In search of secular template: History writing in India in the first decade of the republic

Abstract

It is argued in this article that the attainment of Independence in 1947 raised a number of new questions in the minds of Indian historians shaped by the presence of problems that the new Indian state was faced with. These involved not only a debate between nationalist and communal historiography, but also brought into prominence the Marxist school in the 1950s. There were also the beginnings laid of a ‘collaborationist’ interpretation of colonialism, of the future Cambridge School. The wheel has turned full circle now, six decades later, with a struggle with communalism and chauvinism again on the historians’ agenda.