Organizer and Chair: Jon E. Wilson, King's College
Discussants: Shruti Kapila, University of Cambridge; Michael S. Dodson, Indiana
University; Andrew S. Sartori, New York University
Intellectual history has largely been absent from recent South Asian history.
Yet a history of ideas in the subcontinent, especially a history of political
thought, offers the opportunity to critique and transcend many of the well-worn
oppositions of South Asian historiography: those between nation and empire or
between the force of colonial power/knowledge and the tenacity of Indian agency,
for example.A history of ideas in India also carries the potential to disturb
the parochialism of European intellectual history by questioning received assumptions
about the global diffusion of ideas and by uncovering neglected or assumed aspects
of European thought.
This roundtable brings together contributors to a
recent special edition of the journal Modern Intellectual History (vol. 4,
1, April 2007), edited and introduced by Shruti Kapila, dedicated to elucidating
a new intellectual history for colonial India. Contributors to the volume examine
how specific concepts were articulated in particular contexts, treating categories
such as the nation, religion, culture and society as “open set[s] of ideas” that were “expressed
in terms of political theory” (p. 4), rather than as notions defining
the essence of nationhood or indigeneity. The roundtable will consider the
claims made on behalf of this approach and discuss possible criticisms: How
can intellectual historians of South Asia avoid subsuming the subcontinent within
a broader notion of world history? What critique of the methodology of European
intellectual history can the history of South Asian ideas offer? Can historians
of ideas pay sufficient attention to the peculiarities of the colonial situation?
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