11-26-2006, 06:43 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-ramana+Nov 15 2006, 04:18 PM-->QUOTE(ramana @ Nov 15 2006, 04:18 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Indian Historians are not lazy- Irfan Habib
if you read the full article you see that Prof Habib does have his act together. Its the DDM that reports him incorrectly.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A distorted versionĂ‚Â
I have never stated or implied, as your cover claims, that "Indian historians are drab, dull and don't do any research" ('Indian history is full of colour', November 12). This may be the opinion of your headline writer, but I for one have never spoken or written any of these words, and I strongly object to you fabricating these quotes under my name. I am also misquoted by your correspondent within the magazine. In several places he entirely distorted the sense of what I told him.
I made two points about Indian historians. The first was that while there are many very fine scholars at work in India, they do tend to write exclusively for each other, their fellow professionals, and that they have replaced the historical telescope with the microscope.
This is of course perfectly legitimate-after all, history is a place of many mansions-and has led to a great deal of excellent specialist work published in Indian historical journals. But it does mean we have yet to see the emergence of an Indian A.J.P. Taylor or Simon Schama, a Linda Colley or an Orlando Figes, who is willing to use his/her scholarship to make history come alive for the general intelligent middle class reader in fine prose and with a clear style. ?It was this absence of serious accessible history and biography in Indian bookshops that I said had contributed to the growth of so much historical mythology in India-absurd claims that the Taj Mahal is a Shiva temple dating from 500 BC and so on. I do not, as your correspondent has it, attribute the growth of such mythology to feuds between rival academics and competing history departments.
My second point was that a concentration on theory, and the western gaze on the orient, has sometimes led to the marginalisation of empirical research in archives, and especially a relative absence of work on the huge quantities of Urdu and Persian documents that linger unread in Indian archives. I never claimed that I was the first to work on the Mutiny Papers in Delhi, as your report implies. ?As I acknowledge in The Last Mughal, several specialist papers, and a full length biography of Bahadur Shah Zafar in Urdu, have previously been written from the contents of the collection. But of the documents studied by myself and my colleague Mahmood Farooqui over four years of intensive research, fully 75 per cent had never before been requisitioned, as was clear both from the absence of any previous stamps or requisition details on the files in question (the archives list on each file the dates and names of everyone who calls them up), and from the comments of the archivists when we called up the papers.
I am still amazed that a collection as astonishingly rich and beautifully catalogued as the Mutiny Papers, and one located so centrally in the National Archives of the capital city, has been so little consulted when it forms such an essential resource for studying the storm centre of the Uprising-itself the central event in 19th century Indian history, and the destination of 1,00,000 of the 1,39,000 sepoys who in 1857 turned their guns on their officers. ?If The Last Mughal focuses some attention on the collection, and encourages some future Indian Ph.D student to work in this rich field, then the book will have achieved something.
William Dalrymple,
On email.
http://tinyurl.com/y9vdzw<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
if you read the full article you see that Prof Habib does have his act together. Its the DDM that reports him incorrectly.
[right][snapback]60865[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A distorted versionĂ‚Â
I have never stated or implied, as your cover claims, that "Indian historians are drab, dull and don't do any research" ('Indian history is full of colour', November 12). This may be the opinion of your headline writer, but I for one have never spoken or written any of these words, and I strongly object to you fabricating these quotes under my name. I am also misquoted by your correspondent within the magazine. In several places he entirely distorted the sense of what I told him.
I made two points about Indian historians. The first was that while there are many very fine scholars at work in India, they do tend to write exclusively for each other, their fellow professionals, and that they have replaced the historical telescope with the microscope.
This is of course perfectly legitimate-after all, history is a place of many mansions-and has led to a great deal of excellent specialist work published in Indian historical journals. But it does mean we have yet to see the emergence of an Indian A.J.P. Taylor or Simon Schama, a Linda Colley or an Orlando Figes, who is willing to use his/her scholarship to make history come alive for the general intelligent middle class reader in fine prose and with a clear style. ?It was this absence of serious accessible history and biography in Indian bookshops that I said had contributed to the growth of so much historical mythology in India-absurd claims that the Taj Mahal is a Shiva temple dating from 500 BC and so on. I do not, as your correspondent has it, attribute the growth of such mythology to feuds between rival academics and competing history departments.
My second point was that a concentration on theory, and the western gaze on the orient, has sometimes led to the marginalisation of empirical research in archives, and especially a relative absence of work on the huge quantities of Urdu and Persian documents that linger unread in Indian archives. I never claimed that I was the first to work on the Mutiny Papers in Delhi, as your report implies. ?As I acknowledge in The Last Mughal, several specialist papers, and a full length biography of Bahadur Shah Zafar in Urdu, have previously been written from the contents of the collection. But of the documents studied by myself and my colleague Mahmood Farooqui over four years of intensive research, fully 75 per cent had never before been requisitioned, as was clear both from the absence of any previous stamps or requisition details on the files in question (the archives list on each file the dates and names of everyone who calls them up), and from the comments of the archivists when we called up the papers.
I am still amazed that a collection as astonishingly rich and beautifully catalogued as the Mutiny Papers, and one located so centrally in the National Archives of the capital city, has been so little consulted when it forms such an essential resource for studying the storm centre of the Uprising-itself the central event in 19th century Indian history, and the destination of 1,00,000 of the 1,39,000 sepoys who in 1857 turned their guns on their officers. ?If The Last Mughal focuses some attention on the collection, and encourages some future Indian Ph.D student to work in this rich field, then the book will have achieved something.
William Dalrymple,
On email.
http://tinyurl.com/y9vdzw<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->