesh's book inthe campus of iit guwahati and i was informed therethat surya kumar bhuyan, who was the eminent historian of theearly part of the 20th century in assam, he also was aprolific letter writer. the difference of course wasthat unlike jadunath sarkar who

wanted all his personalletters destroyed, and he certainly wantedanything personal in his letters to sardesai blanked out. and i'm so glad thatsardesai didn't do that. i mean thank god for that. that makes your book possible. but [? bhuyan ?]actually made a copy of every letter he wroteand those letters were then pasted in these big notebooks.

so [? arupjyoti saikia, ?]who is in iit guwahati, is actually planningto do a biography of [? surya kumar bhuyan. ?] the other element in this bookwhich i found quite amazing was of course the friendship andthe intellectual give and take which is at the crux ofthe relationship of sarkar and sardesai. but in addition to thatthe kind of relationship that this younger historian,the author of the calling

of history, dipeshchakrabarty creates, conjures up withjadunath sarkar. you've of coursementioned the issue of how inferioryou felt comparing your writing with the form ofwriting of jadunath sarkar. but i think one of the mostmarvelous spots of this book is this kind ofdialogue which takes place at the end ofthe book between-- it's entirely conjured up--between dipesh and jadunath

sarkar, where dipesh actuallygoes over many of the issues that he has raised in this book. and he also uses that dialogueto actually rib himself, pointing to the fact,the irony, that people like him and [inaudible],and so many others spent hours doing a [inaudible]in this house of jadunath sarkar, a man who was actuallyso disciplined and so anxious about not wastingtime on idle chatter. now apart from all this, oneof the most important things

about this book isthe manner in which dipesh chakrabarty goes intothe heart of sarkar's writings. sarkar was [inaudible]man of english literature. and what he wrote was shapedby his literary sensibilities. but dipesh doesn't actuallystop at merely demonstrating that there all kinds ofanalogies and quotations from literarysources in his works. he doesn't stop at justtalking about where shakespeare is quoted or wherecoleridge is quoted,

or where tennyson figures. he looks at how sarkarmined those ideas in the works ofeuropean writers, in the works ofmughal chroniclers. so by showing wherethey're coming from he is actuallylooking at his style. and he then showshow sarkar actually modifies many of those ideas. so one of the mostinteresting parts of the book

is the section whichdeals with tragedy. tragedy, a themewhich is so often evoked by europeanwriters, which is also evoked by europeanchroniclers of the decline of the mughal empire. and yet when jadunathsarkar actually talks about the tragedy of thedecline of the mughal empire, he's talking about thetragedy of this dynasty not having fulfilledwhat could have

been its historic role of makingindia, or rather shepherding the transition of indiainto the early modern. i think it's alsointeresting that there are others like jadunath. [inaudible] forinstance, who also were people who used theirknowledge of literature to write in a beautifulway and to write in a way which is actuallyquite uncommon among historians of india.

and i think whatwe as historians have failed toadequately appreciate is the fact that oneshould pay attention to style when you look atthe writings of historians. we look at theideas of historians but we don't look at the style. and dipesh has actuallypointed out how important it is to deconstruct the veryendearing prose of people like jadunath.

i have of course onequestion for dipesh. i'm not entirely persuadedbuy everything in the book. and the one questionwhich comes to mind is a theme which actually runsthrough the book, the idea that history inthe academic sense was first created inthe public sphere. and this is muchbefore it became a part of what was researchedin universities and so on. i mean i'm just wondering wherethat would stand in relation

to, for example, the historydepartments that are created by world war i in places likecalcutta university, madras university? where would you situate a manlike [? rakhal das banerji ?], who for his ma paperon the [inaudible] period in indianhistory, actually traveled all the wayto lucknow to read the inscriptions onthe sculptures which were relevant for this?

and this paper eventually waspublished in a very academic journal,[? epigraphia indica. ?] and also the fact that in calcutta,for many years before this you had the [inaudible]studentship, which people like [? surendra nath sen ?] andothers-- actually [inaudible], jadunath sarkar himself,yeah-- so they had all got this a studentship to doresearch after their ma. and you talkedabout [inaudible]. he's another person whoyou have to view in terms

of an academic space as well. so i'm not sure that worksas far as i can see it. i do think it'simportant to make a distinction between thepublic life of history and academic life of history. but at the sametime the protocols that are followedin these two spheres already exist by thefirst or second decade of the 20th century.

so thank you verymuch for writing this absolutely wonderful book. and i do hope-- you reallymade historiography very sexy. --and if you just juxtapose itwith a kind of historiography that is taught in historydepartments, which is just so dull and schematic. you had the colonialhistorians followed by the nationalists, the marxistschool of historiography, the subalterns.

i mean where is the space forlooking at a man like jadunath sarkar within that. or of the greater [? kosambi, ?][? dharmananda ?], an entirely self-taught scholar. or even the baruda del barthat you discuss in your work. the princely statesand the manner in which they engaged withhistorical and archaeological research. so i do hope at some point thatthat kind of historiography

which allows us to lookat the making of history through a variety of streamsdoes become possible thanks to a work like yours. swapan dasgupta: i willrecount an incident that happened in 1997, which wasthe 50th year of india's independence. and at that time i wasworking in india [inaudible]. they were bringingout a series of books and other publications connectedwith this independence.

and one of those series wasentitled the 50 indians who sort of made theindependence, 50 great indians after independence. now, along with acouple of people i drew up a list andwhen someone suggested we should get somesort of domain experts to also vet it so that there'sno subjective touch to that. so i sent it and one ofthe people on the list was a very distinguishedprofessor, ex-professor

of [inaudible] university. and it came back everythingfine with a red circle around one person, jadunathsarkar, somehow not acceptable. of course i stood myground and we got it in and jadunath sarkardoes feature in that. and i was reminded buti was really excited when i heard of dipesh's book. and rather than waitfor an indian version i actually orderedit from amazon

with paying around ahefty price for it. but it was quite interestingthat someone like dipesh, given what therepetition of dipesh in the largerhistoriographical sense, has written somethingon jadunath sarkar. and i was immediatelystruck by the fact that even after thisbook has come out i think it has been somewhatunder-noticed among his peer groups.

it's beenunder-reviewed in india and i thought, why is this? and i think part of the reasonis as nayanjot pointed out, jadunath sarkar perhaps is notvery sexy in today's context. but i think there is alsoan equal sense of shock. how come a chap like dipeshchakrabarty has written it? i posed this question to anotherof [inaudible] colleagues who said what a strange subjectfor dipesh to write about. so there is a sense in whichjadunath sarkar has already

been prejudged andunceremoniously discarded. the centre of socialscience, and i believe they have now movedto some new premises et cetera but anyway, when it existedin what is called [inaudible]. i don't think there wasany trace of [inaudible]. it was better knownburundai's institute, rather than [inaudible]'s house. which was as a sortof incidental thing. and what is itabout [inaudible]?

