The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and his Empire of Truth by Dipesh Chakrabarty (review)

At the end of his new book, The Calling of History, Dipesh Chakrabarty announces an impressive aptitude for the art of necromancy. Entering the corridors of 10 Lake Terrace, Calcutta, he successfully summons the ghost of a former resident—the early twentieth-century historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958)—for a conversation. He finds that Sarkar has been keeping a watchful eye on developments in his home, transformed in 1973 to host the prestigious Centre for the Study of Social Sciences—the very institution where Chakrabarty started his own career in 1974.

This conversation between the living and the dead provides Chakrabarty an opportunity to reflect on the key themes of his book, which traces the making of history as an academic discipline in India through the lens of Sarkar’s pursuits, polemics and fixations. But his dialogue with Sir Jadunath also brings into relief the questions of generational change and shifting scholarly reputation that colour the way Sarkar is read in India today: an eminent figure, perhaps, but outdated—an accomplished historian of Mughal India who, like his contemporaries in Europe, placed now-unfashionable emphasis on the strengths or flaws of great men as engines of history. There are moments of comedy, as when the ghost expresses dismay with Chakrabarty’s use of structuralist terminology, or when the latter begins to introduce “something called ‘postcolonial theory’…” (283).

Chakrabarty’s conjuring act may seem a flourish but in fact feels appropriate for a scholar who has spent his career thinking critically about historicist time, exploring accounts of Indian politics that leave space for the contributions of gods, spirits and unquiet ancestors. The intimacy of a conversation, moreover, provides a worthy conclusion to a text produced out of years of close archival work—it acknowledges the spectral presence already generated by the encounter with thousands of pages of letters and writings, a sensation that will be familiar to many historians. Chakrabarty notes early on the effect of Sarkar’s careful handwriting on his thoughts, and indeed the pressure of a “silent rebuke” that met his own, messier hand: “It was as if Sir Jadunath reprimanded me from behind every sentence of his that I copied, for there was so much difference between his writing and mine” (28).

This weight of responsibility is not, however, inspired by hagiographic impulse. Indeed, it is rather the opposite, as Chakrabarty labours to understand the nature of Sir Jadunath’s intellectual project while recognising that he is often “unable to identify with many of his declared academic and political positions” (277). This is not a book “about” Sarkar; it is written “around” Sarkar (33). The figure’s prominent role in debates over what historical research should look like in India—its need for a “scientific” method, for instance—is taken to raise wider questions about the discipline’s “public” and “cloistered” lives in this context. These are, for Chakrabarty, “interactive categories,” and a central argument of the book is that the discipline of history in late colonial India was moulded importantly by pressures in history’s public life—in the shifting valences of the past outside of academe. He surveys a series of controversies and developments in Sarkar’s career from the 1900s to the 1940s, to demonstrate just how this is so.

Chakrabarty is open about what type of book this is. He suggests at one point that he presents a “mostly ethnographic, as distinct from an intellectual, history of the birth of practices that came to be known as historical research in colonial India” (66). Indeed, he is interested in how certain activities come to be designated and authorized as “research,” and in the shifting social meaning around writing history in the early twentieth century. In this, the text resonates not simply with Geertz but also with the history and philosophy of science, tracing as it does the development of Sarkar’s “method,” his approach to “evidence,” and the force of his moral-idealist...