South Asian History Writing and the Transnational Turn

This paper will assess the impact of the ‘transnational turn’ on South Asian history writing. Over the last fifteen years, South Asian history has in many ways been transformed by wider, field-wide shifts toward the ‘transnational,’ ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘connected’ in history. The effects of this ‘internationalizing’ transformation of historcial analysis have have been profound, and from the perspective of South Asia, largely welcome. It has, at various levels and in different ways, had the effect of challenging older nation-driven historical frames, ‘provincializing’ dominant Eurocentric narratives of historical development, and of complicating  unidirectional theories of cultural and economic flow and diffusion. At a professional level, it has also, though arguably, made South Asia a more important global ‘player’ in discipline.  These changes, however, grounded in new global class formations, have come at a cost, both institutionally and analytically. The emphasis on global and connected histories has, by definition, placed high value on social, linguistic and geographical ‘mobility’, rather than localized and even ‘immobilized’ spheres of interaction--a cleavage that may at least partly be mapped onto elite and non-elites, making the worlds of the merchant, the portfolio capitalist, and the transcultural ‘knowledge-broker’somehow more interesting than those of the peasant and worker. The wider shift in history writing, however, has not only been about privileging the global over the local, but also about abandoning different traditions, objects and styles of historical analysis. In the field of South Asian historical writing, this shift was concsious and polemical, taking the form of a substantial ‘revisionist’ attack upon the older categories, concerns and assumptions of a more social scientifically informed historical writing, and the styles of research it engendered. This paper will argue that such analyical abandonments may not only be hasty, but potentially perilous for the field.