now part of it canbe attributed to his delightful eccentricities,which dipesh alluded to. the rather unpopularpositions which he took on contemporarypolitics of that time-- there's an incidentin his book which narrates the tale of when, ithink it was when the cabinet mission, or one of thesimilar conferences of '45, and [inaudible],the liberal leader, had called a fewintellectuals, et cetera,

and asked them what do you thinkof india's post independence constitutionarrangements, et cetera. and jadunath sarkarbasically wrote, rather, what i would calla quixotic reply. which said, well, india's notreally prepared for nationhood. but if you have to haveit, make sure that it's regulated to such an extentthat real democracy does not happen until 1997. 1995.

yeah, 50 years. so jadunath sarkar tookpositions like this. he was the one person,along with people like [? mandarka, ?] whosort of quite openly said, european knowledge systems arefar more superior than what we have in india. these were notpopular positions. he called thecongressmen people who imagine that, just because theywear a coat without a collar,

they can presume to dictatethe destiny of the country. so dipesh's book can beread at various levels. and i think that's really thewonderful part of this book. you can read it in termsof the story of history writing in india. you can read it in termsof a particular evolution of some dedicated,austere scholars, and their interaction,or non-interaction with the universities.

and those two sortof correspond. you can read itas a study of how the textual rigor which jadunathsarkar brought in and was contributed. you can contrast therather elegant prose-- sort of straight from gibbon. that's really theoverwhelming influence, compare it to therather pedestrian prose that sometimes historians thesedays, particularly in india,

celebrate. but i also view it interms of jadunath sarkar as a legacy of a historyof indian conservatism, which has not beenadequately studied-- for understandable reasons,because it has no place in the established university. and the importancewhich he attached, not so much to politics, but asto something called character. and dipesh talked about howthis rather austere man would

bang the door onsomeone who hadn't done the basic groundworkfor getting into history. but all along, even when hisstudy of the mughal empire was concerned, imean, he was clear that some dry rot hadinfected the system after the death of [inaudible],that [? mahmood ?] shah was a buffoon or clown. he was equally scathing abouthis historian colleagues. he called the indian historycongress, if i might recall,

a [inaudible] setup by a drunkard. interesting, wantto use sometime in my journalistic writings. but more than that, i thinkwhat he was talking about, interesting, is that greatempires need great people. and the great peoples areformed through certain adhering to certain values, certainsets of characters. now this could be a straightjuxtaposition of ethos which prevailed in victorian england.

if you read arnold,if read all of them, you will get a senseof that coming through. but he was by nomeans alone in this. you find the fact thatwhy was india subordinate being a very major preoccupationamong most of the intellectuals of that period. and they approachedit in different ways. [inaudible] approached[inaudible]. sorry jerry, my exampleswill mainly be from bengal.

because i think arather vibrant debate took place inbengal at that time. i mean, even in hind swaraj,ghandi spoke about the fact that the britishdidn't conquer us-- we allowed them to conquer us. [inaudible] was alsoequally preoccupied with the same question. how do we combat it? and his answer was, abit of social activism

and spirituality. so all of thesepeople at that time-- so if you want tolocate jadunath sarkar, i think he plays a very, veryimportant role in defining a conservative traditionand how nationhood could be built bybeing ruthlessly self critical, at one level, and,at the same time, celebrating your inheritance. now that's the sort ofawkward brinkmanship

which is always involved. and dipesh is quite right. there is a lot ofimagined history. and there is a lotof factual history. and i think it's inevitable. and i don't think it necessarilyfollows a right/left. both are guilty inone way or the other. and what's the spaceto be given to that? and here's jadunath,who says, probably, he

doesn't allow too much of aspace for the imagined part. he is the polar oppositeof those historians who today don't go to the archives. i mean, jadunath sarkarwould have been horrified-- not going to be archives. not being able toread the sources. i mean, willy is sitting here. and with due apologies,william [inaudible]. he wrote this wonderfulbook called the last mughal.

and i think why that bookwas very seriously berated in india-- not becausea scot had written it-- that was part of the problem. but because willy hadactually gone to the archives, discovered moundsof documents which had never been opened by any ofthe scholars of indian history. now, so, in trying torepudiate jadunath sarkar, you've swung to theother extreme by talking about abstractionsand made history,

if i may say so,drearily boring-- something which i agreetotally with [inaudible]. probably not forthe same reasons. but that's really what it is. so jadunath sarkar,in his own way, has a legacy, a veryformidable legacy. i don't necessarily believethat every conclusion he had about mughal history,about the fall of the mughals can be upheld today.

there's been a lot of subsequentresearch which has been done. but the encyclopedicwork which he did, the methodologywhich he followed, the assumptions with whichhe entered those things, i think all of themneed to be recorded. i'm not necessarilysaying they should be resurrected, althoughmy feelings on this can be a little different. but i really want tocompliment dipesh,

because he has broughtalive a chapter of india's intellectual history,which we had forgotten, and which we had chosento forget, more important. it was a consciousrejection of a tradition. and in trying to bringthat, and risking, perhaps, some peer groupunpopularity in the process, i would like tocompliment dipesh. thank you very much for writingthis book, which is wonderful. neeladri bhattacharya:this, i think,

is an extraordinary book. i'll begin by makinga few comments on what i see the book doing, whatdipesh is trying to do, and what his projectis, the way i see it. and then i'll talk about someof the issues and problems which i see within the book. there are many issues which onecan have a conversation with. i'll just points totwo or three of them. what is it that dipeshis setting out to do?

everyone has talkedabout this project. but i'd like justre-emphasize the issues that i see as important. one is that, in thisbook, he's trying to suggest a way of doingintellectual history. how to read anintellectual, and how not to read an intellectual. so at one level, ithink it is an exercise in intellectualhistory which tries

to recover anintellectual tradition and an individual associatedwith that tradition. he argues, for instance, fromthe beginning to the end, that, in order tounderstand an individual, we don't simplylook at his work. what we have to see whathe was trying to do. we have to locate the personwithin the tradition of a time, within the milieuof the time being, within the intellectualatmosphere of the time,

and then see what was the realmof the possible, what he could say, and what he could not say. and if we judge him from theframework of the subsequent generation, then we cannotpossibly appreciate the project that the intellectualset out to do. so in this sense, he'snot posing [inaudible] question, what is history, ashe says in one part of the book. he's asking the question,what was history. what was history to sarkar.

and what was thehistory at that time? so that's the projectthat he sets out. this, i think, is also anwonderful act of salvage, or recovery. an act of salvage which seeksto recover sarkar from oblivion, from the condemnation ofhistory, of the generations after '50s and '60swhen a new kind of new social, economic,political history was developing where were nolonger interested in heroes

no longer interested just in achronology or political battles and acts of emperorsand others, and where looking at transformationswithin society. so within thatmilieu, sarkar was criticized forfocusing on heroes and looking at administrativeand institutional history. and subsequently, hisarguments and ideas became part of a battlebetween secular and communal, where he was very oftenseen as putting forward,

in his argumentsabout the [inaudible] and others, ideas whichappeared to be communal. and it is dipesh'seffort to recover the intellectualand the individual from this condemnation ofthe '50s, '60s, and '70s, and to restore to sarkar theidea that she was involved in project which we needto respect, which we need to understand, which we needto elaborate and develop within our time.

