Panel Organizers:

Prof. Dr Monica Juneja - University of Delhi, India and University of Hannover
Dr Margrit Pernau - University of Bielefeld, Germany

Abstract

Scholarship on modern South Asia today has just about begun to respond to many of the challenges of a changing world. While a handful of analyses have directed their attention from area studies to comparisons, and to the examination of global processes, this shift has yet to be systematically pursued and accomplished. To do so would require addressing a number of problems and questions that are either unresolved, or perhaps have still to be posed. Do historical narratives as we know them today continue to be a peculiarly Western or eurocentric form of knowledge? Can the dynamics of non-western societies be grasped using a conceptual vocabulary that has crystallised on the basis of European historical experience? The dangers of reading South Asian history in terms of "absences" or "incomplete transformations", following from an unquestioning use of Western concepts as criteria of analysis, have been effectively underlined by Dipesh Chakrabarty.

This panel problematises the issue of rethinking concepts in the light of a multiplicity of cultural contexts. This is in part a response to recent perspectives that seek to locate and write history in a transnational frame. In place of customary dichotomies such as European/non-European, coloniser/colonised, foreign/indigenous, growing sensitivity to the enmeshed and mutually constitutive character of the national, imperial, global or local, makes the search for transcultural concepts required to write non-eurocentric histories an urgent one. What kinds of transactions - re-workings, resistance or subversion - need to be uncovered within the act of translating from one cultural context into another? What is the role of power relationships in such a process? Can marginalised or suppressed voices be recovered through a language that is complicit in their exclusion? While the agency of both the orientalist scholar and his native informant - their collaborative as well as conflictual relationship - has found a place in modern scholarship, the problem of finding a language to recuperate the experiences of those who did not control the power of representation remains to be addressed. The issue of asymmetrical power replicates itself at the level of global historiography in which non-European histories end up as "invisible", for they defy the available categories of representation and analyses. What forms of self-reflexivity are required that would create a space for more elastic concepts representative of cultural plurality, both within a regional and a transnational frame? This panel seeks contributions - both of a theoretical thrust as well as empirical case studies - that would address these questions and hopefully suggest solutions so as to illustrate that the study of non-western cultures provides more than just another perspective, rather it could challenge some of the basic assumptions that have governed historical approaches till now.

Dietmar Rothermund, Germany

Cultural Transfer and Historical Comparison: Some Methological Reflections

Both the study of cultural transfers and of historical comparisons are essential for the historian. There is, however, a fundamental metholodigal problem involved in combining these studies. Comparisons require „uncontaminated" discreet units, whereas cultural transfer implies a process of contamination. On the other hand, the tracing of transfers presupposes a comparative approach. A careful analysis of the steps taken in this type of historical research is recommended. It becomes even more necessary when studying „interconnectivity" or „entangled histories". Interconnectivity implies repeated mutual transfers; entangled histories present the analyst with the most difficult problem. Whereas it may be possible to isolate the different transfers in both directions, „entangled history" precludes such isolation. The term is derived from quantum physics where it was founded that particles could not be isolated and no „consistent history" could be reconstructed for each individual particle. The study of „entangled histories" cannot be avoided by historians of a global, „post,colonial" world. The paper is an attempt to outline these problems.

Michael Gottlob, Bergamo, Italy

Towards non-ethnocentric histories of modern India: impediments and chances

Even if Indian historiography after colonialism generally is posed, directly or indirectly, against ethnocentric forms of western historical writing, it does not automatically result in convincing alternatives. This is most strikingly demonstrated by the new "Hindu history" which, what is often neglected, claims an anticolonial perspective but actually is oriented towards cultural hierarchization rather than overcoming ethnocentrism.

It is also evident in many accounts of the Indian freedom movement which have been criticized for suppressing the specific culture of the subalterns. But the intention underlying this critique to give a voice to those who had been silenced by elitist history has resulted on its part in a fragmentation of the historical subject agent, to the extent of losing sight of the necessity to transcend given boundaries. Suppression and violence between communities sometimes even have been ascribed to the historical discourse as such. Does this mean that a history across cultures is not possible at all?

Not necessarily. Gyan Pandey's defense of the fragment against the dominance of the nation,state is accompanied by a quest for new forms of political community cutting across traditional demarcations. Partha Chatterjee too, instead of viewing all the forms of the modern state in India as an unwelcome intrusion of the West, is reconstructing the emergence of nationalism through a sort of entangled history rather than a confrontation of traditional Indian ideas of community and western concepts of state and society.

The attempt to view different cultural traditions as components of a larger whole in Indian historiography could gain from looking for similar tendencies in western historical thinking, and vice versa.

Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, European University Institute, Firenze, Italy

Comparison: an approach and its critics

The paper will persent the ungoing debate on comparative and transnational methods in historical research and reflect the problematic and possibilities of these approaches for non european history.

Sanjay Joshi, North Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA.

Beyond A Hyper-Real Europe? The Making of a Middle Class in Colonial India

From its very inception, the middle class of colonial India suffered comparisons, and suffered in comparisons. Not just imperialists such as Lord Dufferin or Sir Lytton Strachey, but in the writings of nationalists, including Aurobindo Ghosh, Mahatma Gandhi, and even that quintessential representative of the westernized middle class, Jawaharlal Nehru, representations of the Indian middle class were redolent with notions of a lack of authenticity. The real history of a real middle class, it was assumed, lay elsewhere, specifically in Euro-America. That the Eurocentricism of traditional historical scholarship has reinforced these ideas, is also beyond doubt. What is more surprising, though, is how otherwise laudable attempts of postcolonial critics such as Dipesh Chakrabarty to move beyond Eurocentric representations, to "provincialize Europe" also end up reproducing this duality of colonial and early nationalist thought.

In a deliberate attempt to destabilize this duality, my paper focuses on the making of a middle class in one city of north India, Lucknow. My paper will highlight the contradictions in the project of the Indian middle class as they sought to empower themselves as the harbingers of modernity in colonial Lucknow. Yet, rather than accept the notion that these contradictions represent deviations from an already-known modernity, I argue for using this "third world history" to help us better recognize the extent to which modernity itself, in historical practice, is inherently fractured. Rather than seek to provincialize Europe by contrasting the difference between a "hyper-real Europe" and the irreducible difference of a colonial modernity, my paper seeks to create a historiographical space where we are able to look at both as comparable products of history.

Pernau Margrit, Bielefeld University, Berlin, Germany
The Ashraf and the Middle Classes - comparative perspectives

Comparative history, especially in Western Europe, views itself as transcending the traditional focus on nation states and opening up to a new, global perspective on the world. By extending the space given in university studies and in research, first to Eastern Europe, but in the longer perspective also to non,European countries, it sets out to overcome not only provincialism, but also the power structures engrained in historical research.

On the other hand, historians of non,European countries, particularly those researching on India, do not cease to remind us of the ways in which comparative studies have contributed to anchoring the supremacy of European history, reducing the rest of the world to the status of "not,quite" or at least of "not,yet". Very often the language,bound concepts proof to be the way this power structure between the entities to be compared is maintained.
The approaches of New Imperial History in turn have drawn our attention to the extent to which European and non,European history are entangled. Integrating them into a common framework and developing common concepts with which to describe and compare related social phenomena no longer seems an exercise we may take up or leave aside, but becomes the only possible answer to the growing complexities of the problem.

Using as its reference point the history of the Muslim ashraf of Delhi and the German Bürgertum in the 19th century, the paper aims first at integrating the challenges of the linguistic turn into comparative history and second at ways to develop a comparative approach which accounts for entanglement and power relations.