Lecture (16): On the Importance of Storytelling and Narrative for Historians and the Discipline of History

The practice of history writing is at once very old and very recent. On the one hand, people have for quite some time created representations of the past in song, pictorial depictions, and in written word. On the other hand, the academic practice of history is relatively new and in that short time it has slowly developed its own language, rituals, and logic, carving out a discipline that differentiates itself from the kind of representations of the past commemorated in memorials, brought to life in the movies, and works of what has been dubbed "popular" history. It is perhaps this monopolization of practicing history by academia that new PhDs with history degrees find themselves at a loss in an increasingly unfavourable job market. I can offer a personal anecdote that illustrates this.

This year I was a Teaching Assistant for two courses, the first an introduction to Theories in Women and Gender Studies, the tutorial for which took place at the beginning of the week, and History of Iran, the tutorial for which took place at the end. As we winded down at the end of the semester I was asked in the last week by a student in my WGS tutorial what I intended to do after I finished my PhD. "Teach of course!" I replied, as if there could be any other answer. I chalked up the question to the fact that my class comprised primarily of students pursuing professional degrees, everything from majors in Human Relations to those studying journalism. The same question was repeated in my History of Iran tutorial, a class that consisted mostly of majors in various humanities disciplines and the occasional engineering student. I was somewhat more surprised by their asking the question--a surprise that when I reflect on revealed more about my own worldview than the students'. It occurred to me that I was amongst those who assumed that students of the humanities eventually become academic scholars. It is this "of course" and the hierarchies it suggests that have been tackled in a not too recent article by Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "No More Plan B".

In a recent conversation with a friend about her impending comprehensive exams, I remarked that she was ready to take her exams and reminded her that the rite of passage that is the PhD has a way of making us doubt ourselves and forget we are for the most part intelligent, articulate, and often critical thinkers that having spent the better part of half a decade on their area of specialization know a thing or two. Why then do we forget that we have skills to bring to the table even if that table is not in the hallowed halls of academia? To be sure many of us love to research and teach and in fact those were the very reasons why I went into the PhD program. But the nagging question that still lingers is why do we think we cannot broach a much broader audience, a broader set of concerns, and potentially a broader set of career opportunities.

It is in the context of these growing set of interrelated concerns that William Cronon delivered his Presidential Address entitled "Storytelling" at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in 2013 made available here and published by the American Historical Review here. Part sermon, part manifesto, Cronon's address is an electrifying call to action for the future of historians, history as a discipline, and the practice of representing the past. It does not offer all the solutions but it reminds us of the core of our discipline and its potential going forward.

William Cronon served as president of the American Historical Association in 2012. He earned his baccalaureate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a double major in history and English in 1976, and holds doctorates in history from Oxford and Yale. He is the author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill and Wang, 1983) and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W. W. Norton, 1991). Cronon is currently the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Visit his website at http://www.williamcronon.net

As a conclusion I turn to the words of Jane Austen, first brought to my attention by the epigraph in Nancy F. Partner's Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). It consists of a conversation on history between Catherine Morland and Eleanor Tilney from Northanger Abbey: 

Come, Miss Morland, let us leave him to meditate over our faults in the utmost propriety of diction, while we praise Udolpho in whatever terms we like best. It is a most interesting work. You are fond of that kind of reading?"

"To say the truth, I do not much like any other."

"Indeed!"

"That is, I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?"

"Yes, I am fond of history."

"I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all--it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs--the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books."

"Historians, you think," said Miss Tilney, "are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of history--and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one's own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made--and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great."

"You are fond of history! And so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable! At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of history any longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate; and though I know it is all very right and necessary, I have often wondered at the person's courage that could sit down on purpose to do it."

Further Reading

Cronon, William. "Presidential Address: Storytelling." American Historical Review 118, no. 1 (2013):  1-19.

Partner, Nancy. "Narrative Persistence: The Post-Postmodern Life of Narrative Theory." In Re-Figuring Hayden White, edited by Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domańska, and Hans Kellner, 81-104. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Southern, Richard William. The Shape and Substance of Academic History; An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 2 November 1961. Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1961.

White, Hayden. "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality." Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 5-27.

Lecture (15): Anglo-Persian Taxonomy of Indian Religions

Carl Ernst, who really needs no introduction for scholars of Islam or South Asia, is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a long time investigator of Muslim encounters with Indic learned traditions, particularly yoga. His publications on the subject include seminal articles such as "Situating Sufism and Yoga" (JRAS, ser. 3 15, no. 1 [2005]) and "Muslim Studies of Hinduism" (Iranian Studies 36, no. 2 [2003]), made available on Dr. Ernst's website.

Today's talk "An Illustrated Anglo-Persian Taxonomy of Indian Religions: The Silsila-i Jogiyan (Chain of Yogis) of Sital Singh Bikhwud" was an Annemarie Schimmel Memorial Lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a series featured before on this blog. Luckily for us, the MET has kindly made the lecture available here and embedded below. 

