Partha chatterjee on vernacular social science in india
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Historians of India have lately been looking at the place of history in the country, both as an academic discipline and as a mode of public representation of the past. This book explores the status of regional and vernacular histories in relation to academic histories by professional historians. Was there history writing in India before the British colonial intervention? The stock answer to this question is no . Other than the Rajatarangini of Kalhana, no ancient text adequately resembles a historical narrative. The itihasa-purana tradition is largely indistinguishable from mythology. The vamsavali and caritra traditions do not really distinguish between the legendary and the historical. Yet these genres of narrating the past did percolate into India s regional languages, being later complemented by the Persian court chronicles of Islamic rulers, with the latter showing writing practices much closer to European conventions of history