[? third that ?] whatdipesh is seeking to do is to understandsarkar as a person. he looks at the wayhe was meticulous, steady, diligent, careful,in every step of work. he was caring. he was loving. he celebrated hard work. he celebrated anotion of asceticism. he tracks sarkar's loneliness,the darkness with his life,

his bouts of depression,his battles with the crisis in life, his problemswith finances, what stopped him fromworking, and what allowed him, and elevatedhim, and made him work. so this alsobecomes [inaudible], a project to recover the historyof history as a discipline. the profession of historyas it evolves within india. so the argument is thathistory as a profession itself has a history.

and this is a historywe need to recover. see, he focuses ontwo individuals, and a set of institutions,and the journals of their time in order to look for thosedebates which are there within the institutionsand the journals to understand howhistory develops from the early 20th centurythrough to the '50s and '60s. so therefore, in someway, he is locating specific particularhistory of a discipline

of the time withinthe larger history as it unfolds withinthe world and argues that the generalhistory of the world, history in its generalform, always has a home in particular countries. and we have tolook at that home. how does it comes to bein a particular situation. what was the form inwhich it articulated itself wihtin india,came to be within india,

and that idea of home, whichis being something which dipesh has always lookedat, that idea of home is here explored with greatnuance and great complexity. so in the other thingis, he is developing a whole series ofarguments, but an argument about sarkar's commitmenttruth and his method. history for sarkar, as he shows,had to be non-instrumental. it had to bedisinterested research. it had to be unprejudiced.

it had to be a relentless,constant search for truth. it was a selflesspursuit of truth. it had to be atrue transformation of the self, which make itpossible for an individual to search for that truth. the research had to befor research's sake, not for some other instrument. it shouldn't have aninstrumental function. it was not for politics.

it was not to servesome other end. and this commitment to unveilingof the truth, regardless of the consequence,is something which inspires sarkar and peoplelike him who [? operate ?] at the time and subsequently. sarkar, dipesh argues, sawresearch as serving the nation. it was necessary for thenation to become itself. if the nation hadto become modern, if it had to develop,be enlightened,

then, actually, historywas a discipline which could help him to do it. and therefore, he goes on toelaborate how this happens. purging prejudice,recovering the truth becomes very importantwithin this project. now what isimportant here is how these ideas were not developedin any general sense by sarkar. he felt that these were ideasthat should inspire life, should inspire thepractices of the historians

in a deeper sense. so he was animatedby these ideas. he lived through those ideas. and his work wasinspired by those ideas. now this search for truth, thisrelentless search for truth, is something whichwas structured within what is now seen as apositivist frame of reference. and in the '50s and '60s,the rejection of sarkar was partly because hewas seen as a positivist,

celebrating facts andfactuality at a time when people were looking for social economicforces within history and all. now this leads to an argumentwhich the '50s '60s generation could not accept, develop,appreciate, and celbrate. this links up with sarkar'sargument about nationalism, his location within thenational movment, his location within the developingdiscipline where nationalist framework of lookingat india was being worked out, in a certain sense.

in tracking theseideas of nationalism, dipesh is looking at thelineage of the variety of ideas and the way theseare being articulated by the individuals at the time. there is no doubt, he argues,that sarkar is operating within a nationalist frame. yet, he's notnationalist in the way that other peoplewere nationalist. if india was to becomea nation, sarkar argued,

it had to, in some sense,understand and develop the discipline of history. sarkar searches forthe possibilities of the assertion ofnationhood within the regions of the [inaudible] and sawthe failure of character, betrayals, andincompetencies within them. he felt if the destiny of thenation had to be developed, then men of characterfrom within these regions had to develop [? it ?].

now this is a framework. this is a framework that he'strying to elaborate over time. and in developing theidea of nationalism, he begins to develop his ownargument about relationship between nationalism as adiscipline and nationalism of the type that otherhistorians who were associated with the nationalismof the time were developing and working out. and in thinking throughthose arguments,

he disassociated himselffrom those traditions of writing within that timeand elaborated a framework of thought in whichhe could celebrate the nationalism of peoplewith whom he was associating at the time-- sorry. so in developingthis argument, he is he is elaborating awhole range of ideas, where the relationshipbetween nationalism and the writing of historybecomes much more complicated.

i would go on to justelaborate two or three arguments around which, i wouldinclude, develop an argument with him, wherei would like to-- the argument that hedevelops is an argument where he's trying todevelop a difference between the cloisteredhistories and public histories, and the way that publichistory needs to be looked at. --which is central to thefailing of the argument of the entire book.

and his argument is thatthe cloistered histories of the academia, the academichistories of historians, has a very close relationshipwith the public histories which are produced outside. and it is necessary tolook at that relationship in its complexitythat, very often, we imagine the cloisteredacademic history is distinct from, anddifferent from, and is untouched bythe public histories.

but that is a relationshiphe wishes to look at. and he tries todo that by looking at [inaudible] and sarkarbecause they're not professional historians. my argument here would see thatthis argument needs to possibly be pushed a bitfurther to separate a distinct kind of relationshipbetween public and cloistered histories. because we have,on the one hand,

the first us type of aconversation which is possible, and the first type ofpublic history, which is non-academic,seemingly non-cloistered, is that of people whoare non-professionals, like sarkar and [inaudible],actually writing history, and the way they seekto define history, the terms of reference,the way they define the protocols of historybegin to define what academic history is all about.

they are not professionalhistorians, but they do. this is one way of doing it. but from this,actually, dipesh moves to another realmof analysis, which is to do with history as linkedup with identity politics, history as linked up withpolitics of [inaudible]. now, my argumentthere is, can we distinguish these asdistinct from the first type of public history-- that isfirst type is non-professionals

writing aboutprofessional history, impacting onprofessional historians. the second, possibly,are those histories which are linked up withidentity politics, which are linked up with the makingof caste identities, group identities in a variety ofsorts, where mythic stories, where other ways oflooking at the past become part of theformation of identities of groups and people.

and that history doesn'thave the same impact on the professional history. and how do we seethe relationship between cloistered andpublic history of this time. then there is athird type, which is the second type are thesorts that you would refer to in terms of thewounds that you talk about, aboriginal history,dalit histories, and all. but the third typeare public histories,

which are deeply ideological,which have been constructed through ideologicalefforts to produce a certain version ofthe past which confront academic histories, whichrelate to academic histories, and there are debates overhistories where, very often, we talk about communal, andthe secular, and these kinds of debates. but this is not something whichis linked up with the identity politics or the second type.

