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Abstract
This paper provides an interpretation of the Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project as a new archive for studying the intellectual history of South Asia. It explains that an important outcome of the nexus between oral history and intellectual history is the construction of an ‘unintended autobiography’ of each subject interviewed in the project. By considering the centrality of autobiography, the paper offers insights into rethinking the methodological approaches to writing the intellectual history of South Asia. Finally, it provides a reading of Partha Chatterjee’s seminal writings, along with his oral history, as a way to consider the convergence of autobiography with political thought.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the workshop entitled ‘Pasts of the Postcolonial Imagination’, held at Tufts University, USA, in 2016. I thank Kris Manjapra, Neilesh Bose and Iftekhar Iqbal for including me in the project, and I appreciate the comments and suggestions of the participants in the workshop. I am grateful to Aishwary Kumar for his recommendations for a number of readings that helped to shape the argument in the paper; his comments on an earlier draft were very helpful. As always, Robert Moeller and Bina Parekh were kind enough to read multiple versions of the paper. I also greatly appreciate the incisive critiques and suggestions of Arvind Elangovan and the three anonymous South Asia readers. Vivien Seyler provided wonderful suggestions to improve the quality of the text. Finally, I want to thank Kama Maclean for her editorial leadership in bringing this collection together.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Bengali Intellectuals Oral History Project (BIOHP) [https://corpora.tufts.edu/?f%5Bcorpora_collection_sim%5D%5B%5D=Bengali+Intellectuals+Oral+History+Project, accessed 30 July 2017].
2 See, for example, Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Domna Stanton (ed.), The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds), De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); and Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Autobiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
3 See C.A. Bayly, ‘Epilogue: Historiographical and Autobiographical Note’, in Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 307–22; Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002); Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Nicholas Dirks, Autobiography of an Archive: A Scholar’s Passage to India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); and Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries (London: Verso, 2016).
4 BIOHP, ‘Oral History Interview with Partha Chatterjee’ [https://corpora.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:38, accessed 30 July 2017].
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 This argument is fully developed in Vinayak Chaturvedi, ‘Writing History in the Borderlands’, in Social History, Vol. 39, no. 3 (2014), pp. 307–22.
9 See Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
10 Chaturvedi, ‘Writing History in the Borderlands’, pp. 311–2.
11 See Ranajit Guha, ‘Small Voice of History’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds), Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 1–12. See also Ranajit Guha, Small Voice of History: Collected Essays (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010).
12 See also Kama Maclean, ‘Revolution and Revelation, or, When is History Too Soon?’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 39, no. 3 (2016), pp. 678–94.
13 I am specifically thinking of the typology of European intellectual history outlined by Perry Anderson, in which he discusses the three primary methodological approaches to writing modern intellectual history. See Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London: Verso, 1992). The debate on this topic is vast; see Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Darrin McMahon and Samuel Moyn (eds), Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Said and the History of Ideas’, in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 58–81.
14 Chaturvedi, ‘Writing History in the Borderlands’, p. 315.
15 Partha Chatterjee, ‘My Place in the Global Republic of Letters’, in Jackie Assayag and Veronique Benei (eds), At Home in the Diaspora: South Asian Scholars and the West (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 44–51.
16 See Margot Badran, ‘Theorizing Oral History as Autobiography: A Look at the Narrative of a Woman in Revolutionary Egypt’, in Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 25, no. 2 (2013), pp. 161–70; and John Murphy, ‘The Voice of Memory: History, Autobiography and Oral Memory’, in Historical Studies, Vol. 22, no. 87 (1986), pp. 157–75.
17 BIOHP, ‘Oral History Interview with Ranajit Guha’ [https://corpora.tufts.edu/?f%5Bcorpora_collection_sim%5D%5B%5D=Bengali+Intellectuals+Oral+History+Project, accessed 1 Sept. 2016].
18 Institute of Historical Research, ‘Making History: The Changing Face of the Profession in Britain’ [http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews, accessed 8 Sept. 2016].
19 Ibid.
20 See Institute of Historical Research, ‘Interview Transcript: Eric Hobsbawm’ [http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/Hobsbawm_Eric.html, accessed 8 Sept. 2016].
21 BIOHP, ‘Oral History Interview with Amartya Sen’ [https://corpora.tufts.edu/catalog/tufts:MS165.001.019.00001, accessed 22 Feb. 2018].
22 Christie McDonald (ed.), The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussion with Jacques Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 6.
