![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/covers\/GhoshLovers.jpg\" "\\"Ghosh\\"")
Note: Berghahn recently published Ranjan Ghosh\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>A Lover\u2019s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading<\/a>, an\u00a0exploration of the relationship between history and theory. Here the author talks about the origins for the section on dust that appears in the book.<\/em><\/p>\n__________________________________<\/p>\n
Dust<\/strong> My mother, whose mythical bedtime stories first introduced me to history as a child, was a historian. Her specialisation was numismatics but she eventually gave up teaching history to take over curatorship of the university museum. She was also diagnosed with asthma \u2014 a disease for which dust is an enemy \u2014 and she suffered especially during the dusty Indian winter months. I subsequently grew up with a psychosomatic hatred for dust: a maid cleaned our house twice a day and I became the subject of much teenage laughter in school, holding, as I did, a hankie to my nose at all times.<\/p>\n Now, why do I say all this? My book, A Lover\u2019s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading<\/a><\/em>, has a section on dust. When I first read Carolyn Steedman\u2019s fine book, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History<\/a><\/em> (it was published exactly a year after my mother\u2019s death), I was overcome by several strong emotions. Primary among them was a sense of despair. Like my mother who would wheeze at the mention of a furry animal or sandstorm, I read Steedman\u2019s book literally out of breath. My sense of despair came from the realisation that I would never be able to work in an archive \u2014 that I would never have a career in dust.<\/p>\n My Lover\u2019s Quarrel<\/em> is, in that sense, also a quarrel with dust, my private trope for history, the past and the future, beyond the biblical from where we come to where we go.<\/p>\n There is a living, buoyant ligature between a historian and the archival milieux where one encounters the recorded past as much as a \u2018history of loss\u2019, where the dust rests as no mere squalid accretions but animated particles that can waft into the historian with differential vibrations\u2026.Dust speaks; dust makes us aware of a past that is absent and present at the same time, a temptation to the historian\u2019s reconstructionist desires and a reminder of his or her affiliation to grounded evidence. In a kind of sensory encounter with the past, dust, as a materiality, awaits mediation, conjuring up the \u2018presence\u2019 of the past. (102)<\/p>\n My book combines South Asian history with the continental philosophies of history. But my accusative finger is at dust and my physiological condition, which has prevented me from being a \u2018proper\u2019 historian. I\u2019ve written on textbooks and pamphlets, and their unique semantics of a propagandist historicising, but I\u2019ve always had to take the help of someone, a kind acquaintance at the library, often my wife or father, to first wipe the dust away from their pages before I could examine them.<\/p>\n That has also become my shorthand for doing history: wiping the dust. In that there is much romance and representation, and of course, always, always, a new reading.<\/p>\n __________________________________<\/p>\n Note: Berghahn recently published Ranjan Ghosh\u2019s\u00a0A Lover\u2019s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading, an\u00a0exploration of the relationship between history and theory. Here the author talks about the origins for the section on dust that appears in the book. __________________________________ Dust I suffer from a dust allergy. If I\u2019m really careful, it wouldn\u2019t affect my… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[168],"tags":[788,110,229],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21210,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions\/21210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI suffer from a dust allergy. If I\u2019m really careful, it wouldn\u2019t affect my life in any significant way. For what, after all, are allergies? A few crustaceans managing to live out their lifespan because a gourmet friend of mine suffers from a seafood allergy. Compared to that exchequer, my allergy has almost no exchange value. I can joke about it, although, only in the way a bald stand-up comedian can joke about his hair or lack thereof. For the truth is this: my relationship with dust has affected the way I have done history.<\/p>\n