: Revisiting Rana Safvi’s Delhi trilogy shows how her books capture long-term history, not moments #IndiaNEWS In these present times, we are reeling under the surfeit of material that purports to be

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Revisiting Rana Safvi’s Delhi trilogy shows how her books capture long-term history, not moments #IndiaNEWS
In these present times, we are reeling under the surfeit of material that purports to be – and in many cases, passes for – history. Within the academic domain itself, Ranajit Guha had pointed out this trend, back in 2005, tracing the prodigious manufacture of monographs, research papers, books and periodicals largely to the great upsurge of interest in the past in South Asian nations, in the wake of the Second World War and decolonisation. In the decade-and-half that has followed Guha’s article, this “excess of history� has in fact sustained and widened, particularly in India – a good deal of it, middling to diminished in quality– pulp fiction set in historical periods, films, television and web-channel series, not to mention statist and programmatic attempts at revisitations of history, all of it vying for attention, with more serious or academic publications, rooted in authenticity.But even on the front of academic research, there is a challenge. A shift towards “short-term history�, the sharpening of focus to very specific events, via a continual shortening of both timeframes and locales – a vogue in historical research that Jo Guldi and David Armitage have been pained to note in The History Manifesto. Taken to its logical conclusion, history-writing...Read more

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