Connected Histories and the Dream of Decolonial History

This essay argues that historians in post-colonial nation-states and spaces cannot offer connected histories across spaces shaped by war and the partitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It provides examples of these hurdles from a space called ‘Assam’ in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial archive. Native scribes collaborated with colonial Britons in writing accounts that set up spaces as culturally separate and disconnected from erstwhile hegemons. The essay concludes that connected histories of pre-colonial pasts remain a dream in a post-colonial context shaped by global and local investments in mythologised spaces, governing ideals and culturally separatist institutions.