History Professor Douglas Haynes

"I turned back to India."

WHEN DOUGLAS Haynes left India at age 12 after living there for two years, he thought his days in India were, as they say, history. He confesses that he had not much cared for his youthful experience abroad and had been eager to leave it behind. At college he was drawn to social history but was unable to decided what region to study. When a professor suggested " that he take up non-Western history, Haynes looked to his own past: "I turned back to India."

The Indian history he explored was that of ordinary people and groups rather than great individuals and events. Trained in ethnohistory at the University of Pennsylvania, Haynes examined how local elites in Surat, a small town in western India, appropriated and transformed British concepts and vocabulary from the political traditions of the colonial rulers (you can read more about it in his Rhetoric and Ritual in aColonial Setting (University of California Press, 1991). Deflating old notions of how cultures change under colonialism, he explains, "People in any society want to change in ways that they feel are in tune with their own culture."

Haynes, who has been bringing such topics into Dartmouth's classrooms since 1983, already is well along his next inroad into Indian social history, this time with a study of artisan cloth producers, past and present.