Event date:
Wednesday 19 October
Time:
13:00
An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Tana Trivedi (CSMCH-IASH Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary History, Ahmedabad University)
An Archive at the Margins: Positing 'Deshi Rajya' as a Counterfactual Narrative
Among the many conventional narratives that have construed our conception of what an independent nation (India in this case) must signify, several historical alternatives that did not fully fruition into reality, must be examined. This examination counterbalances the often ideologically mobilized binaries: the democratic nation-state versus the despotic princely states of India; the modern rational scientific-educational ideal versus the mind-numbingly scholastic, decadent and regressive models of traditional knowledge systems. My efforts at decoloniality seek to respond to such extreme binaries and defend, or interpretively revive, dubious models of what is considered to be a decolonial alternative. Examining the archives pertaining to the Princely States of British India, who were all, at that juncture of time, aspiring candidates for being bestowed some or the other form of sovereign republic statehood that today they have been relegated to the antiques of history does not take away from the fact that the current-day republic of India was but one option among many, and an option executed due to a combination of factors, and that there was nothing normatively compulsory or historically inescapable about this specific alternative. These "counterfactual republics" continue to exert pressure on contemporary polity in several ways, sometimes as demands for statehood, sometimes as rallying positions for political parties, and sometimes as specific policy directions. The objective of my paper, therefore, is to examine the existing archives of the princely states of Kathiawar/Saurashtra (Gujarat) from the early 20th century, especially focussing on the political discussions chronicled in the vernacular journal, Deshi Rajya. Published by Jayantilal Morarji Mehta from Nadiad, this journal claimed to be “The Only Monthly discussing questions pertaining to Indian States From A Constructive Point of View”. Published for over a decade between 1928-1940, this journal chronicles some significant perspectives from a wide range of contributors belonging to the princely states of India. Contemporary historian Gyan Prakash, offers a way in which recent postcolonial criticism challenges the existing historiography. He says, “Reading colonial and nationalist archives against their grain and focusing on their blind spots, silences, and anxieties, these (subaltern theorists) seek to uncover the subaltern’s myths, cults, ideologies, and revolts that colonial and nationalist elite sought to appropriate and conventional historiography has laid to waste by the deadly weapon of cause and effect.” It is to this end that my paper endeavours to examine the archives that have been exiled to the margins of mainstream Indian history in terms of language, content and significance, thereafter critically reinscribing them within an understanding of the Indian nation.