Tag: history

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Issue 18

What Constitutes a Constitution?

“India requires a new constitution…I firmly believe that so many nations have rewritten their Constitutions whenever they felt it necessary. They have got new Constitutions. Now, there is a need in this country to pursue a new Constitution of India. Our slogan will be ‘Naya Soch, Nayi Disha, Naya Samvidhan (new thinking, new direction, and new Constitution).’” A mere week after India’s 72nd anniversary of adopting the Constitution, this proclamation by Telangana Chief Minister, K. Chandrashekhar Rao seems both provocative and confusing. KCR buttresses his claim by stating that “people’s expectations haven’t been met” in the past 75 years, which invalidates the utility of the present constitution. But how would a new constitution help in meeting those expectations? Is it even the point of a constitution to meet “people’s expectations?” Further, what is the relationship between a constitution and political outcomes?

The comments seem slightly more understandable in the context of KCR’s grievance against the centre, as it constantly overlooks and overrides the constitutional powers mandated to state governments. Yet, that grievance catapults to a desire for “newness” as a sort of panacea: a new constitution will solve everything that plagues the country, much like a project of remodelling Lutyens’ Delhi becomes the key to national rejuvenation. Replicating both the current dispensation’s logic of needlessly introducing novelty and its penchant for alliterative sloganeering, KCR seems to be speaking in the language of the very central government he seeks to oppose.

KCR’s call-to-arms elicited condemnation from across the political arena. Curiously, leading the charge is BJP MP from Telangana, Bandi Sanjay Kumar. In a series of tweets criticising the Chief Minister’s “abusive” attitude towards the Prime Minister and the constitution, Kumar ends with: “BJP abides by Dr. B.R Ambedkar’s Constitution and will never allow it to become vulnerable to the machinations of megalomaniacs like KCR.” One might concede sincerity to Kumar’s opposition to “megalomaniacs like KCR;” but leaving the Constitution vulnerable to the machinations of other kinds of megalomaniacs must certainly be fair game for Kumar.

What with the overt violations of legal procedure and convention, the authoritarian capture of otherwise autonomous institutions, like the Election Commission, military, and even the judiciary, along with a proliferation of hate-speech and atrocities against religious minorities and oppressed groups across the country over the past seven years. It is difficult to believe, then, that the BJP abides, in any measure, by “Dr. B.R Ambedkar’s Constitution,” as it unabashedly flouts the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity installed within our Preamble. Instead, Kumar’s comments stem not from a commitment to constitutional morality, but a treatment of the constitution as a sacred relic rather than a readable document, whose spirit might founder some of the foundational assumptions behind Kumar’s own political ideology.

Both KCR and Kumar, then, seem to leave us with two models of thinking about the constitution: it is either treated as a means to an end—the achievement of particular political and economic outcomes that the current document has failed to ensure—or defended as an object of almost religious reverence, ironically failing to take its actual text seriously. Either a tool, or a sacrament. But are there other ways of thinking about the constitution, other forms of envisioning our relationship to it as citizens? To hark back to an earlier set of questions, what is the purpose of a constitution? Can we ‘defend’ the constitution without worshipping it or resisting suggestions of change?

Without necessarily answering these questions in any direct manner, I’d like to turn attention to a phrase that I just used: constitutional morality. This seemingly self-explanatory term—a moral commitment to the constitution, or the morality enshrined within it—appears as an object of critical inquiry in various discourses of constitutionality. The most relevant instance of the phrase comes from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s citation of the classicist George Grote, in his speech ‘The Draft Constitution,’ delivered on 4 November 1948: “By constitutional morality, Grote meant… a paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution, enforcing obedience to authority and acting under and within these forms…”

It is difficult to do justice to the entire complex of ideas that this abbreviated sentence presents, but what is particularly interesting is the repeated use of the term ‘form.’ For Grote, reverence is enacted not simply to the constitution but its forms. However bitterly opposed different political factions may be, they must share a belief in the sacredness of the form of the constitution. This belief becomes constitutional morality itself.