An Orientalist Bon Mot

Many apologies are due for having all but disappeared but with the end of coursework, the beginning of comprehensive exams, and the unenviable task of writing a thesis proposal I have not had the chance to update much. I return (for now) with a little find from Charles Rieu's Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. 1, p. 246. While describing the manuscript for Taẕkirat al-vāqi'āt of Jawhar Aftabchi Rieu notes that:

The Museum possesses an interleaved copy of the English version, Add. 26,608, [that is, Major Charles Stewart's translation] with extensive corrections in the manuscript, amounting almost to a re-translation of the work, by Mr. Wm. Erskine, to whom Major Yule had lent the present MS. The rough draught of the same corrections is preserved in Add. 26,620.

In a short notice prefixed to the former volume, Mr. Erskine passes on Major Stewart's version the following judgement, which, coming from so eminent an authority, carries great weight: "The translation of Major Stewart is no translation at all. It is full of errors. It adds, takes away, alters. It is not trust-worthy, and one does him no injustice in pronouncing him ignorant of the history and manners of the times, ignorant of the geography of the country, ignorant of the language, ignorant of the duty of a translator."

(Makes one doubly grateful for Wheeler M. Thackston's translation of the work!)

CFP: South Asian Religions Grad Conference, University of Toronto

For the call for papers you may also click here.

The keynote speaker, Vasudha Dalmia, is currently editing two volumes, one of which is on religious interaction in Mughal India, with Munis D. Faruqui.

Margaret Atwood on Reviews and Footnotes

I stumbled across a collection of Margaret Atwood's essays at a used bookstore today and while perusing it two paragraphs leapt out to me:

Book reviews I think are the most difficult form for me. It's easy in them to be flip and dismissive, to make jokes at the book's expense, to sneer at the author; some papers think of this as being "controversial" or "readable." But if you're an author yourself you know how much time and effort has gone into a book, even a bad book, and you can't take it so lightly. A reviewer has a responsibility to the public, but she also has a responsibility to the book; you have to try and see and say what is actually there.

Longer critical essays are less painful. For one thing, you know they aren't going to damage sales and affect someone's livelihood, because they are usually post facto and printed in little magazines or academic journals. They also allow more room, for judicious reconsideration, for more complex evaluation than is usually possible in (for instance) The Globe and Mail, and for that luxuriant weed of academe, the footnote. If the book review leans a little towards Consumer Reports, the critical essay is perhaps more like talking to yourself. It's a way, too, of finding out what you really think.

Margaret Atwood, Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Toronto: Anansi, 1982), 13.

Letters from India: "We horrid English"

As a birthday present last year I received Marian Fowler's Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj through which I was then introduced to an Englishwoman named Emily Eden (3 March 1797 – 5 August 1869) who gave the following account of her visit to Delhi. The perfect 10 minute procrastination for anyone still writing term papers.

Emily Eden by Simon Jacques Rochard, 1835

 Camp, Delhi, Feb. 20.

This identical Delhi is one of the few sights, indeed the only one except Lucknow, that has quite equalled my expectations. Four miles round it there is nothing to be seen but gigantic ruins of mosques and palaces, and the actual living city has the finest mosque we have seen yet. It is in such perfect preservation, built entirely of red stone and white marble, with immense flights of marble steps leading up to three sides of it; these, the day we went to it, were entirely covered with people dressed in very bright colours—Sikhs, and Mahrattas, and some of the fair Mogul race, all assembled to see the Governor-General's suwarree, and I do not think I ever saw so striking a scene. They followed us into the court of the temple, which is surmounted by an open arched gallery, and through every arch there was a view of some fine ruins, or of some part of the King of Delhi's palace, which is an immense structure two miles round, all built of deep red stone, with buttresses and battlements, and looks like an exaggerated scene of Timour the Tartar, and as if little Agib was to be thrown instantly from the highest tower, and Fatima to be constantly wringing her hands from the top of the battlements. There are hundreds of the Royal family of Delhi who have never been allowed to pass these walls, and never will be. Such a melancholy red stone notion of life as they must have! G. went up to the top of one of the largest minarets of the mosque and has been stiff ever since. From there we went to the black mosque, one of the oldest buildings in India, and came home under the walls of the palace. We passed the building in which Nadir Shah sat for a whole day looking on while he allowed his troops to massacre and plunder the city. These eastern cities are so much more thickly inhabited than ours, and the people look so defenceless, that a massacre of that sort must be a horrible slaughter; but I own I think a little simple plunder would be pleasant. You never saw such an army of jewellers as we have constantly in our tents. On Saturday morning I got up early and went with Major J. to make a sketch of part of the palace, and the rest of the day was cut up by jewellers, shawl merchants, dealers in curiosities, &c. &c., and they begin by asking us such immense prices, which they mean to lower eventually, that we have all the trouble of seeing the things twice.

