History Compass 14/7 (2016): 304–313, 10.1111/hic3.12318 The Utility of Scandal: Examples across Disciplines from Europe and India Benjamin B. Cohen * University of Utah Abstract Historians and sociologists of Europe have explored the role of events, incidents, and scandals in time. Yet, historians of India have less explored the study of scandal. The reason for this is the relative dominance of certain topics – colonial subjugation, the nationalist movement, independence, and partition of the subcontinent – among historians of India. However, scandals in particular – and events and incidents more generally – offer scholars insight and utility into particular times and places. In his 1889 poem, Rudyard Kipling wrote of an east and west that shall not meet. 1 While Kipling was referring to social differences between Europeans and Indians, his injunction remains salient in some corners of historiography. In particular, differences remain in the study of scandal between scholars of Europe and those of India. This is unfortunate. Scandals offer a unique insight into a given historical moment, often capturing in their vortex of rumor and innuendo the voices of the poor, of women, and the dispossessed. In particular, historians of colonial India have made only tentative steps towards the full utility of studying scandal. However, historians and sociologists of Europe, and in particular of France and Britain, have been at the forefront in the study and use of scandal in their scholarship. Further, while historians in some corners of the discipline have studied particular scandals, it is from sociology that more robust theories of scandal emerge. Scandals mark discrete moments in time. Scholars often conf late scandals with other types of moments: events, incidents, and even forms of micro history. As such, some teasing out of how these terms are defined is necessary; for instance, do all scandals rise to the level of an historic event? Or, would the study of scandal be better labeled as a form of “incident analysis” (explored below)? Why are these forms of historical inquiry less applied to India’s diverse historical tapestry? What follows then is an exploration of events and incidents – the two primary categories of historical time that scandals are lumped into. Then, I borrow from colleagues in Sociology to present a robust definition of a scandal, before turning to some scholarship on scandal, event, and incident in India. My argument is that historians of India have less taken up scandals because in that field – my own field – narratives of the nation and nationalist movement, just 68 years since India and Pakistan’s independence from colonial rule, still occupy a large space in the field’s historical imagination. Yet, as the moment of independence recedes further into the past, room grows for the study of scandal. Scandals as Events Beyond individual case studies, a problem arises regarding the ways in which scandals are classified. Generally, scandals are chronologically discrete events. As such, they are often included in discussions of events in history. The study of events, however, is not necessarily a stable endeavor in that multiple and sometimes conflicting views of events and their utility in © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd