But one cannot say that there has been no effort to write alternative histories. To be sure, postcolonial scholarship is sufficiently kin to deconstruction and textual analysis (the reading of historical sources is, among other things, decidedly a form of textual analysis) to recognize that there are no pure alternatives uncontaminated by the powers that usually produce historical records. This, we will recall, is the point of departure from the earlier model of subaltern studies and the effort to recover the voice of the true subaltern. Shahid Amin, perhaps the most thoroughly archival of the subaltern historians, shows us in his book, Event, metaphor, memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992, that there is a lot to recover in writing an alternative history even when he “fails” to find the true alternative story of Chauri Chaura