It is the form of the constitution, then, and not just the sum of laws contained within it—it’s content—that should gain prominence in our evaluation of it. The form of the constitution doesn’t merely refer to the framing of a legal document; it bleeds into a socio-political and intellectual space, and the conditions on which the functioning of that space is premised. Thus, we might disagree about the validity of certain laws—the current debates on marital rape, or the infamous section-377, repealed shamefully recently, bear testament to the existence of reprehensible legal statutes—or be disillusioned by the dissonance between the vision of the constitution and the lack of its actualisation. But to truly respect the constitution is not to defer to a specific set of rules or axioms; it is to consider seriously the process of encountering difference, listening to dissenting voices, and respecting the dignity of each individual that undergirds its very composition: what forms a constitution.
Yet, as we collectively acquiesce to a project of annihilating difference, where democracy is preserved merely as a catalyst for demagoguery, we are moving further away from this vision of constitutional morality, a vision that Pratap Bhanu Mehta expands upon in his lecture titled ‘What is constitutional morality?’: “In the face of difference, the only point of unanimity that one can seek is over an appropriately designed adjudicative process…What the parties have to agree to, as Ambedkar recognizes over and over, is an allegiance to a constitutional form, not an allegiance to a particular substance.” It is precisely this ‘adjudicative process’ whose downfall we witness today in the relentless erosion of institutional authority. Far more dangerous, however, is the ruling dispensation’s singular allegiance to its own ideological substance that threatens to deform the constitution to its very core.

Adit Shankar is a first-year masters student of English at Ashoka University. His writing has previously appeared in Scroll, and he is interested in the politics and literature of South Asia.

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Issue 12

An extract from India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present

Chapter 1: page 16-18

“The postmodernists would like us to believe that Indian history is what we make it or are the narratives that we choose to tell ourselves and believe. I beg to differ. History is like a map, an imperfect reflection of a larger objective reality that, over time and with improvements in the historian’s art, becomes clearer and more representative of an objective reality that did exist and certainly seemed to exist to earlier generations in history. That map is important to us in looking at India’s foreign and security policies because we choose, decide, and act on the basis of the map of our own experience, or the history, that we carry in our heads. Perception matters. And when perception does not match objective reality, policy errs or fails.

The problem is that several generations in India have been taught a version of history that ignores that India has for much of its past been well connected to the world and its prosperity and security have waxed and waned in direct proportion to that link. That may be because the regions that undertook these contacts with the rest of the world, what historians call coherent core areas, that is, areas characterized by stable, long-term political and cultural institutions, such as Bengal and Gujarat and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, have been ignored or downplayed in these historical narratives in favor of the relatively insular Indo-Gangetic plain and the region around Delhi, partly because a version of Indian history written by those loyal to the British empire dominated the field. It is only in the last few years that younger scholars have begun to study these less recognized regions seriously.

The simplistic history written by historians loyal to the British empire legitimized British rule by making Indian history a continuous sequence of alien empires and conquerors. This saga of empires was periodized by religion, and caste was emphasized, disregarding the fact that the ruling elite was always of mixed religious persuasion and origins, and that assimilation and social mobility were both possible and practiced.

It amazes me that some Indians—despite having been shown alternative and more cogent lines of enquiry—persist in this religious characterization and accept the simplified history foisted on us. Certain historians and writers in India still contribute to the misrepresentation of India in history as an autonomous world apart, driven by religion and its own logic, and different from the rest of the world. One has only to look at the practice and the linkages with the world of the Mauryas, Kushanas, Guptas, Delhi Sultanate, and Moghuls to see how misleading this representation is. And these entities were carrying on a tradition of engagement stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the Middle East, the Roman empire and the Mediterranean Sea, central Asia, China, and southeast Asia inherited from the Indus valley civilization in the third and second millennium BCE. India was not “a world apart,” but a complex civilization involved in myriad exchanges—of goods, ideas, and peoples—with the surrounding world.

But this is only one part of India’s true geopolitical inheritance. Kalidasa described the ideal rulers of the Raghukula as asamudra kshitiesanam, or those whose territories extended to the sea shore. The Satavahanas used the title Trisamudrapati, or Lords of the Three Seas. Including the history of the other regions in our consideration gives us a very different historical legacy that forms an increasingly important element of our strategic culture and driver of our policy choices. If you see Indian history as Delhi-centered, you will make the mistake that many of us make, of believing, as K. M. Panikkar said, that “India has, throughout history, had trouble arousing much interest in the world beyond its borders,” which he contrasted to British attentiveness to developments around the Raj. The coastal tradition in India, on the other hand, has seen outward projections of power, influence, and culture throughout its history.

