Permanent Black First edition When Does History Begin? Religion, Narrative, and Identity in the Sikh Tradition.

ISBN 10: 8178246449 ISBN 13: 9788178246444

Synopsis

Focusing on important issues in Sikh religious identity and memory, Harjot Oberoi shows how premodern techniques of narrating the past and truth-telling in South Asia were deeply transformed by colonialism. Indian historiographical praxis has long been problematic. Al-Biruni, the eleventh-century polymath, was puzzled by how people in the subcontinent treated the protocols of history it escaped his learning that Indian narrative constructions of the past were embedded in an intricate canon of poetical traditions and represented a radical departure from historical narratives in the Islamic, Sinic, and Greco-Roman worlds. Where others tended to search for facts, people in South Asia looked for affect. This alternative model for comprehending and evaluating the pastthrough aesthetics and gradients of tastegenerated a crucially different variety of historical consciousness. Oberois examination of the Sikh tradition demonstrates what modern critical narrative achieves when it moves away from classical models, traversing significant moments in colonialism, coercion and protest in the Raj, the production of knowledge, the rise of secular nationalism, and modern notions of the self within and outside India.

Edition details

• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8178246449
• ISBN 13: 9788178246444
• Binding: Unknown Binding