ABSTRACT
Some years ago the scholars Partha Chatterjee and Jan Breman expressed the optimistic view that Indian social science research was “more engaged with social reality than its counterpart in the global North.” This chapter analyses the methodological and other problems arising from the need to expand the horizons of history by means of constructively returning to the visual expression of memory in post-literate context. The historian must be “impartial” in an “honest submission to the truth” declared Marc Bloch in the Bible of historians The Historian’s Craft. This telling comment comes from a historian who railed against the ‘positivism’ of Ranke in formulating the basis of the Annales School of history writing in France. Indian historians have periodically expanded their horizons since the colonial times in response to changes in historiography abroad and the demands of Indian society. Time and again their vocation has taught them that in wrestling with their predicament they have nothing to lose but their habits.
