E. P. Thompson and the Writing of South Asian Intellectual History

The impact of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class on South Asian historiography has been debated for nearly three decades by social, cultural, and labor historians. Thompson’s analyses of agency, experience, and consciousness of the English working class certainly influenced how scholars interpreted the histories of the plebian, subaltern, popular, and working classes in India.  This paper contributes to this historiography by suggesting that Thompson’s seminal book further provides important insights for the writing of intellectual history.  Why is this theme significant?  The turn towards intellectual history—and the history of ideas, more generally—in modern South Asian history over the past decade had led to rethinking some of the seminal debates in the field.  The emergence of this intellectual history has opened new perspectives to thinking about the role of social and political thought in the making of modern society.  Yet what often remains unexplored are the theories and methods required to investigate non-literate, non-elite, and subaltern contributions to the history of ideas.  This paper will argue that Thompson’s interpretations of the intellectual (and the intelligentsia) provide exemplary approaches to writing about the circulation of ideas across society.  Further, it will explain that Thompson’s methodological strategy of connecting social history to the history of ideas is necessary to consider for the writing of intellectual history in South Asia and beyond.