Author Description

FINALLY, a book from India that is readable, informative and provides one of the most comprehensive understandings of the art and craft of history and the changes therein. The modern discipline of history is a peculiarly western creation. It acquired a supposedly scientific form only in the nineteenth century. Soon enough researches in history were put into the service of the state, especially in providing certain guidance to the making of foreign policy. Historians like von Ranke insisted that their reconstructions of the past were without bias and that they were only showing how things happened and hence they were ‘scientific’. Some coeval revolutionaries like Karl Marx turned to history in order to determine the order of things in the world so that they could find a theory of change. If historical change was inevitable then surely it should be possible to speed it up a bit by having a superior understanding of history? That belief set many a revolutionaries to double up as historians. In thrall of the scientific discoveries overwhelming the nineteenth century world, historians too claimed themselves as ‘scientific’. The sobriquet eluded them but the hope continued for a very long time till it was punctured for good by the passing trends of post-modernism. It took over a century and a half, though and the efforts yielded ever superior and reliable ways of understanding the past. It is this story that Bhupendra Yadav tells in an engaging manner through this book. As books of telling the history of history go this one is rather bulky. It would have been bigger had the author included a bibliography and the story of history as it was practised in other cultures too. Here there is a complete absence of history writing as it was practised in Asia before that region came under the cultural and educational influence of the West. Also missing is any significant contribution to history writing as the craft was practiced in Russia. But what we do have is engrossing enough.