rebellious historians, white rabbits

There's been an excellent discussion evolving at CM over the last week, touched off by Sepoy's review of William Dalrymple's new book The Last Mughal. The wide-ranging debate covers not only the book itself, the historiography of the 1857 Rebellion, and Dalrymple's other assorted media manifestations, but a whole host of other issues, many of which are of considerable personal interest: the politics of historiography; the tensions between popular and academic--as well as between narrative and analytical--history; the impact and the shortcomings of subaltern studies and postmodernist &/or postcolonial approaches; the recurrent debates over positionality and Orientalism and "going native" and what goes down when whitey writes the history of the Other...and more. And, most fundamentally for me, the question of audience: who are we writing history for, and what does that say about how we should write it?

Alas, I am too busy trying to write some history myself to have joined the conversation yet. But go read and enjoy, if these are things you care about too. This thread and the PEN World Voices panel I attended the other night (and there is non-trivial overlap between the two) have rekindled the sense of urgency and engagement in the paper I am currently trying to distill from my graduate work.

Update: and Dalrymple himself shows up to leap into the fray.