Marxist historians made theoretical Indian history possible beyond rulers and religions

Evidence

Theoretically advanced work in histories of political and economic structures has shown that it is possible to speak of an Indian history which is not the history of mere rulers and empires and religions, and is not composed of discrete developments in sectors and geographical regions. This work, most notably of the Marxist historians, has laid the basis for future work of the empirical kind and created the possibility of theoretical abstraction and generalization, hence for the plotting of periodization as regards the main forms of production and property, as well as their regional and temporal variants, gaps in knowledge and disagreements among the historians themselves notwithstanding. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 488

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Late colonial India newly groped toward secular historicization of the material world — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1192

Related

• Late colonial India newly groped toward secular historicization of the material world (similarity 0.88)
• Marx’s dispatches on India require contextual scholarship, not summary dismissal (similarity 0.83)
• Secular historical narration in Indian literature first emerged only with the communist movement. (similarity 0.82)
• Marx’s colonial writings were conjectural speculation, not worked-out theory (similarity 0.79)
• Marx’s picture of pre-colonial India rested on largely fanciful claims about its economy. (similarity 0.79)
• Only a materialist-comparatist frame can break the colonial grip on Indian English Studies. (similarity 0.79)
• Marx’s Indian writings were conjectural, not theoretical (similarity 0.79)
• Indian criticism of British colonial economics predates Marx. (similarity 0.78)
• Literary periodization must rest on culture-wide material shifts, not chronology (similarity 0.78)