Once you include southern and western India and Bengal and Orissa, the strength of India’s links with the rest of the world, going back to 2600 BCE, become clear. Ptolemy attests to this in the second century CE, while Pliny in mid-first century CE grumbles about gold and silver draining away to India from the Roman empire for luxury goods, a problem that the British also had in the early days of trading with India, until they discovered the uses of opium.

The reach and extent of the soft and hard power of non-Gangetic regions of India in both mainland and archipelagic southeast Asia are visible to this day in the great ruins of Angkor Wat and Borobudur, on the walls of the Vaikuntha Perumal temple in Kanchipuram and in Hampi, and in the living culture of our countries. The Cholas’ activist external policies and willing militarism enabled them to last from the third century BCE to the thirteenth century CE, longer than any dynasty in the Gangetic valley. Their example was actively followed by the Pandyan (sixth century BCE to twelfth century CE) and Pallava (third to ninth century CE) dynasties. The same is also true of the reach and influence of some Gangetic or Indus valley-based political entities like the Mauryas or Kushanas as the spread of Buddhism overland to the Pacific and the Mediterranean attests. Vijayanagara flourished and grew prosperous on its trade with central, west, and southeast Asia. The Mughals, for their part, played an active role in central Asian politics, too. This is a strong, continuous, and abiding legacy of engagement beyond the subcontinent. As long as the Indian Ocean was an open, competitive space, peninsular India was relatively secure. The Mughals punished the Portuguese for piracy by limiting their activity on land, advantaging their competitors, the English, French, Dutch, and Danes. When Britain managed a relative monopoly on trade in the Indian Ocean following the Carnatic Wars with the French, it became possible for Britain to translate maritime control into predominance on land.”

Shivshankar Menon is an Indian diplomat, who has served as the National Security Advisor to the Indian Prime Minister from January 2010 to May 2014. He has previously served as the Foreign Secretary of India (2006-09), High Commissioner of India to Sri Lanka (1997-2000), and Pakistan (2003-06) as well as Ambassador of India to Israel (1995-97), and China (2000-2003). He is the author of “Choices: Inside the Making of Indian Foreign Policy” (2016), and “India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present” (2021). He is currently a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University.

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Issue 8

Whose History Is It Anyway? – A Call For Inclusive Heritage Conservation

There exists a fine line between history and heritage. Our history, according to the books, lives in stone monuments and larger-than-life structures. It consists of towering monuments, expansive halls and rustic motifs. It speaks of kings and kingdoms, riches and grandeur, wars and battles. As for our heritage – it is all that lies  in between. It is in the pages of recipe books of food we eat, the letters we write, the medicines we take. It is in stories we share, songs we sing and the gossip we whisper. It exists not behind the plexiglass of museums, but within us – our communities and families. Our heritage is our history. However, we often tend to forget the role we ordinary people have played in our history. While the preservation of monuments and structures is important, it has resulted in this separation between the people and their history – a separation fostered by dusty, glass-encased, cement-ridden ruins that dot the expanse of most of India, especially New Delhi which is home to over 3000 historical monuments and sites. Historical preservation in India currently does not attempt to bridge this gap between people’s heritage and history, instead focuses merely on preserving monuments as ruins to be admired from afar. To create an environment where heritage is not only admired but lived in, conservation needs to be inclusive of the people and the culture that has sustained the very monument that is being preserved. 

The historical architecture of Delhi spans centuries of civilization, starting from the 12th century (or even earlier, according to some historians) under the Delhi Sultanate. From the Qutub Minar and the Red Fort, to Mirza Ghalib’s tomb and Roshanara’s gardens, to the Kotla Mubarakpur fort – it has an architectural legacy that almost mirrors the plurality of its culture. However, the upkeep and restoration of these monuments leave much to be desired. As heritage enthusiast Sohail Hashmi puts it, “There isn’t enough understanding of how to go about conserving heritage at the governmental level, nor are there ever enough funds for the Archaeological Survey of India”. 

Even the process of conservation and restoration of monuments has often displayed a lack of expertise from the ASI. Monuments deserve special restoration techniques since the materials that were used in their construction are different from what we use now, and the ravages of time and elements have rendered these monuments delicate. Sohail Hashmi explains how “in the 2010 Commonwealth Games, 27 monuments were selected around Delhi to receive a facelift, and the ASI was tasked with that, to be completed within two weeks. The original plaster used in the monuments would take a year to dry if used properly, and so the ASI, placed in a difficult situation, used cement on these structures. It ruined those monuments”. 

