Beyond Pages: A SUNY Press Podcast
Sep 10, 2026 · 35 min · 11 segments
Uses the everyday histories of Brahmin clans, communities, and families in a prominent small town in the Indian Himalaya to challenge the assumption that only grand metanarratives such as colonialism…
Sanjay JoshiGuestRaj PalfreyHostYeah, you know, one of my recent guests was mentioning that one of their mentors indicated, said to them one day that, all scholarship is autobiographical on some level.
And so it's intriguing that your object of research is very much a setting in which you are somewhat situated or familiar or implicated.
And also, I mean, you preempted many of the topics in your opening salvo, in your backstory.
But say a bit more for the audience about using a metanarrative as a hermeneutic, as an analytical tool.
Not the specific metanarrative, but using a metanarrative in general versus what we're doing here in this book.
Yeah.
You know, metanarratives are metanarratives because they are significant, right? So, you know, let's take two or three that are central to the narratives of metanarratives of, say, South Asian history, right? Particularly in my period.
And in that colonialism, nationalism, and what in India, or at least in South Asia, is often referred to as communalism or religious nationalism in some ways, are the three big questions.
I mean, you cannot understand history of the region without engaging with those.
As somebody who's been a researcher, a writer, a teacher for, you know, good 31, 32 years now, I did feel that once we only engage with those, that is, if my work is only goes to explain why did a particular kind of nation state come about in 1947.
For example, why did partition occur? You know, why do communal riots occur? So on, so forth.
it leaves out what is actually of concern for the majority of the people, especially of this class, this background that I'm focusing on.
But I would say that is true for everyone at any stratum of South Asian society.
They're concerned about, you know, getting, either getting married or getting their kids married.
They're concerned about, you know, making sure that, you know, they fit into society.
Yeah, you know, one of my recent guests was mentioning that one of their mentors indicated, said to them one day that, all scholarship is autobiographical on some level.
And so it's intriguing that your object of research is very much a setting in which you are somewhat situated or familiar or implicated.
And also, I mean, you preempted many of the topics in your opening salvo, in your backstory.
But say a bit more for the audience about using a metanarrative as a hermeneutic, as an analytical tool.
Not the specific metanarrative, but using a metanarrative in general versus what we're doing here in this book.
Yeah.
You know, metanarratives are metanarratives because they are significant, right? So, you know, let's take two or three that are central to the narratives of metanarratives of, say, South Asian history, right? Particularly in my period.
And in that colonialism, nationalism, and what in India, or at least in South Asia, is often referred to as communalism or religious nationalism in some ways, are the three big questions.
I mean, you cannot understand history of the region without engaging with those.
As somebody who's been a researcher, a writer, a teacher for, you know, good 31, 32 years now, I did feel that once we only engage with those, that is, if my work is only goes to explain why did a particular kind of nation state come about in 1947.
For example, why did partition occur? You know, why do communal riots occur? So on, so forth.
it leaves out what is actually of concern for the majority of the people, especially of this class, this background that I'm focusing on.
But I would say that is true for everyone at any stratum of South Asian society.
They're concerned about, you know, getting, either getting married or getting their kids married.
They're concerned about, you know, making sure that, you know, they fit into society.
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