The Study of Indian History in the US Academy

Abstract

Notes

1. For a concise overview of Islamic history and historiography, see: Richard Eaton, Islamic History as Global History (Washington DC: American Historical Association, 1990).

2. Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, The Ice King: Frederic Tudor and His Circle, ed. Alan Seaburg (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003).

3. John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 4.

4. While the Guggenheim Foundation has supported higher scholarship, its support of projects having to do with India is nominal.

5. Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America, p. 33.

6. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, “Introduction,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 9.

7. Maureen L. P. Patterson, “Institutional Base for the Study of South Asia in the United States and the Role of the American Institute of Indian Studies,” in Joseph W. Elder, Edward C. Dimmock Jr., and Ainslie T. Embree, eds., India's Worlds and U.S. Scholars: 1947–1997 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998), p. 22.

8. David Ludden, “History (Pre-Colonial),” in Joseph W. Elder, Edward C. Dimmock Jr., and Ainslie T. Embree, eds., India's Worlds and U.S. Scholars: 1947–1997 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998), pp. 271–8.

9. One example of this is: John Richards, Mughal Administration in Golconda (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

10. A Das Gupta, “The International Context,” in John Correia-Afonso, ed., Historical Research in India (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1979), p. 67.

11. Contrast Robert Frykenberg's work on Guntur District with the more recent work of Prasannan Parthasarathi. Robert E. Frykenberg, Guntur District, 1788–1848; A History of Local Influence and Central Authority in South India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); David Washbrook, “South India 1770–1840: The Colonial Transition,” Modern Asian Studies Vol. 38, No. 3 (2004), pp. 479–516.

12. For an overview of this period, including scholarship in Europe, India and Australia, see: Frank F. Conlon, “History (Colonial and Post-Colonial),” in Joseph W. Elder, Edward C. Dimmock Jr., and Ainslie T. Embree, eds., India's Worlds and U.S. Scholars: 1947–1997 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998), pp. 288–90.

13. An example of this is: Michael Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

14. See Cohn's collected essays in: Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987).

15. Conlon, “History (Colonial and Post-Colonial),” p. 291. Further reviews and commentaries on the “Cambridge School” include: William A. Green and John P. Deasy, “Unifying Themes in the History of British India, 1757–1857: An Historiographical Analysis,” Albion Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 15–45; Howard Spodek, “Pluralist Politics in British India: The Cambridge Cluster of Historians of Modern India,” The American Historical Review Vol. 84, No. 3 (1979), pp. 688–95.

16. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

17. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

18. For example, see: Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (London: Verso, 1992); Carol Breckenridge; Peter van der Veer, ed., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).

19. Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).

20. To some degree Foucault has replaced McKim Marriott as the central figure for South Asian anthropological studies. While Marriott was a dedicated scholar of South Asia, neither Foucault nor Gramsci visited or wrote (at any length) on India. Saloni Mathur, “History and Anthropology in South Asia: Rethinking the Archive,” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 29 (2000), p. 93.

21. Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, “Founding Statement,” boundary 2 Vol. 20, No. 3 (1993), pp. 110–21.

22. David Lloyd, “Discussion Outside History: Irish New Histories and the ‘Subalternity Effect’,” in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Subaltern Studies Ix (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

23. Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’,” Social Text, No. 31/32 (1992), pp. 84–98.

24. Shining some light into this seeming intellectual black hole has been Alan Sokal. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998).

25. On subaltern, postmodern and postcolonial scholarship, see: Richard Eaton, “(Re)Imag(in)Ing Other²ness: A Postmortem for the Postmodern in India,” Journal of World History Vol. 11, No. 1 (2000), pp. 57–78; Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” The American Historical Review Vol. 99, No. 5 (1994), pp. 1475–90. See also: Robert Frykenberg, History and Belief (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1996), pp. 278–303.

26. For a recent survey of PhD recipients and their respective disciplines, see: Thomas Hoffer, Vincent Welch, Jr., Kimberly Williams, Mary Hess, Kristy Webber, Brian Lisek, Daniel Loew, and Isabel Guzman-Barron, Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities: Summary Report 2004 (Chicago: NORC at the University of Chicago, 2005).

