Some aporias of history - Time, truth and play in Dangs, Gujarat

Historians and social scientists confronted with pasts imagined differently from history have resorted to one of two strategies: converting oral traditions into the equivalent of archival sources and then writing histories that adhere to the norms of western professional history writing; br by denying any significant traffic between history and other froms of conceiving pasts, subsuming the latter under the rubrics of myth or more recently, memory. This article argues that; the Dangi's 'vadilcha goth' or tales about ancestors are an engagement with modernity and its paradigmatic trope, history. The subaltern practice of anomalous and hybrid histories, in the Dangs, produces a multiplicity of pasts quite different from those multiple histories which historians conceive of and increasingly call for.