Rambhakts: Defining "Us" and Depicting "Our Story" 21machination and to restore the excluded, having beaten down the walls of the
theater. But it is obvious that the historian is himself only another director, his
narrative another product, his work another narration.For Shapiro "there are no 'events' outside of the spacing, connectivity and
the other meaning-giving dimensions that are part of producing narra-
tives."^17
There are discordant arguments against the above reasoning. Although
"history means interpretation" for E.H. Carr, and "historical interpreta-
tions always involve moral judgements, or value judgements," he does
believe in the existence of the realm of historical truth that lies between
two poles: "the north pole of valueless facts and the south pole of value
judgements still struggling to transform themselves into facts."^18 The
"philosophically idealistic assumption or presumption that there is an
innermost core of true being in an event or an object of a movement or
personality and that all else is incidental or accidental" was prominent
in the thought of some German historians of the 1800s.^19 That school of
thought has survived, and J.G. Droysen, for instance, perceives history
to be a convergence of objective events ("res gestae") and their subjective
comprehension ("Historia rerum gestarum"). Likewise, Ranke sees history
as a project of constructing events as they really were ("wie es eigentlich
gewesen ist"). Like the above-mentioned "search for the essence," factual-
ism—the claim that fact can stand alone—also has its roots in nineteenth-
century German historiography. It was reinforced by turn-of-the-century
scientism.^20 Eric Voegelin understands history as "a multi-civilizational
field of meaning processes without an ending." For him, history is "the
process and the record of the experiences of transcending the given order
of things and its various codified meaning stories. It was the constant flow
of symbolic eruptions in, by, and through which concrete human beings
tried to give new meaning to their disturbing or empowering experiences
of personal, social or cosmic existence."^21 As the above schools of thought
criticize each other as "diverting attention from historical realities"^22 and
practicing "residual empiricism,"^23 Dipesh Chakrabarty shows the way
out of this debate by claiming, "It is difficult if not impossible today to
deny the force of post-structuralist rejection of historicist ideas of history.
Yet a heralding of the death of history in the name of postmodernity ...
seems premature and disabling."^24
INDIAN NATIONALISM: ORIGIN AND GROWTH
The welter of historical narratives of "India" and "Indianness" that
come under the broad rubric of Indian nationalism merits close atten-
tion. The interactions among all different peoples in the subcontinent be-
fore the nineteenth century were predominantly cultural and social. The