I should explain at the outset that by the expression "public life of history," I do not refer to the role that historians can and do sometimes play as specialists or experts appointed by governments or to the particular questions that have been raised about this role in forums such as the Public Historian. I have in mind a different question: under what conditions can history and historians play an adjudicating role when disputes relating to the past arise in the domain of popular culture in democracies? By history, then, I mean something very specific: the academic discipline that we research, teach, and study in universities under that name, the discipline that was invented in Western Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century and of which Leopold von Ranke, for all the criticisms made of his approach during and after his lifetime, is still considered a putative founding father. If one could think of the life of this discipline within the university—composed of classrooms, courses, examinations, seminars, conferences, journals, and so on—as its "cloistered life," as it were, then by its "public life" one could mean the connections that such a discipline might forge with institutions and practices outside the university and official bureaucracy. Can this discipline have a public life in my sense of the term when the public actually debates the past?

India is a good site from which to address this question. The Hindu Right that rose to political power in India in the 1980s and 1990s by spreading anti-Muslim and antiminority sentiments was often accused by "secular" historians—justifiably, I might add—of rewriting history or even replacing it by myths for public consumption. Implicitly or explicitly, these historians—the most prominent of them (such as Romila Thapar or Sumit Sarkar) based in Delhi—argued for a role for their discipline in public debates about pasts and identities in India, particularly when the Hindu Right was disseminating antiminority sentiments and "memories" that were clearly at odds with reasoned historical judgments. Thapar, for example, has repeatedly emphasized in her recent writings the importance of historical reasoning in India’s public life. She has argued the need for identities in India to be ultimately validated by the discipline of history: "In the retelling of an event, ... memory is sometimes claimed in order to create an identity, and history based on such claims is used to legitimize the identity. Establishing a fuller understanding of the event is crucial in both instances, for otherwise the identity and its legitimation can be historically invalid."¹ Another reason India is an interesting site is that the demand for the discipline of history—often called "scientific history" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—arose in public life long before Indian universities actually taught the subject at a graduate or research level. Yet over time, as I shall seek to show, the discipline of history has become marginal in debates among subaltern groups that arise from their perceptions of the past. This is not a criticism of the heroic and laudable attempts by historians today to find a public career for their specialist skills. But their present situation—unlike that of amateur nationalist historians at the beginning of the last century—is a bit reminiscent of a moment in the life of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Famously, Hobbes once thought that incontrovertible logic would compel people to listen to him, thus obviating any need for persuasive rhetoric. But he soon realized that while the matter of providing compelling logic was in his hands, logic by itself could not ensure that people would at all feel motivated to listen to him in the first place. Hobbes put it this way: "As it is my part to show my reasons, it is theirs to bring attention."²

Similarly, the fact-respecting, secular historian in India can bring his or her reasoning to the public, but there is no guarantee that the public will bring their attention. Given their expertise, it is only understandable that historians in India should seek a role in adjudicating disputes about the past in India. But what prevents them from realizing this aspiration? It is to answer this question that I provide a history of history in India before returning, in conclusion and with some comparative glances at relevant debates in Australia and the United States, to the larger concern from which this essay arises: can history, the academic discipline, have a public life in a situation when the past is a matter of contestation in everyday life?

History’s Beginnings in Indian Public Life

History was not a university subject in India at the postgraduate level until after the First World War. The first master’s degree in modern and medieval history was created by the University of Calcutta in 1919, and most graduate-level history departments in other universities came up in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet the cultivation of history as a "scientific discipline" began in India in the 1880s and more seriously in the 1900s, particularly in Bengal and Maharashtra, two regions I will concentrate on in the first part of this essay, amid what could only be described as enormous public "enthusiasm for history."