Creative Pasts

Creative Pasts is the first book in South Asian history to unravel, with a meticulous eye to detail, the precolonial and colonial genealogies of a modern regional identity in India. Prachi Deshpande's mastery of a variety of sources--from precolonial writings to modern novels--enables her to tell a story that gives modernity in Maharashtra a deep and autonomous history. This book is a model for scholars of other South Asian regions to follow. -- Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor, The University of Chicago This book is a pathbreaking investigation of the constitution of a South Asian past. It is also a major contribution to the ongoing inquiry into the historical processes that have shaped the modern discipline of history itself. -- Sumit Guha, professor of history and director, South Asian Studies Program, Rutgers University Prachi Deshpande brings a remarkable sensitivity toward forms of historical, literary, aesthetic, and institutional reworkings of the career of Maratha Rule and 'Empire' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result is a work that demonstrates the constitutive salience of the 'Maratha historical moment' in the making of Marathi sensibility, such that the 'historical' comes to animate the modern literary. An elegant first book that reminds us that popular memory need not remain marginal and emancipatory, but can become majoritarian, dominant, and divisive. -- Shahid Amin, professor of history, Delhi University

The "Maratha period" of the 17th and 18th centuries, when an independent Maratha state successfully resisted the Mughals, is a defining era in the history of the region of Maharashtra in western India. This book highlights shifts in history writing in early modern and modern India and the connections between historical and literary narratives.The "Maratha period" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when an independent Maratha state successfully resisted the Mughals, is a defining era in the history of the region of Maharashtra in western India. In this book, Prachi Deshpande considers the importance of this period for a variety of political projects including anticolonial/Hindu nationalism and the non-Brahman movement, as well as popular debates throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concerning the meaning of tradition, culture, and the experience of colonialism and modernity. Sampling from a rich body of literary and cultural sources, Deshpande highlights shifts in history writing in early modern and modern India and the deep connections between historical and literary narratives. She traces the reproduction of the Maratha period in various genres and public arenas, its incorporation into regional political symbolism, and its centrality to the making of a modern Marathi regional consciousness. She also shows how historical memory provided a space for Indians to negotiate among their national, religious, and regional identities, pointing to history's deeper potential in shaping politics within thoroughly diverse societies. A truly unique study, Creative Pasts examines the practices of historiography and popular memory within a particular colonial context, and illuminates the impact of colonialism on colonized societies and cultures. Furthermore, it shows how modern history and historical memory are jointly created through the interplay of cultural activities, power structures, and political rhetoric.