Kleinberg, Scott, and Wilder’s call for a closer relationship between critical thinking and history writing (iii.1–iii.10) so closely resonates with my own training in postcolonial Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru Universities in India that I feel impelled to engage the essayists even though the audiences the authors address are very different from mine.
Let me begin with a caveat. The contextualization that the essayists distance themselves from is perhaps ever more necessary for this essay to make sense to readers who may not share the space-time of which I speak. This space-time is that of northern India in 1984–85. A political party had reorganized itself in the 1970s and begun to offer nationalist/racist interpretations of events of the fifteenth century that had transpired in the subcontinent. The party began a campaign demanding the demolition of a fifteenth-century mosque built by a Mughal emperor in northern India on...
