"Boundaries of History" - Rama Mantena: "Founding Archives: Conquest and History in Colonial India"

Abstract: "My work on the origins of modern historiography in India centers on the emergence of new practices of history and history writing in the context of the socio-political crisis brought about by British colonialism. I attempt to uncover the tension at the heart of imperial conquest between destruction and preservation. With regards to historical preservation and the creation of archives, the very same tension lay at the heart of colonial archives, where the productive nature of archives was intermittently cut by the constraints placed on Indian pasts by those very same archives. Colonial archives ranged from the records of the state—those records devoted to the transactions of the state, primarily its bureaucracy—to the collections of texts and manuscripts held or preserved by the state in the interests of preserving the pasts of the Indian subcontinent. My focus will be the latter preservation efforts by the colonial state".

Moderator: Prof. Alexander M. Semyonov
Working language: English
Address: 17 Promyshlennaya St., room 412
Contact email: vepopov@hse.ru

---

 

Rama Mantena's research interests include colonial archives and the production of knowledge, historiography and the practices of history, and more recently public spheres, publicity and debates over civil society in Twentieth-century India. At UIC, she teaches survey and thematic courses on Modern India, on nationalism, colonialism, the British Empire, and women and gender in Indian history. Her first book The Origins of Modern Historiography in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) examines everyday practices surrounding acts of collecting, surveying, and antiquarianism in the early period of British colonial rule in India. By examining early imperial strategies of producing historical knowledge, the book traces the colonial conditions of the production of “sources,” the forging of a new historical method, and the ascendance of positivist historiography in nineteenth-century India. Her new book project, Political Futures and the Ends of Empire, aims to rethink the period between empire and nation, the early decades of the twentieth century, in which one witnesses the expansion of vernacular publics, of cultures of democratic participation in defining and negotiating not only multifarious cultural identities, but also their relationship to the past, the confrontation of societal inequities, challenging traditional orthodoxies—all of which in effect usher in a heightened era of liberalism and the increased use of the language of political rights and self-determination with open-ended political futures. The book is an attempt to braid together narratives of civil societal discussions on political life and citizenship with proposals of federated arrangements and calls for provincial autonomy using the particular case of the Princely state of Hyderabad and the emergence of provincial nationalism in neighboring Madras Presidency.