ABSTRACT
This research project on History, Memory, Nation, and State deals with at least four layers of problems attached to the methodological and philosophical consideration of my work. The first layer is associated with the question regarding the relationship between history and the historian’s self. Why had I taken up such a project? Did I have a personal attachment/commitment to this particular project? Choosing this particular research topic is eventually linked with the idea of the self. The second layer of the problem is to understand the relationship between a self (in flux) and the process of their deciding upon the research topic, the Partition (1947) of British India. What was the nature of and factors behind that interest? Had that interest persisted largely unaltered over a long period? The third layer addresses the relationship between people’s memory and history. When an account is to be located in a social matrix, what would be the implications of its biases? When people remember something, do they also erase out/forget something else, either consciously or unconsciously? That is the fourth layer of the problem. Nationalist and statist history remembers and gratifies certain aspects/periods and erases out/cuts short some others.
