Expertise is under attack worldwide. The attacks feel ironic as the professional, baptised the ‘knowledge worker’ by the 20th-century management guru, Peter Drucker, faces an existential threat from forms of Artificial Intelligence. This is ironic because this attack is not coming from a place of more advanced skill (as AI threatens to be) but from a suspicion of the very notion of expertise. One of the avowed goals of the newly-elected president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, is to fulfil an old Republican fantasy — to get rid of the department of education. Trump’s reasons are the same as those of right-wingers everywhere — that education has been monopolised by left-liberals, by the teaching of the ‘nonsense’ of critical race and gender theory. The acceleration of this attack is at least as old as 2016, the year of Brexit and the first Trump victory, since when reactionary politics and conservative education policies had revealed a sharpened ideological convergence, as I wrote in this very space that year.

Now a popular historian has also blamed academic experts for the pervasive rise of jingoistic and chauvinist narratives of Indian history in the popular domain. William Dalrymple has claimed that the failure of Indian academics to reach out to general audiences has allowed the growth of WhatsApp history. Several academics and public figures have already spoken in protest against Dalrymple’s negligence of the nuances and realities of different kinds of history. But I cannot help wonder if Dalrymple’s accusation is merely against form (the sometimes-inaccessible rigour of academic history) or the very notion of expertise that must pass through scholarly scrutiny to be part of academic history, a process which actually creates the form, language, and internal conversations that make most academic histories difficult for the general reader to enjoy.

We need to situate this accusation within the contemporary climate of suspicion of expertise. I have spent quite some time thinking about the self-presentation of the public intellectual as a charming amateur. Such amateurism, whether real or staged, creates an affinity with the general reader and helps to win their trust. While this may be a universal phenomenon, I’ve been particularly intrigued by the self-taught intellectual whose growth and learning have eclectically deviated from the British colonial educational methods and institutions. Such amateur engagement with history has been a crucial part of both individual and national self-making in India. This is evident not only by the eclectic reading of history by figures like the essayist, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, or, for that matter, Apu in Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s novel, Aparajito, who reads widely and eclectically in history, his favourite subject, but also through personal exchange and argumentation between amateur historians. Such is the ongoing conversation between Jadunath Sarkar and Govind Sakharam Sardesai, that, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out, became a significant force in the making of history as an academic subject in modern India.

Does Dalrymple see himself as a non-professional or a post-professional historian? Several years ago, on his visit to Stanford University, where I was teaching at that time, the popular historian had declared a suspicion of ‘theory’. He had claimed that he simply crafted narratives out of his direct encounter with the archives without the mediation of concepts and theories that weighed down academic historians. Let me leave aside for now the nature of these archival encounters, which I hear some experts question on grounds of Dalrymple’s inadequate knowledge of relevant languages. My question today is what does it mean for a historian to disdain theory in favour of narratives? I’m no historian, but this sounds a lot like the kind of narrative to which I’m much closer — that of literature. Dalrymple’s histories often have a fictional quality, not in the sense they are untrue, but in the immediacy and sensory texture that we associate with novels.

History as a discipline, as the subaltern historians famously admitted, is rooted in modern reason. Literature is free from this obligation. Their respective ways of chronicling, say, the irrational and the supernatural are quite different. I like to show this to my students by teaching an instance of an academic historian’s difficulty in articulating an ‘irrational’ tribal belief alongside a short story by Mahashweta Devi about tribal life, which presents the irrational with graceful mystery and magic. But in a recent conversation, my colleague, Neeladri Bhattacharya, persuasively explained to me that the concern for historians these days is not so much what happened, but how an event came to be perceived and constructed. In a reflexive turn, history has moved closer to historiography. In spite of their fictional quality — or perhaps because of them — Dalrymple’s histories may actually turn out to be more rigid than the contemporary academic historians’ more fluid and relativist construction of the past.

Its fluidity and immediate sensoriness are perhaps the reason why English literature has had a greater appeal in the Indian classroom than history, to say nothing of the colonially derived prestige of English and its perpetual promise of upward mobility. The pedagogic excitement around English literature in Calcutta alone has had a distinguished tradition, from Henry Derozio to Sukanta Chaudhuri and beyond, and Shakespeare alone a bright enough sun around which entire teaching traditions have thrived. But history has always had the ear and the concern of the powerful. The Stanford historian, Priya Satia, has shown the complicity of British history and imperialism in her book, Time’s Monster. On the other hand, history and historiography have been powerful nation-building projects in postcolonial India, all the way from Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, continuing in the work of contemporary intellectuals such as Ramachandra Guha and Mukul Kesavan, who have dallied with both their professional and amateur identities.

The irrelevance of literature in today’s public sphere is also our freedom. But herein lies the greater responsibility of history. Merely the fictional appeal of stories cannot make responsible histories, no matter how seductively they are constructed. By claiming to do so, they end up coming too close to WhatsApp history and its suspicion of expertise that rules the world today.

Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-making and the Humanities in the Postcolony