History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200?2000

by Sumit Guha

"Sumit Guha considers South Asian traditions of social and historical memory in the context of world history, identifying the influence of varying forms of socio-political organization on precolonial regional and linguistic patterns of historical memory. These traditions shaped the historiographic legacy that was inherited by the British imperial era in India. Guha explores the ways in which socially objective historical memory has been made in South Asia through the past eight centuries. The latter part of that period was one in which Asia had to deal with the impact of the West, not only...