and how we definethe relationship between ideologicallyconstructed histories, the relationship betweenthat kind of public history, and the cloistered historythat you're talking about. and finally, the histories whichyou have, often, in the past, referred to, are historianswho are non-historians, who are writing and representinghistory in ways which a historian cannot represent. they may be fiction writers.

they may integrate fictionalong with history, and capture the past in wayswhich are more true to the past than even the historians'representation of the past because the historian islimited by the archive, is limited by the fact, islimited by the protocols of history writing, and cannotoften say teams and capture things in the way theybelieve it has happened. so very often,literature and fiction, merged with this kindof writing of history,

captured the pastmore appropriately than history does-- than theprotocols of historian allows. now my question here,and comment, will be, do we not need toseparate these forms? and the conversationbetween cloistered and the public history, doesit not take on different forms depending on which publicyou're talking about. in each of them, there is adifferent kind of [inaudible]. and finally, a point about thelast chapter, which i found it

fascinating chapter,which is written, which may not beacceptable to people like jadunathsarkar as something which can go into thewriting of history, published as partof the history book. this is a chapter where heis staging a conversation with jadunath sarkar. and why i find it fascinatingis that what he, i think, does here is to explore acategory which has inspired,

i think, dipesh fora very long time-- the category of conversation. what is it to have conversation? what do we converse? how do we converse,what are the protocols, and what does conversation do. so he doesn'tdebate and discuss. he converses, always. so that his category.

and here, he is stagingthat conversation in order to unpack thedifferent ideas of history which he has not been able towrite through the book. now, through the book, he'sis being empathetic listener. he's understanding sarkar. he wants to know sarkar. he wants to get into his mind. he wants to look at the world. he wants to imagine theworld he's living in.

and by looking atall that, dipesh wants to make others aware ofwhat his world is all about. how does he think? how does he write? what does he believe? what are the protocols he'strying to operate with? and that is donewith great empathy. it is done withgreat understanding, in order to makereader understand

the seriousness withwhich sarkar is actually thinking of that word. now, in doing that,dipesh refuses to allow his own voiceintrude into the text to disrupt that text. sometimes it comes in. but it is done in a waywhere, with that empathy, you unpack the text in a waywhere this sarkar comes alive. and he tries todistance himself.

he of course comes in. his authorian voice isthere in very many ways. he tries to distance himselffrom the text in certain ways. but it is in thelast chapter, he had to develop and makeclear to the author what his position is, in some sense. so there is a staging ofdiscussion and dialogue across generation-- apost-colonial historian located in the post-colonialmoment, postmodern moment,

having a discussion withsomebody who is rooted firmly within positivism, firmlywithin the positivist tradition of earlier. he has understood himwith great empathy. but can i have somehowdisrupt, disturb, and subvert some ofthat understanding-- not fully, not entirely,because sarkar is still the protagonist of your book. but that is a stagingof a conversation where

he comes to talk to sarkar. sarkar is suspicious. he does not want to carry on. he pushes him away, but,with great patience, dipesh carries on aconversation once too. and through that, hetries to unpack sarkar. subverts some of the ideasand arguments of sarkar. pose a dialoguebetween his generation, the location of that momentnow, and 70 years back.

and that dialogue allows,in some way, dipesh, i feel, to subvert whatseems to be ratifiied through the book asa positivist method, as a wonderful enunciationof positivism as history, and the methods thatsarkar develops. now, in doing this, i feelwhat he shows is that this conversation, this dialoguecannot lead to a fusion of [? horizon. ?] thatthis, dipesh's ideals is not something sarkar understands.

sarkar's ideal is not somethingdipesh can fully affirm. and therefore, thisencounter becomes a basis of understanding whatis it to converse across differentframes of reference. how do we conversewith somebody i do not believe in, i donot agree with, yet respect the person, yettalk about his ideas and allow thatargument to develop to a conversation within it.

so here, my suggestionwould be that this kind of a conversation actuallyraises a set of questions, points, which is, whenis such a conversation possible across generations? what constitutes the premisesof a productive conversation across paradigms,across frameworks? second, how cansuch a conversation become the basisof understanding. is understanding possibleto such a conversation?

what we see, actually, is theimpossibility of understanding. sarkar doesn'tunderstand dipesh. he cannot fully acceptwhat he's saying. he begins to trust him,therefore allows him access into the house, but dipeshcannot persuade him to believe in anything he's saying. so there is a dialogueacross generations, across paradigms,across framework, but that confrontation creates acertain energy within the text.

third, can conversation withoutempathy, or without the desire to understand the other, everhelp us reconstitute ourselves as humans, as thinking beings. now this implies that, in orderto develop an understanding, we have to openourselves to the other. we have to allow the other toactually inscribe themselves on me. here, sarkar doesn't open up,cannot open up because he is rooted within adifferent framework.

so what are the limits ofdialogue in such a situation? and finally, is it possible tohave conversations like this when the frameworks of thoughtare so incommensurable, totally different. but how do you bringthis conversation into a book which actually,in a certain sense, disrupts the frameof the chapters that you havedeveloped otherwise. through the book, dipeshwrites with great empathy,

with great understanding,with restraint-- there is no critique ofsarkar through the book. only occasionally,critique comes in because he wants the reader tounderstand sarkar, empathize with sarkar, see hisworld, see the way he's developing his argument. and then, in thelast chapter, he feels almost suffocated,dipesh, that he has to bring inhimself into the text.

so he insertshimself wonderfully through this final onewhere there is a dialogue. one of his earlier essays,which started off dialogue between [inaudible] was aninvitation to a dialogue. this book endswith such a staging of a dialogue which i thinkallows us to understand what it is to actuallyhave a conversation across differenthorizons which does not lead to a fusion ofhorizons-- which allow

the different horizonsto be there, affirm those differences, yet havea respect for each other. and that is wherei feel this book is such a wonderful book, whichallows us to understand what sarkar is doing, but whichalso allows us to understand how to write about anotherframework, or an idea, or a way of looking withoutnecessarily bringing critique consistently, continuouslyinto the text. yet not fully emphasizing,yet not fully identifying

with that argument. so how is it to empathizewithout identification? how is it to writewithout inserting yourself in every line thatthis is my critique? so how do you help thereaders to understand sarkar in a situation where he'sbeen rejected over 50 years. by the time you finishreading the book, you also begin to empathizewith the project of sarkar. and i think that's awonderful success of the book.

speaker 1: one point i alreadymentioned, dipesh, that is i wish you'd elaborate onpride and history writing. there are two others. maybe they are big ones. one is this obsessionthat jadunath has with decline and tragedy. where does it come from? does it come from gibbon? i mean, let's posea counterfactual.

given his masteryof persian sources, it was open to him to doa book on [inaudible]-- which he didn't. he chose to writeon [inaudible]. is there anything in thesources, in his books, in his correspondence, about whyhe made this particular choice? can you infer somefacts on this? and second, it's more a questionof the historian's craft than anything else.