The deprived nature of the government’s heritage conservation infrastructure hardly allows for engagement with historical monuments. Most structures in Delhi have a few plaques around the heritage compound explaining the basic history of the place, but nothing further. For a city that is oozing with historical significance at every street corner, it is an affront for Delhiites to not be more aware of the heritage they’re living around. However, the entire blame for such  negligence cannot be placed on the ASI and the Indian government. For decades, the decisions on which monuments to preserve and related methodology  have been taken based on the procedure established by the British colonialists, meaning that monuments requiring protection  were chosen based on what the British felt was worth preserving. “So while the Qutub Minar was deemed worthy of conservation, the adjacent caravanserai that was built in the 17th Century was broken down by the British because they didn’t believe it was worth preserving,” Sohail Hashmi continues. 

The city of Shahjahanabad, a bustling region dating back to the period of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan is now but a shadow of its previous self. Several other monuments lay forgotten and ruined around Delhi’s landscape.

The restored face of Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan’s Tomb

One such monument is Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan’s tomb in the Nizamuddin East region. Built during the 16th century by one of Akbar’s famous courtiers for his wife, it had been reduced to a dilapidated ruin in the last few centuries. It was not until the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) began its work under the Nizamuddin Renewal Project that the structure was restored and with it, a new process of restoration was brought about.

Interior motifs of Abdul Rahim Tomb

This process prioritises the restoration of monuments to their former glory, keeping in mind the methods and craftsmanship that had been used earlier. It thinks of conservation as serving the purpose of not just preserving history, but also making the structures useful in the present. The Abdur Rahim tomb, for instance, employed craftsmen skilled in the art of carefully restoring every motif on the dome and walls of the tomb, putting in almost 1,75,000 man-days of work. The work by the AKTC also included bringing back to life Rahim’s history, his poetry and his significant role in the Mughal court. It provided visitors and citizens of Delhi with a wholesome experience of the history of the place, its aesthetic beauty as well as its living heritage. The AKTC has worked similarly in places such as the Sunder Nursery, Humayun’s Tomb, Isa Khan’s tomb and other structures in the Nizamuddin region. Alongside archaeological restoration, the Nizamuddin Renewal Project focuses on enhancing the importance of the Nizamuddin Basti itself as a living heritage region and attempting to liven up its heritage value through food, music, and cultural traditions of the people living in it.

Sunder Nursery Post-Restoration
Isa Khan Mausoleum after Restoration

India is a country with a rich heritage, one that deserves not only to be protected but also cherished. While we are miles away from sustaining an inclusive development and conservation strategy in every monument and historical site in the country, we are on the right path. Projects like Aga Khan’s are required in other areas while aiming to protect our heritage. The restoration of our country’s heritage requires the government to invest in a manner that actively involves locals as stakeholders. With community engagement at its core, historic preservation can be turned into a culturally as well as economically profitable venture for the government and local residents. 

Picture Credits: Nayana Vachhani

Akanksha Mishra is a second-year political science and media studies student at Ashoka University. 

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Issue 7

Museums of Democracy: How the Central Vista Project highlights the Importance of Curating History

This is primarily because any history we read, hear, or watch, is refracted, it is shaped by the person or thought process that is engaged in the exercise of compiling it. The difference between History with the capital ‘H’ and history as everything that happened in the past is crucial. The former is carefully picked out from the latter – a series of events  and artefacts chosen to tell a story. The historian then carefully selects these ‘chosen ones’ to help shape the narrative they wish to see furthered; a narrative that is intrinsically based on the politics of the day.

The question raised then is why should someone care about this act of selection now? The answer is simple, everyday instances like the renaming of roads, the demolition of buildings and the rebuilding of common spaces reinforce this act of selection. One such undertaking that makes one stop and think about this is the Central Vista Redevelopment Project.

The project aims to renovate 86 acres of land in New Delhi, including historical buildings like the Parliament House, the Rashtrapati Bhawan, and the India Gate. Moreover, the National Museum is also set to be taken down and rebuilt where the current North and South Blocks stand in the Central Secretariat. The area, associated with affluence and political power is commonly called Lutyens Delhi after the architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker who designed it when the capital was shifted to Delhi in 1911 under the British rule.