Yesterday we went to the church built by Colonel Skinner. He is a native of this country, a half-caste, but very black, and talks broken English. He has had a regiment of irregular horse for the last forty years, and has done all sorts of gallant things, had seven horses killed under him, and been wounded in proportion; has made several fortunes and lost them; has built himself several fine houses, and has his zenana and heaps of black sons like any other native. He built this church, which is a very curious building, and very magnificent—in some respects; and within sight of it there is a mosque which he has also built, because he said that one way or the other he should be sure to go to heaven. In short, he is one of the people whose lives ought to be written for the particular amusement of succeeding generations. His Protestant church has a dome in the mosque fashion, and I was quite afraid that with the best dispositions to attend to Mr. Y., little visions of Mahomet would be creeping in. Skinner's brother, Major Robert Skinner, was the same sort of melodramatic character, and made a tragic end. He suspected one of his wives of a slight ecart from the path of propriety—very unjustly, it is said—but he called her and all his servants together, cut off the heads of every individual in his household, and then shot himself. His soldiers bought every article of his property at ten times its value, that they might possess relics of a man who had shown, they said, such a quick sense of honour.

G. and I took a drive in the evening all round the cantonments, and there is really some pretty scenery about Delhi, and great masses of stone lying about, which looks well after those eternal sands.

In the afternoon we all (except G., who could not go, from some point of etiquette) went to see the palace. It is a melancholy sight — so magnificent originally, and so poverty-stricken now. The marble hall where the king sits is still very beautiful, all inlaid with garlands and birds of precious stones, and the inscription on the cornice is what Moore would like to see in the original: 'If there be an Elysium on earth, it is this, it is this!' The lattices look out on a garden which leads down to the Jumna, and the old king was sitting in the garden with a chowrybadar waving the flies from him; but the garden is all gone to decay too, and ' the Light of the World' had a forlorn and darkened look. All our servants were in a state of profound veneration; the natives all look upon the King of Delhi as their rightful lord, and so he is, I suppose. In some of the pavilions belonging to the princes there were such beautiful inlaid floors, any square of which would have made an enviable table for a palace in London, but the stones are constantly stolen; and in some of the finest baths there were dirty charpoys spread, with dirtier guards sleeping on them. In short, Delhi is a very suggestive and moralising place—such stupendous remains of power and wealth passed and passing away— and somehow I feel that we horrid English have just 'gone and done it,' merchandised it, revenued it, and spoiled it all. I am not very fond of Englishmen out of their own country. And Englishwomen did not look pretty at the ball in the evening, and it did not tell well for the beauty of Delhi that the painted ladies of one regiment, who are generally called 'the little corpses' (and very hard it is too upon most corpses) were much the prettiest people there, and were besieged with partners.

Source: Emily Eden, Up The Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India (1867), 94-98. Available here.

Lecture (14): Sufism in South Asia

It's that time of the semester again folks! Term paper deadlines! Applications for summer research and teaching assistant positions! Waking up in a cold sweat wondering if next year's grant applications will pan out! Applying for conferences and workshops! Filling out an unnecessary amount of paperwork that could have been sent earlier but wasn't just 'cos! I think it is the only time where I secretly hope for miserable weather outside so that if I can't bask in springtime glory, no one else can.

Anyway, we return to sunny California with our lecture series today and return to two old favourites, the Center for South Asia at Stanford University which earlier gave us Munis Faruqui's talk and Nile Green, whose previous lecture has been one of the most popular posts ever on the Mughalist! Nile Green delivers the Annual Lecture at the Center for South Asia, Stanford University, titled "From Religious Establishment to Reformation: Sufi Islam in South Asia and the World".

Nile Green is a prolific author on the subject of Sufism in South Asia and beyond. His publications include his first monograph Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (London: Routledge, 2006); the textbook Sufism: A Global History (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); and a collection of his essays entitled Making Space Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

But before proceeding to Nile Green's lecture, I would like to post a brief excerpt here from his interview with Jadaliyya on the institutional challenges facing the study of Muslims in South Asia: 

 

Ziad Abu-Rish: What are some of the major issues facing research in your field? Are there any areas of research that you think are missing?

Nile Green: One of the perennial problems that are inherent to the field of South Asian history is the dominance of the Indian nation-state in framing the questions asked and sources used. South Asia becomes a problematic field when so many linguistic domains and social groups are excluded because they do not fit the dominant narrative of the formation of the Indian nation-state. I often find myself in conversation with people whose research field is the Middle East. Most scholars on India have done very little work on Islam and almost no research in Arabic and Persian. One manifestation of this is that categories for dealing with what some term “Indian religions” leave little room for Muslims and Islam. Many academic departments focusing on South Asia are premised on the idea of “Indian religion,” meaning Hinduism and Buddhism, as the originator of South Asian culture. This is quite problematic when one considers the impact of Islam, the presence of Muslims, and the historical legacy of the Mogul Empire. These exclusions have become inherent to the twentieth-century historiography of India. [...] We need to expand our inquiries and break through the limits imposed by nation-state-centric fields.

The entire interview can be accessed here.

And now onwards to Prof. Green's lecture:

CSA Annual Lecture and Reception: "From Religious Establishment to Reformation: Sufi Islam in South Asia and the World" from Center for South Asia on Vimeo.