23 For a discussion on the epistemological and methodological concerns of interpreting oral testimonies and autobiographies, see Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
24 David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, ‘Introduction: Life Histories in India’, in David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn (eds), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 1–28.
25 The development of the autobiography as a genre of writing in South Asia has recently received greater attention in the historiography. See Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (eds), Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance, and Autobiography in South Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); and Sudipta Kaviraj, The Invention of Private Life: Literature and Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
26 Javed Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2015).
27 Ibid., p. 3.
28 Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 218.
29 An Indian Nationalist, ‘Author’s Introduction’, in The Indian War of Independence of 1857 (n.p., n.d.), p. viii. The author’s name, the place of publication and the date of publication are not given in the first edition of the book. Savarkar’s name as the author and the year of publication were later revealed, but the publisher’s name remains unknown.
30 Dipesh Chakrabarty further reminds us that John Malcolm was one of the first colonial writers of modern Indian history to ‘use the stuff of oral history’ in his Memoirs of Central India (1823). Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar & His Empire of Truth (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 77.
31 See also ‘British Voices from South Asia’, Louisiana State University [http://www.lib.lsu.edu/oralhistory/collections/britishvoices, accessed 30 July 2017]; ‘South Asian Oral History Collections’, International Institute of Social History [https://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/docs/south_asia_oral_history.pdf, accessed 17 July 2017]; and ‘Oral History on India’s Independence Movement’ (Gandhiserve) [http://gandhiserve.org/activities/research/oral_history.html, accessed 17 July 2017].
32 See Nonica Datta, Violence, Martyrdom and Partition: A Daughter’s Testimony (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also Nonica Datta’s reply to Ramachandra Guha, ‘The Challenge of Contemporary History’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 43, no. 26 (2008), pp. 192–200, on Guha’s argument that oral history is a ‘fourth source’ of history. Nonica Datta, ‘A “Samvad” with Ramachandra Guha’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 43, no. 40 (2008), pp. 81–4.
33 Sherna Berger Gluck, ‘Why Do We Call It Oral History? Refocusing on Orality/Aurality in the Digital Age’, in Douglas Boyd and Mary Larson (eds), Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 35. For a further discussion on this point, see Yasmin Saikia, ‘Beyond the Archive of Silence: Narratives of Violence of the 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh’, in History Workshop Journal, Vol. 58, no. 1 (2004), pp. 275–87; and Yasmin Saikia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
34 Gluck, ‘Why Do We Call It Oral History?’, p. 35.
35 Ibid., pp. 35–6.
36 In a parallel discussion, Antoinette Burton argues for rethinking our interpretation of the archive itself by considering ‘private memories’ of women in the ‘home’ as archival sources. Rather than constructing new archives, a part of her argument is to expand the definition of the archive to be more inclusive of sources that typically do not enter official archives administered by the state. See Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
37 See the following on the nature of post-colonial states in South Asia, especially on the topics of governmentality and bureaucracy: Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); and Matthew Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
38 Ramachandra Guha, ‘The Challenge of Contemporary History’, p. 197.
39 Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. xi–xiii.
40 ‘Dissertation Reviews’ provides extensive reviews of archives across the globe, including archives in South Asia. For example, see Ali Usman Qasmi, ‘Three Archives in Pakistan’ [http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/12520, accessed 30 July 2017].
41 Clive Dewey, The Settlement Literature of the Greater Punjab (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991), p. 8.
42 In 1996, I had an opportunity to see some of these testimonies while collaborating with the late Kartik Pannalal, who was a member of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights in Mumbai.
43 Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights [http://www.cpdr.in/cdro, accessed 18 Aug. 2016].
44 ‘People’s Archive of Rural India’ [https://ruralindiaonline.org, accessed 18 Aug. 2016].
45 ‘1947 Partition Archive Stories’ [http://www.1947partitionarchive.org, accessed 18 Aug. 2016]; ‘South Asian American Digital Archive’ [https://www.saada.org, accessed 6 Sept. 2016]; ‘British Hinduism Oral History Project’ (Oxford University) [http://ochs.org.uk/research/british-hinduism-oral-history-project, accessed 17 July 2017]; ‘South Asian Oral History Project’ (University of Washington) [http://content.lib.washington.edu/saohcweb/, accessed 17 July 2017]; ‘India Association of Minnesota Oral History Project’ (Minnesota Historical Society) [http://www.mnhs.org/collections/oralhistory/india.php, accessed 17 July 2017]; ‘Oral History Projects of the Center for the Study of History and Memory’ (Indiana University): ‘Indian American Communities’, Projects #065, #066, #067, #068 [http://www.indiana.edu/∼cshm/alphalist.html, accessed 17 July 2017]; and ‘Tales of Three Generations of Bengalis in Britain’ (Swadhinata Trust and Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity & Multiculturalism, University of Surrey, 2006) [http://www.swadhinata.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=31&Itemid=51, accessed 17 July 2017].
