After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography [Hardcover]

The book addresses the question of the politics of historical production in India, while addressing the pitfalls of postcolonial consciousness in the domain of history-writing.This book is about the production and consumption of specifically Indian history, framed by concerns with postmodernism and postcolonialism. Several parallel themes crosscut the book's central focus on the discipline of history: its intellectual history, its historiography, and its connection to memory, particularly in relation to the need to establish the collective identity of 'nation', 'community', or state, through a memorialization process that has much to do with history, or at least with claiming a historicity for collective memory. None of this can be undertaken without an understanding of the roles that history-writing and history-reading have played in public debates, or perhaps more accurately in public disputes.Preface to the South Asia EditionPreface: Reflections on ReflexivityAcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Instrumentalization of Historiography and the Production of VictimhoodPART I: MARKING THE POSTS1. Identifying the Beast Within: Postcolonial Theory and History2. Manifesto on Indirections: Histories, Collective Victimhood, and PostcolonialismPART II: INSTRUMENTALIZATIONS3. The Revolt of Memory: 1857 in the Nationalist Imagination4. Histories of Empire, Imperial Legitimation, and the Wartime Career of Penderel Moon5. History, Cinema, and the Politics of Cultural Sensitivity in Interwar IndiaPART III: POSTDISCURSIVE POSSIBILITIES6. Moving Ideas and How to Catch Them7. Travellers in Archives, or the Possibilities of a Post-PostArchival HistoriographyAfterword: Is There a Discipline to This?Benjamin Zachariah,Senior Research Fellow, Leibniz Institute for Educational Media/Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig, GermanyBenjamin Zachariah read history at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. HislÃ"