Ever since its announcement in September 2019 by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, the project has come under scrutiny for violations of municipal and environmental law as well as change in land use. Following this, the Supreme Court gave it the green light in January 2021. Close to a month prior to January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation of a new Parliament building under a Hindu ceremony. The ceremony itself was allowed when the government reassured the court that no demolition or construction would begin until the final decision had been received. 

The focus of this article, however, is to draw attention to something that seems fairly inconspicuous at first but can have lasting impacts on how we associate our present with our past. The act of demolition and consequently rebuilding employs the historical process mentioned earlier – that of selection and by extension erasure of what gets chosen to be rebuilt and featured. With the National Museum for instance, the idea is that North and South Blocks will be able to house more historical artefacts. However, which artefacts are highlighted and how are questions that remain to be answered. 

The entire episode reminds me of something Susan Sontag said in relation to photography – “[To photograph] means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.” While she was talking about the act of framing something within photographic borders, the idea at its crux seems especially relevant here – when somebody controls the framing of the past, they wield power. Perhaps, therefore, the same self-reflectivity is required for the curation of renovated spaces.

While the words ‘heritage’, ‘redevelopment’ and ‘conservation’ paint rosy pictures in one’s mind about the building of new spaces, they actually point to the larger question of historical knowledge production. Buildings and architecture has always been used to assert power, symbolise progress and display grandeur. The act of rebuilding is not unique either, as history is replete with examples of the same. That being said, the question, especially with an edifice like the National Museum is its current housing of historical artefacts, and the process of curation that will go into the remade property. 

While the aforementioned already acts as a repository of history, the other buildings like the current Parliament House are receptacles of public memory of post-colonial India while themselves being colonial products. The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) is a prime example of a building set to be taken down which is associated with the memory of a former Prime Minister. Founded by Kapila Vatsyayan, it is a space where art has found expression during nationally significant events. Keeping the relevance of these in mind therefore becomes important as contemporary history may be memory for now, but it will not remain so for the coming decades. This highlights the importance of preserving not just historical remains but also elements of post-independence public memory that have not become canonical History yet.

Preserving public memory, if nothing else, can create context. They point to the uncomfortable understanding that even if features do not fit proposed narratives, they cannot be razed. For instance, the reason behind the decision to withdraw the candidature of colonial Delhi and Shahjahanabad as UNESCO World Heritage sites in 2014 has been traced by some to their legacies rooted in the Mughal period and the colonial era. While the legacies may cause discomfort to some, their significance cannot be dismissed.

The Central Vista Project sheds light on the importance of history and public memory. The fact is that the past cannot speak for itself. Whatever the past says, it does through the actors who consolidate it. The thing to keep in mind then in light of the project is this – demolishing heritage buildings should not open up the passageway to raze history.

Sanya is a student of History, International Relations and Media Studies at Ashoka University.

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Uncategorized

My Son’s Inheritance: India’s Invisible Violence

By Aparna Vaidik

Published by Association for Asian Studies on Thursday, August 27 2020.

Mahatma Gandhi and the philosophy of non-violence are facets of Indian history that have inspired generations of world leaders from Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela to Martin Luther King Jr. Also perpetuating this image of India as a land of non-violence and tolerance are some other facets of India’s history such as the conversion of the ancient Emperor Ashoka Maurya to Buddhism; his adoption of non-violence as a state policy in 3rd century B.C.; and the existence of a composite culture known as the “Ganga-Jamni sanskriti” (the comingling of waters of rivers Ganga and Yamuna), a referent to the peaceful Hindu and Muslim cultural intermixing in the Subcontinent. Indian public intellectuals from Amartya Sen to Shashi Tharoor have invoked these elements of India’s historical past to debunk majoritarianism, to decry communal conflict, and to critique right-wing political agendas.

Violence, if at all examined, is primarily done through the Weberian lens by studying state actions such as battles, wars, or political retribution. Other than that, it is the episodes of communitarian riots, gender violence, and subaltern resistance that are scrutinized. Seeing violence as episodic phenomenon, on the one hand, pathologizes it as an aberration or turns it into an exception in need of an explanation; and, on the other, reinforces the presumption that Indian society is fundamentally peaceful, non-violent, and tolerant. My Son’s Inheritance: A Secret History of Lynching and Blood Justice in India challenges this munificent image of India to show that the ubiquity of violence has rendered it banal and thereby historically invisible. It asks, how is the violence not visible? Why is it invisibilised? How does it turn into a secret? What allows the unconscious denial of the existence of violence? Who are the recipients and witnesses of this violence? Finally, what is this violence?