i remember beingbriefly with you when you were researchingyour first book-- rethinking working class history. and i remember itwas a struggle, more than anything else. and i emphasizethat word struggle. i picked it up fromsomething that you said in your presentation. it was a strugglemore than anything

else to do withscanty resources. you were always struggling tofind the right kind of source, the right kind of voicethat would tell you about the working-classexperience. here, you have not adearth, but a plenitude. you actually landeda treasure trove. from the point ofview will crafting a history, which is abetter situation to be in? speaker 2: the general thrustof the discussion so far has

been to emphasize jadunathsarkar's relentless search for the truth. and, of course, [? dipesh ?]has very skillfully pointed out the distinctionbetween invented facts and inferred facts-- and theway jadunath sarkar definitely preferred the latter. but i wonder whetherjadunath sarkar was as dismissive ofimagined or imaginary history as some of the panelistshave suggested.

after all, heregarded [inaudible] as a great historian. and [inaudible], in hisbengali book, [inaudible], cites the authorityof jadunath sarkar to claim that [? bunkim's ?]novel's, like [inaudible] and [inaudible], were histories. so it'd be interestingto hear from you what it was that he foundin historical novels which allowed him to describe itsauthor as a great historian.

now, it may well be,this is just a hunch, that, since he was sointerested in character, not only was he himselfa fascinating character, as you have pointedout, but because he was a master at etchinghistorical characters, that he wasfascinated by somebody who wrote historical novels. and of course,there was somebody else who was writing historicalplays about precisely

the decline of the mughal empiremore or less at the same time in fact, just beforejadunath sarkar wrote his monumental historyof [inaudible]. and the playwright he wrotethese historical plays i'm thinking about, ofcourse, is [inaudible]. who published three historicalplays between 1906 and 1909, [inaudible]. and in many ways, ifind [inaudible] etching of the characterof [? arumzeb ?]

to be even more fascinatingthan that of jadunath sarkar because as-- but theinteresting thing is that these novelistsand playwrites were also engaged in research. [inaudible]thoroughly researched that era in mughal history. and he went on to say,that unlike [inaudible], i was not going to change thecharacter of [? arumzeb ?] as a monster, a [inaudible] wasthe bengali word that he used.

and he presented[? arumzeb ?] in all his psychologicalcomplexity, which made his play [inaudible],such a great play. so i'd like to hear a littlebit about the extent to which jadunath sarkar mayhave been accommodating of imagined andimaginary histories, which actually producedmasterful characterizations of figures who had playeda major role in history. dipesh chakrabarty:sorry, you can hear me?

ok. in one part of the book--this is only part of the book where i come, youknow, i don't treat foucault as an untouchable. and use the workgenealogy, explicitly saying i'm borrowing it fromthe foucault-nietzsche lexicon, where, basically, iused the word genealogy to cover my back because i wasfearing that somebody would say, why do start fromjadunath, why didn't you

start from so and so? and because foucault explicitlyuses the word genealogy against the word origin,and geneology entails multiple origins, ithought this were my way of saying that it's one origin. but you raised the mostessential question, which is that, soif you think back to [inaudible] participationat the same time, and he headed adepartment in madrass

which was called departmentof history and archaelogoy. the calcutta university setsup, in 1919, a new department, the department ofmodern history. and by modernhistory, what's they meant was what we todaycall medieval history. because this is the debategoing on with the archives that, for a long time, thebritish were extremely reticent to open records whichwe, today, routinely access-- like thenon-commissioned records,

for instance, from[inaudible] period. they are [inaudible] in thinkingthat all of these records will lead to litigation aboutthis claim and that claim. so in some ways. jadunath is, in '20s,'30s, [inaudible] what are the eyewitnesssources from which we can reconstruct mughal history. and i think, so[? in times ?] when i said history, what i meantwas more textual history.

in other words-- i don't say somuch about it, and i should've. i should have made it clear thatjadunath himself was actually full of praise in privatecorrespondence for [inaudible]. and remember that,by the time jadunath is coming into his stride,the debate between [inaudible] about the nature ofsources, [inaudible], has already taken place. but, on the other hand, thereis the story of [inaudible]. so there's a point in, at leastin [inaudible], ancient history

treated together, and[inaudible] sets up the department ofmodern history-- so makes modern historyinto a researchable subject, [inaudible] apost-graduate subject. but what they meanby modern history is this early modern historybecause of limitations of what sources youcould actually look at. but it's still a veryinteresting point. i mean, your overallpoint remains.

and i think one shouldgo and look back. and i don't do enough of whatyou suggest i should have done. but it also speaks partly to[inaudible]'s question, then, to [inaudible]'s question. so i mean, he did edit[inaudible] later on. but, i mean, he comes to[? aurungzeb ?] at least in the 20th centuries,early [inaudible], you know what i'mtalking about, he comes to [? aurungzeb ?]it's pretty clear,

from a very nationalistpoint of view. because he's interested,i mean, if i'm extremely charitableto jadunath, unlike the way thatpeople have read him, this is a man who is tryingto explain to himself, why the hell did we haveto go through british rule in order to modernize? why couldn't we havebeen like the japanese? in other words, look atthe world around you.

copy westerners. so his regret that, eventhough the mughal saw books, they had no interestin the printing press. and he said even a stonelithograph wasn't important. so as i discussed, so he alsotalks about [? aurumzeb ?] as a tragic character. but the bigger tragedyis actually for jadunath. and the tragedy is,it is the problem is that [? akbar ?] holdsout by unifying the country.

and later on, not just[? akbar. ?] he said, you unified thelaw, more or less. you unified currency,more or less. unified territory. now all of that [inaudible]had to do was to build on that. and he actually says, and hecould build on that because he didn't have european powersbreathing down his neck, unlike later mughal's. and therefore, his regret,and his tragedy is, one,

is what he sees as[? aurungzeb's ?] orthodoxy, or [? militant ?] view of islam. and the other one is thatthe later, the followers of [? aurungzeb ?] not havingthe character that he thinks was needed. but on the otherend, jadunath clearly belonged to manyindian nationalists who worked with this idea ofprovidence-- that somehow, because this didn't happen.

our providence wasto become modern. the destiny of any modernpeople is to become modern. we made mistakes, so we had togo through the british rule. so if, for instance,you were a novelist who were writing withthis larger sense of the destiny ofthe nation, then you were a conveyorof a larger truth. see, the truth aboutprovidence could never be archivally proven.

so the truth about providencebelonged to your philosophers. so he would grant [inaudible],the philosophy of history, but remember, inmany of the prefaces, actually, thatnicholas [inaudible] and the other person has nowcollected, the collective, he actually pointsto factual errors. now, it takes me backto an earlier point the very birth ofthe discipline. so you remember that somebodylike [inaudible], who

is actually a student ofthe philologist [inaudible], the classicalphilologist [inaudible]. and it's through philologythat he brings [inaudible] into his discipline. you know that [? ranka ?],for a long time, was toying with the idea ofbecoming a novelist because he was so influenced byscott's historical novels-- particularly historicalnovels with footnotes. speaker 3: [inaudible].

