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Urban history and urban anthropology in South Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 March 2010

Rajnayaran Chandavarkar
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Summary

History and anthropology have been intimately, if somewhat fractiously, intertwined in the investigation of urban themes: the former borrowing promiscuously and not always profitably from the latter; anthropologists, looking increasingly for empirical support and historical depth, have often recoiled in frustration at the historian's fact fetishism. It is no longer possible to examine developments in urban studies within one discipline without reference to the other.

The particular success of urban history in the 1960s was symptomatic of a general crisis in the subject, arising though only in part from the growing interest in and development of the social sciences. While conventional political, constitutional and diplomatic history appeared increasingly narrow in scope, economic history, which for a while had offered a plausible alternative, seemed to confine itself to the application of neoclassical economic theory to data from the past. Some historians began digging in the quarries of the social sciences, framing their research in terms of their languages and taking on board their conceptual apparatus though not necessarily their techniques. Where conventional historical practice appeared to circumscribe the scope of research, a greater openness to the insights derived from sociology and social anthropology opened up an impressive range of fresh questions and lines of historical enquiry. The result was the proliferation of sub-disciplines within the subject: social history, oral history, women's history, demographic history. Urban history ranked among them.

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History, Culture and the Indian City , pp. 206 - 235
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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