ABSTRACT
This chapter makes an argument for a historian’s deeper engagement with fieldwork and sacred shrines. Building a critique of secular historiography, I argue that historians in India have not gone beyond the questions predetermined by communal historiography. These are deeper imprints of colonial historiography on the trajectory of historical knowledge in India where conflict and antagonism have made it impossible to document histories of practice and belonging. By problematizing popular academic tropes like Sanskritization and Islamization, this chapter seeks to situate ‘everyday’ and ‘practice’ in the historiography of religion in India.
