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The historiography of modern India focuses on a number of important questions. Among them is the question of whose history deserves to be written and remembered. Is the history of modern India and the struggle for independence the story of leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah?

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Or, is the story really about ordinary people and their lives and actions? The Subaltern Studies collective, for example, is a group of historians that fundamentally challenged how historians were thinking and writing about the past.

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Here you can meet some of the key historians to better understand those arguments:

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Shashi Tharoor

Hans Mommsen, a German historian, was a key historian of the Holocaust. He argued that Hitler was a weak leader and the Holocaust happened due to the larger Nazi state and the German bureaucrats who were trying to please a distant leader.

RANAJIT GUHA

Lucy Dawidowicz, an American historian and Mets fan, was one of the primary American scholars of the Holocaust. She argued that Hitler was the primary driving force behind the Holocaust and had the intention to exterminate the Jews from the beginning.

AYESHA JALAL

Stanley Milgram was an American psychologist at Yale University. He attempted to understand the role of obedience and conformity in explaining the actions of ordinary people who participated in the Holocaust

DAVID GILMARTIN

Saul Friedlander, born in Prague, published "The Years of Persecution" and the "Years of Extermination" which argued that the Holocaust resulted from Hitler's orders.

C.A. BAYLY

Raul Hilberg, was born in Vienna and then studied at Brooklyn College and Columbia University. He was perhaps the most widely respected historian of the Holocaust.

CHRISTOPHER BROWNING

Christopher Browning is an American historian who taught at UNC Chapel-Hill. His most famous book was Police Battalion 101. Browning believed the gradual radicalization of Nazi bureaucrats led to the Holocaust as well as obedience and conformity.

DANIEL JONAH GOLDHAGEN

Daniel Goldhagen is perhaps the most controversial of the scholars of the Holocaust. A political science professor at Harvard, Goldhagen argues that the eliminationist anti-Semitism of the German people caused the Holocaust. In other words, the government didn't cause the Holocaust -- the German people did as they hated Jews and wanted them dead.

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