© Columbia University Press
Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960
May, 2007
Cloth, 320 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-12486-7
$50.00
/ £34.50
"recommended for readers interested in Indian historiography as well as those who are interested in the negotiation of modernity and the politics of identity in the Indian context." — Srikanth Mallavarapu, Journal of Asian Studies
"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