My Son’s Inheritance traverses several centuries and explores the history of Vaishnavism and warrior cults in northern India; the history of Arya Samaj, a nineteenth-century reformist organization; the role of a violent cow-protection movement in forging the Hindu majoritarian identity; and the myths of Hinduism that invisibilised the oppression of the lower castes in the Subcontinent. It uses pamphlets, popular publications, prints, poetry, and myths, as well as my own family history, to offer a cultural reading of violence. The book demonstrates how violence is secretly embedded in our myths, folklore, poetry, literature, and language, and is therefore invisible. Framing my narrative as a message to my son, I acquaint him with his ancestors—those who abet and carry out lynching as well as those who are lynched. In this way, the “son,” a metaphor, embodies both the violator and the violated, much like the country in which he will come of age. The book lays bare the heritage of violence bequeathed from generation to generation and disabuses us of the myth that holds nonviolence and tolerance as being the essence of Indian culture.

The book argues that perpetrators of this violence have not always been the state, the rulers, the police, or the army, but the ordinary Indian who thinks of India and Hinduism, the majoritarian religion of the Subcontinent, as tolerant, spiritual, and non-violent. This person is often the silent witness or a bystander to whom the violence in Indian society remains invisible. In doing so, the book addresses the “banality of evil,” a phrase coined by philosopher Hannah Arendt. She argues it was not just the big generals and the Nazi party officers who were responsible for the Jewish holocaust, or Shoah, but also the normal, ordinary, everyday people who went about their everyday lives, did their jobs and obeyed the laws. It is easier to understand the mind of thinkers and ideologues but, as Arendt shows, it is immensely hard to fathom the mind of an ordinary person. Carlo Ginzberg has attempted this in The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, which seeks to understand an ordinary miller’s notions of how the cosmos came into being. In a similar vein, My Son’s Inheritance examines an ordinary law-abiding Indian’s mentality that either denies the existence of violence or sees it as something that foreigners or wrongdoers indulge in.

The inheritance of this violence, the book demonstrates, comes to us in a form of a secret, a secret that is hidden in plain sight. It is visible and yet we don’t see it. Once the secret is unveiled the question of atonement or redemption comes up: How do we redeem ourselves? How do we atone? According to My Son’s Inheritance, atonement lies in Indians owning up to their history of violence. The choice is to either hide one’s shame and generate even more violence, or to own up to one’s historical shame and break the silence around violence. For it is our silence borne out of privilege that perpetuates violence.

This is a crossover book written as creative non-fiction. A nagging worry as I embarked on this project regarded crafting the narrative. After writing years of staid academic prose, I felt unsure about transitioning into a more conversational narrative style. Surprisingly, it was much easier than I had imagined. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and James Baldwin’s A Letter to My Nephew served as narrative inspiration. Choosing a creative narrative strategy also required me to make “travel-style” field trips, first to my hometown, Indore in Central India and, second, to the ancestral shrine in the small town in Rajasthan. The histories of both places are woven into the book’s narrative. I was now seeing them with the eyes of a writer.

As I started conceptualizing this project, the question for me was how do I tell stories of violence? How do I narrate stories of conflict in a non-conflictual manner? How do I not fill the hearts of the audience with hate in talking about hate? How do I persuade people to pause and examine their own complicity in perpetuating structures of violence? These questions were also arising from the loss of my belief in the persuasive power of the historical mode of narration. For a while I had felt that we needed to tell historical narratives differently, ones that were more accessible to the public. This book is an acknowledgement of the fact that we as social scientists and humanists are accountable to not only one’s peers and the institutions we serve but also to the society and the times we live in.

This article was first written for https://www.asianstudies.org/. The author has commissioned it for use by OpenAxis.

Aparna Vaidik is a decorated academic and an Assistant Professor of History at Ashoka University (India). Here she writes about her new book My Son’s Inheritance: A Secret History of Lynching and Blood Justice in India (Aleph, 2020).

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).