Rejoinder: ‘The historian can understand the past only through her own concepts of the present’
· Scroll
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In my introduction to Speaking of History, I had hoped that the book might “spark curiosity and encourage readers to embark on their own wide-ranging readings and conversations” about the past. An essay by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee – also a friend – published in Scroll, offers one such engagement. In this brief piece, I would like to respond to, and extend, his reflections on the problems of anachronism and presentism in historical interpretation.
In The Idea of History (1946), the philosopher-historian RG Collingwood wrote: “All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one’s own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian’s mind.”
A corollary of this view is that the historian can understand the past only through her own concepts and categories of the present. It is only through these that she recognises, interprets, and evaluates not only past societies in all their complexity, but even...