Dipesh Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty is an Indian historian and leading scholar of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies. He is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in history at the University of Chicago, and is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, named after Professor Arnold J.

Quotes

• It is true, as some modern historians have complained, that (Jadunath) Sarkar’s patriotic voice—the voice of “the true son of India”—is sometimes hard to distinguish from other kinds of patriotism that may have been actually present in the eighteenth century. Thus, when Mirza Muhammad Shafi, a mir bakshi (army minister) to the emperor and “the last fighting army chief of the empire”, was slain through “the blackest treachery” by Muhammad Beg Hamadani, a Mughalia sardar (chief), on 23 September 1783, Sarkar has the Maratha envoy “aptly describing” the situation: “Muhammad Shafi is dead. All Hindustan is lying bare. No sword for fighting is left in India.”
  • The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth [1]

• But Sarkar is also being a ventriloquist here. The deliberate mixing of his authorial voice with that of the Maratha envoy produces a cultivated ambiguity, but the two types of patriotism can be analytically separated. The Maratha envoy’s anguish would not have been tied in any way to a modern sense of, or a desire for, the nation. But then again, we would also be aware of the ambiguity of the word nation that allowed Sarkar to thus mix up sentiments belonging to very different historical periods. He would say of the “Jat state” during the “prudent reigns of Badan Singh and Suraj Mal” that its prospects of enjoying “a period of peaceful recuperation and progress” were destroyed by factors internal to the community: “A nation’s greatest enemy is within, not without.” Similarly, “internal quarrels and lack of statesmanship and even of intelligent self-interest among their leaders …so often ruined the national cause of the Marathas.”
  • The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth [2]

• The project of Subaltern Studies would have been unthinkable without the vibrant tradition of Marxist historiography in India.
  • Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical ... Dipesh Chakrabarty · 2009