| Summary/Abstract |
The four essays in this special issue focus their attention on excavating particular strands within Indian historiography that look askance at the existing schools of thought be they nationalist, Marxist, or subaltern. However, this is not a project of recovering the forgotten or arranging these events into a long shelf of fragments that disrupt the unified history of the nation-state; rather it is a project of discovering various moments that went into the making of India-projects that were elite but forgotten; projects that were for the forgotten peoples of India, but ironically remembered only by a handful elites, projects that speak of the European, but not the colonial, entanglements in the making of the thirties and forties and, finally, these projects unearth some of the conservative energies and impetus locked within our master- and counter-narratives of state-formation, liberalism, nationalism and democratic republic. The essays return to the biography of the nation, to resist not simply its homogenising impulses, but to ask critical questions about acts of remembering, commemorating and excising that go into the narration of the nation's biography.
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