I went thru bibliography and could not find reference to “Panipat 1761″ by T S Shejwalkar -one of the few great books available in both English and Marathi. It is a great pity that some of the best historical work in Marathi is not translated in English. (e.g. Sardesai, Vasudevshastri Khare, Shejwalkar’s other work, Rajwade etc.)

I read and re-read that book. Panipat 1761 is still so relevant in many of its aspects. In the context of your book, the most important reason that battle was fought was to save Mughal dynasty. At some level, it was a great sacrifice by Marathas for the cause of Taimur’s successors. Shejwalkar argues that if Nehru had shown willingness for such a sacrifice, India may not have been divided.

According to Shejwalkar, perhaps it was a mistake-fighting for Muslim leadership of India - dilution of principles on which Shivaji’s kingdom was found. But I think it was first great POLITICAL act to lay the foundation of modern, secular India.

By the way- Abdali was impressed and shaken by Maratha’s valour in the battle. That valour was mainly due to Ibrahim Gardi’s division. It was manned by ‘Telangi’. (page 17 of your book) who according to Shejwalkar were forerunners of modern British/ Indian army

Abstruse-ness (help me guys, what’s the noun here): I think we cannot overlook the ideological subtext of criticism that something is too obscure (sometimes it is; Bhabha is a human rights violation). i.e. not that the criticism is ALWAYS unfair, but there is more than a little strain of “when I say you are too difficult I really don’t like what you are saying.” If a story is not very palatable to “official” discourses, don’t expect it to show up on MSNBC, and if it doesn’t don’t say it was simply because no one outside the academy could relate to it.

I was thinking about the high modernist avant garde in relation to greater or lesser “difficulty”, and I started thinking about “the professions”. To illustrate how some of what we have been talking about is a wider problem, consider the financial services industry: a hundred years ago if someone said he was a”banker” I think people would have a fairly clear idea what that entailed. Today, can we say the same if someone speaks of their job as “hedge fund manager”; “hedge funds of funds specialist”; “credit default swap structurer”; “I’m in event arbitrage”? The strange and somewhat (to me) discomfiting thing is that it’s not about people from a very different cultural/socio-economic background who might have difficulty here as they lack the requisite exposure; what we have is that even people from the same “backgrounds”, the same socio-economic “demographics” would most likely not have the faintest clue what any of this actually means! Same thing re: other disciplines: the imagined “Renaissance man” of centuries past was by definition inter-disciplinary (a Samuel Johnson would have had no difficulty understanding many of the scientific, and certainly all of the economic texts of his day)– today even Leonardo couldn’t be Leonardo.

1.I had been meaning to ask our eminent host sepoy, what genus of a history work is Hourani’s A History Of The Arab Peoples?

2.Prakash was a great read. Seems like Willy D. is a Fielding wannabe…but the horses have neighed as ordained by the naked punkah-wallah god.

1)Lapata: I am sympathetic to all your concerns. As you so correctly point out, ‘religius studies’, departments often produce some very interesting scholarship (in discourse) that is often ignored.

2. Qalandar: I am also in agreement with you: underpinning the debate, is indeed the tension between the “liberal arts” and a division of disciplines–there is nothing a “Dictionary of Critical Theory” can’t explain; just like you would refer to Black’s Law or a Dictionary of Philosophy or any other reference text to get the definition for a specialized language, I don’t see why poco/pomo/subaltern scholars are singled out for their purported “intellectual pageantry”? In an undergraduate English class, I was assigned to present on “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Despite initial problems, I was eventually able to make head and tail of the piece (able to impress people at cocktail parties) by using external reference texts…I agree that such criticism is a little unfair. As far as the question of being too abstruse and specialized (I suppose some areas are more incitive than othes), you correctly analogize with high modernist writing, avant-garde art and film and I would say music as well; their cerebral quality eschews a wider, more universal apprehension and therefore raises questions about their utility. But then again, the seemingly futile avant-garde endeavors have become staple in the contemporary arts. So….

3)With that being said, I do feel like poco/pomo/subalterns have served their purpose; these academics have left a mark on academia and need not take themselves “so seriously” anymore…no? (I can’t buttress this claim with any authority; I am a perfect layman and I love being corrected)

4)the real hardcre poco/pomo/subaltern types are just so goddamn disdainful! kinda like hipsters…also, a lot of them are trust fund kids.

5)Whire rabbits are not to be confused with White Mughals.

That’s it. I was encouraged by Qalandar’s and lapata’s revelation of their laity to post here–which is also a great, great, great provision of CM…non poco/pomo/subaltern/laypeeps is playas too.