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A History of the Present
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2010
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In his comments Kunal Parker has framed my article within what he calls the “ontology of colonialism as difference.” He argues that my article “fits squarely” within a “self-consciously postcolonial scholarship” that in recent decades has been centrally concerned with “the rendering of colonialism as difference.” My research in this article, however, was neither inspired nor guided by the historiography of difference. Indeed Parker's framing of my article in these terms prevents him from seeing the most important claims in it. If I were to characterize the nature of my essay in terms of a genre of historiography, I would place it in the genre of the history of the present. My aim in this article, which is part of a larger project, was to make the postcolonial political formation in India intelligible in the light of its pre-independence historical origins. While most historians of modern India terminate their research at 1947, the year of India's independence, assuming postcolonial political development to be inaccessible to historical research, most studies by political scientists have taken 1947 as their point of departure, as if the postcolonial political formation had emerged fully formed without any history. My larger project seeks to break through this historiographical barrier and make postcolonial India accessible to historical research.
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References
1. See Mithi Mukherjee, “Justice, War, and the Imperium: India and Britain in Edmund Burke's Prosecutorial Speeches in the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings,” and Parker, Kunal M., “The Historiography of Difference,” Law and History Review 23 (2005): 589–630CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 685–95. Parker's critique seems to be addressed more to Uday Mehta's reading of Burke in his Liberalism and Empire than to the specificities of my arguments. See Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).Google Scholar Although Parker seems to be aware of the difference between my arguments and Mehta's when he says, “Mukherjee's major contribution is in showing that Burke did not restrict himself to exhorting his fellow Britons to approach Indians’ difference with respect, but went further insofar as he sought to concretize his impulses in a vision of the politico-legal structure of empire.” However, when he comes to his critique, Parker lapses back into responding to Mehta's concern about liberalism and the question of difference. Our concerns are very different. My first encounter with Burke's speeches in the trial occurred in the process of pursuing the lineages of the Indian National Congress and its mode of politics while working on my M.Phil dissertation at Jawaharlal Nehru University. See Mukherjee, Mithi, “From Pleader to Leader: Legal Practice and the Birth of Politics in India (1772–1920),” M. Phil. dissertation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 1992Google Scholar.
2. See Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar ; Guha, Ranajit, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar ; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
3. Basu, D. D., Shorter Constitution of India (New Delhi: Prentice Hall of India, 1988), 272.Google Scholar