Morality and Cognition in Historical Thought: A Western Perspective

40Historically Speaking · March 2004 history." In effect, this meant concedingthat history as such was a purely Western invention , and that all other approaches to the past in other cultures had to be hyphenated with terms such as "ethno-" because they could only be understood through the prism of a handful of "indigenous" concepts. Dirks's approach was to provide plot summaries of the narratives that he used, which were often themselves derived from colonial translations; at any rate, he eschewed any close reading of the texts themselves, and certainly had no access to their narrative texture. Dirks had two principal objections to Textures ofTime. First, he could not accept that works such as those which we cited were in fact written by karanams, since he had seen references in the colonial archives to other sorts of authors, notably sannyans and renouncers of the late 18th century. But Dirks was apparently not aware that a renouncer might in fact have been something else at another point in his fife. Second, Dirks (and here he was joined by several other like-minded members ofhis group) sawin ourprojectan attemptto bring pre-colonial India too close in its trajectory to Europe, whereas their investmentwas in renderingIndia rather more specific and exotic, in sum more "ethno." What was still more extraordinary was their claim that whereas writers such as Nandy were engaged in an emancipatory and self-regenerative project, by drawing a bald contrast between a happy and myth-minded India, and an unhappy and history-minded Europe, ourwork in factwas reflective ofa far more conservative political position and hence to be decried, as it in fact interfered with such lachrymose romanticism. But what to me was particularly remarkable was the fact that none of these critics was in factwilling to engage with the body ofmaterials that we presented in Textures ofTime. The certainties ofpostcolonial studies here had rendered its practitioners entirely immune to any empirical touchstone, even as theywere blind to the curiousparadoxthat Dirks himselfhas become exclusively concerned in the past decade with the use ofEnglish -language archives and materials. Interestinglyenough , their reaction resembled that ofcertain groups of classical Indologists in Germany, who saw in our project an attempt to give vernacular materials an entirelyunjustified status at the expense ofclassical Indian texts. I must contrast this reception to the responses from other more traditional and empirically rooted scholars of South India (such as R. Champakalakshmi) and a variety of other audiences, whether of Southeast Asianists or ofhistorians ofEuropean intellectual traditions such as François Hartog (author ofimportantworks such as TheMirrorofHerodotus and Régimesd'historicité). Yet, whereas Hartog and others see in Textures of Time a work that permits comparison while nevertheless retaining the specificity ofcertain institutional and referential aspects of the South Indian context, the thrust of the postcolonial studies scholars remains one of insisting thatpure European agency dragged a variety ofnon-European societies kicking and screaming into a homogenizing modernity ofwhich history-writing itself is a key diagnostic feature. One is at a loss to imagine what one is to do then in the face ofthe very richhistoriographical traditions oftheArabic and Persian-speakingworlds, to saynothing ofthe massive phenomenon ofpre-1800 Chinese historiography! Butthatis another story, and one thatmustbe addressedwhile looking to the historyofthe complex connections and interactions thatin factcharacterize the early modern world much before the rise of the British Empire, or even the European Enlightenment in its diverse manifestations. To address this issue, however, one must do better than subscribe to the postcolonial shibboleths identified above, which, in myview, constitute a self-inflictedwound thatimpedes the serious study of the history ofIndia, as well as many other parts ofthe world. Sanjay Subrahmanyam isprofessor ofIndian history and culture andafellow ofSt. Cross College, University ofOxford. He wrote Penumbral Vision: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (University of Michigan Press, 2001) and is co-author of Textures ofTime: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800 (Other Press, 2003). Morality and Cognition in Historical Thought: A Western Perspective Jörn Rüsen Thereis animportantdebatenowabout the differences between Western and Eastern historical thought. One area of difference, it is argued, concerns the role played by morality. According to this view, Eastern historical thought retains a lasting commitment...