Experiencing Evidence

       Joan Scott says that one of the strategies employed by historians of difference is to document experience and provide evidence so that it becomes a part of the epistemological frame of history. In rendering evidence into narrative, the historian experiences evidence. It sounds convoluted but let me put it more clearly: in working with various archives to identify evidence, the historian experiences not only the archive but also that evidence. Evidence becomes labeled as such because of the historian’s particular experience of it (think of Approver’s Testimony).

         In this sense the historian is a subjective witness of the history that he narrates because he/she experiences evidence and his/her biases, politics and worldviews shape the narrative that the evidence formulates. Consider Chandra’s Death. In telling us the story of the solidarity of Bagdi women, Guha basis it upon his experience of the ekrar. This puts greater emphasis on that which constitutes evidence and the historian’s reading of it. But in the writing of history is it only through the reading of evidence (through which one performs various inclusions and exclusions) that the historian experiences it? It is important to understand the duality present within the reading that I am proposing: evidence constitutes at some level an experience (the subaltern experience for instance) while what is seen as evidence is shaped by the historian’s experience of it. This means that there is no autonomous subject –neither the historical subject nor the historian rather both are mutually affirming subject-positions (particular experience and reading of evidence makes a narrative into history which in turn affirms one’s position as a historian).  It also means that a historian bestows subject-position. In the case of the subaltern collective, in recovering the ‘subaltern’ experience historians create that experience at some level.

          Scott tells us that experience is always political. Evidence too is always political. It is concern with these political aspects of experience and evidence that Guha identifies in the first volume of Subaltern Studies as the grounding upon which the efforts of the collective are predicated (“to rectify elitist bias characteristic of much research and academic work in this particular area”). Some historians actively reflect on their experience of evidence (I think of Darnton, Thompson and Guha).  This allows for alternative experiences to exist which applies both to considering different things as archival evidence and reading (and experiencing) the evidence provided by historians in a different way. What remains ambivalent in that experience of evidence is the visibility of the historical processes that construct evidence. This is one of the questions that subaltern historians try to complicate.