46 See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
47 See James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
48 Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
49 See Phillip Howard, Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).
50 Douglas Boyd and Mary Larson (eds), Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
51 Gluck, ‘Why Do We Call It Oral History?’, p. 48.
52 I have borrowed these ideas from Lecia Rosenthal, ‘Walter Benjamin on the Radio: An Introduction’, in Radio Benjamin (London: Verso, 2014), p. xi.
53 Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2000). See also John Sturrock, ‘Theory versus Autobiography’, in Robert Folkenflik (ed.), The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 20–37.
54 The following are select interviews with Partha Chatterjee: Sudipto Chatterjee, ‘The Two Hats of Partha Chatterjee’, in Journal of the International Institute, Vol. 2, no. 3 (1995) [https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0002.304/–two-hats-of-partha-chatterjee?rgn=main;view=fulltext, accessed 24 April 2017]; ‘Partha Chatterjee: In Conversation with Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Oberlin College’, in Interventions, Vol. 1, no. 3 (1999), pp. 413–25; Kuan-Hsing Chen, ‘Intellectual/Political Commitments: An Interview with Partha Chatterjee’, in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 2, no. 1 (2001), pp. 23–34; ‘India’s Divide: Economic Growth and Marginalized Groups—Interview with Partha Chatterjee’, in Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol. 14, no. 2 (2008), pp. 139–43; ‘Partha Chatterjee Interviewed by Manu Goswami’, in Public Culture, Vol. 25, no. 1 (2013), pp. 177–89; and ‘Partha Chatterjee Interviewed by Aditya Nigam’, in Development and Change, Vol. 45, no. 5 (2014), pp. 1059–73. See also Partha Chatterjee, ‘An Interview with an Imposter’, in Outlook (23 Sept. 2014) [https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/an-interview-with-an-impostor/292024, accessed 30 July 2017]; and ‘Rethinking Postcolonial Capitalist Development: A Conversation between Kalyan Sanyal and Partha Chatterjee’, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 36, no. 1 (2016), pp. 102–11.
55 Sudipto Chatterjee, ‘The Two Hats of Partha Chatterjee’.
56 Chatterjee, ‘My Place in the Global Republic of Letters’.
57 Partha Chatterjee, A Princely Imposter? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
58 Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).
59 BIOHP, ‘Oral History Interview with Partha Chatterjee’.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Chatterjee, ‘My Place in the Global Republic of Letters’, pp. 46–7.
69 BIOHP, ‘Oral History Interview with Partha Chatterjee’.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
75 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
76 Ibid., p. 7.
77 Ibid.
78 An important aspect of BIOHP is that all the oral histories are in English, not Bengali. As Partha Chatterjee notes, the language of academic discourse was English. This is not to suggest that Chatterjee or the other Bengali intellectuals abandoned writing in Bengali, but it raises a tension in the oral histories of whether using English was a limiting factor for Chatterjee in his self-narration, given his prioritising of the Bengali linguistic worlds.
79 Richter, Walter Benjamin, p. 13.
80 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, p. 13.
81 BIOHP, ‘Oral History Interview with Partha Chatterjee’.
82 Chatterjee, ‘My Place in the Global Republic of Letters’, p. 51. For a further discussion of the global republic of letters, see Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Debjani Ganguly, ‘Global Literary Refractions: Reading Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters in the Post-Cold War Era’, in English Academy Review, Vol. 29, no. 1 (2012), pp. 249–64.
83 Chatterjee, ‘My Place in the Global Republic of Letters’, p. 51.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
87 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992).
88 Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Gender & History, Vol. 11, no. 3 (1999), pp. 445–60.
89 Sunil Khilnani, Incarnations: A History of India in 50 Lives (London: Penguin Books, 2017), p. xi.
90 Ramachandra Guha, ‘The Challenge of Contemporary History’, pp. 194–5.