The Margins in Historical Consciousness

Abstract

History as an academic discipline, preoccupied with scholarly description and analysis, has so far succeeded in creating the history of the dominant' event'~ 'structure' and 'process' to, thus, consciously leave out the so-called 'non-event', the 'ordinary' and the 'small' endeavours, not encompassable within the 'structure' or 'process'. Most historians from countries bequeathed with a heavy colonial cultural legacy have had to struggle to understand the present by mapping the historically constituted locations of the past. However, we cannot talk about the distant past without referring to our· essential and immediate history of the last two hundred years, for ancient India was a contesting ground for some of the earliest endeavours by both the imperialists and the nationalists.