ABSTRACT
This chapter consists of a conversation between Saurabh Dube and Dipesh Chakrabarty that was conducted in cyber-space across nearly two decades. Dube’s probing questions prompt Chakrabarty to extend his arguments on a wide range of issues: amidst much else, the formative influence of the Subaltern Studies group and of Australian aboriginal history on his own development; the relations between “History 1” and “History 2;” the vexing question of universals; the reasons he would now be critical of the “politics of despair” that he had flagged in earlier efforts; and the importance of affective histories. Especially intriguing is the most recent segment of this conversation, where Chakrabarty returns to prior debates that questioned the historical discipline’s claims to truth: “We forgot something crucial in those heady days of skepticism: that while there may not be anything called ‘the truth’ about the past (or any other object of knowledge), there was – and there is – always, for the historian, the question of being truthful.” In this, the writing of pasts becomes a care of the self: “Doing history is an ethical struggle against one’s own biases – if my Marxist account of the past has to seem ‘true’ or plausible, it should do so not because I want to Marx to win all ideological battles, but in spite of my being a Marxist.” Chakrabarty also stresses, with reference to his work on climate change, how his very concept of the social is changing: “Can one think the ‘social’ any longer without taking into account the nonhuman?”
