Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Chronicling the Histories of India: The Politics of Remembrance and Commemoration’

Abstract

Postcolonialism has proven to be a fertile ground for interdisciplinary enquiries into the loci of power and agents of change. It has provoked intellectuals to ask probing questions about the exclusions, disparities and invisibilities they detect as pervading international politics, both elite and everyday. This sensibility has informed analyses that examined imperial associations with globalization, identity, memory, development, and indeed, with the international itself, among other issues. This distinctive aspect about its orientation—an abiding interest in drawing continuities between the past and the present—invariably brought historical depth into postcolonial formulations, even as these reopen history itself to critical scrutiny. In doing so, postcolonialism has prompted a richly textured engagement of International Relations (hereby IR) with history that has not only examined macro-historical processes but micro-histories as well. They bring out how elite politics intersected with the ordinary and the everyday, thereby constituting individual and collective memory. Postcolonial theory shared this emphasis on socially situated analysis with other post-positivist approaches in IR. From the 1980s onwards, and steadily picking up pace ever since, critical approaches such as non-Western IR, postmodernism and feminism have questioned structural power and the role IR as a discipline has played in legitimizing it. Consequently, we witness a continued engagement with issues concerning marginalized identities, structural violence and discriminatory practices. Such normative positioning has, expectedly, disturbed traditional typologies that inform order as we know it and which, willy-nilly, regard dominance to be a function of such order. Traditional IR’s preoccupation with great power politics, and the claims of Western scholarship to universality (and hence, to superiority) are regarded as reflecting this bias. Given how wary critical IR is of authoritative claims to (universal) truth, it is no surprise that it employs a diverse range of epistemes. Postcolonialism, in seeking to represent the unique historical experiences of the non-Western INDIA REVIEW 2021, VOL. 20, NO. 5, 483–496 https://doi.org/10.1080/14736489.2021.1996120