When Does History Begin?

Harjot Oberoi takes up questions of Sikh religious identity and collective memory. He asks how the ways South Asians once recounted the past and defined truth were reshaped by British colonial rule.

Writing history in India has long been a contested matter. Al-Biruni, the eleventh-century polymath, was puzzled that people on the subcontinent seemed to disregard the conventions governing historical writing. He did not recognize that Indian accounts of the past rested on a dense canon of poetic traditions and departed sharply from the historical narratives of the Islamic, Chinese and Greco-Roman worlds. Where those traditions hunted for verifiable details, South Asian writers were drawn to emotional force, and they judged the past through aesthetics and shades of taste. Oberoi argues that this different approach produced a distinct kind of historical consciousness.

Turning to the Sikh tradition, Oberoi shows what modern critical narrative can achieve once it moves away from classical models. The book traces key episodes: colonial rule, coercion and protest under the Raj, the production of knowledge, the rise of secular nationalism, and modern ideas of the self both within and beyond India.