Doing the Intellectual History of Colonial India

South Asian history after the subaltern moment has moved to a writing of the intellectual history of colonial India. While at one level this signifies an attempt to take seriously forms of intellection by indigenous intellectuals, in its form and method it may signify a return to an elite history that privileges elite thought, national identity, and a hermetic understanding of writing and texts over the contextual and miscegenated spaces of historical imagination. Moreover, it continues with the dichotomy instituted by subaltern history of doing elite thought and subaltern action. I suggest we need to look at the idea of itinerant thought, of the circular relation between text and contexts and the necessarily transnational space of intellection.