Re)Imagining India: A Study on Nineteenth-Century Colonial Historiography

Abstract

The differences between Indian and British (by and large, the Western) historiography have been much discussed in post-colonial academia. The leitmotif that the early Indians were preoccupied with imagination was reinforced through and through to the point of celebration.  But was the predominance of imagination so unique to the pre-colonial Indian practice of historiography? With the recent upsurge of revisionist historiography, old scholarships are again being summoned from academia to the public domain to deconstruct the long-held constant. This paper critically examines the historiography of the nineteenth century and especially nineteenth-century Bengal to revisit this question and, in doing so, considers deconstructive forays into history, particularly Alan Munslow and Ethan Kleinberg’s reflections, to develop its argument.