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

Centred on the correspondence between two pioneers of the history of eighteenth century India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) and Rao Bahadur Govindrao Sakharam Sardesai (1865–1959), The Calling of History is as much about the making of the discipline of History in late colonial India as about an individual historian. Sarkar was one of the best-known Indian historians of his time, though he has been somewhat out of fashion since the 1970s. The real purpose of the book, however, is to reveal the permeability of the “cloistered” (that is, more strictly academic) and the public lives of History in India. To simplify Dipesh Chakrabarty’s more sophisticated argument, Sarkar’s own approach represents an ideal-type of the “cloister.” The larger context in which Sarkar operated, however, made impossible the sort of dispassionate, professional, objective history based only on primary-source evidence that Sarkar aspired to write.

The book is divided into seven substantive chapters, along with an Introduction and a last, somewhat whimsical, imaginary conversation between the author and Jadunath Sarkar that also serves to reiterate many of the arguments regarding Sarkar’s historiography that Chakrabarty makes through the book. All the chapters add to dimensions of Sarkar the historian, his penchant for “scientific” history, and reveal Sarkar’s adulation for what he believed was disinterested European historical scholarship in the tradition of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1896). Sarkar was a professional historian at a time when modern Indian History was not taught as a subject at Universities in India or elsewhere. Nor were the primary sources Sarkar craved easily available. The colonial state was secretive about its own records (a legacy it appears to have passed on to its post-independence incarnation), and records of Maratha states were often lodged with families of former office-holders. Sarkar and Sardesai used a variety of stratagems to gain access to elusive records, sometimes in ways inconsistent with Sarkar’s own stated commitment to the public-ness of historical records.

Sarkar lived through the period of popular nationalism in India, but both his politics and his approach to history made him, quoting A.D. Nuttall, “a man out of his time” (273). His belief in the fundamental benevolence of British rule made him disparage the mass nationalism around him, for instance terming the Mahatma a “demented Gujarati bania’s son” (94). His commitment to objective and dispassionate analysis of historical figures — to “facts” rather than “false patriotism” — did not sit well with the politically charged atmosphere around him either. An unwillingness to valorize Shivaji simultaneously alienated a powerful group of upper-caste historians from Poona who saw Shivaji as an icon of Maratha pride, and led to severe criticism from the growing body of anti-Brahmin opinion in Maharashtra, who represented Shivaji as an inspirational lower-caste ruler. The unwillingness to write histories celebrating regional identities even created some differences with his close friend and ally, Sardesai. In the long run, these were to lead to his ouster from the Indian Historical Records Commission in 1942 — a body he had helped create and shape since 1919.

Jadunath Sarkar’s story makes a very convincing case for ways in which cloistered and public domains of history interacted with each other in India. Recurring controversies since Sarkar’s time, over history textbooks for instance, show the extent to which this permeability remains a part of discussions about the past in contemporary times. Yet, one does wonder whether locating History in only binary distinctions such as “academic” and “public” do justice to the rich history that Chakrabarty unearths in this book. The privileges and limitations of class, caste, gender, and language, among others, create their own cloisters that attempt to keep others out of their domains. They certainly shaped both Sarkar and Sardesai. It might also have been interesting — given Chakrabarty’s earlier...