dipesh chakrabarty: sure. and [inaudible] wantto escape the question of evidentiary rules. but what i'm sayingis, [? ranka ?] made a veryinteresting decision. and this goes back to jadunath. and i was amazed by it.[? so ranka ?] actually writes, at a point,that i found the search for truth more thrillingthen assuming the truth.

and that's why hesort of then decides-- so he take philologyand [inaudible]. but you know what,[? ranka ?] has a letter he writesto his brother heinrich on hisfirst trip to rome, when he's looking at documents. and he says, i have apriestly sense of exultation when i'm in thearchives looking, or when i'm actuallyworking through documents.

from [? ranka's ?] priestlysense of exultation, come to mark block, who is not,like [? ranka ?], protestant, but more in the frenchuniversal republicanism. you would remember,in historian's craft, he actually says--historians have to honestly submit to facts. and jadunath saysthat his stories have to-- so there's a veryinteresting tension here between the freedomyou'll grant a novelist

to speak a larger truth. but on the other hand,the ethics is different. for someone likejadunath to become a historian is to learn theethics of submitting yourself to facts that are not pleasant,that do not give you pleaseure. and i think that's [inaudible]. speaker 4: dipesh, ihave two questions. one, it seems to meyour project is also about history and thehistorical imagination.

and what you'relaying out, really, is a larger territoryof a certain historian's imagination. the second questioni had was in relation to history and democracy. now you seem to belaying out an argument that experience must beput through the sieve of the rules of evidence. i've heard you, on anearlier occasion, when

you give a talk on thepublic life of history talk, about the wounds of history. and i want to raisethe question today about the right to historyand the importance, also, of imagination in tellingthose stories about the past, and the importanceof other people listening to thosestories, just in itself, as an aspect of democracy. speaker 5: professor dipesh,can you just share your thoughts

about jadunath sarkar,why they are not focusing on [inaudible]. [inaudible] has beenvery meticulously ignored or being not taken seriously. what was the reason? dipesh chakrabarty:the second question is easy to answer injadunath sarkar's case. it's because [inaudible]lost the succession battle. jadunath was interestedin political history.

so he was interestedin the [inaudible], and in the [inaudible]'sfailure to lay the groundwork for nationhood. so it's the factthat [? aurungzeb ?] won the successionwar is what made [? aurungzeb ?] more important. which is not to say thathe didn't have sympathy with [inaudible]. now there's a lot of scholarshipon [inaudible] that's

happening now. but to come backto your question, yes, so what i'msaying is i'm saying that there's a tension betweentwo aspects of democracy. one is that a democracymust democratize the sense of the past. and there are so-called peoplewithout history, [inaudible], people who haven't leftsources, people whose histories have been spoken for byother people, people who have

been humiliated for centuries. and it is absolutely legitimatefor those people to say, i want a past that makes mefeel proud about who i am. so that i can stand up on myfeet and fight, or whatever. so past becomes a resourcein their struggles. at the same time,there's another struggle to be undertaken. it seems to me now,today, going through all my evolution and everything,my participation in this debate

that you are pointing to. so [inaudible]'s what i callincendiary article, history and its doubles, very muchtalks about this aspect that i'm talking with. but i think there's anotheraspect to democracy. and these two are in tension. and being able to hold them intension without one crushing the other, space-wise,is, i think, what is critical to the qualityof the democracy you have,

which is that becausefacts are to be inferred, facts are not given. you have to have roomfor rational argument. in other words, there has tobe room where you and i agree on the rules by which wewill decide if something is closer to the state offacticity than something else. and sometimes, what happensis that the politics of everyday life workout in such a way. so jim laine's book on shivajiis a good example in point.

so jim laine's bookon shivaji comes out, and it results in acertain kind of vandalism of [inaudible] library. the book is, i don't knowif it's actually banned, but it's not sold. it's difficult to find in india now that actuallysquashes the space for evidence-basedargumentation. i'm not saying jimlaine is right.

and it seems to methat a democracy which is in the very processof democratizing public life-- in other words,in every democracy, there's always room for peopleto come into democracy who've been unrepresented inthe narratives of history. and that precisely produces thebattle, the right to my past, the right to kindof narrate my past, the past i need that i canpass on to my children. and i was absolutely aneyewitness-- presence

i had for this, not so muchin india, but in australia, with aboriginals. and that was their struggle. and the form it tookwas autobiography. aboriginal people beganto write autobiography to create that past that theythought they could pass on to their children. and i was totallysupportive of that. i think that's apart of democracy.

but that project, if thatcompletely squashed the space that a democracy also needs,where you and i agree on rules by which we willactually conduct a rationaldisputation-- we don't have to come to agreement. because agreement is muchless important than a space in which we willrationally dispute things. so that you don't stop me,immediately, by saying, that's a marxist position.

or your name is [inaudible],that's why you're saying it. because we suffer thesethings in different ways. and it seems to me thatmy evolved position is that what is theimportant is to maintain the tension betweenthese two positions. and there's imagination onboth sides to reconstruct, archivally a past requiresas much trained imagination as to imagination historiesin other [? moons. ?] and so long as thepolitics is not such

that one space completelysquashes the other space. if squashes the other space,you will run into trouble in [inaudible]. that's what i'm saying. quickly, ok, sure. just one point to jerry. james miller is a veryinteresting instance because he actuallythinks he can write a better historyof india because he

doesn't come to india. that's his [inaudible]. so he, i mean, yeah-- speaker 6: so myquestion is why he never wrote anything on bengal. he wrote on [inaudible],which, from bengal, is at the other end ofthe country, and then on [inaudible], which,again, is at the other end of the country, andthen on distant dehli,

the mughal empire,but nothing on bengal. why is that? or nothing substantial. is it because he was, like[inaudible], contemptuous of bengal? dipesh chakrabarty: no, i mean,jadunath sarkar, first of all, he wrote for bengalis a lot. i mean his bengalwriting is huge. and also, he edited ahistory of bengal volume,

a very important volumeon the history of bengal, on muslim bengal. speaker 7: [inaudible] dipesh chakrabarty: [inaudible]. no, the reason why he wroteabout the mughal emperors, and about shivaji,was because he was interested in successand failure of statesmanship in nation building. so that's why there's apoint where he actually

says to [inaudible], i'm notinterested in the details of marata history. i'm interested in themaratas only to the degree that they challenge the mughals. because i'm actuallyinterested in that power which will build the empire that canfunction as the basis, one day, for the nation. so it is deeply committedto the nation project, not to the province project.

speaker 8: i'm highly emboldenedto ask a solitary question. you see, [inaudible] raiseda question as to that, since he had masteredpersian, and had studied persian civilization, that whydidn't he write on [? akbar ?]. i'm going onto different things,since he lived in calcutta. i'm very curious toknow that he went at all into the history ofthe parsis and zoroastrianism. i tell you why, because whensir jadunath sarkar lived in calcutta, calcutta had afairly strong parsi influence.

