Telling Lives in India

Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History is editedby David Arnold (professor of South Asian history) and Stuart Blackburn(research associate), both of the School of Oriental and African Studies(SOAS), London. The intellectual contributions of the editors and nine otherdistinguished scholars, all of whom belong to a range of academic disciplines,make this collection of eleven essays a remarkable and highly readablework on life histories – biographies, autobiographies, and oral accounts– from India. This volume grew out of the “Life Histories” project establishedat SOAS and out of various workshops held between 1998 and 2000at SOAS, the London School of Economics, Oxford University, CambridgeUniversity, and the British Library.In their well-thought-out and written “Introduction,” the editors explainwhy this volume was published. According to them, for a very long time thelife history approach has been gaining wide acceptance among scholarsbelonging to various disciplines, such as women’s studies and black studies,due to a “growing distrust of ‘meta-narratives’” and a firm desire to “movetowards a more nuanced, multi-stranded understanding of society and agreater recognition of the heterogeneity of human lives and lived ...