As ideology, nationalism requires that the nation be ascribed a stable and unified identity—call it culture, community, or civilization—that endures the vagaries of time and maintains the nation-ness of the nation through social conflict and historical change (Bhaba 1990). In other words, the nation is defined by its historical antiquity, continuity, and unity, which is why the modern art of history writing, however specialized and formalized it may become as a university discipline, remains always already implicated in the everyday politics of nationalism. Put otherwise, there remains a Gordian knot between the nation as a political form and history as an epistemological formation, which plays out in the form of a face-off between academic history and public history.

This chapter maps the evolution of the ‘India of history’ —from the early twentieth century when nationalist history ruled the roost, to the 1950s-70s when Marxist economic history came to dominate academia, to the 1980s when social history emerged in a critique of the statism and economism of earlier historiography (Sarkar 1997), and to the cultural turn of the 1990s and 2000s when multiple linguistic, regional, sexual, caste, and ethnic subjectivities seemed to demand their narratives (Chatterjee, Guha-Thakurta, and Kar 2014). However, instead of chronologically mapping the changing contours of the discipline, I focus on the three conceptual issues at stake in the changing relationship of academic history with public history in India: (a) political representation, (b) public affect, and (c) time and transition.