The Gyanendra Pandey Omnibus
Gyanendra Pandey, editor
The three books brought together in this omnibus may be said to describe an arc that runs from a critique of nationalism to a critique of history. They are unified by an attention to two questions: first, “Whose ‘nation’ do we write of when we write of nations?” and secondly, “Whose history?” or “What kind of history?” They lead on, by that means, to a fundamental inquiry about what is reckoned as significant and consequential in human affairs, what counts as the historical, and what as the archive – an inquiry that is adjacent to feminist and other evaluations of the supposed boundaries of the political.
At the time of their first publication, each of the books presented in this collection appeared to be swimming against the tide of historiographical orthodoxy. The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh directly challenged the received understanding of an always already incipient popular struggle for the establishment of an always already known, or pre-destined, Indian nation. In it, I attempted to unravel the layered character of Indian nationalism, and underlined the contestation between classes, communities and aspirations that went into the forging of the anti-colonial movement. I sought to demonstrate too that localized peasant protests, like much else that was passed off as ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ effervescence in the existing literature, were very much part of the contemporary political struggle and critical to the making of the broader nationalist movement.
The second work, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, dealt with the colonial and postcolonial conceptualization, as well as the ‘everyday’ enactment, of Hindu-Muslim difference. In asking questions about the relationship between communalism and nationalism, I argued that what is called communalism in the subcontinent gained a great deal of its force from its likeness to nationalism, that these are contradictory yet related ways of conceptualizing the political world, thinking political futures and fighting for particular political arrangements.
In subsequent work, I have turned to a more direct investigation of the question of collective violence, and the history and memory of political violence in the making of communities and nations – in the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. In the third book included in this omnibus, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, I tracked the debates on a moment of ‘extraordinary’ violence in the recent history of the subcontinent. My attempt was simultaneously to portray both the enormity of Partition violence and the impossibility of describing it. As in all my other work, Remembering Partition asked questions about the histories that are claimed as the ‘real’ histories of India, the construction of the ‘normalized’ nation, its (‘mainstream’) culture and politics, its collective amnesia – and how such amnesia is produced.