the creative and innovative ideas that lost out

Sugata Bose Harvard historian and grandnephew of Subhash Chandra Bose on his book A Hundred Horizons and the recently set up Harvard field office in Mumbai Outlookindia.com

Tell us about your book.

It's about India's economic, cultural, political connections with the wider Indian Ocean world in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is an interpretation of the historical antecedents of globalisation and shows how there were multiple authors of the globalisation process. I argue that the history of the modern age was characterised by the interplay of multiple and competing universalisms rather than clashing civilisations. The book offers new perspectives on globalisation, empire and nationalism. It is an exercise in comparative and connective history written in a literary vein narrating stories of oceanic voyages of many Indians, elite and subaltern.

You've been on sabbatical from Harvard?

Yes, I've been busy with my research on the history of economic and political ideas in India in the late 19th and mid 20th centuries. I am focusing on the creative and innovative ideas that lost out in the battle for state power in 1947 -- imaginative ideas on Indian unity from say Aurobindo Ghosh and Bipin Pal and their ideas of ethical polity.

Is it Bengali intellectuals versus the rest?

No. there's also Lala Lajpat Rai and Tilak and many others drawn from a variety of linguistic regions and religious communities. Lala Lajpat Rai, for example, had an internationalist vision and even wrote a book on the US in the second decade of the 20th century.

Which are the areas of India's history that remain unexplored?

India's inter-regional connections with its neighbours. We need to creatively trespass across the outer boundaries of India, not just recover its internal fragments.

• The area studies rubric has been too rigid. A sound historical grasp of both India's global and inter-regional roles is necessary.
• Secondly, new histories of Indian regions where it's possible to explore both regionally and religiously based identity. The secular-communal dichotomy has to go. Self-avowedly secular historians have been awkward in writing about religion in public life and hence the bigots took over religion. We ought to be able to understand religion sensibly and distinguish between religious sensibility and religious prejudice.
• And thirdly, a new history of ideas drawing on innovative approaches to intellectual history.

India has been around for sometime and so has Harvard. Why a field office now at Mumbai?

We are building a powerful South Asia Institute at Harvard and through the field office at Mumbai we intend to facilitate the study and research of students and faculty in areas like History, Economics, Anthropology and other disciplines in India. We have neglected India and South Asia in the past. Most of the funding had gone for studying China and Japan. Now there is new interest in India: South Asia is strategically important, the Indian economy too is attractive and there is great scholarship. There are younger South Asian scholars now whose work is at cutting edge.