the first parsi hadcome in the year 1787. it was [? banerjee ?],[inaudible] banerjee. and then, as youknow, into 1902, the great [inaudible][? madden ?], [? madame ?] street incalcutta, he came to calcutta, started the bicycle company,had 100 wine shops and built all these cinema halls, andproduced the first feature film in calcutta in1919, [inaudible]. so in that atmosphere,why is it--

maybe he has written something. i'm not aware of it. i'm very curious to knowwhether, with his knowledge of persian, and his interestin persian literature, whether he went at all intothe history of the paris and that impact oncalcutta, all those horse questions and the wineshops, and the cinema halls. i think it's an importantthing which i need to know, whether he wentinto zoroastrianism.

dipesh chakrabarty: i haven'tcome into any evidence that he did. but knowing jadunath, to dothat all the achievements of the parsis that youenumerated in calcutta would have been completelydisapproved of by [? sir ?]. films, wine, these werethings that he thought should be avoided. i mean, he was as opposedto cinema as gandhi was. speaker 9: and then a question.

my observation is that we weretalking a lot about character. and perhaps there'sa distinction between being acharacter, shutting the door in people'sfaces, and having character, which involves theidea of virtue and ethics. now it seems to also thatthe first mode could well belong to literature,while the second could belong to a lotof academic disciplines where you might privilegecertain types of knowledge

and the way you go aboutacquiring and setting those types of knowledge. this brings me to my secondquestion, which is also on this interesting relationshipbetween literature and history, and the fact that sarkar, and somany others, drew on literature and, indeed, language as a worldon which history could rest. and my question hasto do with something i read [inaudible]words, long time ago. but i do remember thinking aboutthe distinction between what

might count as ahistorical fact, and what might count as animaginative, or metaphoric, fact. and [? eh carr ?] sayssomething like, had caesar crossed the rubicon alone, hewould have been having a bath. but if he crossed itwith 1,000 soldiers, then that was a fact of history. in other words, historyinvolves numbers and impacts on the lives of manypeople, perhaps.

whereas literature,of course, dispenses. it cannibalizes historyin order to imagine a new world of facts. so i really wonder, becausei was also spent years, you know, copying out thingsin longhand in the national library, and i didn'tremember, for example, versus this land-- about bengal--this land, as it present, it stands, has nochurch or steeple. it's lands are alllow lying lands.

and its people arelow lying people. and i think thatwhat was happening there was that youwere rehearsing an ideological universe, whichwas captured throughput poetry. and that would involve thehistorical, the creation of ideological facts, whichare not facts, and not even inferred facts, but leadto trails of inference later. so those are the [inaudible]i would like to hear about. dipesh chakrabarty:no, you're right.

and in fact, in oneof the chapters, from the chapteron character, i try to show how ideological thereception of goldsmith was. because jadunath usesgoldsmith's description of the swiss todescribe their rajputs. and i have a sortof a quick history of how the receptionof goldsmith changes from 18thto 19th century, as british rule consolidates.

and a lot of ideologyand philosophy actually percolate intopeople like jadunath through literature. so when he writes, characteris destiny, i mean, as i say in thebook, he's probably getting it from shakespeare. but you see renaissanceengland is actually recycling a lot ofclassical philosophers through these plays.

so heraclitus comes into thiswhole vision of character as destiny. and [inaudible] wasinterested in heraclitus. there's a [? maraji ?]philosopher, [inaudible], who wrote a book onheraclitus at the same time. but the interestingthing about character-- i have a picture ofjadunath, actually, in the book, taken from theside, but with his spine completely wrecked.

the most artificial kindof posture for human spine. [? william's ?] posture isthe more natural one that we tend to sort of gravitate to. but jadunath actuallywrites passages in praise of the erect spine. whoever walked aroundwith an erect spine, he is completely impressed. but you know what it means. so i mean, the truth hereis to have talked about it.

a character is a twodimensional construction. i don't discuss it, butwhen i read jadunath letters in [? bangla, ?] written to hisfamily at moments of crisis, he does not comeacross as the person that he wanted to projecthimself as to his students. so his students, he stageshimself as a character. and that's why it's atwo-dimensional jadunath sarkar. if you read the lettersthat he writes-- but

i didn't go into it because iwas very clear that i was not writing biography. because if i waswriting biography, i'd have had to go intoa lot of those things. and in my dialogue,he actually tells me that, why do you ask me, you'renot writing my biography. so i had to remind myselfabout several points because, in thiskind of a book, you get pretty close to thefeelings of a biographer.

but what sort ofto clarified for me is that character is nota flesh and blood person. and the character jadunathis not the flesh and blood jadunath. one shouldn't make that mistake. that so that's why i said,i end the chapter by saying, the man was tryingto be his method. but nobody can be a method. i mean, lives are not methods.

lives are unmethodical. and that's whyliving lives is fun. so it's very interesting. so [inaudible] characterwas part of this emphasis on character and tryingto sort of live out a theoretical concept. so i began by saying, youknow, character is really a palimpsest for him. and what i can say, and i wrotethe chapter as a provocation

to the likes of[inaudible] and others who have persian,what i don't know is what are the words in thepersian documents that he is assimilating and translatinginto the english word for character. now, it's entirely possiblethat the persian documents, through islamic sources, areusing the same classical code word about character. so maybe heraclitus is present.

i have no idea. and i wrote this thinkingthat some rude critic, of which there are plentyin the subcontinent, will tell me aboutmy errors and take me to task for the audacityof writing, particularly this chapter withoutknowing persian. but that i would gain someknowledge in the process. because i thought,without the provocation, these guys wouldn't get intothese kinds of questions.

in fact, when istarted working on it, the person who said tome-- this was in bangla, so i'll say it in bangla. [speaking bangla], so whatare you thinking about, what do you thinkyou will work on now? jadunath sarkar. jadunath sarkar? [speaking bangla], animperialistic historian. why work on him?