27. This search is made possible by using JSTOR. I recognize that not every use of the word “India” denotes the article's subject, and also the possibility that the word could be used to refer to Native Americans. Further, not every “hit” in the search is necessarily an article about India's history. Thus, the results here are preliminary and meant only to give a rough estimate of interest and publication about India.

28. John Pickering, “Address at the First Annual Meeting,” Journal of the American Oriental Society Vol. 1, No. 1 (1843), p. 3.

29. The year 1941 is significant because in that year production of the Far Eastern Quarterly began, thus affording historians of India in the United States with ever-increasing avenues for publication.

30. The Association of American University Presses Directory 1990–1991 (New York: The Association of American University Presses, 1994); The Association of American University Presses Directory 1990–1991 (New York: The Association of American University Presses, 1990); The Association of American University Presses Directory 2003–2004 (New York: The Association of American University Presses, 2003), pp. 10–17.

31. Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to Ad 1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Stanley Wolpert, India, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

32. Partha Chatterjee, A Princely Imposter? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Mridu Rai, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

33. For instance, Ian Copland, State, Community and Neighbourhood in Princely North India, C. 1900–1950 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

34. http://www.historians.org.

35. http://www.aasianist.org.

36. http://www.southasia.wisc.edu.

37. http://www.ias.berkeley.edu/southasia.

38. http://www.rockfound.org/AboutUs.

39. http://www.ssrc.org/ssrc_mission.page.

40. http://www.ssrc.org/programs/publications_editors/publications/1996-98_biennial/programs.pdf.

41. http://www.cies.org/about_fulb.htm.

42. http://www.caorc.org/about/fulbri.pdf.

43. http://www.neh.gov.

44. http://www.caorc.org/fellowships/multi/.

45. I am deeply grateful to Elise Auerbach for providing statistical data on AIIS grants, and lists of grant recipients.

46. The following ten schools (one holding a joint appointment) have been and continue to be the major centers for the study of South Asia—including history—in the US. With their start dates, they are: the University of California, Berkeley (1959), the University of Chicago (1959), the University of Pennsylvania (1959), Cornell University (1960) and its joint appointment since 1985, Syracuse University; the University of Texas, Austin (1960), the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1960), the University of Washington, Seattle (1974), the University of Virginia (1976), and Columbia University (1977).

47. The authors of the 9/11 Commission Report recognized Pakistan and South Asia as a vital area for further funding. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/911/pdf/fullreport.pdf.

48. Michael H. Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British, and the Mughals (New Delhi: Manohar, 1987); Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).

49. See the American Association of Community Colleges at www.aacc.nche.edu, and a report by the AHA on historians at community colleges: Nadine Ishitani Hata, Community College Historians in the United States: A Status Report from the Organization of American Historians' Committee on Community Colleges (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1999).

50. For instance see Anderson's work and Chatterjee's reply—neither of them are historians, but both have deeply influenced subsequent historical writing about India in the US and beyond. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

51. Chatterjee, A Princely Imposter?

52. Patterson, “Institutional Base for the Study of South Asia in the United States and the Role of the American Institute of Indian Studies,” p. 43.

53. http://www.nationalarchives.nic.in/register.html.

54. http://www.indianembassy.org/consular/visa_guide.htm.

55. For instance, William Dalrymple witnessed the disappearance (?) of the NAI's Hyderabad papers. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002). See also: Peter Schmitthenner, “A Research Scholar's Perspective on A.P. State Archives,” Deccan Studies Vol. 1, No. 1 (2003), pp. 91–4.

56. http://www.dsal.uchicago.edu/bibliographic/urlc/urlcabout.html.

57. http://www.gutenberg-e.org/about.html.

58. For instance, scholars can search online the British Library as well as the Cambridge University collection of material pertaining to South Asia. See: http://catalogue.bl.uk/F/?func=file&file_name=login-bl-list and http://www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/archome.html.

59. http://www./dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/.

60. http://www.jstor.org/about/.

61. Some account of this can be found in: William Dalrymple, “India: The War over History,” New York Review of Books, April 7, 2005.

62. Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 2005), p. 2. Bold in the original.