The National Supervision Commission: A “Subaltern History”

This article explores the history of state supervision organs in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the early attempts to establish supervision organizations in communist revolutionary base areas to the founding of the National Supervision Commission in 2018. In the PRC today, the power to supervise the activity of state organs is not autonomous but is rather part of the disciplinary powers of the Chinese Communist Party. This type of institutional arrangement does not result from any predetermined path of historical and institutional development. While institutions should ideally work as predicted or dictated by distinct political philosophies or by models of institutional design, their development can in practice be shaped by bureaucratic politics and by variables endogenous to both political philosophy and institutional modeling.

“Prompter’s Whisper”: History, Travel and Narrative in Post-Colonial Indian English Travel Writing

The theory revolution and the counter-traditional wave in humanities in the 1980s have garnered attention towards new localism by positing alternatives to the great tradition. In this, Travel writing has proved adaptable and responsive to post-colonial and Globalization studies, thereby shaking off its ‘middlebrow’ status. Keeping in mind the relevance of travel writing in Global politics, the paper aims to engage with In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale (1992) by Amitav Ghosh to delineate the question of History, Travel and Narrative in Indian English Travel Writing. The paper contends that Ghosh uses the Hybrid non-fiction space of the travelogue to write a counter-narrative to the Eurocentric discourse of Travel writing. It seeks to foreground that the reverse Grand tour of Amitav Ghosh problematizes the western hegemonic hold on the field of Ethnography and History. The paper is divided into two parts- the first part will establish In an Antique Land as Resistive subaltern history, followed by the second part, which focuses on Ghosh’s privileging of third world ethnography to write an alternative narrative.

Remembering (to forget) English: The crises of world literature in Jotirao Phule’s slavery

Discursive history of the English language has been vital to analysing ‘the postcolonial condition’ in the Indian subcontinent, with a broadly overarching emphasis on how English is a ‘usurper language’. Simultaneous to this, however, there exists a hitherto understudied history featuring subaltern, ‘organic intellectuals’ from the lower castes. Not only does this ‘subaltern history of English’ exhibit a more positive affect toward the English language – by invoking its emancipatory potential in an economy of deeply casteist vernacular languages – but it also complicates multiple assertions that the postcolonial apparatus has so far held as a priori. Jotirao Phule’s Slavery/Gulamgiri (1873) is one of the foremost examples of such a position; its preface, which lucidly announces this seemingly unique position, is quite possibly the first explicitly political treatise written in the English language in the history of the subcontinent. This paper highlights the enormous shifts that take place in our understanding of the history of English – and (post)colonial modernity – if we were to (aptly) classify Phule’s preface as a key text in the history of ‘Indian writing in English’. Subsequently, it is argued that Phule’s work crystallizes into a radically alternate – and far more egalitarian – conception of ‘world literature’ contra Tagore’s well-known idea of visva sahitya.

Hegemonic Past: Exclusion of Subaltern Histories in NCERT Textbooks

History textbooks are always a site of contestation. Therefore, present political struggles for maintaining hegemony or overthrowing it play on the site of history. History as discipline has always been dominated by androcentric values. Therefore, feminist historiography was emerged which not only criticized existing androcentric historiographies but suggested new ways to do history. This article tries to analyze inclusions and exclusions within history textbooks. In the first part of the article I will try to analyze why certain histories never became part of the textbook and what are the sources that are used to write history. In this article I will analyze VIII standard NCERT history textbooks in India (Central level Government textbooks) through caste and gender lenses. In 2005 the theme of NCERT History textbooks changed from ‘our past’ (singular) to ‘our pasts’ (plural). However, this change does not reflect in the content of the textbook. I am using content analysis as a method to analyze pictures and texts. I will also try to contextualize the text within time and space. The exclusion and inclusion of history in the textbooks depends on the contemporary caste, patriarchal hegemony in our society. The dominant mainstream history has become part of these textbooks, but subaltern history is excluded from it. In this article I will also talk about the Dalit histories, Dalit women histories and tribal histories which are silenced as ‘other’ and remained part of counterculture but did not become part of these mainstream textbooks. In the later part of the article, I will try to look in what way the histories are altered to fit in a particular framework especially the histories of subalterns. At the end I will focus on how textbooks always build the idea of hegemonic nation and nationalism in students mind. Therefore, through this article I will analyze the ways through which the ‘other’ is being silenced in history textbooks.

Book review: John Solomon, A Subaltern History of the Indian Diaspora in Singapore: The Gradual Disappearance of Untouchability 1872–1965

John Solomon, A Subaltern History of the Indian Diaspora in Singapore: The Gradual Disappearance of Untouchability 1872–1965. London and New York: Routledge, 2016, 220 pp. (hardback). ISBN: 978-1-138-95589-9.

Global history, world history and globalization

This paper is intended to describe and discuss the major concepts of global history, and to elucidate connections between global history, world history, and globalization. The research reveals that global history is a field of study and a methodology of historical research. These two concepts supplement each other. As a field of study global history is understood in two ways – a form of world history, based on some methodological principles, and a history of globalization. Global history appeared in 1980-1990s as a reaction on globalization, and it was influenced by its different concepts. Debates on globalization impacted world history, its themes and methods of research. Those world historians, who accepted the «global turn», began to practice global history. For the reason, the terms «global history» and «(new) world history» may be used as synonyms. A part of historians understand global history as a history of globalization. However, this definition is disputable because of numerous concepts of globalization and the absence of consensus on the issues. As a methodology global history consolidates different approaches, such as world systems theory, postcolonial history, transnational history, subaltern history, imperial history, and others. They share similar principles that include a rejection of Eurocentrism, an understanding of the past as an integrated unit, interdisciplinary approach, and a focus on connections, interactions and mutual influences that transcend borders (national, cultural, and others). Global history prefers some specific research topics that are trans-national and trans-cultural in nature, because in these cases it has the strongest explanatory power. However, as a methodology it can be applied to different scales of human experience, including events and processes at local, national, and regional levels by studying them from a wider, global perspective.