Autobiographical memories make individuals who they are but they are anchored in the frame of collective memory. These together that make us who we are. How then are these are made? And how do those processes bear on academic history?

I will argue that collective memory world-wide has been made by how communities recollect pasts in order to shape their presents. The shaping of collective and historical memory must be seen in world-historical context. Analysis reaches out beyond the cloistered world of the formal academy to argue that “history” is but one kind of collective memory .

Collective memory itself is the result of both remembering and forgetting, of the preservation and the decay of record. These processes work through socio-political organizations that shape collective memory. The two disappear alongside each other.

I will sketch the diverse ways these practices worked before colonial rule came to South Asia. I emphasize that the feebleness of organized power made it possible for many contradictory memories to coexist. The creation of a centralized educational system and the mass production of textbooks began to unify historical discourses under colonial auspices. For the first time, students and their families were confronted by an authoritative, unified narrative. That triggered opposition and the development of alternative anti-colonial histories. Finally, these discourses diverged in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization.

I will gesture therefore toward sources in many languages from different regions to provide an intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized collective and historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. Most of the lecture will focus on the less studied period before Western imperialism and the imposition of Western modes of thought. I hope thereby to contribute to contemporary debates about historical memory and objective evidence in seemingly ‘post-truth’ world.

Sumit Guha, Frances Higginbotham Nalle Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Before his current position, Sumit Guha has taught at the St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, the Indian Institute of Management Kolkata, Brown University and Rutgers University. He began as an economic historian with interests in demography and agriculture. These widened into the study of environmental and ethnic histories. His first book was The Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan 1818-1941 (Oxford University Press, 1985) followed by Environment and Ethnicity in India, c. 1200-1991 (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Health and Population in South Asia from earliest times to the present (Permanent Black, and Charles Hurst & Co., 2001). This was followed by Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (E.J. Brill, 2013). A corrected Indian edition appeared from Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2016.

His recent book History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 was published by the University of Washington Press in October 2019. In Spring 2021, the Association for Asian Studies will publish his newest work, Tribe and State in Asia through Columbia University Press.

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