Earlier this month, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a historian who teaches at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), was awarded the Dan David Prize in recognition of his “innovative and interdisciplinary research”. Over and beyond what was reported in newspapers, it was striking to see how little of the evolution and debates within history as an academic discipline or his role in them informed any of the reportage. Yet for an eager, and even if amateur, student of history, disentangling the lineaments of the influence of somebody like Subrahmanyam can be a profitable exercise. In its ideal form, an intrepid (and perhaps foolhardy) Boswell — one who, at the minimum, knows a little about many things, for the subject of the study knows much about many things — would guide us. In the absence of one, we must make do on our own.
The British historian C.A. Bayly wrote in his classic work The Birth of the Modern World that “all historians are world historians now, though many have not yet realised it.” Subrahmanyam, unlike many of his contemporaries, however recognised this early. This has allowed him to be at the vanguard of the ‘connected histories’ movement, a research agenda that attempts to think of ideas and flows as local expressions of global influences. Such a framework implies a systemic undermining of static ‘master’ concepts like system, class, ideology and superstructure that were traditionally used to understand medieval Indian history.
If we ask how history writing has changed over the course of Subrahmanyam’s career, this would also mean coming up to speed on forgotten intergenerational debates such Jadunath Sarkar versus Irfan Habib in India and or between contemporaries Albert Soboul and Francois Furet in France. Stylistically and methodologically, we would meet masters of sweeping narratives such as the holy trinity of the Annales school (Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel) on the one side and the Italian master of micro histories Carlo Ginzburg and innovative Left historian Geoff Eley on the other.
Interestingly, this would also involve asking how Subrahmanyam has profited from learning languages as diverse as Telugu, Persian, French, and Portuguese (to wit, perhaps his intellectual biography ought to be subtitled: from Tungabhadra to Tagus) that many of his contemporaries — limited only to English and therefore circumscribed by the Anglo-Saxon historical traditions — have had little access to.
By the 1990s, linguistics, cultural history, and philosophy (inspired by works of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and others), had launched a frontal attack on “traditional” history writing. This “linguistic turn” (tournant linguistique, as the French called it) brought with it near religious faith that archival documents were “performances” rather than documents of quotidian realities. As these ideas swept into Indian historiography — in parts, courtesy the Subaltern Studies movement — Subrahmanyam declared to the chagrin of many that the emperors of post-colonial psychologisms had no clothes. More devastatingly, he told us that many of those making great sweeping claims were ignorant of primary documents or suborning truth to ideological priors.
In their efforts to sustain a victim narrative, he argued that these postcolonialists represented Indians of the 18th-19th century as participants in some sort of Newtonian vaudeville. The British stirred the ladle of requisite action and the natives offered up a soup of internalised recalcitrance as reactionary tribute. According to this view, Indians in the late medieval period lived in a sort of happy pre-history, a people comforted by their mythomania, and the Europeans acted as a causal spur for Indians to form a self-conscious understanding of their own past. On various occasions, he and his co-authors have demonstrated that pre-modern Indians were just as capable of ironic distancing, numeracy, and self-consciousness as their early modern contemporaries in Europe.
All of this makes it difficult to pigeonhole Subrahmanyam into a politically convenient box. The Indian Right has little use for his intellectual forays (and he for them) given he undermines their essentialist nationalist narrative. Yet, ironically, on the Left his insistence of privileging primary documents over the psychologism of internalised oppression has led his work to be accused of, horror of horrors, “conservatism”.
Perhaps in the years ahead, somebody will write a well-researched intellectual portrait of this scholar, who is one part iconoclast and in others a careful architect of research agendas. What Subrahmanyam teaches us — and not just historians — is that to read the past with fidelity there is no substitute for the hard work of learning foreign languages, struggling to overcome ideological biases, and trawling in archives. We may ultimately realise that the past is both alien and yet intimately familiar.