[speaking bangla] so obviously the smallersentences come from me. and the longer sentencescomes from my guru, who will remain unnamed. who is still alive. i've had several gurus. this particularguru is still alive. and actually, when he gotthe book, he said to me, on the phone, he said,[speaking bangla],

this has becausea valuable book. so obviously, i knew thatthere were a lot of prejudices against jadunath sarkar. and because part of thebook was ethnographic in [inaudible]'ssense of the word, like trying to understandsomebody we don't identify with, i made onepromise to myself, which i say in the book, thati'm not going to discuss any prejudice on jadunath'spart that i cannot make

intellectuallyinteresting for myself. in other words, it's onlywhen you sort of enrich your understanding ofsomebody's prejudices that you bring somethingof the human condition into the discussion. otherwise, itbecomes [inaudible]. and i knew that iwas not out there to give this manany [inaudible]. he was a much superiorscholar than i was.

i have seldom felt that i'min the presence of somebody so steeped in sources and withsuch an ethic of accuracy, or certain devotion to whateverhis understanding of truth was. so that was onecondition that i put, that i'm not going to do this. and i didn't do it-- i hope. but within that, this questionof conversation in cloisters or public, i agree with you. the nature of thatrelationship changes

from context to context-- andof different kinds of publics and different-- but thebasic point, as you see, i was sort of saying that, as adiscipline, it looks the same. and [? the ?] page of indianeconomic and social history review, and a page fromamerican history review, wouldn't look allthat different. a book review would lookpretty much the same. and sometimes, people do bookreviews for both journals. but, on the otherhand, if you look

at the life of a discipline in aparticular context, the home it has, as you were talking about,that varies from one place to another. and i actually, intoday's discussion, that now [inaudible]is here, and i can only say this because i'veseen [inaudible] take part in many television debates. i haven't seen for years now. the last time i sawhim was [inaudible].

it was your old past. before i get to [inaudible]. i will come back to [inaudible]. i want to say this. the one reason why i wrote thething as a dialogue-- actually my former student and nowcolleague [inaudible] is here. and [inaudible] asked me, whydid you write that dialogue? and i said, one desire i hadwas to imagine jadunath's house, where i worked for afew years, and where

he was completelyforgotten-- was to imagine that house as hauntedby the presence of this man. so that goes backto [inaudible] point about [? hauntology ?]and other kinds of pasts. so actually, thatchapter goes against the whole reconstructionof the past that i'm doing inthe rest of the book. that's more kind oftrying to imagine a past. and frankly, there will be abook event in jadunath's house

this time. and when i go to calcutta. and i'm going to suggest,which nobody is going accept, that the-- sorry, [inaudible]'soffice was jadunath's bedroom. the register's office wherewe used to have our, , what [inaudible] used tocall [inaudible], you know, kind of unrestrained[inaudible], was his study. his study was asacrosanct space. and we had sacrileged it foryears, doing things that you he

hated. but our [? moxy ?]was strong enough to fend of any sort ofevil, or [inaudible] that he might have wished on us. but i often wonderedwhat would've been your feel of the house ifthe director's office, which was [inaudible]'s office, hadjadunath pillow in a glass case. what would have that houselooked like-- sometimes,

in the us, youcome across shops. the nike shop in chicagoworks both as a shop and a museum of nike shoes. and i thought, whycan't an office work both as an office spaceand a museum space all at once? because that's the wayyou make this person, this significant person, thedrama of his life unfolded. and the sad drama of hislife unfolded in that house. and within 15 years, wehad wiped the blood clean.

the letters found,and the photographs found, had been handedover to national library. now, some of hisphotos have come back. but not just photos--have objects. remind people of whatthese rooms were for. and so i wrote it partly,precisely in my own head, to make that house haunted,so he was a specter at the center of [inaudible]and social sciences, now living his sort ofspecterly life among books

and hating [? people ?]. and what inspired me to writethe dialogue was the sadness i felt in visiting the houseof the great linguist, [inaudible], which hasbeen made into a shop to [? fab india ?] india outlet,with nothing thing telling you-- i mean [inaudible]used to write sort of couplets and thingsin the languages he learned. so throughout thehouse, there are still marble plaques carryingcouplets in tibetan

and in other languagesthat he taught himself. but there's nothing that tellsyou who did those things. so you go there, and completelyilliterate rich bengalis come, or calcuttans come. you know, the vulgarly richand deplorably ignorant who come and shop for the latestfashion design, or whatever, of this american-- i meanit's an american-owned chain of marketing indian design. and i was so angryhonestly, within myself,

having gone therebecause i wanted to buy some[? fab india ?] things, and somebody took me there. and then i realize it's[inaudible]'s house, near [inaudible]'s house,near [inaudible]'s house. so that made me write thedialogue to make these houses kind of haunted, inhabited bythe spirit of these people. and when i go back,i would suggest to [inaudible] that somehousehold objects come back.

they don't even haveto be his objects. all you have to dois to give people a sense of what this house was. so in some ways, [inaudible],but conversation, and, see, all i'm trying tosay, in struggling to keep the space openfor rational disputation, is that often, what happensin democracies in the name of disputation is that oneparty to the conversation wants the otherparty to shut up.

or shut down. make it into a monologue. sometimes withlegitimate grievances. if, for instance--and now this is where i'm being nowcompletely contemporary, it is entirely possible, for allkinds of psychological reasons, for many hindus tofeel that hindus do not have enough rightin [? the indies ?]. to give you an exampleof it, on the weekend,

i saw a sociologist, retiredsociologist [inaudible]. and he was telling meabout a great sociologist. i mean, people haveto remain unnamed. i'm very sorry. but this greatsociologist about whom i was hearing a storywas one of the founding figures of the sociologydepartment, who, if you know, wasn't allowed to usethe european [inaudible] [? style ?] toiletsbecause he was indian.

and the engineerin the university told him, no, no europeantoilets are europeans only, even in dehli university,when he started his career in this university. this great sociologist,one day, came back to the office of thisyounger sociologist, now old, who is telling me thestory, very angry that he had been to a lectureby, again, a very well-known left historian--our teacher, your teacher,

my teacher-- who in thecourse of that lecture had referred to"hindu mumbo-jumbo." and the senior sociologist,whom i can name. he's gone. [inaudible] said, about thisleft-wing teacher of us, how can he talk so flippantlyabout a great religion. doesn't he have any pride? now, of course, you don'tassociate [inaudible] with any hindu fundamentalist.

but the story was about hishaving a certain kind of pride. so somebody can feel hurt thata left-leaning historian is suddenly referring tothis great religion as "hindu mumbo-jumbo." but if, becausethey feel that hurt, they pursue a politics whichis actually about shutting down the marxist part ofthe conversation, then that's stoppingconversation. so what i was tryingto do is to keep

the space open forreasoned disputation so that the argument that i needa history in which i can take pride does not become the excusefor squashing that other space, or does not everbecome so powerful that it can squashthe other space. and i think a lotof that's happening. a lot of that hashappened in the past. and some of it hashappened in the past. i mean, i know of peoplewho've had trouble getting jobs

because they were not marxists. i mean, they finallydid all right, but they had totake other roads. again, names do notneed to be named. but probably not to thedegree that the current sort of hostility that we are seeing. so i think it's in the interestof indian democracy [? of a ?] public life that we fight,because facts are inferred, that we fight to keep open thespace within which facts can be

arrived at by inference,which means that fact is not a rock-solid fact. if somebody candispute it, so long as they're able to reasonagainst it with evidence, that's the idea weneed to subscribe to, alongside the idea that peoplewho feel hurt in their pride, in their own identity,have every night to say that i actually need apast that makes me feel pride. but it must not be at theexpense of this other space.

and there are sometimes thatdemands are contradictory. and the democracy issuccessful to the degree that it can negotiate thatcontradiction, and tension, and keep both asthriving spheres. that's all i want to say.