Reflections on the Possibility of Historical Truth: Is the Recovery of Subaltern Histories Possible?

Sumit Guha, Reflections on the possibility of historical truth: is the recovery of subaltern histories possible? Historians are dependent mainly on written records for their knowledge of people's thoughts and actions in the past. Oral record and contemporary memory can easily be shown to have mutated dramatically in recent decades. Yet in most societies before the modern era, literacy was a rare privilege that many people did not have. This was especially true for South Asia where the strong culture of orality and persistent patterns of social exclusion caused most people to leave but little first-person record of themselves. Still less were they permitted to contribute to the recording or imagining of their own past. This paper will seek to work its way out of this problem by using a set of texts usually derided as forged and inauthentic and therefore not scrutinized further. It argues that we can extract a picture of an imagined past from these texts.