Chakrabarty's view on history (Kelsey Hunter, Week 8 Substantive)

Chakrabarty's piece "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?" brings up a very interesting point about the place of history in the education of any schoolboy or girl. History is "embedded in institutional practices that evoke the nation state" and this role of history teaches everyone that "the nation state is the most desirable form of political community" (19). Chakrabarty claims both European imperialism and third-world nationalism is responsible for this aspiration to the nation state. The Europeans implanted the notions of "freedom" and "citizenship" in the minds of their colonial subjects (not citizens) and although these ideas take on meanings distinct from their original European meanings, freedom and citizenship became the aspirations of the natives both pre and postcolonialism. The intense influence of European dominance on their colonial subjects is revealed in the ways the subjects begin to view modernity and also nationalism. These influences create the contradictions inherent in any history that claims to be "Indian". Any Indian history is one of "lack" or "inadequacy" precisely because it has been influenced by Europeans.
After all of this discussion of what is missing in Indian history, I found it interesting that Chakrabarty concludes not by claiming a need to revise history as written by Indians, but instead to revise history as written by Europeans or at least history about Europeans. He sees this need to dispose of such a Eurocentric history of the world as one that would also have to dispose of "modernity" and "citizenship" as the ideals and themes of history. I personally do not believe this will happen because no one wants to portray themselves in a negative light, so I do not think Europeans will revise their history, but I do think it is important that those living in the so-called "Third World" or the subaltern continue to seek their own history and to portray it in their own context.